Lizkdc Dislocation

Dickensian



This week you may have seen the Google doodle that marked the 200 birthday of Charles Dickens. Sometimes the dates they choose to honor can feel eccentric or narrow or precious, and sometimes you are the exact target audience and think " THAT"S RIGHT!"

I have read every novel Dickens wrote, many of them many times. A few, like Great Expectations or A Christmas Carol, I began with so young and have read so often, that they shaped my very sense of language, time, and that unnameable inner sense, how stories are.

For a twentieth century child,  perhaps the most vivid effect that reading Dickens has on you when young is to produce a startling sense of strangeness, of otherness---a world of things, objects, atmosphere, smell, of roles and words that are as unknown in your daily life as if they were a fictional society on Mars: coal and fog, orphanages and servants, waistcoats and wigs, horse-drawn coaches and treacle and gruel and ale and stockings and child servants and stick-weilding teachers and shivering exile in a vast dark London and incredible rescues and compassionate, just-met strangers who take you in.

And at the same time, those same stories fill you with a sense of startling recognition, of familiarity,  because Dickens' stories always feel as if their spine, somehow, is shared with fairytales and ur-stories, primal legends and myths about lost parents, unrecognized merit, miraculous meetings and recovered love.

Dickens's stories in one way another at their heart usually figure the child or the outsider, not only lost, but shamed, powerless, rejected.  And at the same time, these works provide a voice--often the author's--saying "this didn't just happen," and "what does it mean about our society that this is how things are?"  As a young adolescent struggling with my own culture's (and consciousness's) overpowering narratives that insist that suffering, injustice, pain, humiliation, loss, are just the way it is (and you deserve it), I found in Dickens a way to experience the hopefulness and pleasure of imagining, what if it doesn't have to be?

Of course, I realize that for many people, that isn't the effect he has at all. Instead, reading Dickens may produce a feeling of oppressive boredom, of excessive alienation, creating ---not a forgettable indifference--but an absolute distaste, a revolt against a canonical burden forced on them by stifling schoolmasters (especially sad because Dickens loathed bores). A friend of mine, a great reader, has told me that reading Dickens (for the briefest of spaces) "makes her want to poke her eyes out!" Well! I must clutch my thick paperbacks and recognize that the Dickens audience is, by the very nature of things, a limited one,  a lingering, but slowly retreating and shrinking body of readers for whom Dickens remains a warm touchstone, the author of a living, vivid imaginary space, a fictional city that at the same time provides a path into actual history, someone who speaks to our personal inner lives of loss and abandonment and hope.

 

 

 

Toast and Yoga

This yoga instructor at Mike's Fitness in JP gave the following lecture.  

Happy New Year! Some of you, he said, have been complaining to the front desk. You complain that there are too many people and the mats are too close together. You complain that some people come late and their entry disrupts the class. You complain that I, HERALDO, talk too much!

* Heraldo says his name in capital letters. Even his Facebook name is in CAPS.

Well. Listen. Yoga is not only the pose, you see. Yoga is the practice. Yoga is the mindfulness, it is the what is in your heart. If you are thinking how mad you are at the person who comes in late, you are losing whatever it is you could be getting from the pose, from the right now.

In Japan, in Zen, they have a saying: If you are so upset when your toast burns, what will happen when your house catches fire?

Open your heart! Love the person next to you! If you step on their mat, that is so wonderful, because it is an an opportunity to look them in the eyes and connect to this person. If you touch them, you share the energy and have twice as much!

If you do not like these things, if you want me to shut up and stop talking, if your practice stops with the pose, this maybe is not the class for you! 

I definitely decided that this was the class for me.

And all week I drove around thinking about my life's burnt toast.

 

Over That River, Through Those Woods (Thanksgiving Travel)

The day before Thanksgiving, I was driving my much-cherished tiny commute to work in Brookline and I had one of those odd and intense bursts of sense and memory triggered by association. They happen when you do a thing on the a particular day of the year that you have done on just about the same day in manyyears past. In this case, driving at Thanksgiving time.

Wednesday was one of those grey and wet November days.  After the red and gold leaves have fallen, only the faded pale ale of old grasses and reeds, the grey and sliver planes of pond and river, the dark curved stems and thin fingers of leafless trees. An inkbrush world. The holiday itself and the rest of this weekend have been that other kind of November day: pure blue sky and brief afternoon light, fading too quickly, leaving the senses confusedly protesting at being robbed of time.

Now my Thanksgiving week trips this year are brief--to a half day of work in Brookline on the eve of the holiday, to family in Lexington on the day itself, home to Roslindale. But for a long time for me, Thanksgiving was about journeys,  sometimes grey and stormy, sometimes in bright chill sunshine, always a holiday framed by time and distance.

There were the years with my then-husband: the years we made it up from Washington, DC to Boston to spend the holiday with my family. He loved driving and hated flying, so we'd get up in the navy blue pre-dawn in Washington, DC, start onto the road at 5 AM to beat the early rush hour. Roll across the Delaware Bridge at sunup with coffee in hand. By the time the sun got bright, we'd be in New Jersey, packed in among vast lines of barreling trucks and the great holiday flood of travellers in mortion. We'd have a packed lunch from the Korean Jewish deli in Adams Morgan, washed down with swallows of whiskey with slow intakes of joint and cigarette for dessert. We didn't do much planning besides jeans and sweaters and having a good stack of cassette tapes. Led Zepplin, Richard Feynman, David Bowie, the Smiths. Sometimes we stopped along the way to have get physical. I can't even remember what it was like, to not be able to go 12 hours without touching and affection. It sounds like a sappy joke.

There were the years after my marriage ended. I flew a couple of times, but the crowds were tense, the airports miserable, the flights unreliable.  After 9/11 and about a thousand factors made air travel in the US even more of a burden, I just began to drive by myself. And oddly, weirdly, I loved it.

Me and the Buttons: a Bevvy of Social Accounts, and Anxiety

You know that metaphor about challenging times, where you talk about having to rebuild a plane while you are still flying it?

It's interesting how much social media feels like that, all the time. Right now I am having one of those moments where I feel like I am unscrewing the tail while rejiggering the wheels and talking to someone on the ground and, now, the metaphor is dying out.

Vintage Postage Stamp Social Media Buttons courtest of Dawghouse Design via Tutorial9.net

But suffice it to say, I'm just in the middle of a fairish-ly big life change—a new job—and it's making me stop and think about the accounts and channels and networks represented by the plethora of buttons on my toolbars, and just how to use them. And evento  try to retrace how they got there, over the last few years of my life.

I started this blog on Typepad in January, 2007, after just having moved back to Boston from Washington, DC.  As I went through that previous massive life change (city, job, friends, family), it was a way to reach out to a few people close to me but far away.  It was also a way to create a practice around writing and reflecting,  and a means to push myself to share a little of that work, against the grain of my tendency to put on a game face with much of the world.  Even if  the audience was only a few people. Even if it the audience was occasionally, only a theoretical one.

At times, I wove this space into my professional life, with occasional posts about the craft of web content, or, like so many others, used it to register a meta-comment on social media itself. But mostly I wrote about my life outside of work.  Though, at the same time, I generally found myself to shying away from using it as a form of reportage.  I've written about a hike, a film, a moment in political discourse or a glimpse of a neighborhood scene. But not, generally, about what I did at work this week, an argument in my family, worries about the economy or my bank account. Although, those realities must often have leaked through in what I did write, and especially in the many long gaps between posts.

Undiscovered Worlds (At the Museum of Science)

Undiscovered Worlds: Trailer from Jason Fletcher on Vimeo.

 

My niece and nephew Milo and Annabelle were staying with Nana and I over the weekend, and because of that, I got to do things I never do. Not can't do, just, usually, don't.  Read Harry Potter out loud. Play chess on the rug.  Watch cartoons. Brush someone else's hair. And awesomest of all, go to the Science Museum.

 What an amazing constructing of the high-tech, and the low.  Annabelle put on a bee-striped cape, and climbed into a giant plastic honeycomb. Milo put on a grey squirrel cape, and raced around a climbing- fort clutching a giant acorn, declaiming MINE MINE in a way that I am sure a real squirrel would cheer. 

 A brilliant volunteer presented them with an enormous box of bones, and challenged them to assemble them back into a skeleton, without telling them what it was a skeleton of!  With coaching and handling and speculation, together they slowly made sense of the parts until it became a creature, a monster, something more familiar--a bird! A really big one! Named at last: an ostrich.   A pretty amazing demonstration of the deep satisfaction kids can get from hands, and touching stuff, and brains, and pictures in books, and a smart teacher.

Pièce de résistance

It's been a month on overflow. I had these personal commitments around my work life and  plans for coming phases of it that I needed to work on each evening after work, some changes to how I manage my personal time for creativity, fitness, and intentionality, a huooooge bunch of family times that I enjoyed and had been pledged,  but that had to fit in around all that. 

I feel like everything is about TIME, TIME, TIME and paradoxically, I am at long last and after much prodding taking up a meditation program. Which I clearly need (BE MINDFUL OF THE PRESENT floating over my head in fiery letters) and at which I currently suck.

Meditation consists of the things that I am stupid at, like living in my body and being with my emotions and letting go of suffering and verbosity, and  right now, I am a big ball of RESISTANCE. I'm resisting like the French Resistance, like a mutant virus overcoming your big damn cure, like an insulating thingie resisting all that nasty electricity.

But what I do know is that usually all that commotion signals I have gotten somewhere near the top of a thicketed slope, and am about to come out into clearer ground.

I think.

Maybe.

Wait, I'm not supposed to be about getting meditation "right"? DAMMIT.

Trotting back to starting line again.

My Fairly Safe-ish Dangerous Youth

Yesterday, my brother and I, grown-ups both, spent a few minutes of our Fourth of July chortling in the kitchen (away from Nana's ears) about the great traditional tie between our national birthday, and doing goofy, unsafe stuff.

When we were in grade school, the two "big kids" on the street would sidle away from the eyes of parents and light off fireworks, recruiting us as the audience (they were smart enough to not to give them to little kids to hold, except sparklers). There was the fountain firework, which was pretty, and the cherry bombs, which they dropped in the sewer and made a giddy bang (probably would not make the  DPW or the taxpayers happy, either) , and the wonderful time we donated a toy Fischer Price Little People School Bus to the cause and they rolled it down the street exploding with fireworks and flames! I hope we took the little peg-headed passengers out first.

And my brother, since he was younger when us older kids went off to college, got the chance later to tag along with some cousins and uncles up at a lake in New Hampshire who would float out onto said lake in canoes, possibly fueled by beer, and light off their works from the canoes! Because that was stupider, and therefore, more fun!

I mean, that was stuff we weren't officially supposed to be doing! But there was SO much stuff we were let to do, which now has been relegated to the category of unsafe.  Even though everyone knows our Mom was "strict," and our Dad would (mostly) back her up and could yell really loud. Because these were all stuff that everybody did!

A People's History of the Fourth of July in Boston

Pops Concert By Garrett A. Wollman. (From The Archives @ BostonRadio.org) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

 

Whilst scrubbing my grill, ordering three types of meat and other patriotic tasks, I find myself diving back into childhood memory of this national holiday. 

There are a few small-town Fourth memories, the times we were at the beach somewhere for the weekend. The parents would drive a car into a field of scratchy, dry sun-bleached grass, and settle us kids for the fireworks to come.  You could have convertibles and kids back then: not only did we not have car seats, we drove around with our precious little noggins caressed by the murderous highway breezes, HOW ABOUT THAT. 

So you could sit in that attractively unsafe car, or on an old blanket on the grass, and watch some part-time volunteer firemen--doubtless without the appropriate training--make pretty explosions in the sky.

Other times you got to have your big city Boston Fourth, heading downtown to Pops' giant bandshell to see their deathless leader, Arthur Fiedler, lead the storied band through a medley of Burt Bacharach, Broadway, and George M. Cohan hits that really heated up those World War One-era gramophones, plus a few Beatles tunes for those crazy kids.

Legend has it that when the Pilgrims first arrived upon the shores of Massachusetts, Fiedler emerged from the woodland shadows in his spotless band leader's suit with his snowy white mustache, and foretold that one day, a new nation would be born, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all people were created equal, but that it would take a really, really long time for folks to get that through their heads.

An Urban Wood, and Mysterious Bits

Don't you love it when a weird little bit of mystery wanders into your life?

First off, one of the great things about postmodern city living is the empty spaces that open up even in the middle of dense development, and the way the woods creep and sneak back into the gaps.

And from something neglected or overlooked comes something cherished.

Communion

 

So I was at the First Communion of my little niece, E.

The Church is clever--it decided long ago that a great way to appeal to all the little girls in the universe was to invest them for the ceremony with fancy white dresses and flowers and veils.

E. not only looked lovely, but was decidedly on top of all things ceremonial, carrying the holy cruets up to the priest and kneeling at the right place and popping up again on time.  She is one of the those girls who likes to make an extremely pious face over her little tented hands. No one out holies a little girl when they are feeling holy.