Summer Television

Back when TV was free:

Every summer my husband spends interminable lengths of time watching the list of television programs crawl over the screen. “There’s nothing on,” he says of our hundreds of available channels. “I’m thinking of canceling our cable.”

“Remember when television was free?” I ask, recalling the days when the antenna mounted our roof pulled in the three major networks and one weak signal for PBS.

“We could go back to that,” he says.

I wonder. Our neighbor, who has no cable and an older model television, set herself up for the big changeover from analog to digital by installing a converter box. She received five good, clear, channels in those few minutes before her screen went blank. A technician came out today. He pushed a button and told her all was well with the equipment, but that the local stations were having trouble with their signals. Thousands of people, including my neighbor, are apparently surviving quite nicely without television. Of course there has been an upswing in local crime lately.

And when I think back to the “free” television of my youth, I can also remember rabbit ears festooned with aluminum foil. My father running outside to turn the antenna. This way for Youngstown stations. The opposite way for Pittsburgh stations. My mother lamenting that we would once again have to call out Mr. Quinn, a humorless man who took off the back of the television set to fiddle with those mysterious glowing tubes. My father resorting to a resounding smack of his palm against the cabinet when the vertical/horizontal buttons failed us.

“That’s all you pay for cable?” our daughter asks her father. “That’s a bargain.”

Oh.

Somewhere between free television and mega-cable channels, there must be a happy medium, but we have yet to discover it. Besides, how can my husband possibly find contentment with only five channels to surf?

The Merriest Month

West Cork Cows

When I was a young mother, my friends and I would meet once a month to talk about raising children or to hear a speaker or take a class: our one night escape from the routine of mothering. But we never met in May. Besides our customary family activities on Mother’s Day and Memorial Day, we were overcome by a wave of dance recitals, band and choral concerts, school field trips, and soccer and soft ball games that required plenty of practice sessions. May was the busiest month of the year.

Today, when I look at the calendar and realize it is June, I appreciate that May is still the busiest month for Liz, Tracy, and me. In between trips to New York and Cape Cod, Liz is readying her latest book of poetry for its publication deadline. It may be a labor of love, but it is time-consuming. Tracy, freshly returned from Italy and her encounter with the toad, also went to Ithaca, New York, for Cornell’s graduation ceremonies in May. She is working on short stories.

As for me, I spent most of the month in Ireland observing how the Irish are similarly frenetic during this time of the year. The farmers are watching the skies and worrying about having their fields cut and their cows out to pasture. Parents are carting their children to Gaelic football practices and matches, preparing them for first communions, and cheering them through the school year’s final exams. There are also weddings and commencement parties aplenty. Everyone is looking forward to the summer holidays.

Tracy, Liz, and I are also looking forward to our summer holidays, especially our July week in Findley Lake, New York. In addition to teaching our week-long writing workshop and eagerly greeting our writer friends and meeting new ones, the three of us will have a chance to catch up on stories from each other’s lives. The stories too long to put into a single email, stories that meander and require postscripts and speculation, stories that will make us laugh from the joy of being together again.

And we will continue to have stories to share with you as our summer rolls on.

Toad Ode

I submit this with my already-given apologies to Liz, our poet of note. Italy does strange things to people. It made me write a poem. About a toad.




Ode on an Umbrian Toad

O beige spotted rock
Whose skin gives to the touch,
Alligator shoe without laces,
Purse that blinks and bears no money,
There you rest in a grassy hole
Hiding in full view,
Startling those who mistake you
For dirt or anything other
Than what you are.

We, the lumbering tourists, stare down
From our height and fuss over you
So that our landlord Aldo
Comes with fireplace tools
To spare us the unsightliness,
Which is actually what we love
In all that expanse of photogenic countryside,
You with the toxic sweat,
You with the warts.

Disclaimer: No toads were harmed as a result of our tourism.

Secondhand Lion: Part 3 of Our Cat Trilogy

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.

Rocko's Sphere

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.

Tuesday When Everyone Was Irish

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.