so long summertime

This summer has been wet and wild as a rain forest, everything growing too fast; packed full too, like a 2-year graduate program where all you can hope to do is skim the surface of the material, tend only to the most egregious weedy outbursts.

For my part, I’ve made lists, read novels, cleaned closets, and written 100 pages of setting and dialogue. It all feels tangled, unreal in these first cool days. And already I am anticipating that inevitable change: the zen-like drifting of one leaf after another—of fall.

Photos by me and Billy Billy

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baseball field on 1st street

–9-1-1, state your emergency
–There was a man, a woman
–What were they doing?
–I was walking my dogs. He was cornering her, pushing, shoving…
–Where were they?
–By the baseball field on 1st street
–Can you describe them? Black, white?
–Black, both black; he had on red
–Did anyone look injured?
–He was pushing, yelling. It was escalating. It didn’t look good
–Do you want to leave your name?
–I don’t think so
–Okay then, we’ll send someone by to see
–It didn’t look good
–I know, ma’am. Okay.

I’m enjoying this local blog of a mom I know. Check out Coconut girl, here, or read a review of her at stlworkingmom.com

Photos by Billy

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wearily at the walmart

The signs boasted ‘unbeatable’ but from where I stood, things looked broken. From the waxy de-laminating floors to the pairs of plastic shoes hanging—off-gassing and strung together like fish.

I wandered the aisles, filling my basket with 5.99, 2.39, 1.29, weaving through mothers struggling behind strollers and old people wearing worn sneakers and furrowed brows.

The construction out front was marked by cryptic posters: ‘ Wait for the WOW!’ they read, but I for one, was not dying of anticipation. I hurried by a stack of cinder-blocks, a story high, teetering near the doors.

As for you Walmart, I used to fear your belligerent ‘Beware of Falling Prices! and you ceaseless expansion, but today I just felt sorry for any malice I may have wished on you and yours. As if you are, in some small way, a symbol of the promise of America; your decline a view to what we might become.

Read more about Walmart here.
Or for fun, consider this: Big box stores, like our lives, are cluttered with objects. My friend Hope just launched a site about the stories behind objects called both Life with Objects. Read it, write for it. Enjoy!

Photos by Billy

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graduation

This year I went to fifth grade graduation. I sat to the side, on one of the folding chairs patterning the gymnasium floor. Most seats were filled by wistful parents, holding Mylar-balloon-congratulations. Waiting.

The graduates were mine too, my art students for their last three years of elementary school. They filed into the gym in purposeful attire: a boy in a navy blazer with brass buttons and a stripped tie, like a tiny lawyer. Another, identical, except with shorts for that pre-frat boy look. Yet another a pink polo, pomade in his hair.

The girls paused at the entrance in their pink cake-topping frocks or darker pre-prom numbers. Then they hurried to make up the time, clicking on new heels; they teetered with the hurrying, the new height, but they did not fall.

We wavered with them, listening for each of their names to be called, crossing our arms in mime as they took their diplomas from the principal, all of us dreaming on who these young people would soon become.

Photos by Billy

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have cake, eat it too

Maybe those mythical mean girls have it right, at least in one regard; when it comes to dear friends, maybe you have to choose the ones you want, fiercely, (and so, by default, leave some other perfectly decent chap un-chosen). Maybe you have to take sides, save seats, guard places in line, because that makes this other person special, like a candle atop a birthday cake. You cannot save a place in line for everyone, real nice-like, as if friendship is your default setting. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.

Photos by Billy(above) and Papa Johnson (below).

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garden love

Our recent trip down South: Uncle Bug’s sandy road.

Because he is *my* boy I let William blow dandelion seeds out over the lawn with its bare patches. A few drift into the shade garden beds, settling between wilting hellebore and bold new hostas with broad, bright leaves.

It’s spring and Virginia is a rain forest, wet and wild and full of red-brimmed greens. This year I ordered too much mulch and the pile sits mocking me at the top of the driveway. Dwarfing my rusted wheelbarrow. William’s shovel crisscrosses mine.

William indulges my weeding, pulling chick and poke out by the roots. But not the dandelions. I don’t blame him. Those yellow flowers are so cheery at first, then so aerodynamic. He plucks, blows, and watches the seeds float out into the day.

Photos by Billy

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women who make things happen (in art)

This month the Piedmont Council of the Arts is shining a spotlight on women in the arts–a proclamation far less controversial than Virginia Governor Rob McDonnell shining his spotlight on the honor of the Confederacy.

Or is it? There is something brassy, audacious even, about making art— especially if you are are a woman; the one who is still supposed to take care of and clean up after and support everyone else.

For my part, I’m going support this local powerhouse of a female theater company take their all woman show—Our American Ann-sisters— on the road.

For 5 bucks or more, pledged safely on Kickstarter you can help them reach their goal of raising the cash, but act quick if you want to help!

What female artists do you admire?

Me alongside Jenn Tidwell, of Our American Ann-sister, Performers Exchange-Project, CLAW and more.

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being a black writer

President Obama speaking on Heath care at George Mason University and William scowling

During Festival of the Book, I attended an event on being an African American writer.

The moderator questioned her panel of authors:
Do you consider yourself an African American Writer, or just a writer who is African American, and why?

The panel was accomplished, well spoken, diverse, and each author answered this initial question and a set of others with intelligence and poise. One writer said, ‘This always feels like a trick question.’ Another said, ‘Race is a construct, but it is real.’ Some authors noted, they came to their blackness, their black identity, in part through literature. And I came home pondering it all.

Am I an African American writer?
Or a writer who is African American?
And what does the different mean?

I am
I guess
an African American writer,
a writer,
a black girl who writes about an Indian girl who feels out of place or a pale mohawked boy named Shadow, or an elderly black Janitor who is thinking about back in the day.

I almost always feel like an outsider. But when I am writing, placing words on a page, my outsider status is finally an asset. Maybe this is what makes it a hard question—black writer? Writer?

I’d rather not have to determine the difference.
I’d rather not have to choose.

Authors Carleen Brice and Heidi Durrow where among the authors on this panel.

Photoa by Papa Johnson (Obama) and Billy (William).
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precious

‘Push’—the novel behind the film ‘Precious’—was not an easy story. Sapphire’s words on the page, phonetic and full of voice, placed me viscerally into someone else’s shoes. It was a painful fit, but the story felt so real that I followed it through to the end.

Strange but true, this protagonist— Clarese ‘Precious’ Jones—would be inaccessible to me if I were to see her on the street. She’d glower or bowl by me. Or I might not notice her at all. How else could I know her, know what she’d been through, except in a story?

I’ve been thinking about this in terms of people I do know. Some days, teaching students, I catch tiny glimpses of untold tragedies. It’s mostly in the kids that are too loud, too needy, too quiet, too different. These kids call out, act out, or tow the line.

Sapphire’s novel reminds me to listen more closely. To be gentle and assertive and kind. To everybody, but especially to those kids who arrive angry, or aggressive, or wounded-looking.

Some days I think we are all just a series of reactions: an algorithm of endurance.
So who knows what a small kindness might mean in the end?

Loved this NPR Talk of the Nation discussion on Building a Better Teacher, and the corresponding New York Times article.

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Photo by Billy

good guys/bad guys

William’s world of play now consists of so called good guys and bad guys.

-Mama, he tells me, Here comes some bad guys, down the driveway. I’ll shot them with this one, okay?

Breathless with righteousness, he wields a stick for a weapon.

Later I tell him I’m not so sure about good guys and bad guys. There are only actions, I say, And we all own our share of those. Some good, some not so much so, and some half-good depending on who you ask.

But you know there are bad guys, William insists, and even though he is three, I’m sympathetic to his point of view.

When he is older, maybe I’ll ask him where the divide comes between doing a bad thing and being a bad guy. Is it all at once or can a million small actions add up, out-waying any good that someone might have done or will ever do?

Photos by Billy

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