#takes place between Deadhead and Pride

[0writerchick0]

Burning the Bird

“Daddy! Daddy!” Elenei called at the top of her lungs as each little foot slammed down hard on the floor. She was terrified and needed him more than ever. Daddy would know what to do; he always did.

He was in front of her in an instant, his grey-green eyes searching her with obvious concern. Perhaps he’d noticed the difference between one of her usual hollers and this panicked scream. She was still mid-stride when he scooped her up in his arms and searched her little wrinkled face. “What is it, Princess? What’s wrong?”

She could see what she wanted to tell him, but couldn’t find the words. Words had been difficult for her, but didn’t seem so to anyone else in her family. Auntie Aerie rattled off a ton whenever she visited, and Daddy and Mum always seemed to speak so easily to each other. Even Uncle Jon and Auntie Ygritte seemed to know their words, except they cheated and used their hands to say them. On any given day, Elenei would be jealous, but she didn’t have time for that right then. The image of her mother opening the oven door and all the fire pouring out froze her in horror.

Her father smoothed his hand over her hair and asked again, “What’s wrong?”

She thought to the most recent episode of Paw Patrol she saw. He was fire dog so he was very brave. She needed to be brave, too. Mum needed her to be. “Mum.”

“Mum? What’s wrong with Mum?” She felt his grip tighten and his eyes widen. “Sansa?” He called out.

Caught up in his firm grip, Elenei found the courage to spit out, “Fire.”

“Fire?” He asked, taking a step forward, his gaze darting to all the exits as he yelled, “SANSA!”

“It’s fine, Petyr. Really!” Elenei heard her mother shout back through the wall from the kitchen.

Her father’s muscles relaxed at the sound of her mother’s voice. He looked down at her and raised his eyebrows, which she knew was his silent way of asking her if what Mum said was true. Elenei shook her head no and then held both of her arms up and explained, “Big fire, Daddy.”

He nodded, “Alright. Stay here. I’ll go help Mum.”

He set her down and she watched him walk towards the kitchen. She was relieved he was going to help her mother out, but a part of her wanted him to keep a hold of her. The safest feeling in the world was when either of her parents held her, but she would settle for just seeing them. Her father had told her to stay put, but she didn’t care. She wanted to see them, know that Mum was okay.

She crept one tiny foot in front of the other, holding her breath as she walked. When she got to the archway that lead to the kitchen she stayed around the corner at first, just listening.

“Why did you dismiss the help on Thanksgiving of all days?” Her father asked.

“Because I wanted to cook,” her mother replied as if it was an obvious answer. To Elenei it was pretty obvious; if you didn’t want someone to do something for you, you did it yourself. She didn’t understand how that would be so difficult for her father to get. He understood most things, after all.

“Sansa, no one expects you to cook Thanksgiving dinner.” His voice was softer, and Elenei wondered if they were hugging. Their voices always got softer when they were hugging.

“I know that, but I wanted to. I’m a mom now, I feel like I should be able to cook something for my family.” Elenei nodded to herself. Her mother wasn’t wrong. Mommies always cooked for their families, she never knew why Mum didn’t. Then again, the flames that came out of the oven when she opened the door might have had something to do with it.

“You were a mother last year and the year before, and you didn’t have it in mind to try cooking then. Why is this different?” Elenei didn’t understand what her father was trying to say.

She heard her mother sigh and she snuck a peek at her.

Her father held her, and her head rest on his shoulder, her long red hair falling down her back and over his arms. If there was anything about her mother that Elenei would always remember, it was her hair. It was gorgeous and she always wanted to touch it. Sometimes she would wrap it around her finger and fall asleep. Whenever her mother attempted to move her sleeping form, she’d feel a tug on her finger and wake up. She knew her father cherished Mum’s hair too, because he was always touching it and every time he hugged her, he would smell her hair. Elenei wondered if all prince charmings liked their princess’s hair. She touched her hand to her own inky black tresses and chewed her lip. Her hair was devoid of color, how would she ever have a love like her father and mother?

She’d stopped paying attention to their conversation, too caught up in her own plans for marriage and happily ever after. They’d separated and her father was pouring her mother a drink in one of the funny looking glasses that only grown ups were supposed to use. He smiled as he said, “I’ll call them back. They can fix this, for enough money. Arya’s always late and Jon and Ygritte won’t care. Rickon’s flight was delayed anyway.”

Her mother accepted the glass, “Thank you, Petyr.”

Elenei snuck a glance at her father, he looked so happy to see Mum smile. He continued, “And if you want, we’ll celebrate Black Friday this year.”  

Her mother’s eyes bulged and she set the glass down on the counter, coughing her drink. “You said ‘never again’ after last year!”

Elenei wondered what Black Friday was. It didn’t sound very nice. What day that had ‘black’ in front of it was a good day? She looked down at the tips of her hair and wondered for a moment if it was to celebrate people with black hair. Did she have a day devoted to her and others like her? No way. Couldn’t be. That would be too perfect. And if that was the case, why would Daddy say that he wasn’t going to ever celebrate it again? She had to know about this day. Auntie Aerie would tell her about it if she asked, she was sure of it.

Her father chuckled, “The Bentley hasn’t needed bodywork for a while, why not?”

“You make it sound so bad.” Her mother playfully slapped at his chest. “Like you’ve never gotten into a bit of a scuffle while you’ve been shopping before.”

“Not until I met you, and never with a vehicle,” he laughed. Elenei was seriously wondering what a ‘scuffle’ was and what part cars played in it.

Her mother scoffed and rolled her eyes, “Okay, fine. It won’t get that bad this year.”

“Now, now, don’t speak too soon. You have a reputation to keep,” her father teased. “The richest bargain shopper in the city.”

“It’s not about saving money. It’s about the sport of it.” She huffed, “Cersei would understand.”

Auntie Cers! Elenei loved it when Mum and Auntie Cers played together. They were always drinking grown up drinks and giving her things. Auntie Cers kept promising to take her to get her ears pierced and Mum kept telling her no and then they would both buy her pretty bracelets and necklaces instead. Elenei didn’t care about those things, she loved to run and play outside more, but when she saw her mother and Auntie Cers together, they looked like princesses and Elenei wanted to be a princess too. She wondered how long it would take for her to be grown up enough to have some grown up drink.

“Cersei would,” her father rolled his eyes.

“You’re in a mood,” her mother challenged lightly.

He shook his head and she wrapped her arms around him, “What is it, Petyr?”

“I was just worried. When Elenei came running to me and told me you were in a fire, I just..”

Her mother nodded as if she knew what he was going to say. Elenei didn’t have the slightest idea what he was going to say, so she didn’t know how her mother did. It was more proof positive that her parents spoke so easily. Elenei wished she could think of the words she needed, so she could be more like them.

Her mother’s voice lowered as she whispered, “Can I make you feel better?”

“Always,” her father answered through closed eyes.

“Good. Let’s put the parade on tv for Elenei.” Her mother kissed his cheek as she pulled away from him.

Elenei didn’t stay to wait for his reply. She covered her mouth with both hands and ran as quietly as she could. She was standing almost in the exact same place her father left her when her parents came in. Her mother came over to her and gave her a big hug. “It’s all okay, sweetheart. There’s no more fire and everyone’s safe.”

Her father was already fiddling with the controls on the television. “No more fire?” Elenei asked, knowing it was gone, but needing to pretend she didn’t.

“No more fire, promise.” Her mother kissed her forehead. “But, Mum’s all covered in smoke and soot, so I need a shower.”

Elenei nodded.

Her mother smiled up at her father and added, “And I need Daddy’s help.”

Mum showered on her own sometimes, cause grown ups could. Sometimes, though, her parents helped each other. Elenei just figured it was for times that they were extra dirty. Before she could think about it too much, a gigantic Paw Patrol blimp appeared on the screen, and a Pacman just after that. Elenei dropped to her bottom on the floor, staring at the screen with her jaw hanging open in wonder at all the cartoons she’d watched come to life at a hundred times their actual size. She barely heard her parents laughing as they scurried down the hall to their private bathroom.   

[theloniousbach]

Week 33: Resist/s/urge: An Epilogue

[This entry concludes a weekly series of Facebook posts started as I sought to cope with going on lockdown.  Though we may well be heading back or should be, I have ended the series.  They are no more than ephemeral, but I archive this one as a record of the series.]

My title is meant to mash up “resist surge” and “resists urge” as I bring to an undoubtedly temporary end to this series which I started as we headed into lockdown.  I used it to focus on how I was coping—how as a measure and how as methods.  I shifted the heading every eight weeks as it seemed that we and I were entering new phases.  

We are certainly entering a new “resist surge” phase as we seem to have had almost 100,000 new cases yesterday and deaths over 1,000 the day before and nearly that many yesterday.  Most states are surging as is Europe and Latin America.  So, despite the profound US leadership crisis, the problems are not even primarily of that character.  It is not who is captain of the Titanic but that we are on poorly designed vessel sailing into a sea of icebergs.

It is also odd to suspend this series right as we end a US Presidential Election cycle where this issue is at the center.  But I have easily “resists urge” to write about that.  More challenging to resist is the urge to write about the broader, more fundamental politics underlying it.  I have such opinions and lived them in my 20s and 30s with pride and no regrets.  But this format is far from the avenue for those discussions—and, frankly, dear readers, even the young ones, for those discussions to matter very different social forces will be involved and lead them.

But I felt the series drifting in that direction as I have been settling into personal solutions to the profound challenges are living through.  So, it’s time for a balance sheet and an epilogue for now.  Again, there are new challenges/icebergs on the horizon.

But I started with addressing how I would keep body and soul together with attention, focusing on physical and mental health in the face of stress.  I continued and continue with intermittent fasting and, rather than the pandemic 15, I have continued to get rid of that middle aged gut and my weight is down 3% (rather than up 10%).  I am back in the range I was 30-35 years ago, but I am well aware that I don’t have the body of a 30 year old.  

Still I might be as fit as I have ever been.  From the start, I knew that daily exercise was key—and daily walks had been my prime exercise for year.  They were and are important for getting out of the house.  But I made daily yoga the focus witchin that first month.  I’ve been doing yoga fairly regularly for over 20 years, since I gave up alcohol as part of a detox prompted by getting off Codeine 3 for a long term bout with kidney stones in 1999 that culminated in surgery.  So I know my poses and had been using Yoga with Adrienne once or twice a week for several years.  I ramped it up with her several annual 30 Days of Yoga series working my way through all of them.  Now I’m a subscriber and follow mostly her daily classes.  I have much better muscle tone, posture, and lung capacity.

So, with the body part of body and soul going, I took up soul in parallel.  

I rolled with the punches with work and teaching fairly well, adjusting to the technology and tempo of remote work.  I am productive in ways that I couldn’t/cannot be at the office and feel connected to students and colleagues.  I get enough peopling in.

But, as someone important once said, life begins when this activity ceases, at the table, at the tavern, in bed.  Now the sale of my labor power is complicated and elements of it truly are unalienated and the rest of it is certainly rewarding and meaningful.  But it is alienated in the sense that, at 65 years of age, I can see the day looming when I can choose not to do it.  Life begins when I do the things I doubled down on to keep soul together.

STORIES—At first it was quite hard to concentrate and I could not read anything with a long arc.  So I read the Decameron, a story or two, but no more than three, a day until I had all 100.  It was a story of plague and distraction, so it fit. I also discovered streaming plays at first from the National Theatre of London but soon the Globe and Stratford Festival.  I homed in on Shakespeare, particularly lesser known plays.  That welcome habit has fallen off and I have missed an October series of three Shakespeare plays from a National Theatre partner.  But it is an acquisition that I hope to foster and grow.

I settled back into novels soon enough with mysteries mostly.  Right now, I’m rereading Elsa Hart’s The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne to teach and for a Webster University Book Club with my class and Elsa herself.  Since she is someone I take my beginner’s questions about my retirement project book, it is useful to outline it on this reread as I took my note taking to a deeper, multiple purpose level.  Recently I got caught up in the 1632 universe of alternate history.  There have been several Anna Eliot/Charles Veley Sherlock Holmes/Lucy James pastiche novellas which are also good to study for my own project.  I got back into mysteries by rereading, 35 years on, the Martin Beck series on the occasion of Maj Sjowall’s death.  I also dipped into the Hogarth Shakespeare series to see how modern authors dealt with the very challenging source material of “The Taming of the Shrew” and “The Merchant of Venice” which were part of the theater season.  There were also a couple of Jodi Taylor St. Mary’s/Time Police novels as I keep up on that series.

SCHOLARSHIP—My teaching, an unalienated part of my labor and the part that I will do after retirement from the day job, has been rewarding.  I took Science in the News remote and asynchronous as we locked down.  That worked in the moment as I could make COVID our subject matter (because that what we were all studying anyway) and could think about how the world was testing us far more than I as a teacher could.  So I could relax about some of the mechanics.  I had already built eight weeks of rapport with them, so that helped too.  My current class happens synchronously but largely remotely.  It’s topic—the role of place—has been a way to test some concepts (place as human constructed, therefore rich in history worth studying, and where community happens) that are part of a broader collaboration that may result in a conference.

As we were shutting down, I had made some significant changes to my “last” Edgar Anderson paper for the Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden with Gar Allen’s suggestions.  It received further polishing from the Annals editor and also pal Peter Hoch.  So it is well and truly done, set to appear in the last quarterly paper issue of that renowned journal.  While I have said it’s the “last” Edgar paper, gee, maybe I could write about his collaboration with Pioneer Hi Bred Seed Company and so might see if Agricultural History might want it.

Place and a historical mystery are where my intellectual interests will shift.

MUSIC—The biggest threat of the pandemic is/was the loss of live music.  That very first weekend of lockdown I had the decision to not go taken out of my hands by cancellations of the SF Jazz Collective celebrating Miles Davis’s In a Silent Way and Sly Stone’s Stand at the Sheldon and Joe Russo’s Almost Dead (where I have invested my Deadhead energy as I don’t think I’ll see any original members again, though talk about “resists urge” pressures) at the Pageant.  Those cancellations were sensible and necessary, but gee it would have been hard to make the decision to stay home.  

The pull for live music is that strong.  

But I’ve found it in ways that might even make for more opportunities.Jorma Kaukonen has done two dozen Quarantine Concerts, mostly solo with local friends from his Fur Peace Ranch operation, but Jack Casady came in for two shows in July and is around currently with the third show tonight.  Kaukonen is not only musically formative, but so forthrightly himself that it is comfortable to be with him.  I have similar warm feelings of connection with Larkin Poe who are extending the southern Americana blues roots etc tradition with slide guitar and killer vocals.  They have done various streams, both from their spare bedrooms to empty venues with their band.

The piano has been key and, at first, the recitals under the auspices of the 92nd Street Y and Fred Hersch’s almost 40 Tunes of the Day were the start.  The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the BBC 4/Wigmore Hall collaboration (with the helpful YouTube algorithm kicking in) gave me more choices.  Wigmore Hall is my go to source and through them I have seen Angela Hewitt wrap up her Bach cycle and Andras Schiff dig into the last three Beethoven Piano Sonatas.  I have discovered key parts of the horn repertoire including the Brahms Trio and the Mozart and Beethoven Wind Quintets and some of the clarinet chamber works (watching Gassenheuer for example.  I’ll click on most cello sonatas and ensembles and all piano trios.  There is something about this listening that has paid benefits to my jazz listening, particularly more challenging out there works, as I can hear structural elements better.

Jazz is my go to though and there is a wealth of in real time performances as if we really were in New York and had to choose between the Jazz Gallery (got a membership), the Vanguard (an annoying platform but top drawer stuff), the Blue Note, Smoke, and Small’s (a place to check for up and comers but also, with a contribution, through their archive, people who upped and came on the scene).  I have seen folks I wouldn’t have otherwise—George Cables, last night Oliver Lake/Reggie Workman/Andrew Cyrille, David Murray, Billy Hart with Mark Turner, Kenny Werner, Omer Avital.  It goes on and on.  I have lots of Couch Tour FB Note/Tumblr entries.

I was playing piano lots until we went on vacation, exploring how tunes fit together.  Nothing ready to unplug the headphones even for Ellen, but rewarding.  I have a new tune, “Everything Happens To Me” to understand, so I think that habit is returning.  But I do sit at the piano frequently for my almost weekly discussions with a young singer/songwriter/marching band tuba player about music theory where we explore things together.  They’re free to her and she still may be getting a bad deal but it’s part of keeping my body and SOUL together.  Between her, Jorma, and my own inclination, I do play lots of guitar and that helps too.

But it is WRITING that has been my biggest solace.  I come out of this experience comfortable saying I don’t just like to write and that I have a decent body of published work but I am a writer.  It’s how I live in the world.  It’s how I pin down my musical experiences for example.  

But obviously this series itself about coping with the pandemic is how I have coped with the pandemic.  I treasure that more of you have read these than I would imagine and I do take you all into account somewhat as I write these.  I want them to be organized, appealing, and clear.  But I am a writer and I would do this even if you weren’t here.  But social media means that I’m not Franz Kafka or Emily Dickinson writing to make sense of the world but creating papers that they would just as soon be destroyed.  That said, these are thoroughly ephemeral and this one will be the only one in the series curated in the sense that it’s on my Tumblr.

So, I am a writer who makes sense of the world by writing.  The world will call me to write by being insensible.  Very soon very likely.  But this series has run its course.  So as we resist the surge, I will resist the urge to do the same old thing.

Still I bet I see you soon.

[0writerchick0]

2018 project list

Rules: list all the projects you want to work on this year, then tag up to ten friends to do the same.

Thanks @the-targaryans. This is really gonna make me accountable. 

1. Finish The Fall of the Pride. This is the last installment in the Baelishes series and a huge step for me. Finally letting my baby go (with the exception of a random tidbit here and there) and moving on. 

2. Work on Wolfswood Tavern. I wanted to explore the dynamic of BronnxAryaxGendry from Baelishes au -- see how they got to where we see them in the series. It takes place during the 2 yrs between Merger and Deadhead.

3. Outline and write A Lion Of The Rock. It’s gonna be a short ficlet on how Cersei and Jaime from The Baelishes got together. Takes place 20yrs before PxS got together in Baelishes. 

4. Mockingbird Don’t Sing. As depressing as this is--and I know it is, I want to someday write a tidbit on Petyr’s death. In outlining Fall of the Pride, a lot of characters die and I started thinking about Petyr’s death, and I wanted to do him justice. I wanted to give him something better than what season 7 did. So I started picturing how things would go down. And then I got too emotional and put it aside. So, one day, when all the projects have finished. I would like to brace myself and write Petyr’s death in The Baelishes as a tidbit with a huge warning at the top so that readers know not to read it if they’re not up for it. I just think it would be cathartic for me personally to do it.

Tagging: @greedisgreen @redlektor @queeenpersephone @shadowedscribblings  -- there’s probably a ton more people I’m just not thinking of now, but anyone can do this if they want! It’ll help you feel more accountable--promise!