Tag: ten-minute write

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It never rains in Southern California: Ten for Today

September 12, 2016

The deserted parking lot on a Monday night at 7:50 p.m., one lone woman standing in an empty store, peering out the window into the low-lit night, it looks like the opening scene of a horror movie. Time freezes as the camera zeroes in on the woman’s catatonic face, drugged with the silent motionless night. The light peering from the cracked-open door leading to the store back room casts menace into the scene.

Will the spell be broken?

The painted prancing orange Corgi silhouette on the dog training parlor next door leaps to no one, nowhere. Odd. No clear launching or landing points for the dog–seems implausible. I’m not sure I’d take my dog there with that emblematic greeting: teach your dog to leap from nowhere to nowhere. Eerie and unsafe.

Seems pointless.

Like paying someone to write lame stories—pumping her creativity, not the store coffers. What should I do? Take to the boulevard with one of those huge arrows to twirl, dancing customers into the store or causing accidents by the distraction?

Who would mind the store?

Perhaps the old man picking through the trash in front of the store could keep an eye on the place while I wrestle up business. Ah, but he’s destroyed the horror movie ambiance with his fruitless search. But no, not picking through the trash (that’s reserved for the 50-something bedraggled woman in the wheelchair right around 9 p.m.), he’s throwing out trash and heading in!

“Did you see it?!!”

“What? See what?! (Yes! Some action heading my way).

“The rain. It’s raining. I even had to use my wipers to swipe it away once.”

 
Pixabay/rain

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Fat Knees: Ten For Thursday


September 8, 2016
 
I’ve always had a rocky relationship with my knees. Maybe it was my mother who first brought notice to the knee knocking. She once remarked that she had fleshy knees. I have the same knees. The surrounding knee flesh on the inner leg side puffs noticeably, like a mutant swollen skin tag.
 
Luckily, my era saw the maxi and midi skirts, either ankle length or below the knee length skirts and dresses. I recently emptied a closet full of midi skirts I wore professionally with a smart suit jacket, the uniform I wore to my law office. Like the law practice itself, those styles belong to a bygone era.
 
Now the mini and maxi remain, the latter my preference of course. The knees.
 
I recently wore a mini-ish dress, a sleeveless, painted, loosely-body-conforming sunset dress I bought in Hawaii a dozen or so years ago. I took a long look at my knees peering out from just under the hem of the midnight blue portion of the dress (sunset waters), and still did not like my fleshy knees, especially now that they’re accompanied by crepe-y skin sliding down to meet them. Aging ain’t pretty.
 
But it could be. While I know I’m perpetuating the cultural lore of youth beauty worship by disliking my knees, hiding them most of my life, I still wore the dress–with only a little trepidation. The beauty of aging lies in Helen Mirren style fuck-its. The gorgeous feeling of not giving a shit. But maybe that trite image–the rebel 50-something–is culturally produced too.
 
I’d like to take my fat knee to the crotch of cultural dictates, the media and marketing agencies. This fifty-something raises her age-spotted middle finger and says, “Fuck you!”

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Published on Life in 10 Minutes


A Room of my Own, a ten minute write I published here was published today on the site that inspired me to begin the daily habit of ten minutes to drain-write. I’m finding the creative sprints have opened possibilities, even whistle beckoning to begin or finish those bigger projects. 
Read the piece here. Hope you enjoy… Again. 

Peace. 

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Tightroped: Ten for Today


Stay just where you are. Don’t cross that line. We drew it for a reason. Once you cross, it’s all over for us. You see, we’re only good so long as we each pace our own squares, our own patterns and affairs. The space between us, well, that’s what keeps us together.

When we meet, right there at the line, on the line actually, we can do death defying feats. We tightrope that line of yours and mine. We get tunnel vision. We narrow our gaze to the line, but see, your face takes up the view just as mine does yours. So—on the line—we only see each other’s eyes, not where the rest of the line beyond us leads.

And I rarely peek over the line into yours just as you rarely glimpse over at mine. And we keep it that way. I think we like that. This balancing act on the line.

Your square is larger than mine, yet narrower. In fact, it’s really an elevated rectangle with thick supports. Everyone supports your rectangle like scaffolding that undergirds the mansion perched on the hill. You can see the lumber dug deeply into the ground, keeping the place afloat in space, like struts smoothing out a bumpy ride. All the pot holes repaired, groomed.

My square is square, equal on all sides, though the area is smaller. The numbers–height, length, and perimeter– like an old geometry quiz, reveal significantly smaller space than yours. But there’s enough to go around for us who take up that square to meet the corners of our lives, breathing, laughing, eating and thriving. We take up less than those who seem to need more.

But it’s not just rectangles vs. squares. There’s other stuff too. Enough difference that might make mine think yours misshapen and yours view mine as distorted. You’ve said so. I’ve said it too.

So best you squelch curiosity, dampen desire and drop the dreaming. You know the allure is solely the forbidden stepping over the line—to know, for sure, what’s there. So stay there, where I can find you.

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Reaching Out Reaching In: Ten for Today


August 22, 2016
 
How do I make it through this election season without losing friends, lovers and hope? I have never been particularly political in the sense that I cared not overly for the outcomes of elections. In my 40 plus years of voting, I may have voted FOR someone on the ballot twice. And only one presidential tenure had me gritting my teeth and angry too often.
 
But for the most part, my life is lived locally and interiorly. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the results. I do. But I am fortunate enough to live a charmed life where I can choose to live in a cocoon. Going about my daily chores, cares and doings, I burrow down deeply and ignore the rest of the world, or participate to the degree that I wish.
 
Perhaps that’s called first world or birth privilege. I don’t take for granted my genetic demographic winnings to be born where and to whom I was. I vote. I discuss. I inform hundreds of students a year about the world, locally and globally. I am not nihilistic. I hope. I care. I do my civic and personal duties.
 
But this election is different, to belabor the obvious. And not just because of who is running and how. I think I’m different. My eyes and sensors seek the world more, and so am more susceptible to it. My practice leads me to confront this headache nation, this raucous populace, with equanimity. I’m finding it difficult, prone to suddenly remembering books that need urgent reading. 

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Room of my own to clean: Ten for Today


August 21, 2016
 
Late summer cleaning: Decluttering my room brings me to well-traveled roads. Everything I touch feels or smells like time: last week, month, year or decade. My room aggregates time.
 
But not just this room. I’ve inhabited rooms all my life, fortunate as I am to have had roofs over my head. Only by choice have I slept outside a room–from camping under the stars, backpacking across the country or passed out drunk on a stranger’s couch.
 
My first room–one of my own–had tan shorn short carpet covered in down feathers slowly de-fluffed from my down comforter through small growing holes. I shared an apartment with my older sister after I left the home I shared with my husband for nearly 9 years. We were on hiatus. Six years of separation. And this room was the first I called my own, having shared all my other rooms from birth to age 29.
 
Though the circumstances of my landing in this room in an apartment complex settled below the hump of a freeway on ramp dampened the excitement of this first time experience, still I marveled at the possibilities: stamp my own identify into the fabric. Finally, I could fill a space with me, pieces of me in art, furnishings, bed sheets and comforters, knick knacks–all my choices.
 
As it turned out, however, I’d only half live in that space and the only addition to the bland, bare tan room, bed and dresser I unloaded moving in was the escaped goose down feather floor covering. Between obsessive work hours and mad dash dating, I hardly spent time in that room I slept in for two years before I bought a house, where I lived for another three or four years before moving back into my marital home, where now, 21 years later, I have my own room–sort of, mostly–to clean.

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The short-sweet life of a teenage carnie (Ten For Today)


I’ve never joined or worked for the circus. Can’t even remember going to one as a kid but must have as an adult with small children. I just don’t remember one. Maybe I’ve blocked it out. I know zoos are a drag. I get bummed seeing the animal prison cells, even the ones that try to look like “natural” habitats. I know–and the animals do too–that they are NOT free. It’s unnatural.
 
But I did work in a carnival on Long Island for a couple weeks when it was in town. I don’t recall where it was, some place for it to spread out over a good square half mile or so. I want to say at the Islip Speedway or maybe at the Farmer’s Market grounds, but those don’t seem to jog my memory. Yet I can see that carnival in my mind’s “movie” reels.
 
The booth panels were coarsely painted royal blue, where the tickets were sold and pay checks were picked up. The rest of it was a winding affair: serpentine rows of small squar-ish booths, tents, food stands and rides. I worked a game booth. The floors strewn with straw partially hid the dusty dirt floor beneath.
 
Actually, I worked a few games: the balls thrown at wobbly flat wooden clowns with painted white faces that only took three balls to knock down three clowns. They defied the laws of gravity and never seemed to fall all the way down. I also worked the ping pong ball toss in the ceramic cups that alchemically caused ceramic and lightweight plastic to create super bounce. And then there were water pistol shooters to knock down ducks or rabbits passing back and forth. Hardly anyone won, so I mostly collected quarters.
 
I remember smelling popcorn around me and on my clothes for two weeks solid. I was 13. I just learned to drink coffee, creamed blonde and sugared sweet. That summer, I also found a boy who liked me. I don’t remember his name though I’m sure it started with an R or an M. He was cute, brown short hair with a bit of curl in the tresses. He kissed me and put his arm around me a lot, claiming his own. I was thrilled to have attention paid me–my company desired.
 
He would visit me at the carnival. We’d get coffee on my breaks, and he’d walk me to and from the carnival. We’d go on rides sometimes after my shift, though for the life of me I must not have had much of a will to survive, having seen how those rides were assembled and by whom. No one looked to me as if they were long into their parole, even with my young, naive eyes.
 
And when the carnival started packing it up, I looked for the guy who asked me if I wanted to earn a few dollars manning the booths, to no avail. I checked the blue wood paneled booth with the door sign “administration” or something official like that, but I was told to come back. I did. Twice. And then I brought my mother, who I watched stomp up the two stairs to the booth window, her arms flailing in threatening gestures and her shoulders pulled back. I couldn’t hear the exchange, but she came back with cash.

Ah, the short, sweet life of a teenage carnie.

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Bar Tending Ambitions: Ten for Today


In my thirties, whenever I’d go to a party or otherwise meet new people, inevitably the subject of what I did for a living came up. So often when I revealed I was a lawyer, I’d end up hearing someone’s legal problems. Of course, I’d make the salutary joke: “Okay, I’ll listen (tapping at my imaginary wrist watch), but I’ll have to charge you.” Ha ha (sigh).
 
The dreaded question, “What do you do for a living?” became a drag, so I started answering, “I’m a bartender.” It came to me on the spot once, and then it stuck. Everyone who asked me what I did, I answered, “bartender.” Then the conversation moved on to something else. Rarely did anyone want to hear more, and I was fine with that.
 
I once had aspirations to be a bartender. I was 19 and working at a Mexican restaurant as a hostess, training to be a waitress. I was promised a shot at bar tending when I became of age and had enough experience waiting. Until I got “laid off.” My manager, a middle aged man (could have been 30 from my young perspective of what middle age was back then), and I butt heads on this one point. He hinted at first, but after I didn’t bite, then insisted that I wear make up; he thought I needed a less hippy, more sexy look as greeter and server, especially when I worked the bar.
 
Ten or more years later, one early morning when I found myself watching the sun rise outside the window of my 12th floor law office after pulling an all-nighter to meet deadline, I closed my gravelly eyes before heading home to change clothes. Heaven forbid I should be seen with the same suit from the day before. In the soothing warmth of closed lids bordering on seconds of sleep, I flashed on a flicker of fantasy: I’m giving up this hellish grind and going to bar tending school.
 
That thought–that I could always be what I pretended to be–gave me solace. Still does. When I grow up, I still want to be a fifty-something year old bartender. Is it too late?

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Room Mosaic–Ten for Today

Fan 

A fan blows rhythm into wood;

Across the room stirs fluttered paper;

Vibrations travel far into distant jungles.
 
Poster

Sylvia Plath said it; trapped inside the mind

Nothing you can say or do to get out of that fertile futility forest

Except to lose it.
 
Picasso

The politics of a line fascinates the artist,

Astonishes the viewer with simplicity, 

Of message, method and mood–peace face.
 
Photo

Three folded into one chair–Mamie, flanked by two little granddaughters–summer in France,

My two girls embraced in awkward submission, forced smiles,

Posing for another camera off center.


Air Plant

A floating glass bubble filled with silver and brown sand,

Hemp roped from the ceiling,

Inside crowd rocks, pebbles, earth, shells and one dead succulent.
 
Clay Pot

An art fair in Santa Monica, a day before many moons ago,

When time belonged to browse and easy chatter,

Not like now 20 years later when sparse, efficient words work us through the hours. 

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A kind of kindness (Ten for Today)


We’re in the car. I muse out loud, “I want to carry into the world the kindness and caring I feel when I do yoga or when I write about the garden I peek at sometimes through the fence separating our yard from the neighbor’s or when I’m baking apricot and garlic spread into baguette then topping it with sun dried tomatoes that have soaked in Greek olive oil a good long while, for our dinner guests.”

The one in the front seat is silent, but the wise ass in the back seat, snarkily asks in disbelief, “You?” Then she shakes her head slowly and says, “Nah.” They both laugh.

I laugh. She’s a quick witted funny kid. But as we drive a way into the silence, a momentary pause in conversation, each with our thoughts, I frown inside. 

I meant it. The kindness does not extend far beyond the mat. I don’t want to manufacture it for myself by motion and feel-good-pat-on-the-back exercises and readings. I want to exercise it, stress test it in the throes of messy, even horrible existence, in the battles on the streets, on the road, in the supermarket, and on social media. 

This election circus distracts me (a Trump funk), foments mental terror and pulsing anger that requires the quelling by kindness, everyone’s. But mine is especially important in my world, to the people I touch. Hiding inside words, playing nice with language won’t do. I won’t be jailed by the surrounding toxic vitriol. I vow to melt it, laser it with the heat of my passionate dispassion. 

Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love…

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