CLICK -- FOX News -- dangerous bigotry or just pure idiocy?
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The Anomaly of Accomplishment
So here I am heading into the final semester of the MFA program, accomplishment in sight, and wondering: what of it?
Sour and disenchanted and discouraged are all the immediate sensations that arise. My student loan debt will be well over $50,000, nearing $60,000. That's more than the price of my home when purchased 22 years ago.
Flying, boarding, eating, and fueling costs affiliated with a low residency program make up another percentage of that debt apart from the student loans. Twice yearly trips from Florida to California on an income that will not support those costs means that the charge card phenomenon is in motion. Interest rates as high as 22% extended over many years add to the debt-load.
Then there's the toll in human resources - me! The lack of a vacation in over two years when what I need more than anything is a respite. I haven't figured out how to calculate that debt. But I imagine it manifests in the "sour" reaction mentioned - a lack of patience for trivial things and trivial people with their trivial remarks, the lost capacity for graciousness and compassion; forgetting how to empathize with the troubles of others while imagining mine to be megalithic in size. There is the lost sleep, the missed opportunities, the rejected dates, the friends who can't understand the dimensions of time involved in reading and analyzing a book of poetry or conceiving and crafting a poem.
But I haven't arrived at the sorest spot in this MFA anomaly. I'm talking about the future. What do I get with this gold-crusted degree? Common wages for part-time faculty at a community college average about $5,000 a year more than my current salary. And that's without the benefit companions of a full-time position. The Ph D trumps the MFA when eyeing the plum jobs. What remains are the raisins - those "rapid-hire, there-you-are, teach English Comp" positions that are a dime a dozen because there's no competition.
What's a 55-year old woman to do? I'm vested. A state job is the place to go and in this state the education structure is about as valued as an MFA grad.What? Publish a book? Add mine to the pile? I'm inspiration-drained, future-foreclosed
and weary.
Mary Oliver had the right idea all along. Just write.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Missing
This is the day that forbids reproduction. Mother's Day, May 11, 1991, I arrived at my mother's home with a card and Crimson Glory, a vibrant bush of red roses. She had the hand, the one that touches those temperamental flowers - violets and roses - and brings them to bloom.
Then the hollow, the dread, the emptiness of silence, the open door, the tools on the table, the machine still running, the sight. I can't say what but something went out of me in those moments. There she was, humbled on the floor of the bathroom. There was her neatly folded polo shirt, pink-striped with the scent of Tide still clinging to its weave. There was a single tissue in the empty waste basket, a blotch of rusted blood. There was her flip flop, bent. There was her toe against the tile, broken.
My brother saw her face. He told me about the purple stain. But I felt death. I touched the utter cold of skin without spirit on a balmy May morning. Mother's Day. Seventeen years and it's still unfinished. The something that escaped that day is more than haunting. The something that escaped was replaced by something like skin, something without volume or sheen. Something ungraspable.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Motherhood Times Six
This morning my dwarf hamster, about the size of an engorged tulip, gave birth to a litter of pups! A fascinating voyeurship for me, gazing thru the glass of her aquarium home to see three pinkies with their bulbous, lidded eyes, their nub tails and their veiled viscera.
A day later, I count five maybe six little squirming pups. When she leaves her tissue paper and cotton nest, they squeak like frail kittens, tumble over each other, mouths still open, and are not content until she returns.
This is Sport's first litter and her tenacity is amazing. For hours and hours, her body gives to what it produced. The spectacle of their miniature life just makes me grin and hum.
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