Write Around the Block

We drove to Derry on the wide River Foyle, where our tourguide talked openly of the city’s history with The Troubles and pointed out the memorials to Bloody Sunday. At the Ulster Folk Park outside Omagh, exhibits portrayed the Irish farmers and weavers who sailed to America when faced with eviction, hunger, or religious and political persecution. Many, like my own ancestors, went to Pennsylvania.

Then we went into Omagh city center. I knew about the Real IRA car bombing that killed 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins, in 1998 – well after the start of the peace process — and I expected to see memorials similar to ones in Derry. The town map from the visitor centor listed a memorial garden, but I remembered the explosion as being in the middle of a busy shopping area. On Market Street I did find a tall blue pillar with a heart etched at its top, but there was no hint of its significance.

I went into a bookstore and, finding no books on the local tragedy, asked for a local newspaper. The shopkeeper shuffled through various stacks of papers before offering me one. “This is local,” she said, “and it presents both sides of the community.”

It set me back a bit to think that in a town of that size there might be a newspaper that only Catholics read and another strictly for Protestants. Rather like Americans reading only Republican or Democratic papers. And it made me wonder if the shopkeeper had hestiated in choosing a newspaper for me because she feared handing me the wrong one.

Back in Fivemiletown, I fell into conversation with the Methodist minister, a woman who spoke proudly of the new church windows. “The old windows were destroyed in a bomb blast. Not a bomb in the church, of course, but in the village.”
“Why here?” I glanced over my shoulder at the usual shops and pubs and houses.
She shrugged. “It happens.”

No where are we safe from violence. Or paranoia. I understand that. But I have difficulty imagining car bombs in the small American towns where I lived most of my life. Nor in Richmond, Virginia, where I live now. And while I try to avoid offending my Republican friends, I don’t live in fear that they will have me killed. All of which brings me to a toast:

As a kitten on my Aunt Mid’s farm, Kit slept on the enclosed porch, but spent his days chasing after anything that moved. Birds. Butterflies. Falling leaves. When my aunt died and we inherited Kit, we turned him into a neutered, indoor cat. Not that he complained. He had a cat door to the upstairs deck, where he continued to chase after flying, falling things, and he was well-pampered. When our move from Pennsylvania to Virginia became a long, slow process involving several mini-moves, we gave Kit to our son, Nathan, for safekeeping, and Nathan did not care to give him back.

Now, having lived with Nathan in Georgia for several years, Kit is aging and sickly. He is to the point where many folks would consider euthanasia, but not us. How can we put down a bright-eyed, always purring cat? Instead, we decided to put him outside. “You might as well kill him,” our daughter Megan said as she ordered him a supply of special diet cat food.

“It’s the Secondhand Lion approach,” my husband said, referring to the film of two robust older men who set loose an aging lion on their Texas farm the same summer they take in a great-nephew.

Like the Texas farm men and the secondhand lion and most of the senior citizens who come to this part of Coastal Georgia for the remainder of their lives, Kit is behaving as if he is years younger. He is active and alert and eating heartily. Perhaps he is senile and imagines himself back on the farm of his youth as he chases after palmetto bugs and live oak leaves. Or perhaps, like the rest of us, he knows his time is short and he wants to enjoy every moment.

My cats are jealous of Rocko’s new fame. My husband is jealous that Tracy has a cat that behaves like a cat. “Don’t you know cats are supposed to be aloof?” he yelled again this morning as the two of them followed us from room to room practically wagging their tails. I refer to them both as “dog-like cats” which should not be construed to imply that they are trainable the way dogs are. (One of my favorite tee shirts says “Dogs Come When Called. Cats take a message and get back to you.” But I digress.) They’re dog-like in their devotion to their people and in their demands for interaction with their people as well. But then, my friend, Jeanne has a dog who jumps up on furniture and settles into sun patches in their kitchen. 

I’m probably focusing on these overlaps between different animals because as a writer I’ve been thinking a lot about blurred lines between “species” of writers–about poets who write prose poems and narratives, about the story arc in a script, about the poetic moves some fiction writers make. I’ve been writing and publishing primarily poetry for a couple of decades now, but lately I’ve been drawn to prose, both fictional and memoir. Recently I had the thrill of having a story I wrote accepted for performance in a program through InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia. InterAct hires actors to do readings/performances of stories submitted by fiction writers. So my story, written by a “mostly a poet” writer, will become a theater piece and will be read on April 27. (If you’re anywhere near Philadelphia, do come!)

At the end of January, WXPN, a local NPR affiliate at University of Pennsylvania previewed the performance on “Live From Kelly Writers’ House,” a show recorded before a live audience at Kelly Writers’ House also on Penn’s campus. Before “my actor,” Lillian Rozin, read an excerpt of my story, I was asked one question by the radio host. To paraphrase: You’re a poet. What are you doing writing fiction? To paraphrase my answer: I’ve always written fiction, but not, I think, too well until I let the poet in me inform my prose writing process. 

WXPN and the Kelly Writer’s House at Penn just provided me with a link to the story that was broadcast back in February. If you go to this link http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/calendar/0109.php#26 and then scroll down to January 26 you can listen to the show. (The first two pieces cover my story– Michaela’s introduction which goes into her bitty interview with me and then Lillian Rozin reads the story excerpt. ) The story’s not too linear, and I do head off into descriptive/philosophical reverie at times. I guess that’s the poet in me, or perhaps as writers we each write whatever it is we write in our own distinctive voices and our voices are the voices of story tellers and poets, playwrights and performers or pundits depending on the tale we feel compelled to tell.

I am not a cat lover. Ever since high school when I babysat a kitten for a friend and awoke to the adorable fuzzball ripping the curlers brutishly from my head, strands of hair included, I kept a respectful distance from the feline species. They are stealth warriors.

But when I moved in with Andy, Rocko was part of the deal. Andy adopted the cat after our friend Sarah found him as a kitten, trapped under boulders outlying a slough. She’d been exercising to a workout tape in her condo, and heard what she believed to be a baby crying outside, louder than the video’s volume; she searched out the cries, reached into the rocks to fetch him, whereupon he hissed and bared his teeth. I think she finally wrapped a sweatshirt around her hands to complete the job, and rushed the emaciated brown kitty to the vet. It turned out Rocko was white with grey patches, and that Sarah’s husband, Manuel, was allergic, but the rescue was so compelling Andy volunteered to keep the intrepid youngster.

He was full-grown by the time I appeared in Rocko’s sphere, and we successfully ignored each other for months. Then one night as I lay reading in bed, the cat hopped up and sidled over, head-butting my hand, demanding, it seemed, that I pet him. I obliged so I could continue my reading, and after a while realized the cat was drooling a lake onto the bedspread. Drooling uncontrollably, and I called downstairs, “Andy, this cat is sick! He’s drooling all over the place.” Andy explained some cats drool as a sign of affection and contentment. From that evening on, Rocko arrived, peering over my book like the head of a snowy owl, a meowing snowy owl, ready for our quality time.

This is not quite a love story. Rocko is not entirely domesticated. His feral youth abides and he won’t ever be a housecat. When the house is sleeping, he leaps out our window to the roof of the neighbor’s garage then down to the alley, and combs the vicinity for vermin. Occasionally, he hauls his prey home, leaving them atop the bedspread he drools on. So far there have been two baby opossums and a smelt probably scavenged from a night fisherman at the bay. One of the opossums was still alive. I am certain he brings the creatures to me as presents, and remind myself he is not unlike some men who, though otherwise faultless in their affections, have lapses in judgment when selecting gifts for their ladies.

I was thinking of my most Irish friend, Darin Kelly, who named his sons Eamon for Eamon de Valera and Eoin, because that’s the truly Irish spelling of Owen. (Darin always refers to St. Patrick’s Day as Amateurs Hour and claims it’s when the real Irish-Americans stay home and watch all the pretenders go out and get sick on green beer.) Darin’s charming cynic’s eye aside, St. Patrick’s Day really is quite the eye-opening festival in Philadelphia. Near where I live, folks sporting Mardi Gras style beads, funny hats and clothing of all types but all the requisite bright green, fill the sidewalks. Some amble from Irish bar to Irish bar listening to music and sampling brews on Philadelphia’s version of a pub crawl. They begin the crawl at 11 a.m.

Tuesday I watched as a band of bagpipers went from pub to pub serenading diners catching a corned beef and cabbage special at lunch time. Along the way they entertained those who were simply doing what I was doing–wandering for an hour to see how my neighborhood transforms itself and becomes, for one day, some place foreign. My writer self loves these opportunities to see my familiar spaces and routines recreated. They give me the chance to play tourist in my own life, to see my routine through a foreigner’s sharpened gaze. That’s the kind of gaze we’ll sharpen and write from in my class this summer at Findley Lake, the kind that let’s you stand outside your own “usual” and “be there”, as if for the first time.

Here in Brunswick, Georgia, it is porch season. At last, the azaleas and the redbud trees and the dogwood draped in Spanish moss are in bloom, and, unless the no-see-ums chase us inside, it is warm enough to sit on the porch. We have a south-facing porch here on Prince Street, so it is possible to follow the sun from one side to the other throughout the day.

Growing lazy in my own patch of sunlight, I watch two geckos come up the porch steps. First a nice-sized green one darts over the brick, and then a tiny brown one skitters past him. Up the steps, up and down the porch post, and then across the grass green floorboards to park himself inches from my feet. There he methodically laps up the silver-winged insects emerging from between the boards.

I am mesmerized by his effortless consumption. With quick jabs of his head, he picks the creatures off one by one, and while I know I should call for Tom at once, any sound, any movement, would scare the little brown gecko from his feast. In less than minute all of them – maybe twenty – are swallowed whole. Beyond the porch, against the sunlight, silver wings of a dozen or so escapees flutter away.

When I go into the house, I still don’t say the word out loud, but speak instead of silver wings and the gecko. My practical husband understands at once that he must crawl under the house to check the foundation, to capture a specimen or two in a plastic paint jug, to talk to our neighbors about the life cycle of termites. Later, when he witnesses whole multitudes taking wing from tree roots in other neighborhoods, he learns they came not from the house’s foundation, but from the ancient oaks in front of the house. Not that such knowledge consoles him.

I would like to offer some Annie Dillard-like wisdom from my observation of the termites and the gecko, but the best I have is that there is beauty in the bizarre and you might not have to go far to find it. Perhaps in my July class, “Confabulation,” we will capture these extremes in new and interesting ways.