Teeming with life!

Downtown Phoenix, despite its hotels, coffee shops, and conference center seemed empty.  That is the way, often in the desert, that emptiness prevails, and it is why I love the desert, but I hadn’t gone to Phoenix equipped for the desert.  I acquired a water bottle, and found fresh spring water sources in the hotel fitness center and the conference center to keep it full.  I am good at finding water in the desert.  If water coolers aren’t available, sliced cactus, condensation traps, and low ground can get it done.  But food in the desert is harder.  I have not quite resigned myself to eating insects yet, and there was nearly nothing gluten free in Phoenix.  There were nuts, chocolate, smoothies, and salads. I wandered like a hunter gatherer through the heat from coffee shops to smoothie bar trying to find a banana. Finally a woman at a bakery found one in a fridge in the back.   I found a tamale stand once, but it was gone the next day when I went to find it again, almost as though it had been a mirage. 

Empty.

By the time my plane came I was on empty.  At the airport there weren’t even smoothies or salads let alone bananas.  I had a headache. 

When I found my seat, it was the one near the window, to keep me away from the flight attendants.  The straps of my backpack always stray into the aisle and the flight attendants become hostile at me because I am the owner of the offending backpack straps, so I sit by the window to maximize my distance from trouble.  In my mind, flight attendants wear nuns habits for their uniforms and carry rulers instead of beverages; they terrify me.  As I sat down, my skirt rode up a bit on my leg, exposing my knee.  The woman next to me was middle aged, slender, hair cropped short.  She seemed tightly wound somehow and irritable and she sat staring at my knee.  I wasn’t sure if she was irritated that my knee was showing at first, but after a time as she kept staring, I realized she was staring at it in the same way that one would stare through the feathers at Folies Bergere.  A fleeting glance at something covered…forbidden.  I pulled the hem of my skirt back down.   I do not like the idea of my knees being treated like forbidden territory.

A few minutes later two twenty something women appeared in the aisle to inform the person beside me that she was occupying one of their seats and she needed to move.  She was deeply annoyed but moved, and the two sat down beside me.  One was bossing the other around, telling her not to eat any snacks.  The other was defensive and trying to hold her ground. She was hungry, but self conscious about eating when her partner disapproved.  The bossy one backed down, before she crossed some line…A lovers quarrel.  The bossy one turned on me then, asking me to crack the window so she wouldn’t get motion sick as we took off.  We weren’t even moving yet, and the windows were closed to keep the plane cool.  I cracked the window a bit for her, since that was what  she asked, and heat poured through the slit.  

“No?” she asked. “You could just open the one up there in front of you.”  I explained that the heat was intense and coming through the windows, and that we weren’t moving yet, so her motion sickness was not as great a concern as the heat.

When the plane moved, I opened the window for her, and the two of them held hands as it took off. She started talking about flying to Minnesota once, and she kept going on and on like she was an expert at flying or something.

I jammed my earphones in and turned on Beck as an escape, from a cranky lesbian, from being hungry, from a headache. 

When I landed in Denver, the cranky lesbian had simmered down and was quite decent to me, helping me pass my trash to the flight attendant.  It was as though leaving a completely barren desert for a less barren desert had somehow hydrated her soul.  

There were friends excited to see me after I arrived, and my students came with posters ready to give excellent presentations of their work.  And happily Denver had more gluten-free restaurants than any place I have ever been, including New York, Geneva, Madrid, Vegas, and L.A.  I started sleeping through the night again and got done nearly all of the work that I needed to catch up on.   

When I left Denver, it was time.  The bit of my consciousness tied to the growth of the grass on the front lawn of my house started manifesting itself as did the bit that is tied to an awareness of how many times I had worn the same clothes, and the bit that is aware of dehydration and altitude.  I made it home safely, very late at night,  grass long, air moist, heavy and cool, from a windstorm that had blown the air of San Francisco across the hills that define the Bay Area. Car fine, house fine, and the clean white sheets of my bed and soft feather pillows beckoning.

Grades are in, revisions are out.

Student posters presented, science fair judged.

Editing underway for the writings of friends, and myself.

I managed to catch all my flights, though I cut it closer than ever before.

At the moment, I am even ahead in Scrabble.

And sleep is easier; I can make it through the night

Like a good child

Who has finished her chores and pleased the people around her.

I wonder sometimes whether true love is Poisson distributed….a randomly occurring and somewhat rare event, with its probability being uniform and spontaneous at every moment. And as time approaches infinity, the cumulative probability of finding love approaches one.

And then sometimes I think it is gamma distributed with the bell shaped part of the curve being centered around age 22 and the 95% confidence intervals between 17 and 25… Like Greek ideals of beauty, or cavalier poetry about rosebuds and time. (There is a part of me that thinks the poets must have it because poetry is a language made for love, but then I think about poets I have known, and I am less certain about their wisdom.)

I think maybe it is Cauchy distributed with a mean somewhere around some age, that is perhaps bounded in a sliding window that increases with time, school, juvenilization of women…..and men, and infinite variance, like a rotating light projected from a cylinder onto a square, a lighthouse trapped in a box.  Utterly unpredictable.

I wonder whether if it is tethered to the biological clock, and if so, how strongly that affects the mean.

I talked with Laura on the phone, for three hours. She is in true love, and her belly is curving out like a normal distribution with another love protected inside.

I was there when my cousin Eileen had her first. It was my job to keep the doctor from being overly involved and messing things up. I shooed him from the room politely at every mention of cutting her open. She was 19 and I was 19 and we were both idealists so the doctor didn’t stand a chance. Her husband was there too and he was a buffer between me and the doctor. The doctor laid on the guilt as he stitched her up after it was over. He told me it was more work for him to stitch her up than if she had delivered by C-section or had an episiotomy. I glanced at Eileen exhausted after hours of contractions and gave him a look intended to ask who had really been the one working in the room. Maybe he understood that look because he didn’t say anything more about it.

I told Laura about this in our long conversation;  I will be there for her first too. She is preparing with statistics: The C-section rate is around 40% even though the need for them is around 4%.   Pregnancies become risky enough that a women who has c-sections is limited to 4 children because the probability of uterine rupture is way to high after the fourth to continue. (These are all normally distributed events).

So she is doing everything she can to avoid a C-section and be healthy, for her child, for herself, for women everywhere.  Simply put, she protects the people, things, and ideals that she love and does and does not let others undermine her paths.  

breakingnews:

WWLTV: At least 12 people are injured after gunfire rang out at a Mother’s Day second-line parade in the 7th Ward of the city of New Orleans.

Police say around 200 people were in the area when the shooting occurred. Three suspects are believed to be involved.

The youngest victim is 10-years-old, officials say. Three of the victims who were shot are in critical condition.

Follow the latest at Breaking News. 

I would really love it if the co-occurence of death and community events would change its trajectory to a sharp decline.

I learned something from Sam once after his sisters had stayed with me for a week, alone, without their parents. Over the course of the week, I had pulled out coloring books and crayons, and then old backpacks for them to carry them around in. None of seemed like much to me, not even a gift, just hand me downs that might be useful to some little girls. When Sam saw all of it though, he said “you gived them so many things! And you gived me nothing.” and he was really sad. His parents told him to rope it in, in so many words, and that you don’t go around asking people for things, but I started thinking about it.

I had given Sam things before. I had bought him Oreo Cookie ice cream sandwiches, and some birthday presents, but somehow he was jealous of what his sisters had. He wanted hand me downs. So I found hand me downs for him too. A little pocket knife, tiny really, it could maybe sharpen a pencil, but that was all. A sea turtle carved from bone that I had bought years ago, at a bead store in the NY garment district, because I was a girl in a bead store and everything was such a good price. I fastened it to a leather cord and made him a necklace, and then later, when I found an old pocket knife in the attic, I passed that on to him also, and then a headlamp. And he liked all of these things more than any shiny new toys or books I have ever given him. He liked them, I think, because I had owned them, and maybe I was giving a little bit of myself to him with each one. I like very much that he likes the used things of mine better than the new, because when he tells me he loves me, in a way that only a little boy would ever tell his aunt, I know he means it.