Energies

My loves, I have good news. Apparently the British lottery has awarded me their highest prize. I just got the message my e-mail. I have many, many plans. And I think all my friends will want to share in the cash cow so get your proposals together now. . .

Actually, I do have good news. We were granted an extra hour of time tonight, so instead of the hour closing on ten, it is only almost nine. Elspeth did not practice piano at eight, as we thought and cursed ourselves, the gods, and our schedules for our lack of time management, but at seven! Martin and I were generally starting to be a little grumpy until we realized that I had set the clock ahead by an hour--joy was ours. One more hour tonight to pursue our own peaceful edges, to make lunches, to drink Sleepytime tea.

Also in the jubilant Cockroft news: Elspeth can now play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" on the piano all by herself. She was so excited by this that she sprung up from the piano bench and streaked through the living, dining, kitchen, and hallway rooms, giggling and clapping. Then she plopped on the bench long enough to plunk it out again, shouted, "CLAP FOR ME!" and did the lap again. This happened at least three times.

Merry, who also recently started piano lessons, approaches the instrument this way: seriously, with respect and a trembling sort of confidence that she will be able to read notes and some day run her hands over the keys like Keith Jarrett.

As I reflected over the phone to my mother, Merry's energy is like a stone, deep inside of herself. It's focused, private, intense, serious, still, contained. Elspeth's energy is like water, flowing like a mighty river that's skipped its banks, soaking everyone and everything in its path. Even when in her most intense concentration, when she's drawing, her energy is something wild to behold, and when Martin's dad walked over and looked over her drawings, he was astonished by their order and vision. "It looks like she's just scribbling over there!" he remarked, and indeed, Elspeth at work is a startling vision; she seems to tremble and jerk all over, her pen or crayon stabs the paper as if she's trying to kill it, and her hair falls into her eyes.

And Beatrix's energy? Maybe a brook? It's certainly not as wild as Elspeth's, though when she skips her nap, as she did today so we could drive down to an orchard to buy a couple bushels of Jonagolds, she's a force to be reckoned with. Here's a little piece of no-nap insanity; she stripped off her clothes, tore around the house, then froze in the hallway to hiss, "PISSHHHHH!" as she peed all over our wooden floor. I barely saved my slipper.

Martin's creaking up the stairs. Time to make lunches, I think. . .

Apparently, my left shoe is very squeaky. Every time I walk up and down the hallway of the English department, it speaks: scrinch, scrinch.

I pack my class of twelve into a tiny conference room for workshops. It's very cozy and very warm. I feel as though I should bring candles in glass jars and pass out hand rolled cigarettes (only in this room should we inhale deeply and into rattling lungs). Somebody should brew black coffee in an old rusty percolator and we should sip it with deep grunts. It should slide like syrup over our tongues and we should have at least a few brown teeth and some deep wrinkles around our eyes. Somewhere out in the hallway someone should be playing the accordion, slowly and sadly.

Someone should read an essay that sounds like Hemingway. There should be bulls and red capes and women who speak little. Red bottles of wine atop trains and on tables in dirty cafe corners. A cat who sleeps all day on the bosom of a large, wrinkled woman, a woman whose fingers stink of garlic, whose eyes are full of rivers.

I wonder if I could book such a workshop room?

I, the undersigned, promise in good faith to exclaim, "ZOUNDS!" as a matter of habit, starting twenty minutes after this troth is published.

Too, I will accompany said exclamation with an upraised fist and expression of genuine astonishment, thus convincing hearers of my absolute fidelity to said "ZOUNDS!" whether the occasion suit or whether it be of questionable timing.

Signed: Kimberly Long Cockroft
in the year of our Lord 2011

The Misfortune of Others: It Makes Me Laugh

The rain, it's a poundin' down outside the windows. Sounds like there's a wall of water headed our way. I'm struggling against the soothing white noise, actually, because Martin's grading a stack of poems and I should be writing reading questions but I feel so alienated from my blog writing lately I thought I should come by for a visit. And the warmth of my slippers and the weight of the day easing into the comfort of evening tempts me to slip into an early sleep.

I just read a funny blog entry on "Days Under the Sycamore" (link below right) wherein my friend Sally and her family go for a lovely stroll up a ridge, enjoying the September evening sunlight gleaming on fresh-cut piles of grass waiting for the hay baler. It all sounds pretty bucolic until their son, Will, withdraws a stick from the earth and lets loose a mass of swarming bees. The family of five, covered with these buzzing horrors, tear down the hill, shrieking all the way, and the boys sprint the half-mile or so to the van (leaving their parents in the dust) where at least one of them has to be strapped in practically naked because he's covered in bee stings. Once they've recovered, Sally has to wonder cautiously back up the road, retrieving the clothing they had stripped off and flung asunder in their hasty retreat.

The whole story gave me quite a chuckle, even though it includes bodily injury to people I love.

Martin is half-asleep now and resorting to food to keep himself awake through the rest of the poems. Last night I tackled a mountain of prose, so I have less sympathy for his poetry. Oh blast. He brought back chips. I have sworn to eat better and now the bowl of chips is. . .within. . .my. . .reach. . . .

I may have to get myself some Fruity Kix to stave off temptation.

And now, to Huxley and Africa.

Happy evening to you all, and if anything really bad but not permanent happens to any of you, please let me know so I can laugh heartlessly at your expense. Thanks.

Just an update to my wall obsession. Four things happened:

1. I drank tea

2. The sun came out and we went out and I commiserated with a couple root-bound house plants out in the clear, crisp air and then I freed them from their gloomy pots and introduced them to their new homes

3. My daughter, Elspeth, finally stopped talking back to me after every sentence that left my lips (she drew by herself for twenty minutes, a sure-fire cure for grumpiness)

4. I dropped my children with a couple warm people and attended a reading; listened to fiction from a talented college student in a vintage dress and poetry from a man whose craft and images blew me into another place entirely, where there are no walls that block the elements from me (it wasn't Martin; it was another man, Bob Randolph, who punctuated his poems with a little harmonica, guitar, and finally a pair of zennish cymbals)

So, basically, using Martin as my example,
I went from this

to this.

Take Down the Wall!

It's the kind of grey day that makes you long for new, sparkling things. Right now I am longing for a view from my kitchen, which entails knocking a wall down, installing a header, and building an island in the space. Easy-peasy, right??? Right? Well, the contractor who gave me a quote a year ago has since moved to Delaware and I am a defeatist who took that as a sign that it's not the wall's time. Listen, honey, all I want is some natural light in the kitchen. I have one window now over the sink that looks to. . .my neighbor's wall. It's pretty.

My mother is a big proponent of signs, of things that "aren't meant to be." This sounds wishy-washy on paper but it's actually a pretty good way to live, most of the time, because then you can just let go of something and move on. My mother's belief in signs is rooted in faith; my belief in signs is rooted in far murkier territory. An inner exhaustion that is too weary for my years? Yes. An edge of cynicism that gives way to laziness? Perhaps. For instance, if I nail up a curtain rod crooked, I can almost convince myself that was the way it was meant to be, after all, and that I can learn a lesson from living with a little imperfection: relax, take a deep breath, and let go.

But this wall in particular has been informing my weak longings for years. Maybe it's because we spend so much time in the kitchen, or regularly pack the space with dozens of people (not to mention Martin's students twice a year). When I say "regularly," I mean, often all week long. We have a very open house, which is lovely, but it makes me wish our kitchen were a little more spacious.

But fast on my heels is Guilt. How dare I complain of a perfectly pleasant, functional space? In some parts of the world, my entire family would live in a room that size, plus my Grandma and Mother and Father and an uncle or two. And maybe the goat. I am not being snarky, I am chiding myself as I will so often do, for the rest of my life. And that's not a bad thing.

Still. . .that wall. I've wrapped it in psychology (ie., I have inner walls I need to take down; I feel trapped; yellow wallpaper stuff, etc.) to explain my obsession. I've wrapped it in politics (take down the walls that separate us, barriers of ideology, etc.), and I've surrendered to the conclusion, many times in the past six years, that this wall needs to stay where it is. It's a thick, plaster wall that has existed there for over a century.

Once I told a contractor that I'd trade him one of my children for the removal of my wall. I was half-joking. I also tried to give him all our kitchen cabinets in exchange but he didn't bite.

Anyone know anything about putting in headers?

My sister recently e-mailed me a link to an article that should be dear to every Wordie's heart. It made me ashamed of my limited vocabulary, and also sad that I could not wrap my tongue comfortably around the word pusillanimous. Why is it our words generally get so much more vague when there are so many succinct words out there, if we can only claim and utilize them? Are we cowards, or just lazy?

Here it is; click on it: FWIW

Listening to Stories

I've been memorializing Sept. 11 victims by listening to NPR's StoryCorps recordings. They are two-minute conversations or reflections, and it's amazing how much can be packed into two minutes. I've been sitting here listening as I watch a squirrel wrestle a walnut off our tree. I remember clearly where I was on the day itself, standing pregnant with Merry, looking at the footage on a classroom TV, realizing that my high school freshmen would never forget that day. At one point, someone suggested we turn off the TV, but it was important to watch, to be part of the tragedy. I looked outside to the lawn beneath a great pine, finding comfort in a squirrel, to whom the day was as sunny and normal as ever. Later I excused myself to call my mother back in Illinois, to make sure that my father, who was traveling that day, was okay. Deep down, I knew he hadn't been on the destroyed planes, but I wanted an excuse to hear my mother's voice.

It's easy to feel detached now from the tragedy that has been so wrapped in political agendas. But listening to the simple stories of victims and their loved ones has refocused me. Beverly Eckert's reflections on page two are particularly moving. Listen to them here: http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifNPR STORYCORPS: SEPT. 11.

At the end of the day. . .

At the end of the day. . .There has to be a song out there that starts with that line. It sounds like a song from my childhood but I don't know which one or if it ever existed. Bea jumped into her first day of school with penache and confidence; when I dropped her off she touched my pants leg and then disappeared into a cluster of children, and when I picked her up she raised her chin in the plucky way she has and announced: "I didn't cry!" Later she explained that some kids cried, but she didn't, and then she sang the Eency Weency Spider for me.

And so it happened that for the first time in our family's history, three children were at school at the same time. So, too, were Martin and I at school. We even ate an early lunch together in the department's conference room and as I ate my pbj and peeled my banana, it did indeed feel like the long old days of school.

My writing is clunky today. I can hear it rattling out of me in fits and starts, like a car running out of gas. This morning in class we listened to NPR's Sounds of Summer Summary--which basically consists of quintessential summer sounds (clink of ice in a glass, a lawn mower, the whine of a mosquito, the cheers of a Little League game. . .). I asked the students to pick a sound and write about a memory it sparked for them. I picked the mosquito and sat down to write, but getting words down on the page was as awful and hard as wringing water out of a rock. Some days are like that, I guess.

I've been reading more lately, which is lovely and may account for the fact that my writing has partly dried up for a while. I find that when I am deeply in a story, I can't focus my mind and my imagination elsewhere. I have to finish the book, shake my head vigorously a few times, and refocus on another story--hopefully the one I will write when I finish rereading "Flame Trees of Thika." I don't know how many times I've read Elspeth Huxley's childhood memoir, but I am enjoying it this time as if I never encountered it before. I assigned the book for class and I am cramming the margins with pencil marks and underlining especially wonderful lines and I know I will never be able to read this particular copy again unless I erase all my marks. I intensely dislike reading books covered with another person's scribbles; it feels as if someone is reading over my shoulder. However, reading a book closely in order to teach it requires that I form a more dynamic relationship with the characters and the richness of the text.

Oh, my heavens. I just reread the paragraph above and hey--do you think I could run on more sentences than I just did?

Better stop while I'm ahead, people. Back to Elspeth (who is my daughter's namesake, of course), back to Kenya's colonial days with its charming, philandering English colonials who seem better than the horrible colonials who beat their servants. Back to Kikuyu myths, to pet chameleons, to coffee bushes.

Ninety and then Sixty. . .(we're moving in the right direction)

The rain is dripping and plunking off the thick leaves of the Bird Tree (actually a young Black Walnut) outside the dining room window, and the smell of a chicken stewing fills the house. It's thirty degrees cooler today than it was on Saturday, when Martin, the girls and I swam through the soupy air down to the Monongahela River, where crowds of artists and families had gathered for the Arts Fest. Martin and I are in a band (Martin on guitar and vocals and me on vocals only plus the occasional egg shaker), "The Unreliable Sallys" and we had an hour long gig, which is much longer than usual. My eyelids were sweating and Amy, our lead singer and songwriter, was so warm she had to step away for breaks to mop her face. We sang some good Louisiana and Texas tunes, so the weather felt just right--bayou-like. The girls sat on a bench and behaved fairly well (Bea spent much of the gig on my hip) except when Elspeth shimmied down to sing in Martin's guitar mike and later hiked up her mother's dress to an unacceptable height. Some people dance and march around the stage; I chase children.

Oh, I love it when September feels like real Autumn. I feel like lighting candles, baking bread, stewing apples. I feel like rearranging furniture, packing the larder for winter, double checking the shelves for tea.

Friday Happy Hour: Now Less Time Away Than it Was Yesterday

The first week of school lays you flat. Right this moment I am a fish that flipped for a good long while, eyes fixed in that fishy expressionless terror, scales gleaming in the late summer sunlight. . .now my gills barely move, I am breathing my last and reconciled.

All right, so that's a little dramatic. Still, there was a seed of weariness that I felt in my right shoe at the beginning of the week, but I've walked on regardless and the seed has blossomed into a tree; I have born fruit, big pears like the ones we caught Grassy Sam, our resident groundhog, feasting on yesterday. We just let him keep on, ridiculously satisfied that at least someone is harvesting our garden this fall!

What's up with the metaphors today? When I get tired like this, happily tired, actually--I lose the ability to think in Roman Numerals. I go mosaic and begin rambling.

*Beware*

Oh, and grandparents, the first-day-of-school photos are forthcoming. I promise!

I whipped up a quadruple batch of pumpkin bread and wrestled my numerous pattypan squash into a submissive curry soup before they could keep breeding in the corners of my kitchen. I have only two more to chop to pieces now and a hefty zucchini which is sitting by the cutting boards like a beaming green Buddha.

I think Bea is on the loose. One more day to Friday happy hour. Maybe I will even get to have a conversation with Martin--a real one--this weekend. One can hope for a brief cessation of wild activity. . .

Oh, and PS., my story, "Birds in Snow," was given an award of distinction from Midwest Literary Magazine. If you haven't read it, you can now by clicking on it down the page at right.

Happy Places

My friend Tonya put a basketful of swiss chard in the washing machine to disastrous consequences. She swears the rinse cycle works splendidly with spinach. Apparently chard is of a more delicate constitution.

Tonya has a big, productive garden, and she is of good Mennonite stock which means she can never. . .stop. . .working. . .She tells me she's up to her ears in peaches and she's already canned enough beans to build a replica of the Empire State Building. Plus she works two mornings a week and educates her children at home by cyberschool. My question is: when does she sleep?

Did I mention she has a flock of chickens? And a penchant for personal, physical disaster? Since I've known her she has almost shot her eye out with a hunting rifle, stumbled backwards into a ravine that was hiding a nest of bees, and bashed herself countless times on countless objects.

Last evening, she was already doubled over with pain from a previous injury, but continued wildly chopping basil to more unfortunate consequences. . .the permanent loss of the tip of her thumb.

There are these miniature children's books that Merry used to like about sad bunnies (by Rosemary Wells, I think) who endure horrible things and get rescued by a Queen bunny named Janet who then takes them to the Bunny Planet so they can experience the day that should have been.

Tonya, let's go to the bunny planet.
Or to the shores of Orcas Island, on the placid cool waters of the Puget Sound. Only the sound of a paddle in water, mountains rising around you, the hope of a seal.
Ah. . . .

A Letter to, (but not exclusively), My Life Writing Students

My father has always been a patient man. Kids could climb on his head, stick their fingers in his eyes, pull his hair and hear nothing more than a mild redirection. The times we children remember him agitated are fabled and few: the morning the wheel rolled off our car at an intersection, the afternoon I insisted on taking home a large, rusty kid-car from the friendly swap at the dump, and the night my 16-year old sister telephoned from a shady train station in the bowels of downtown Paris. . . .
Whether we recognize that our lives are interesting or not, each person is a walking fount of history, humor, grief, and loves. To you, your life and the lives of those you know best may seem wildly fascinating or dull as bricks--no matter. The trick is in the storytelling. I'm a miserable story-teller; I forget bits and pieces (and sometimes the largest, most important bits), I interrupt my plots to apologize for possible fallacy and lies, and I feel my audience slipping away from me, slowly, then quickly, looking over their shoulders to the refreshment table or pinching their children until they cry.

Okay, maybe it's not that bad. But even if, like me, you lack a bit of confidence in your oral skills, you can find a home, a place where you can wander at ease in diverse terrains of memory and imaginings and my favorite things: Words. There's a whole world to each word; they're heavy things, sometimes holy temples, sometimes so hot you can barely hold onto them. And each person is full of words, the stories of their lives and longing, the idiosyncrasies that make each person so perfectly peculiar and fascinating. An editor once said to me that he was unsure that I'd have enough stories or ideas to write a weekly newspaper column. I smiled--as long as I'm living among people, there are more stories than I will ever have time to write down.

Really, this could be a class named: Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, Journalism. What story doesn’t find its start in the wrists of the writer, in her mind, history, and personality? Whether the setting in your compositions are as familiar as your own shoes or whether there’s only a kernel of familiarity in a character you create (that only you, and maybe one other person, knows), your writing will always flow up and out of you, and parts of you will cling to the words as they travel onto the page.

By this I do not mean that I want you to succumb to that annoying and facile task of navel-gazing. Rather, I’ll always recommend that you take the harder road. If writing is easy, if you think you’ve arrived, then you need to go to the beginning and start again. Bad writing bangs around in the writer, making echoes and embarrassing sounds. Good writing is like a shout: it originates with the writer, of course, but leaves immediately, travels far, and leaves the rest of us scratching our heads as to the source.

As writers have said for ages, you must be a good collector. Happy is the writer who keeps a journal in his pocket. Even scraps of paper, stuffed into an envelope, will do (but not for this class). You must sit quietly, learn to eavesdrop, learn to listen beyond mere words. Collect small things, such as the dip of a head, the crease of a mouth, unsaid things that bubble in silence. Don’t worry about their purpose; just write them down, or they will leave you. Maybe you've heard that we are sponges that absorb everything we need, but I do believe that's wrong--or just lazy. This is what I say to myself when I am desperate and undisciplined. Run, pursue, catch the details, and then take a pin and impale them to your notebook.

Never forget that you are many things beside a writer. Do not aim to be a writer alone, just as you would not plan to be just a parent or just an accountant or just a student. If you want to be terribly unhappy, work to be just a writer. Then, when you fail as a writer, which you will, then your identity will crumble as well. Gird yourself with many identities, interest yourself in diverse and wonderful things; remember to be surprised and let yourself wander into new houses and countries and shake the hands of many people. Drink tea with many people. Then you will be whomever you are first and also a writer.

You are in college. I know the miseries and joys of college, and chief among them was never being able to run away from myself. While this is a common malady, it seemed worse and more painful because I was a writer. I never experienced anything without tucking it away, sanding it down, ironing it into prose. Now, a busy mother of three, a writer but also a gardener, wife, reader, cook, friend, and still a child of my parents—this has not changed. What has changed is my attitude toward it; I relax and do not let this sense of never engaging fully bother me. Perhaps “engaging fully” as an adult is unattainable, unless you are hysterical, on drugs, or struck by pain. The older I grow, the more I forget about myself, but still carry around that writer-tendency to always be drafting experiences in my head even as I am experiencing them. (And I don't mean Face Book stuff, those pithy barks that we send into the darkness. I mean essays, stories, even novels). But I find that while I do not always remember things well naturally, I remember them when I write. Though I do not always perceive correctly, especially about myself, the fog clears when I write. Many writers start their memoirs just this way—searching for answers.

Clarity comes with many drafts and a whole lot of editing. Good memoir, good fiction, good poetry, makes connections. These connections between experiences, thoughts, flashbacks, dialogue, characters, and setting—they hold together a story like the studs of a building. You might purge yourself and even do some really great writing, but if there are no real connections, no structure, your composition will fall apart immediately, lack movement and strength, and you will, as I often have, feel a deep sense of discontentment when you reach the end. And if you know, deep down, that you’re not done writing, you can bet that your readers will know, too.

But that’s what workshop is for. Being a writer all alone with the computer glowing on your midnight face may make you feel powerful and confident (or it may make you feel the opposite), but isolation will rarely produce final drafts. Many is the time I have finished a story or poem and congratulated myself heartily on my talents, to show it to my in-house editor (whom you all probably know) to disastrous results. A few times I have really written something good the first time. Okay, maybe one time. Mostly, I have learned to buckle myself in for a long, long ride, for many drafts, for frustration and also a great deal of laughing when I realize just how bad my wonderful writing is. Many times I have shelved a story, thinking it was done, to realize a year later I must rewrite it again. Just relax. You have lots of time. You have endless energy. Writing is not the best thing that will ever happen in your life; it’s good, maybe you can’t live without it, but it’s not anything that should fill you with the fear of loss or failure. The best advice a writing professor once gave me was this: “You think you can’t write right now? Going through a rough spot? Frustrated? Good! That means you’re growing as a writer.”

To be in a room with people who have come together for a common purpose, to celebrate something they love—this is a good place to be. It’s a safe place, a place to grow without fear, a place to trust one another. I feel this deeply when I eat with others in my home, and a workshop class is just like this. We bring our dishes to the table; we eat slowly, thoughtfully, with appreciation. Of course, unlike the well-mannered people we are who would never complain about Aunt Martha’s bland stew, in workshop we make suggestions or ask sometimes uncomfortable questions. But nobody is afraid that their dish will get thrown in their faces; no one will leave empty.

Did you reach the end? Hurrah for you! Here's your circus, courtesy of my girls and their cousins:

For reflections on back-to-school/Autumnal stress and the importance of slowing down to watch caterpillars, please click on the geranium at right to read my article this week.