I saw the DaVinci Code today.  I think if I hadn’t read it I might have felt too lost.  It’s been a couple years since I read the book and I hadn’t remembered the end that way.  Did they change it?  I can’t imagine I wouldn’t have finished the book.  But I was in a book group and I always waited to the last minute. Sometimes I wouldn’t quite make it to the end, counting on the group to fill me in.  That was kinda fun, too.

I got the most out of our good weather.  The grass is mowed, the flowers are watered, and I pinched back all the spent pansies and English daisies and primrose.  Even the columbine and iris will be done soon.  I need to do the roses, too.  They’re in full bloom but by the end of the weekend and the rain I’ll have to cut them back, too.

Since every morning with the market was worse than the day before I’d knock off early and go for a walk or meet a friend.  You would not believe how much money I’ve lost.  It doesn’t even feel real.  Someone said we hadn’t had this big a — The person doing the interview said not to use the word crash — loss in twenty years.  That’s good to know because I’ve only been paying close attention like this for a couple years and didn’t know how bad it usually got in a bear market.  I’ve had good stocks tank before, and I’d just wait for them to come back.  It took a year for Nokia, and when it finally came back up I sold it.  That was a mistake.  I certainly hope it doesn’t take that long for things to recover.  

I don’t know if you remember that Edward Jones woman I took the financial classes from.  She had this chart we weren’t allowed to keep; we could just pass it around.  It showed the Nasdaq with its bear and bull markets graphed out.  I remember thinking the bad times didn’t last all that long.  I wish I could remember if that was one or two years or more like three bad years.  I’m thinking it was two.  My plan has been to wait it out.  The only stocks I have that are really in trouble are stocks I think will climb back up.  This has been my plan from the beginning because I knew it was going to get bad.  I just had no idea how bad.

I’ve lost eight pounds and I’m still going strong. Every morning I do sit-ups and leg lifts and then later I stretch and dance in the kitchen.  I’m remembering how to put little routines together.  Some I can still do on the right side but mostly I’m working on the left now.  My sacrum is becoming looser.  I’m being slow and deliberate about separating out those vertebrae again.  Sitting in front of the computer for the last two years, I think my lower back has been compressed into this solid mass.  Stretching everywhere else feels great but I am being very careful with my back.   I’m going dancing tomorrow night with my friend from the hospital so that’ll be great fun.  And I’m looking forward to church on Sunday.  Maybe I’ll stay for coffee this time.  No, I’d rather meet my middle daughter for brunch.  Have a great weekend!

I don’t know if the rest of you are having strange weather but here in Portland, Oregon it feels like September.  It was in the 90s at the beach, even.  I  stay up late when it’s hot, waiting for the upstairs to cool off.  I like falling asleep on top of the covers, feeling the night air on my skin.

I bought watermelon and strawberries today.  The stock market plummeted even lower while I wasted grocery money on plastic plates and glasses and a tea pitcher.  I mean to say I was at the grocery store.  It’s not like I traded food for the dishes.  Believe me I bought plenty of food.  Every time there’s a big weather shift and we enter the long-awaited next season, I celebrate with food.  I’ve got my special iced tea brewed and iced.  My favorite sandwich stuff and organic lemonade was lunch.  I don’t eat many sandwiches and because I pile them high I divide it into two meals. 

Marcie you’d be proud of me.  I thought of all that food in your garage as I stocked up on cans of soup and beans which were on sale.  My cupboards are overflowing, and with winter-type food.  I guess it’s just like shopping for clothes; you get the good deals out of season.

I never mentioned Mother’s day, which was interesting.  Not that I didn’t mention it, but that it was strange at one point.  I ended up at my mothers with the middle daughter.  She discovered how much like my mother she is and, as it was obvious to the three of us, our wheels were all turning in different directions.  I guess I’m glad it happened.  I stressed the idea that each of our qualities has a negative and a positive and her grandmother is a good example of what those qualities manifest when you don’t understand about love.  What followed was an intense discussion I’m still digesting.

I am probably closer to the middle daughter than the other two, I understand her better at least.  I’ve got more of a psychic connection with her and can feel where she’s at even if she’s in another state.  Anyway, before she made me drive over to my mother’s (I was going to drop the plant off while she was at lunch with my sister) we went to the farmer’s market and to lunch.  And in between that she stole a mailbox for me.  It’s possible she relieved them of it.

After the upsetting episode with my mother, she wasn’t upset she was overjoyed, I drove over to meet the oldest.  She showered me with presents, too, and we had a really good visit.  The youngest was at work all day and then opted to attend a family dinner with her grandmother and new step-mother-to-be.  The little shit avoided me, knowing she wasn’t going to see me for another week.  Saturday night was her prom. She is living with a friend and didn’t have time to drive over so I could see her dress.  I tried to drive over there but she barely had time to change from work, get to the restaurant and then hit the prom.  I’ve always been part of the getting-ready process for prom so I’m feeling very absent from her.  Even though I’m less of a mother more fuss was made over me this year. 

I assured my oldest yesterday that I wouldn’t have parked my car in that neighborhood unless I was right out front.  She asked what had changed that I was more careful (She grew up hearing what an idiot I was for going to bellydance clubs late at night).  I said now that I had a bum knee I knew I couldn’t outrun them.  Not that I could have before but now I feel like I can barely get around. A bad knee changes your whole self-image.  Even after all that surgery and chemo I still was in pretty good shape.  The effects of chemo take a long time to wear off and I think permanently alter your stamina.  But a bad knee just puts you in slow-mo. 

 It’s been a good thing, though.  On stage, dancers tend to use the right hip with the left arm up while the right arm and hand gesture.  The left knee supports all this.  No more.  I have been forced to switch sides.  Thank God I had good teachers who, in class, made me repeat everything on the left side.  But when I go to use my left hand to accent, it feels foreign.  When I try to do all the same tricks with my left hip, my balance is off.  This is why it’s not so bad to be in the middle of nowhere at a biker bar, practicing.

The reason I’m stalking the sax player is that I have this problem where I can’t dance to music unless I’m feelin’ it.  This man plays music I relate to.   The minute he steps up to the mic I’m on automatic pilot; my body knows what to do.  Moving in unision, knowing where he’s going, it’s a heady high and I want more of it. 

FACTS ABOUT THE MOON

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year.  That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters, and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

   Dorianne Laux, from “Facts About the Moon,”
               W.W. Norton & Company, 2006

I just went dancing. By MYSELF and the kicker was that it was on 117th and Division.  It was a biker bar.  The reason I went was that the saxaphone player was there.  I saw online that they were playing tonight so I got my dancin’ shoes on and drove over.  I was almost afraid to get out of my car but I’d come such a long way so I went in. 

I took a seat in between two couples at the bar.  All they had was beer and wine so I ordered a  Corona.  A young woman in her late 20s or early 30s smiled and because more bikers came in and were trying to order at the bar I moved over near a table where she and her friend were.  They were both missing several teeth in the back and were best friends.  They said they hadn’t been out in over two years.  One was pretty wasted but they wanted me to dance with them so that was cool.

It is empowering to be able to slip into other people’s worlds.  There was an older guy in a Hawaiian shirt trying to pick up the toothless girls, even though he was with a very well-put-together woman in her 40s.  They must have followed the band there, too.  When I was sitting a dance out because it was too slow she danced over to me and said this was “a good opportunity to do those yoga stretches.”  She started stretching her neck like a turkey.  I looked skeptical so then she said I could do arm excercises and began rotating her forearms back and forth, keeping her elbows behind her and taut.  I waved her away. 

The band is named after the guitar player and he’s pretty good.  He was doing a solo for the two girls, who were making appreciative whoops and hollers.  When they took a break the fellow came to our table and was chatting with the girls.  I told him I had seen them play a month or so ago, gone online, and noticed he was playing accoustic guitar right down the street from me.  He said some old man had complained that it was too loud so they won’t be playing there again.  He also said they weren’t going to be asked back to the original place I’d seen them. Hmmm.

I told him I was a fan of the saxaphone player, and when I realized how rude that was, got up to get another beer.  When I came back the two girls and the guitarist were gone and the sax player was there.  He wanted to know where he’d seen me and I told him.  I said I’d followed him there.  We joked about the place and I asked if he played with anyone else.  He said he was concentrating on getting his group back together again and about that time the guitar player and the bass player made noises like it was time to start again so he got up.  But the next song was his.

Having navigated all those new places in Seattle I’m feeling bolder about getting out at night.  At least I know where I’m going here.  It was such late notice and I was afraid the place might be raunchy so I didn’t ask anyone to go with me.  I’m glad, too.  It’s easier to fit in when you’re by yourself.  A woman who I think worked there came up to me and offered me a drink out of her glass.  That kind of freaked me out and I declined. But that’s the kind of place it was.  Think of all the places I haven’t been to yet.

Last night I went to a very upscale place.  A Latino band I’d seen at the state fair had emailed me saying they were playing.  I hadn’t realized I was going to such a swanky place but they were playing in the bar so I found a barstool and hung out there.  It was a tapas place and the drinks were fantastic.  I sat next to a girl who worked there so she told me all about the place.  Other than the two of us it was all couples so that was fun to watch.  From now on I’m going to make a concerted effort to go dancing on the weekends.

Do you ever get that feeling, for no reason you’re aware of, — Did you catch the fact that I didn’t use apparent?  — the one where there’s something good around the corner?  I get this sort of titillated sensation.  If memory serves –Scratch that.  My memory is that nothing good ever happens.  It is in anticipation of nothing.  But I’m going to enjoy it anyway. 

I’m on this kick lately where I’m not going to question everything, in terms of whether or not it’s real.  I’m just going to enjoy whatever sensation I’m having and not ruin it with a reality check.  Ignorance is bliss; couldn’t help myself there.

The sun is back and it’s here to stay.  Ahhh, maybe that’s it.  I laid out briefly and something happens to me in the sun, but only when I’m laying out.  It’s better than any drug.  And I only like laying out in the spring before it gets too hot.  I like a slight breeze. 

I say “briefly” because I could hear my neighbor talking to her yard man about where to rodatille sp?.  I have a raspberry patch next to a raised bed which fills up with weeds.  On her side of the fence everything is manicured.  The only weeds are the ones that jumped over the fence.  I hurry over there and make like I’m on it.  Maybe tomorrow. 

I tried several times to write something at the hotel but it always got so involved and people were coming in and out, wanting the computer.  I used to live in Seattle.  Actually, it was Bothell.  Just for a year and then I told my husband I was leaving with or without him, come September.  Being at the hotel for a week was much more like living there than the weekend visits.

Over the years, because my husband worked there, I would visit often.  It’s where I did all my shopping and when I was dancing I was able to rent a house for next to nothing.  She rented it out to visiting dancers with the idea that they’d take a lesson.  And I did for a while. 

During those trips and even when I lived there I spent all of my time downtown or at the market.  If you’ve never been, there is a huge market along the waterfront called Pike Place Market.  Or maybe it’s Pike Street Market.  Anyway, it’s a big tourist thing but locals get flowers and fish there I think. 

This week has been exhausting because I went to every cool store and restaurant in every cool neighborhood I could find.  I researched it thoroughly, writing down all the addresses and phone numbers, and I got the hotel to do a MapQuest for each neighborhood.  Then I divided the week into North, West, East and Northeast.  On the first day I barely left the room and on the last day I walked everywhere because I did 1st and 2nd street. 

Every night I’d get back to the hotel exhausted.  That’s when I’d read my manuscript.  I finally bought a printer and printed what I had:  200 pages.  I remember seeing a picture of one of your manuscripts once.  It was either Jeri’s or Pina’s and I couldn’t even imagine getting that far.  I remember thinking What if I finally printed it out and it wasn’t good enough? 

So far I still like it and today I figured out an ending.  I don’t know how strong it is.  I don’t like it as much as I liked the ending of the first book.  The other thing is that if I use this ending which includes a whole lot more years than I was planning on, it’ll take me at least through summer to get it done.  Unless I can stay off xanga.

This trip was intense for a lot of good reasons and I’m still sifting through them all, not ready to write.  But it sure was nice to have a week of sun.  I got to wear my summer skirts and blouses.  And I started wearing my hair up.  Every day I’d take all this time getting ready with these up-dos and make-up.  I felt sophisticated, swishing around with my skirts and sexy sandals.  A little of that city life goes a long way, though.  It’s nice to be back, sitting at my computer wearing a sweatshirt and old pants the dog can climb on.