Trip to Gainesville

Home again after a week in Gainesville visiting old friends and their friends. Lots of socializing, a spectacular birthday party where everyone was required to read/tell a story of a memorable birthday (nonfiction!) after dinner. I was deeply moved and excited by the insights I was able to share from the stories of these women I barely knew. Another day, I read three poems to a small gathering for music & poetry in Melrose. They laughed and enjoyed my poems, feeding my joy in writing them. It was a week with virtually no exercise, so now I have a lot of catching up to do.

In Gainesville, I got to know a woman I want to know better and get closer to. How to do that from so far away is a dilemma. I need woman-company. Grumpy and I get along and are good to each other, but we share almost no interests and he doesn't like to talk. I want to talk! I want intimacy, though I've pretty much aged out of any interest in sex. I want a long-distance relationship with a woman along with my partnership with Grumpy. Can this work? Maybe.

One particular highlight of my trip was a visit to and guided tour of a big cat sanctuary called E.A.R.S. One of the women at the party, and her partner, created (and largely constructed themselves) this sanctuary on 35 acres near Gainesville. They provide a home, until death, for abused, dumped, and confiscated large animals, mostly big cats (tigers, lions, cougars, etc.) but also a few bears, monkeys, etc. The animals have room to run, and most are human-friendly enough to also get a lot of tender love from their big-hearted keepers. Gail abandoned college to travel to Nepal to study tiger behavior. Now, that's the sort of thing I sometimes dreamed of but never actually had the balls to do. Back in the states, she worked helping to take care of tigers for a circus and ended up doing a year of ringmaster tiger work for enough $$ to pay off the chunk of land in Florida. She and her partner have gigantic hearts and have pretty much turned their lives over to cat-keeping. They are amazing, admirable women. I couldn't possibly do such a thing and am very glad someone else does.

One night we went to a ballet (Aspen Santa Fe Ballet) that included four pieces, each by a different choreographer. The Moses Pendleton piece, Noir Blanc, stole the show. We were blown away. We left the theatre in a daze of perception-altering, other-worldly music, costume, and dance. Costume & lighting effects were used to create the perception of dancers doing the impossible and impossibly beautiful.

Poetry recitations & doggie eating disorder

Tonight I fed Lady, then took off to hear high school students recite poetry. I didn't know what I was getting into, thought it was a poetry slam kind of thing because I didn't read very carefully the info I had in front of me. If I'd known, I might not have gone, and that would have been sad. It turned out to be the finals to select the Arizona champ to go to Washington DC and compete for the national prize of a $20,000 scholarship. Wow. That's not chump change. So, I've added a new vocabulary word: recitation. It does not mean performing your own poetry. The big upside to this is that not only did I not have to listen to any bad poetry, but I also heard wonderful poems I'd never heard of by poets I'd never heard of, what I call making new "friends." These students were mostly excellent reciters, putting lots of interpretive expression into it, and also speaking slowly and clearly enough that I could actually follow along (not true lots of the time when people read their own poems). I had a great time. I am going to start memorizing some poems. Alberto Rios (another reason I'm glad I went) reminded us that memorizing (the work) is for remembering (the reward) and also read some of his poems, as he is a widely renowned Arizona poet and another new "friend" for me. He read one about a grandmother with mile-long hair (a frightening abusive tale with a happy ending in which the hair saves the life of her and a baby) and a hilarious one about pies.

When I got home, there was Lady licking her chops from her second dinner, as Grumpy was asleep when I left, and I didn't leave a note. Then she went racing back and forth between us slurping stuck-to-dish remains from our meals. I swear, by the end of all this she was whining to lick my ice cream container (Haagen-Dazs dark chocolate), and I was threatening to send her to eating disorder meetings.

Discovery: Kashi frozen meals - yummy, wholegrainy.

I've upped my exercise with aerobics & yoga classes (ideally two of each per week, but actually so far, the past two weeks, I've only made it to three total per week, like tonight I skipped yoga for the poetry) in addition to all the dog walks and forgetting to go to Bally's. I'm achey anyhow.

Bio/poetry interface... Oops!

In class yesterday I kinda fell through the language crack. Three lines in an Elizabeth Bishop poem bugged me: "--the frightening gills,/fresh and crisp with blood,/that can cut so badly--" (from "The Fish"), so I spoke up. I said "This really bothers me, because gills are soft. I never heard of gills hurting anybody." Several others piped up to disagree and related their personal injuries. So I shut up, puzzled. On the drive home, I realized what had happened. Gills are soft -- capillary beds enclosed in permeable membrane, the sites of gas exchange between capillary blood and the water. But the gill arches (the gill-bearing structures) are made of cartilage and can indeed be scratchy. I hear the very specific language, and others hear the general reference that would include the gills, gill arches, and gill slits as single thing, "the gills."

That sort of thing is inevitable, the differences in language use. What bugs me ultimately is that I can be so blind to it, just not "get" it right away but only an hour later on the freeway. So I miss the chance to talk about it, to clarify it when I'm still in the group, to not be taken for the idiot who's never poked at a fish. I can be so stubbornly literal sometimes, blindered.

Travel & carbon trading

Babies grow so fast! It's only been a couple of months, and my grandson has doubled his size and become sharp enough to recognize that Grandma is actually a stranger. Each smile won doubled in value by virtue of its scarcity, like oil.

On the plane home, I read "Conning the Climate" by Mark Schapiro in Harper's (Feb 2010). I wanted to puke. If what he says about cap-and-trade is true (likely), and if my instincts are accurate (admittedly dubious), the sociopaths that gamed our financial system to near death are onto something new and not-so-new, playing a frighteningly similar game with carbon trading ("the fastest-growing commodities market on earth"). In the good old days I might have theorized that organized crime had taken us over, but no, I think it's individualistic sociopaths having a hell of a good time gaming each other and to hell with us insignificant and uninteresting ordinary people. It's enough to send an otherwise down-to-earth citizen, taking poetry classes and trips to enjoy nature and family, off to the boonies to hole up in a shack in the woods with neither running water nor internet access, struggling to become a good buddhist.

I remember well when the banking system forced us former savers into dubious investments by shriveling the interest rates on savings to effectively less-than-zero when inflation is figured in. I kicked and screamed and refused to cooperate for years, having concluded (with brilliant insight I might add) that the market is a colossal gambling casino that best serves players that can afford to lose. I nurse the heartfelt conviction that the savings interest evaporation was a conscious ploy to pull more money into the sociopath playground.

"Precious"

Tonight I saw "Precious." I felt like I'd been stabbed in the heart and emerged from the theatre wanting to teach literacy. That faded, but I still feel stabbed and bleeding. I feel smart sometimes, like I know about things, but there's knowing about and there's KNOWING. The film put me right into her unspeakably horrible life. I'll never forget it. I doubt I would have survived it like she did.

I've been requesting official transcripts and letters of recommendation to be sent to Pacific University's MFA writing program in poetry. Yep, I'm really going to do it if they'll have me.

Hassayampa, Temple Grandin

Hassayampa River Preserve, near Wickenberg.

This is an oasis in the desert, complete with native palms. The river emerges from underground here, via 26 springs (originally), dug out decades ago to form a small lake, which is now being allowed to sediment in and revert to its natural form, which will take a while, already almost three decades since The Nature Conservancy got hold of it and stopped messing with it. An area with picnic tables is surrounded by desert palms (like the one in my front yard) which are loaded with drooping, fruit-heavy inflorescences. Birds make a constant racket here when most of the preserve is pretty quiet by mid-afternoon when I've been able to drag my butt out of the house to go anywhere. It's said to be a birdwatcher's paradise, which I hope to sample one day early and binoc-equipped. Squinting, I saw robins and flickers, and a ring-neck duck on the pond, and coots of course, and smaller birds I couldn't see well enough to name. I had a pleasant, slow walk. Half the trails were wiped out by our recent rainfall extravaganza, which also remodeled the riverbanks. I was surprised to see an enormous bull stopping for a drink, though why I was surprised, having already seen cloven imprints in the sand, is beyond me and a testament to scatterbrained relaxation in retirement, apparently not only from work.

Tonight I watched the HBO film "Temple Grandin," which I've been hearing about for weeks on NPR as they interview her and replay old interviews. I also saw her at a local bookstore where she plugged her latest book along with the film and was quite entertaining. She's a damned handsome sixty-something woman! Poised, gracious, funny, with a tendency to coast off track in response to some questions. Oh how she must get tired of repeating the same stories over and over! I heard her say how much she liked the film and how Claire Danes played her absolutely perfectly, so I've been eager to see it. It is a wonderful film! It kept me laughing, choking up, and teary-eyed the whole way through. Claire Danes really ought to get some awesome award for the role. She played its heart out.

Films, poetry, dog stuff

Two more excellent films! "A Single Man" is powerful, characters dealing with & talking about heavy issues with absolute honesty. So rare. Role model much needed for most of us. It is a painful, hopeful, moving film, serious about love and death. Colin Firth has my full attention now. Fine acting, deep writing. "Appaloosa" is a western so non-formulaic it took my breath away. Ed Harris has had my attention for a long time, and he just gets better. So interesting and unexpected.

I won a poetry prize! This time first place, community college lit magazine competition. Moving on up!

Saw/heard Temple Grandin at a book-signing talk. I admire her so much, and she is a very handsome woman now at just about my age. She's all over the place pushing latest book and an HBO film about her early life & eventual success. She said on npr that Claire Danes does an excellent job being her, just perfect. Thesis on mooing. Can't you see the cowboy profs' faces? Got her master's here at ASU! I never knew that. Out in the stockyards with the guys (whose wives complained, this being the 70's) giving her a hard time, covering her car with bull testicles, etc. Now who's laughing?

Grandin says if you have a whiny separation-anxious dog, get another dog for company, or dog sitter, gave the impression you're dreaming to imagine there's a cure (though a friend tells me there are anti-anxiety meds for dogs that work). Lady is a case study in separation anxiety. If I leave and Grumpy is asleep, she howls and cries and carries on like she's been tossed down a well! If both of us are gone and we forgot to close the bedroom door, our nice moccasin slippers take a beating and every sort of paper and plastic within reach gets spread all around the living room. At least she doesn't destroy furniture or piss on everything. It could be worse.

I went dog shopping this weekend, finally deciding that's just not going to work, too much more on our plates than we can live with. But maybe a kitten. I have a mental image of Lady curled up with kitten while I'm gone. Is that too far-fetched? I dread kitty-litter stink though.