Alecto's Ophelia

Choir Fest '08

I hate Choir Fest. I hate it so much I spend the entire year looking forward to hating it. Here is why I hate Choir Fest (you knew I would tell you, right?):

The parents, siblings and possible grandparents of 139 students are crammed into the old middle school gymnasium along with said 139 students. Parents, sibs, and grandparents are herded up into the antiquated bleachers that were constructed at the turn of the century (I'm making this part up) for midgets (this part is true, I'm sure of it). By the time we are all packed in together, knees jammed into backs, hips and shoulders disjointing in the heat the farting starts. The farting doesn't start until it gets really hot either and then it just hangs there, stagnant and deadly and you pray you don't pass out and fall forward into the beehive hairdo in front of you. Or maybe you should, it might be more comfortable and she looks sturdy enough to withstand it.

Choir Fest is kind of like the rainbow bridge. Not like when animals die but when brownies turn into girl scouts and there's this cute little ceremony where they walk over a decorated bridge and are greeted by their sisters in fascism (did I just use my out loud voice again?). In any event, this is the High Schools way of making sure the enrollment doesn't drop off when those eighth graders move on up and music stops being compulsory. So they do it in the middle school to make the middle school students feel something or other (I have no idea what because those 40 year old squishy seats in the High School Theater/Auditorium are LOVELY and the acoustics are just fine) and we all suffer. Also, it is purgatorial in it's length.

This thing starts at 7:30 and you might get out by 9:15 if you're lucky and it's Friday night and all most of you want to do is get home and commence with the Friday night drinking. As it is no longer politically correct to consume any form of adult beverage prior to any school sanctioned event no matter what time or day of the week, there have been no cocktails either and you can see a fair number of the congregation sweat. Toxicity is not fun.

There are 8, count 'em, 8 different choral ensembles. We have the 8th Grade Chorus, the Jr. Chamber Singers, the Women's Choir, the Concert Choir, the WesTones, the Chamber Singers, Women's A Cappella and the Bittersweet Harmonies. Cletus, by the way, is in two of these so there's no release in sight. There are, on the program, 22 pieces to be gotten through. I mention this because our choir directors have been known to mix things up a bit and add a song or two in between. Everyone in the bleachers counts the songs down. Everyone breathes a small sigh of relief as we pass the mid point. Some of the larger men use the mid point as the breaking point and bolt for the hall, sweat stained shirts billowing in the imaginary breeze.

It isn't that the music isn't beautiful. It is. These children are talented, devoted and well led. It is the conditions in which we sweat, wriggle, and smell. There are high points, like when the Jr. Chamber Singers sang Adiemus and there was this one tall voice in the second row that brought the house down and all you could think was, 7th grade, she's in 7th grade, will she make the Chamber Singers before my kid is off the circuit 'cause God I do want to hear her again. And it isn't as if your kid isn't spending more than her fair of time belting her lungs out. This is all good. This is the stuff that dreams are spun of, this is the reason for being. Except somebody just let out another of those silent but deadly things and good lord! is that woman really breathing into her handbag? Why yes she is.

And then it happens. All 139 of them, less the 4 who have become the band called The Fireflies, take the makeshift stage and the anticipatory hush washes over the bleachers creating that single moment of stillness when you can almost hear your heartbeat because you know that what is about to happen will never be recreated but will happen again and again, year in and year out and you know, right then, that you will cry when it is over and wish for one more chance to sit in the middle school bleachers.

This year it was Let it Be. I don't remember last year because that's the day Cletus left her father but the year before was Bohemian Rhapsody. I remember that I cried during Bohemian Rhapsody, that I could not believe what I was hearing and seeing. I remember wondering how they'd got all those kids to sound that way together in just three short hours (the only time they'd been together as a complete group). Last night I positively wailed. I clutched my gut and let the tears wash over my tired face and I let the music lift me up and carry me to heaven.

I can feel it in my middle, even now.

Looking behind the curtain

This might be a two-parter, I have a lot to say tonight.

I don't think I paint a fair enough picture when I write about myself or my experience of myself. I tend to leave out the brains leaking out the ears or popping out the top of my skull and needing to be scooped back up and sorted out. That's because it's bad to admit that. Part of the reason it's bad to admit it is because a good amount of the time, showing the guts of the sausage making process is not necessarily forwarding. That's a metaphor; I'm not really making sausages yet.

The last month has been particularly difficult. NoMans got a new job and has a slightly longer commute but the real issue is that both he and I assumed his job came first. He's the man, right? He makes more money, right? I'm the mom, they're my kids, I own the daily feeding, right?

Deep sigh. Wrong.

I find myself doing this over and over, marginalizing my value as a human being because I'm a woman and therefore the secondary adult in the household. This is me, not him. What he thinks and wants and believes he's entitled to are kind of irrelevant if I've already bought into it. Blaming him, or any other man is pointless. That's throwing my power into, well the septic tank. I've been doing a lot of that lately.

So this week the top of my head blew off on Monday and every time I managed to scoop up my brains and screw my cranium back on it blew off again. Sometimes we have weeks like that, gender aside, it's the truth. It ended in a meltdown that had us up until four AM this morning and it was just terrible. I have nothing against meltdowns in general as long as they're contained. Good God, just read that last statement! How many of us live our lives like this trying to hold it all in and do no harm? How many of us remain invulnerable and unsupportable because we look at ourselves this way? Well, all right, I do.

Periodically my mother writes and asks how I am and in the response I find myself crying into my keyboard because I'm living so close to the edge right now. It has not always been this way and it will not be forever but it is. And it doesn't mean I'm not as strong or maybe stronger than I ever was, it just is what it is. I don't give quarter ever, to myself.

I spent two hours on Karl's website last night. Mostly I was listening to his music but I'd been crying so long and hard for no discernible reason I started to read and I read through months and months of his life. I read about farming and sick cows and babies and new trucks and the cost of running against the wire. I read and was touched by another life so different and so close to my own and by now he's got to wonder what happened to his stats. And today I feel a bit more at peace.

We all spend some time at the edge. Some of us spend what might seem like an inordinate amount of time there. Maybe that's what it means to be alive and present in the world? Maybe. I would not trade any of it but I would like the swelling in my face to go down a little now, please. The results of eight hours of crying are downright ghastly.

Part two - if you're related to me stop reading now. Go on now, shoo!

I love Christmas. I love Channukah (NoMans spells it different for me every time). I love Winter Solstice. I love the shortest day of the year and the coming into the light. I love the smell of fresh cut pine and a roaring fire. I love my house full of my family, packed in so tight you can't find a quiet place to think. I love the food and the warmth and the giving, I love it all. The commercialism comes closer every year to breaking my heart.

Never mind the kids, kids are easy, honest they are. Even a bag of chicken starter (which one of 'em just might be getting this year) works out well in a fit of scrabbling delight. Honestly, in most cases, you can give them anything and they will wriggle in joy over the anticipation alone. Go too far and you'll wreck it for them. It's about abundance and it's not. It's about abundance of surprise and delight and thought. It has never been about abundance of money. Money bothers me this time of year more than any other. In any case, my kids aren't what's killing me, it's the adults.

I need to give to my family the same way I need to breathe. I need to care for my family and show them that I know them and love them. If I have to give my brother another sweater I will cut my throat. Last year I picked up my knitting needles and went to town; they all got funky hats and scarves and later in the year my children got blankets and sweaters as I got better at the craft.

This year it will be about food and sustainable life. It is hard to eat food that comes from within 100 miles in Connecticut. So hard it's almost laughable but that's what makes it worth the journey. My sister in law, an attorney in New York City has almost got this mastered, almost. My brother looks at my canning and thinks I'm nuts except he took home two jars of tomato lamb soup and promptly changed his mind.

This year is about canned joy. Very little of the fruit is local but next year a lot of it will be because I'll  have started earlier. This year will be about lemon curd and ginger cookies, marmalade and spiced pickles, scones and breads. I'm getting really good at breads. I'm learning to track the wild yeast. This year is consumable and recyclable. This year is kitchen sweat and love. I feel busier and strangely, better today.

Samhain Snapshots

I have a story to tell, one more, before the big one.  The one that has me shaking in my space boots, whatever it is because I do things in chunks, I run relay with myself, but I used to run cross country.  Maybe I can remember how again.

I listen to Fordham University's public radio in the morning and on the way home.  They play great stuff, I give them money. I am so old they are my only new source of music, except for Cletus and thank God she's over Britney. Today, in honor of Samhain (OK, they said Halloween but I know what I know) they were unmasking instead of masking.  They were playing 'Guilty Pleasures', music you only play in the privacy of your own home or car and never admit to listening. So I will remove another mask as well.

Just before I got off my exit, the morning DJ played a Kenny Loggins piece from the early nineties.  A time when Mr. Loggins was going through some significant personal change. This song is a trigger for me, it was meant to be a trigger, and all these years later immediately removes six layers of psychic skin. The song is called Conviction of the Heart and when I hear it I am rendered vulnerable and naked.  I am laid bare.  I am also infused with a sense of power and conviction, which was the point of the trigger.

When I was nineteen years old, I attended a workshop called The Basic.  The Basic was the preface to The Advanced which came before LP - Leadership Program. It's transformational education at it's best, invented in a garage that produced Lifespring and EST and a whole host of others but in the seventies and early eighties it was rampant. It was also a lot like a pyramid scheme in that enrollment, revenues, what have you, were entirely generated by the graduate base.  It made for some pretty intense conversations. In the early eighties it was so intense I ran away after The Basic and didn't come back for eleven years. 

When I was thirty years old and leaving my first husband and my two children I dialed a NYC number that I'd had stashed away for all those years and a woman named Robin Lynn answered the phone. And she did enroll me in the second to next Advanced course because I was still too reasonable to change my work schedule and get in the next one and she was smart enough to hear the fear.  I went there because my marriage was over and I heard that in the Advanced course they'd strip you bare and you'd have to look at exactly who you were and face it. That's all I knew but I was in enough pain that I was willing to walk through any kind of fire at all just to find some solid ground on which to rest my spinning head.

Well.  Let me tell you, I willingly participated in having ALL of my skin removed. And some flesh too.  I know I've written about this in the past but it does bear repeating - I am an ice queen. I am a bitch.  I am a shut down barbie doll. I drive my body as hard as I drive my car (it was an '83 RX-7 at the time). I report things like my rape like I'm reading the weather. I use sex for power and avoid intimacy. My feelings are so shut down I would sell my own mother.

In an exercise called Lifeboat, I saved a stick for myself. I know, makes no sense but I suspect at a gut level you know exactly what I'm talking about.  I saved a stick for myself, which was a first, and I didn't save one for my buddy, which was not a first. I stayed up all night crying and the next day I had an opportunity, in the nakedness of my own bare flesh, to reinvent myself.

People don't change but people can change how they choose and from where they choose and People, Transformation will  NOT tolerate mediocrity.

I staffed five Basics, five Advanced courses, and seniored three leadership programs to completion.  I bailed on the fourth half way through. I think it was the right thing to do but I'll never really know. I have served on at least a dozen service teams (cook, clean and look after 30 strangers in the middle of nowhere with limited supplies and make sure they have the best weekend of their lives - I specialize in cooking wholesome food for large groups of emotionally raw people with little or no notice but am also a knock out whiz on Music, which is an integral and constant part of any training).

And the song Conviction of the Heart played a pivotal part in all of this.

We are standing, a group of people, who would never have spent ninety days together, much less five minutes under any other circumstances, in the archway by the fountain in Central Park.  It is 5:45 AM on a weekday morning. I am wearing my underware on my head (OK, listen, we were ALL wearing my underwear on my head - I believe in equal opportunity weirdness and it was CLEAN). It's what I do, the outrageous and unexpected. It gets your attention whether you want it to or not. I am holding Nina's hand and there are fifteen or so other people and we have made a circle.  The cheap boom box is in the center and we are cold and damp.  We are unprepared, Nina and I, as usual. We have spent the last ninety days, as a group and by ourselves, accomplishing the impossible.  Each of us has written and completed a Letter of Accomplishment touching seven major areas of our lives.  Each of us has acted outside ourselves and part of a larger and selfless whole to effect mass change in our environments (our legacy project included collecting funds for a playground in the Bronx and a steady supply of free food to two homeless shelters as well as a legacy of 'drive by food and coatings' that is still practiced in NYC today).

Our legacy has included a serious amount of personal pain and struggle and the loss of 40% of our starting team.

I know what to say.  I always know what to say whether I or Nina like it or are comfortable with it or not.

I talk about the last ninety days.  I talk about our differences and what we have accomplished and not accomplished individually and as a group. I talk mostly about the members who are not standing here with us, who did not make the ninety days, who bailed or were tossed. I talk about taking what we've learned into the world and applying these concepts of leadership and risk to our lives outside the structure of daily coaching calls and weekend meetings and insane 6 AM meetings in Central Park.

And then I bend down and reach forward and pull the trigger, one of many, resuscitated by me from the past and played by many.  I hit play and the first notes of Conviction of the Heart echo off the walls of the archway, building into the crescendo of passion, faith and desire for connection and truth and the need to matter in the world that Mr. Loggins clung to, like many of us, in the darkest hour of dark.  And this public urinal that has been the witness to a multitude of murders, rapes, and other assorted assaults too numerous to catalog is transformed into a momentary epiphany about the human condition and our not so singular place in it.

We are team. This is our torch run.  We, the graduating leadership program will light and carry an olympic torch around the fountain and hand it off to the LP just behind us. This is a Thursday, we will receive our third weekend instructions to begin on Friday and we will complete on Sunday.

I led three groups of people plus myself through this process. I was laid bare each and every time. My life altered considerably with every passing of the torch. I can still smell and taste the dampness of that tunnel and the smoke from the fire. I have run that circle four times.

I could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Jeffrey is going to die in six to twelve months (horribly, I suspect). There is a community of bloggers that come off and on this site and others that have almost nothing in common and yet connect and find the truth of their own humanity. I would not trade if for anything.

Someday is not a day of the week. And Transformation does NOT tolerate mediocrity.

I am going to write a book starting tomorrow.  It might suck dead monkey pud and it might be the greatest thing since wet dreams and sliced bread or it might fall somewhere in between.  But I've wanted to do it almost my entire life and wanting, well, wanting, is just not good enough. 

And so ends the month of NaBloWriMo and begins NaNoWriMo.  I will see you on the other side and post whatever I post (I'll be interested in the results of that!)

Transcendental Blues

In the darkest hour of the longest night
If it was in my power I'd step into the light
Candles on the alter, penny in your shoe
Walk upon the water --- transcendental blues

- Steve Earle - Transcendental Blues

I've been listening to one of my Big Furry Guys (Mr. Earle, the king of the Big Furry Guys, for whom I took my very pregnant body - I was actually due that day - to see with Emmylou and Nancy G in the nosebleed seats at the old Palace Theater in Stamford, prior to any kind of renovation, and have never forgotten it) all day, on and off, interspersed with David Gray and Natalie Merchant and now I've moved onto Mark Knopfler's All the Roadrunning singing Beyond My Wildest Dreams.  It's been that kind of Sunday, my favorite kind, in which much was created, baked and consumed and much laid aside for the coming week.

I don't think the world is going to end as we know it in my lifetime.  I'm not even sure it will occur in my children's lives.  I think it will continue to occur gradually until we are lulled into such complacency that we have entirely forgotten ourselves and can so be consumed by a greater and perhaps more worthy beast. I'm not even sure I mind all that much. I don't really know. I do mind starving to death. I do mind poisoning myself. I do mind being asleep. I do very, very much mind that some of my friends are feeling it today. I also mind that I can't quite wrap my mind around the people I don't know, who aren't my friends, who also suffer terribly. I mind a lot of things. I can process a bit of it.

I read an article yesterday about the human race splitting into two separate species in the next 100,000 years. And we were meant to be alarmed. How can any of us truly be alarmed by something 100,000 years in the future?  We aren't wired to process information that isn't immediate. The article discussed the future of The Beautiful and Bright and the Ugly Caretakers. Huh. As if this isn't happening all around us all the time?  And as if the Hapsburgs weren't any indication of what occurs when the gene pool implodes on itself. Huh. And I remember the film Gattica that was released in a time when I stored literally gallons of breast milk in the freezer and sniffed fragrant (I can't really refer to infants as dirty under any circumstances) infant clothing in the privacy of my office to bring on the let down reflex that would catapult my last girl's meals gushing from my corporate breasts into sterilized receptacles and put on ice for another day. I did this twice a day every day and I cried every time I did it because all I really wanted was to be at home in my rocking chair with my last girl at my breast. The day I stopped crying was the day my milk dried up.  I made it six months and for any of you who nursed your children that's a serious feat, to continue to produce while separated from your infant 10 - 16 hours per day.  It broke my heart and I never did get over it.  I just moved on and found other ways to merge the me who is on fire in the world and the me who needs to pull my children in as close as I can get them. It is all about the need to be.

She is nearly seven. I can still feel her in my breasts; they constrict and ache when she cries with a particular tone or is away too long.  My oldest will turn 21 in two weeks. I have not seen him in two months nor had an intimate conversation in over six months. My breasts still ache for him too. I have not forgotten but I have let go. It is very hard and I try not to think too much or I would come apart and fly off into the ether and then what good would I be to anybody? But you know what, I love you, Mikie, I love you so much I can't catch my breath some days. And I believe in you. I believe that you will find your way and in doing so find your way home, where ever home happens to become.  I believe that deep inside, you know how much I love you too. I cut my arm off and my heart out because it was the only thing I could think to do. And I love you. Always.

So, having revealed all that, maybe Sundays will make a little more sense. Maybe I'll stop being the confusing enigma that is not one thing nor the other and pisses off just about everyone but me at one point or another.

I go to work every day because that is me.  That is me being who I am on fire, every single day. My friend The Consultant asks periodically, Alecto, do you like your job?  He asks this because he thinks my business partners are lunatics.  He's right, they are.  And I tell him every time, Consultant of Mine, I love my job and I do my damn best to tolerate them that has the need of me.  A large part of who I am is defined by the creativity that causes these databases to whir and chirp and push out their own product all day long.

I have Sundays because I need to be here as well. I need it all. Some days I think it might kill me and other days, like today, I think I have mastered the alchemy of what has become my life. Here is cheese bread and pumpkin pie plus the leftovers because I always end up with too much. I have moved on to using spelt instead of wheat and I'm still not sure what I really think of it.  It's a bit drier but it rises better, although you can't tell here by the bread because there are two pounds of cheese in these loaves.  They are asiago and goat gouda, both local and both packed with protein. Cletus and I both have food issues. We need to get the most possible bang for our calories to remain healthy. We need to get so used to this kind of gathering and eating that we no longer have the idea of a food issue. The pie comes from a little sugar pumpkin and he didn't take much to cook up and pie at all. He is, however, taking forever to cook because there is so much of him.

Here is the inside of my refrigerator.  Talk about intimate! On the lower shelf are four meals for the coming week. There are duck breasts marinating in a red wine, garlic, shallot, ginger concoction that will be finished in a plum glaze in less than 20 minutes when it's time to cook them.  There are chicken thighs and legs in a chipotle marinade (yes, I make all my own), a flank steak in balsamic and garlic, and finally veal chops in a white wine and lemon reduction with fingerling potatoes, yellow squash and plum tomatoes. This will get us through the week. Remember, Alecto DOES NOT cook on Fridays. There is a cream of tomato soup on the stove with a red wine infusion to go with the cheese bread and the spelt sour dough (I nurture the starter four days a week,  refrigerate two and wake up and utilize one). I'll let you know how I feel about the spelt in another week or so.

NoMans is making pickles. NoMans has been going through some cathartic stuff this week relating to his childhood and what did and did not happen and the fact that, as the youngest of four, his parents and siblings might just have gotten tired and it might not have been all about him after all.  One of the things I love most about him is that this cathartic stuff shows up in pickle making. He takes his ache and makes something beautiful out of it and he feels good in the process. I'll tell you though, I laughed my ass off when he figured out the pickling process was an actual process as opposed to an event and will take 5 - 6 weeks to complete in this climate. And also, I wished for CG's mother's punch bowl but the other yellow bowl will do just fine.

And finally, if you look up above those frou frou cherry veneer cabinets you will see to the left of my new butcher block, an actual wooden bread bowl.  I let go last week in Vermont. I bought the hand milled bowl and then had a long chat with a baker (who talked me into playing with spelt and made the most incredible sour dough raisin bread I've ever tasted and had the coolest mother f'ing long white beard I've ever seen) about the need to generate yeast in the kitchen and the fact that it would, simply, feel better.  He wasn't kidding.  It felt incredible.  It felt alive. My grandchildren, if they are so inclined, can use it. It doesn't mean I don't love the old yellow bowl. I do love the old yellow bowl and it is still mine.

And lastly, here is my beautiful first girl, my reason for being, my reason for breathing life into anything I can get my hands on. She might not be unschooled but she's remarkably creative and free. Her hair changes color weekly and she consumes books at an alarming rate. She paints and draws things I can barely process, she sings in two choirs, has been immersed in Latin for the last two years (chick seems to dig it, go figure)and is wearing her Thing One Disney T in the warm fuzzy memory of turning sixteen in the park of dreams with her best friend, her sister and her two step-brothers. She sits under one of my goofy wool blankets (I knit like a hyperactive fiend) and keeps her macbook close at all times. She too listens to The Big Furry Guy and smiles her secret smile. 

I cried when I wrote this tonight. And it was good. Thanks for listening.

- kisses and good night - Alecto