Artists together in our enclave.

Today was the first meeting of my photography class, where my classmates include a former student and someone who once shopped my class but decided not to take it (though I barely remember this, and she showed no sign at all of recalling it). I have not yet decided what my name should be in that setting. Perhaps I should just switch to a pseudonym in my real life and get it over with.

At least for now, Kenyon's art buildings are clustered at the north end of campus, and photography takes place in what we knew as the Art Barn when I was a student. (It has some more proper name now.) When I walked into what is known as "the photography area," on the second floor, I looked up and saw an enormous framed portrait of my good friend Thomas (aka Four Inches of Ego), who looked down on me throughout the afternoon.

From where I sat, I also had a wonderful view of what the sun, coming through the Art Barn's enormous corner windows, was doing to one student's neck, backlighting wisps of hair, fairly gilding her. The longer I sat, the more it dawned on me that I will probably have to photograph people during this course. I started wondering whether my colleagues would sit for pictures. I started wondering who would let me photograph her face, who might let me take his hands. The one mention we had of our first project is that it may be a study of blurred motion. Motion? As alien to my pictures as people. I felt the worry mounting; I confessed freely to my nervousness at having enrolled in an actual art class. (You are no artist, whispers the same voice that hates everything I enjoy doing. Look at what happens when you shoot with your new camera.) (I can't face that point down yet; it is so frustrating: it seems that I may not be steady enough to get an image in focus. How is this possible?) I defy that fear again and again.

Seeing Thomas's picture on the wall made me think of the other people I knew who studied photography when we were all students here, especially my good friend who transferred away when she figured out that she wanted to do urban images. She had done a summer program out west, learning art photography techniques in Montana and New Mexico; there she learned how to superimpose her body over the landscape, how to match up the rise and fall of her hip to the rise and fall of a mountain range. Had her camera been a car, we'd have called it a beater. But her images were amazing, and she found them everywhere here. For my birthday our sophomore year, she gave me a tiny snapshot of the corner of a ruined house, weeds growing through what might once have been a bedroom window. She taped this scrap of photo to a scrap of paper with Scotch tape. I've never gotten a more beautiful birthday card.

Once, she did a series of topless shots of herself and of her roommate. She held a femur behind her, superimposed it over her spine. Her roommate held a hammer in front of her, its handle aligned with her sternum. At this point, she was shooting with a 4x5 camera, which meant she was taking Polaroids first, in order to determine whether she had her settings all right. (She did the single best portrait of me ever taken, during this phase; it took about 30 minutes to set up. I still have the Polaroid somewhere, but I think I gave the actual print away to someone, long ago, though he denied it when I asked him.) One night, in the study lounge where I worked, a group of fraternity brothers were snickering over something; it was their Hell Week, and they were basically living in the study lounge. They hadn't showered for days by this time, and they were nothing less than pungent. When they were herded out by their pledgemaster, I went over to see what had been making them so jolly. There were my friend's Polaroids, in a stack; either she or her roommate had left them behind. I conveyed them back to their owner, but the experience left me thinking that I'd been right in my decision not to pose as the figure drawing model that semester. In a place this small, that's just not necessary.

After today's class, I suited up (it's gotten cold here, suddenly) and wandered down to the swollen river, flooding into the fields because of our week of rain. I was hoping to get some shots I could love. But the temptation to go back to the point-and-shoot is a mighty one; now I realize fully just how much that camera did for me, and just how little I ever needed to know about what was going on in that silver box between my hands. That's what the class is for, I keep reminding myself; that's what the class is for. Soon I will know things.

By the time I got back to the officehouse, my face had gotten so cold that I couldn't move my mouth well enough to feel good about my talking. And of course I ran into a student who wanted to talk to me, before I even got inside. "I can't feel my face," I said to her. We had the conference she needed to have anyway. A friend stuck his head out the door to say hello. "I can't feel my face," I said to him. "I'm not going to help with that," he said, going back inside. But warm time thaws cold faces; soon I was back to normal, of my own accord.

My lovely photography professor tells us that we will all be in the "art zone" during class. "Everything else disappears here," she says. "And we will just be artists together in our enclave."

I love that I am about to have another enclave.

Oh, yes: if you checked in here around 4:21 p.m., you were the 10,000th recorded visitor to this site. Welcome to the five digits, everyone.

Fortunes I have been told.

Startlingly good things happened with my writing out there today, and so I am low-balling tonight's writing here. I only have so many words to go around, apparently.

I carry my fortunes in the back pocket of my wallet. (I keep the ones others have given me hanging on my office door.) It seems as good a place as any for years of accumulated wisdom. Were I an historian, I would probably have put dates and places on all of these tiny slips of paper. As a literary archivist, I am left to wonder about the affective significance of my having neglected such details.

1. Your talents will be recognized and suitably rewarded.
2. Many a false step is made by standing still.
3. You will help someone in need.
4. Place special emphasis on old friendship.
5. One who admires you greatly is hidden before your eyes.
6. A new outlook brightens your image and brings new friends.
7. Your determination will bring you much success.
8. You will pass a difficult test that will make you happier and financially better.
9. Your spirit of adventure leads you down an exciting new path.
10. Trouble brings experience and experience brings wisdom.
11. You find beauty in ordinary things. Do not lose this ability.
12. You will soon take a very pleasant and successful trip.
13. Happiness begins with facing life with a smile and a wink.
14. The secret of staying young is good health, and lying about your age.
15. There's a good chance of a romantic encounter soon.
16. You will be called upon to fill a position of high honor and responsibility.
17. You have a keen sense of humor and love a good time.
18. You will learn quickly, never fear.
19. You take a reverent attitude towards life and are most capable in the guidance of others.
20. Nothing in the world is accomplished without passion.
21. The old believe everything; The middle aged suspect everything; The young know everything.
22. Your skill will accomplish what the force of many cannot.
23. You deserve to have a good time after a hard day's work.
24. You will conquer obstacles to achieve success.
25. Your luck has been completely changed today.
26. Soon you will be sitting on top of the world.
27. You are almost there.

What I can't believe is that I've only accumulated twenty-seven after all these years. What I also can't believe is that I feel a bit crestfallen about that.

I love no. 27. I think it's true.

Art's spacious graces.

Miscellanie went to the Brooklyn Museum this weekend, and since she has asked me to fill in the blank in my comment that said museum owns one of my favorite paintings, I will oblige--with a tiny story, and an image.

Fall 2002 was a dark season. Taking the long view, I can see that I have a knack for turning my autumns into tests of will, spirit, body, heart, faith--pretty much anything that can be tested. But fall 2002 marked my first entry into the academic job market, as well as the ruthless flowering of a romantic interest that was a kind of self-cursing from the start. By the time I reached mid-November, I had spent a couple of months alternately hollowing out and refilling with anger and bewilderment, cut with a terrible self-doubt. And so it was with great gratitude that I boarded a plane to LaGuardia to spend a weekend with my beloved Brooklynite. That fall, the Brooklyn Museum featured an exhibit called "Exposed: The Victorian Nude" (it may even have been "Exposed!"), and so on Sunday afternoon we wandered down the block to look at roomsful of nineteenth-century flesh. (That morning, we had bagels from Le Bagel Delight, instead of going to Tom's.)

But before we looked at the Victorian nudes--which, to be honest, was going to be both play and work for me, given the parlous-feeling state of my academic career at that moment--we wandered around the rest of the museum. On the second floor, we turned a corner into a gallery, and a vision rose up before us:

It's Hans Hofmann's "Towering Spaciousness" (1966), and I turned to my friend and said, "That's my painting. That's the kind of painting I needed to see." I promptly misremembered the title of the painting as "Towering Magnificence" and was not able to find an image of it for years and years. I'm glad to have it back in my visual repertoire--for its energy, its movement, its gamut of blues, its having given my heart a powerful touchstone when I needed one.

But as for Miscellanie's comment that she stared at the Walton Ford paintings: well, I would have been staring at those today, too. I did not know about his work until this evening, and the Brooklyn Museum's "Tigers of Wrath" exhibit will be gone before I next make it to the borough. To see why I'm bummed, take a look at Ford and his work here and here.

source for tonight's image: the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Desire is no light thing.

Anne Carson's Geryon wings himself right into that truth. I've seen desire called a wonderful catastrophe. I'd name it, instead, a catastrophic wonder. Perhaps also a stupendous unfairness.

I don't know whether you'll hear me writing this, from my eyrie above a fog that should not be gathering in January. For all I know, you've been listening all along.

Some absences are easier to navigate than others; I am becoming a regular mariner of near missing, and what you imagine I'm writing about is only the thing I think I could explain, not the thing that might well come to matter more.

While I wander, I will collect these windings and weavings in log books bound in calf. I will gild their covers' script. I will sign my leaves in unimagined colors, gather them in the most complicated duodecimos. I will use only the finest nibs, and an ink the precise color of this moment of dusk.

I will etch the details again and again until someone figures out what I'm feathering, how great the humility of its wanting, how sweeping and soaring its coming spring.

source for tonight's image: e-flux, though Anselm Kiefer's "Buch mit Flügeln" lives in the Modern Art Museum in Houston and is currently sojourning in San Francisco.

What will I do with all those leaves?

Oh, is it grey and messy here today. Undecided weather: weather that can't make up its mind about whether to stay or to go, to increase velocity or ratchet back, to be something devastating or just continue as an annoyance. The weather has no mind. I know this. But days like today leave one wanting to find an intelligence behind meterology, just to see whether that will help make the joke of warmish, drizzling January weather make any kind of sense.

This whole place is in a moment of teeter: students return tomorrow, and there's a palpable mood of acceleration rushing into the corners of things. Someone asked me today whether I feel gleeful, watching others get ready for Monday. Gleeful is not the word, but I'm happy (for my research career's sake) to report that wistful is not the word, either. Alternately, parallelingly engaged: these are perhaps the words.

Papers and notebooks are starting to circle up. Stepping into the upstairs study today to check something in a mirror, I effortlessly discovered the notebook whose whereabouts I've been trying to remember for days. Buried things self-excavate. Old ideas and plans, things I haven't considered consciously for months, if not longer, meet me at the breakfast table, which is actually my bed, late in the mornings, which are sometimes the afternoon. I muster and meditate.

On days when the weather will not yield me a good view, I dig into my archives and pull you a better picture. You must know this by now. Tonight's is from the drive-by photoshoot my father and I did in the fields ten minutes from my parents' house on new year's eve. "The light! The light!" I said to my father, after my mother agreed to take care of the endgame of baking the cherry pie for dessert. "Come on!" He seemed reluctant. But he's the one who taught me that when the light comes, you must go. "I'm going to get in the car. Come on come on come on." As soon as I saw that he was indeed getting out of his chair, I dashed to the car. We dashed to the fields. We were gone for an hour. It was magnificent. With leaves on the trees and crops in the fields, nothing would have worked quite this well. The seasons all seem to turn up for their own kind of art. But I am coming to appreciate the cast of a wintering field: what lies fallow promises glory; what seems ruined shelters astonishment.

Those surprisingly thin shells.

I waded knee-deep in that brown Indiana river, feeling with my feet for the knobbly spheres most likely to be geodes. I had not seen my feet in hours, but over the course of the morning I had grown to love their absence. With the fearlessness of young years, I almost immediately forgot everything I had ever known about things that live in rivers: leeches that suck, snakes of all sorts. The other children from the bus dangled their red mesh bags behind them in the current. I tried to hold mine aloft even when trying to reach into the water all the way to my shoulder--at which moments the bulk of my body seemed to have disappeared into the river's muddy pull, and what had not gone under had come close enough to kiss.

When the morning ended, we waited in line for our turns with the hammer, waited to see what those rock eggs would yield. The preliminary test was the gurgly rattle: if you palmed the rock, shook it beside your ear, heard the sound of music class percussion instruments, then that one you kept. But that didn't mean it would give up beauty, once cracked open. And when we grew tired of waiting, we simply started throwing our geodes at the ground, cracking them any which way. Most of them cracked into jigsaw pieces, muddy grey rock against sulfurous gold crystal. One of mine cracked almost neatly but was dark like blood inside. Its glitters were tiny and fierce. It swiftly became my favorite, in the ranking and sorting I could never bring myself to stop doing.

I have wondered about that river's whereabouts for more than twenty years. I wonder now about the red mesh bag's location. It haunted my time in my parents' house, because finding it would mean finding the year I was eight, finding it boxed and buried somewhere in the closet under the basement stairs. So I made only tentative forays, half-effortful finding missions, feeling around with my feet in the dark, bending over the old tent, the old punching bag, the old model railway table, legs and arms submerged in familial stuff, the rest of my body bent close enough to kiss and scrape and gather it all before backing out again.

Enough with the promising.

I'm dancing right around the edge of a piece I want to write--a critical piece, I mean; a piece for work--and that fact has me a little short on words here tonight. Which means that yet again I've told you I'll tell you a story, and yet again I'm not going to tell you one.

Tomorrow night, I will definitely not tell you stories.

I certainly won't tell you about bowling. Or about the big-bodied steam of a faceful of espresso in the morning. Or about writing. Or about the new lamp that has changed my living room. Nope. I won't even tell you about how, upon coming home from my excellent friends' house this evening, I saw the stars over my house, Orion a colossus astride my garage, and thought, as clearly as it was cold outside: I'd have thought you'd be here by now. I didn't think I'd still be seeing these stars by myself. Such a thing to find oneself thinking, in the driveway, in the starlit chill--that is, on a night that finally feels like winter, with the snow glittering on the paving stones.

Oh, may the words be where I am tomorrow, so many words that I almost have a hard time keeping up. They're all there, but they're all there, not here. And no matter how many circles I turn here, I don't get there unless I reach and pull in one direction for a sustained amount of time.

Which leaves me, for tonight, saying: I'd have thought you'd be here by now. You don't know how much you're being missed, how much you are wanted. You have no idea, just none at all.

Swirl crochet disaster.

[I take it as a sign of something or another when the girl who grew up (at least partly) in Buffalo gets out her camera to take pictures of this kind of dusting, simply because it's the first substantial snow of this academic year.]

Sometimes, I blatantly misread things. Today, at the post office, I received a six-inch stack of catalogs--I basically received only catalogs while I was away. On the back of the top one was an item I swore was billed as a "Swirl Crochet Disaster." It turned out, of course, to be a "Swirl Crochet Duster." But I think my misreading was better; that particular garment really is a disaster.

On my way home yesterday, I passed a church (the same church that refused to say Happy Holidays, in fact) that had a sign reading, "You can't catch bees with vinegar."

A candy wrapper today told me, "Decorate your life."

A friend's fortune, just before Christmas, told him (and then me, since I promptly photocopied it for my office door), "Plan your work and work your plan."

You see how I'm charging up with strange aphorisms. Tomorrow, perhaps I'll tell you a real story.

And the bliss of return.

I have things to tell, especially about wild animals--a heron, a deer--that turn up in surprising places, but I'm tired enough to drop, and so my flannel sheets are going to get my full attention before you do.

* * *

Yes, in fact, my resolution to sleep gratuitously and fabulously every night is going to work here in Gambier, as well. It was important that I find that out for sure.

Driving east on I-74 near Cincinnati, I saw something standing in the median and was stunned when, after a second or two of double-take, my mind resolved it into a heron. A heron, standing in the median? It was facing the eastbound lanes, and I was past it too quickly to catch it with the camera or even to think of a way to keep it from walking out of the median and into traffic. Just stay where you are, I said and said and said, pushing onward with everyone else. We were all going so, so fast.

Both the officehouse and my real house have certain smells that I stop smelling when I haven't been away for a long time, and it was good to smell those smells upon arrival. I had this experience every time I returned to my house in Ithaca, too: a rush of happiness that everything was right where I'd left it, in greater or lesser stages of disarray, and that the radiators still sang the same songs, and that I was in my own bed, and that when I woke up in that bed the next day, everything would smell like where I lived.

I walked out at 10 p.m. to the post office and the bookstore. My tiny post office box can hold so much more than it ought to be able to hold, I discovered; I now have to go back for the tub of mail that I can only pick up during business hours. As I approached my yard, I was turning something difficult over and over and over in my mind, something about love and seeing and silence, and the deer in front of me was moving before I realized that there was a deer in front of me. We were both startled enough to jump. The deer reminded me of my tiny bear of a dog, who at that point in the night was undoubtedly sleeping deafly somewhere in my parents' house. I spoke quietly to the deer, and she lingered, warily. We contemplated one another for a few minutes. She had been eating out of the bed that surrounds my house and, once I startled her, had moved toward the front of the yard. As I eased myself into the front porch and then into the house, she made a slow return to her eating from my yard. I know it's no good thing for the deer to feel comfortable around humans. And yet, she was such a welcome home.

The bliss of postponement.

Some mornings, you wake up and you just don't want to travel. It's raining; the dog is snoring; the bed is too warm to leave behind. And so you decide to stay where you are for one more day. Because you can. And everyone approves, especially the sleeping dog.

Where I will be for only a short time more.

Soon I will leave these fields for my own fields, going back to my own barns, my own furrows and floods, my landscape, my hills and woods. This afternoon birds dropped from a wire like leaves, to dip and turn in a diving cloud, as I searched for broken-backed barns. Rivers wound out from under the fields and rippled the skies back to themselves. And the word comes from home that the rain there continues.

Flocking.

A tiny child loves a small square of paper grown winged, folded in secret and left as a surprise.

A tiny child in an airport marvels at flight fitted to the palm, lofted by a swooping twirl. A tiny child will, if coaxed by her father, offer in shyness an abstract image of gratitude, markered in pink and aqua and gold and brown, and will retreat to her side of the waiting area where you are both stranded.

Two tiny children on a night train to Scotland will fret their mother, will bring down on their bored selves a torrent of blame, will go wide-eyed when your fingers make the last tug and produce two cranes as your bright-lit car hurtles past Durham near midnight. Two tiny children will make four in the night glass, four children, four birds, migrating north up the dark coast in a hush of paper.

Two tiny children will be so taken with the magic of fast folds that they will lose the capacity for speech, will pocket their birds and finger them secretly, will wave goodbye to the winking lady who drives away into the sticky summer heat, leaving their aunt's house after proffering little gifts.

And you will wonder why you do this each time, what makes the signal that this particular tiny child needs a bird. You will hear a father teaching his daughter how not to crumple the bird, and you will know again how ephemeral these things are. You will hope that something survives those moments' swift flights.

source for today's image: a site for Understanding the Work of Nurse Theorists.

This slippery sleeper.

During my last two trips to my parents' house, I've been startled by how dry our deaf dog is becoming. She's always had her itch spots--those spots that can make a dog kick her legs involuntarily, or lick a human hand as though she herself is licking whatever part of the body that hand is scratching--but now her entire body would seem to be an itch. She's barely resting when she's up again to scratch her jaw, or her neck, or her sides. This morning, I put my increasingly well-rested mind to work on this problem, after the dog and I woke up for her first trip outside at about 7 a.m. Surely, I thought, there must be something we can apply to the dog's skin to keep her from needing or wanting to scratch all the time. When I'm itchy, I use lotions. But lotions aren't made to be licked, and that could be a problem for our dog. Nothing petroleum-based, for instance. And the dog is untutored genius, head to toe; there's no stopping her when she wants to be somewhere or to do something, and so any application that would require her to be still is pretty much out.

Somehow, by the time my mother had returned from a morning beautification, I had thought of olive oil. If she licked olive oil off of her toes after we rubbed it in, that extra oil in her system might also work its way through her digestive system and improve the condition of all her skin. I said to my mother, of course she keeps licking her feet--she's trying to keep them from drying out, but it's just like licking chapped lips over and over. Let's heat up the oil a little bit first, my mother said.

We double-teamed the dog on the kitchen floor and rubbed warmed olive oil into her paws, getting it in between the cracked tips of her toes and her claws. She was, as one might imagine, confused by the proceedings, and she was even less skillful on my parents' kitchen floor than usual. But she found her footing soon enough, and three hours later, she'd barely touched tongue to paws at all. We decided the treatment seemed a success so far and proceeded to dose her digits again this evening.

One disadvantage of the dog's deafness is that it's difficult to talk her through things, though that didn't stop me from crooning to her while I massaged her paws before bed. On the other hand, one advantage of the dog's deafness is that it's easier to sneak up on her now--say, with a camera. And if I shoot without flash, she even lets me stay around and practice on her for awhile. And her deafness hasn't changed a thing about her favorite activity to undertake with me around, which is sleeping while I read. (I used to joke that the dog liked Anthony Trollope's novels best. I don't think that was true; I think she would have liked Tolstoy best, had she not just had all the innards of her left ear removed when I was reading Anna Karenina, and she's never seemed to have many complaints about Eliot. Anything that keeps me sitting still and warm in bed. Anything that might prompt me to eat Swedish Fish, or anything else, really, in bed. Thus, she has no problem whatsoever with my reading Nadeem Aslam. She is an equal opportunity sleeper.)

She believes that this bed is her bed, though now she sometimes loses her nerve and needs to be lifted onto it. She tears it up every night, gets it ready for both of us, curls up right where I'm going to sleep, near the very edge of the left side, though she could lie down anywhere on its double-bed width. Once I'm settled, she moves further away. She runs in her sleep, snores and barks and croons, has gotten even louder than before now that she can't hear herself and can't hear us quieting her. We joke that she is learning to read lips, but I believe she's just enjoying her new liberation from our commands. She is a dog who knows her own stubborn mind. She gets jealous and loud when my father kisses my mother goodbye.

First thing tomorrow, she will try to cadge shredded wheat, or bagels from Shapiro's, or yogurt--or whatever else I rustle up for breakfast. At some point during the day, she will get frisky and want to play. But mostly, she'll curl up beside my right hip while I keep reading Maps for Lost Lovers, or she'll curl with me in front of a fire if I make one, and if I leave the house, she'll get into the front window and watch me drive away. She is, as we have always said, such a dog. I continue singing this identity to her, even though she has not been able to hear me for months. She is such a dog.

Brother, you're never fully dressed without a smile.

The day after I returned home from the Mayhem, my father said to me, when I'd first gotten out of bed, "There's a surprise for you and your Mama downstairs." "What is it?" I asked him. "Just go and see," he replied. Though I asked "What is it?" a few more times, in my morning bleariness, he wouldn't tell me, and so I stumbled down to see what was waiting for me. I've let you know, over the past year, that my family and I enjoy pulling good surprises on one another. This week, my father had decided that my mother and I should follow up on the vestigial six-year-old's squeals I let out during a television commercial for the Indianapolis performances of Annie, the musical that's celebrating its thirtieth anniversary by touring the country. We'd seen this commercial a couple of days before I left for Philadelphia. While I was away, my parents saw the commercial again, and my father said, "You should go to see that next week." He managed to get my mother to offer Tuesday's opening night show as the best date, and then he managed to get us front-row seats.

To understand why it was such an excitement for me first to see the television commercial and then actually to go see the musical live, you have to know that Annie occupied a substantial part of my waking life a quarter-century ago. My parents took me to Shea's Buffalo Theatre to see the show live in 1981, and my mother remembers my having sat perched on my father's lap, rapt from the first note. "You were so excited when there was more after intermission," she said to me last night, as we left the theater in Indianapolis.

But my love affair with Annie really got underway, as it did (I suspect) for many girls of my generation, with the release of the 1982 movie starring Aileen Quinn and Albert Finny (and Carol Burnett and Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters and Anne Reinking--it really was a great cast). Knickerbocker Toys released several levels of licensed Annie dolls in conjunction with the film's release. One could get the six-inch dress-up model or the sixteen-inch rag doll (with Annie's dog Sandy in the pocket). I had both. One could also get Annie wigs, Annie dresses, the soundtrack for the film (on vinyl, baby), and books about the history of the comic strip "Little Orphan Annie." I had all of these things except for the wig, which my mother refused me (for good reason). Also, my mother refused to buy me a cheap polyester Annie dress. Instead, she hunted out some wonderful finewale corduroy and made me an Annie dress with a gored skirt that flared when I spun. I loved that dress so much that on school picture day in 1982, I went to school even though I was nauseous, just to be sure that I'd have my picture taken in my favorite dress. Looking at my smiley, curly-haired self in that picture--my starting-to-fall-out teeth on their way to becoming the mess an orthodontist would labor to straighten out six years later, my hair in one of its periodic long phases--you'd have no idea that I was sent home, viciously ill, later in the day.

And I can't even talk about the bubble gum cards. The coveted one, of course, was the one of the scene interpolated for the movie: Aileen Quinn's Annie crying for her life, hanging from a drawbridge--such a fine contrast of greeny oxidized metal and of Annie's iconic party dress and curly red hair. I was fascinated by the fact that the figure climbing the railroad ties on that bridge (by the searchlight of a circling helicopter) was not just a stunt double but also a man.

My friends and I knew all there was to know about Annie, from differences between musical and film to subtleties of lyrics.

I realized just how little has changed when my mother and I walked into Clowes Hall at Butler University last night, and the sight of a merchandise table had me squealing. "I had that shirt!" I said to my mother, looking at a baseball jersey. The clothing! In addition to the dress my mother made, I had shirts and overalls and a nightgown, all featuring Annie. And a baseball jersey just like this one.

My love of Annie was a full-blown obsession. And the year I spent in love with the show and all its accoutrements left its marks: play me a couple bars of music from any of the numbers, and I could probably sing you all the lyrics--a fact that made seeing it at 30 peculiar, to say the least. Part of me was hoping that my mouth wasn't twitching too much, since I wanted to sing along (as we did, loudly, when Grease was rereleased for its twentieth anniversary in 1998). But part of me was thinking about this show as a work of art for the first time.

In the show, Annie's optimism and defiance play out against a backdrop of adults misusing or being abused by Depression-era power structures. "We'd Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover" is a particularly interesting song to listen to at this historical moment (as at least one other blogger has suggested); Annie turns up under the Brooklyn Bridge with her new stray dog in tow, and a crowd of Hooverville dwellers apostrophize Hoover to sketch their downfalls swiftly. "I used to winter in the tropics," the men sing; "I used to summer by the shore," reply the women. "I used to throw away the paper," sings a lone man; "He don't anymore!" everyone chimes in, as he puts the newspaper under his vest. Annie gets arrested by the cops who bust up the Hooverville at the end of this number (which concludes with the Hooverville residents' inviting Hoover and his wife down for stew). Her fate seems to parallel that of the people who have grown desperate by December 1933.

But the musical braids together Annie's adoption by the billionaire Warbucks and FDR's adoption of the New Deal (which becomes the product of an impromptu, and initially coercive, singalong in the Oval Office, when Warbucks and Annie pay a visit and Annie starts to sing the reprise of "Tomorrow"). It's a tempting narrative line: "When I'm stuck with a day / that's grey and lonely, / I just stick out my chin, and grin, and say..." You know where the song goes next, I expect. "The sun'll come out tomorrow, / so you gotta hang on till tomorrow / come what may..." The show goes back and forth between tomorrow's being "always a day away" or "only a day away." Both the president and Warbucks have their charitable, paternal impulses catalyzed by the presence of this scrappy red-headed girl. At the end of the show, Warbucks and Annie sing that they're "tying the knot / they never can sever." The movie goes further to neutralize this pairing, by bringing out the romance budding between Warbucks and his private secretary Grace, but by the musical's end, that relationship is just barely resolving out of Grace's obvious affection for this man. The predominant narrative is one of a kind of parthenogenetic child--an Athena to Warbucks's reluctant Zeus--who almost singlehandedly (or single-voicedly) kicks off the New Deal.

And yet the whole time my intellect was fighting the show, my six-year-old heart was delighted, and delighted, and delighted still more. What strange dissonance. And what tenacity of memory: my brain has held so many more of those words and notes than I'd have had any idea.

A quick explanation for the top image of tonight's post: on our way to Clowes, my mother and I stopped at my favorite Indianapolis eatery, Shapiro's Delicatessen. Shapiro's is on the way to the airport from my parents' house, which meant that on a few occasions, when I was either coming or going from grad school, we headed there for dinner. (We ate there lots of other times, as well, but it was particularly nice to get on a plane to Ithaca with a belly full of pastrami and fruit flan.) I haven't been there in an age--long enough to have forgotten that it's hot pastrami I always get, not hot corned beef. I caught this error in time to have beautiful, truly beautiful hot pastrami on fresh rye bread. With a pickle. And macaroni and cheese (of which my mother received a comically large helping--a helping that might have violated the cardinal rule of eating, "Never eat anything bigger than your head," which means that it's a good thing she didn't eat the whole dinner). If you are ever in Indianapolis or even just passing through (especially if you're on I-70) and looking for a place to eat, let me recommend Shapiro's to you. Leave room for dessert. If you're not a vegetarian, try a meaty sandwich.

While we ate, a large family sat down to my right, on the other side of a support pillar, and set up its dinner. I paid them no mind until the wife and mother of the group said, to the man across the table from her (who was hidden from my view by the support pillar), "Now, wait a minute, Mr. Half-a-chicken!" It wasn't the best line I heard all night, but it was close. I still don't know what she was going to tell him.

sources for tonight's images: 1) me; 2) and 3) eBay.

Resolution no. 1.

I'm not one for new year's resolutions. I never have been. But just for this year, I have a good one, for myself: I'm resolved to sleep at least 10 hours per night until I'm rested again. The deaf dog at my feet reminds me (by her solid, silent example) that I'm in danger of falling behind.

There's much more to say this evening--about, for instance, the excursion that my mother and I took to Indianapolis, an excursion that could only be called a nostalgia trip, from start to finish. But for now I need to stick to my resolve.

Malacology for the new year.

On Saturday, I got stuck in the Philadelphia airport for a little while, and so I went wandering off to find one of my Chicagoan friends, who was supposed to be leaving from the D terminal about 90 minutes before my rescheduled flight was due to go. Wandering around his boarding area, I heard snippets of Academic Mayhem-related conversation ("I interviewed at..." "Oh yeah? I heard they were..." "Nah, I mean..." and so on), and I realized how tricky it can be to try to find even a very good friend in a crowded boarding area, when he's not expecting you to turn up. After a few minutes, I decided that he probably hadn't even arrived at the airport yet (and I was right about that), and so I turned to head back toward my own terminal.

But then I was arrested by three cases of shells.

At the end of Philadelphia's D terminal is an exhibition of specimens from the Academy of Natural Sciences, which holds the second largest catalogued collection of shells in the world. They have around 12 million shells in all. To my mind, this exhibition is a supremely well-placed thing. It's entirely unexpected--who puts something like this in an airport? And yet it's a random and utterly desirable place to let one's eye dart and dive for even a few minutes. I have other reasons to feel glad that I got myself stranded in the airport for a couple of hours, but the shells are right in there, too.

For a girl who grew up inland, I developed an intense and abiding love of shells early in life. Then again, it's possible that everyone develops this particular love; until recently, I thought that I was one of a relatively small group of people who'd had childhood experiences with geodes, but it seems that many people were introduced to them at some point or another. (That won't keep me from writing about them.)

My first neighbors in East Amherst had a wonderful conch shell that told me the ocean long before I could remember ever having seen it. My father ate steamers at the bar that served the best chicken wings I ever ate; when he and my mother would come back from nights out with visiting friends, back when they were all the age that I am now, he'd always bring me clamshells. Every once in awhile, I'd get a pair still hinged together.

On the last day of this year's Academic Mayhem, just before I liberated my suitcase from the hotel, I strode back to the Reading Terminal Market to get some last pictures--revisiting the honey bears, for instance, and looking to see what else there was to see. In one of the fishcases was a prefiguration of what I found at the airport:

This combination of images and recollections makes me remember that, somewhere back in Gambier, I have a tiny box (made for me by my beloved Brooklynite four years ago), papered over in blues and decorated with tiny lilies and other watery flora, that contains a tiny, translucent, still-hinged pair of bivalve shells that I found on the beach below the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, at the end of Academic Mayhem the year it was in San Diego. My upstate New Yorker friend and I had rented a white Ford and driven it up the coast like mad things; for once, I was grateful to have spent the fall learning key defensive driving skills while getting to school and to the grocery store in Rochester. And at the end of our escapade, there was the Pacific Ocean, laid out to infinity before us, just at the brink of sundown. As we walked the beach, finding sandpipers and other flocking birds, I happened upon this perfect piece of white fragility. I cupped my palms around it and somehow kept it safe all the way back to the midwest, all the way back to Rochester, all the way to now.

That whole shell's lucidity reminded me of the slight iridescence that sheened the insides of my childhood's clamshells. The case of shells in Philadelphia, in turn, made me think of the many assemblages of shells I owned as a child, including one shallow box, perhaps 8"x10", that held, among other things (like olive shells), a shell that looked as though it contained a pair of front teeth set in slightly bloody gums.

So many of the details of those kinds of finds and gatherings are gone from me now. I spent part of the evening trying to figure out where in this house my red mesh bag of geodes might be, and so far it's made no signs of being willing or able to materialize where I might find it. Gathering these materials together again is not so different from my original process of collecting them: I get frustrated because I can't resolve the specific things I seek out of all the things and thoughts that have encompassed and grounded them.

So: thank goodness for the shells that simply materialize when I least expect them.

Sundown on the year.

A warm morning of cold rain, a drear end to a strange, changeful year. But then, near the end of the afternoon, the sun came out, just to sink through the scudding clouds and into our flooded fields with great beauty and extravagant austerity. The unwinding, the unspiraling, the repairing of this fatigue's fractures, will all take more time, and I fully anticipate some year-end inventorying to come. But for now, we sit with the fire and wait for the ball to drop. The deaf dog tries to sleep behind my right shoulder but keeps being awakened by people scratching her toes and pulling her ears, and by her sense that some smell somewhere (her nose twitches) portends something good still to eat--more cherry pie, perhaps? Emmylou Harris sings songs in silver cowboy boots. I look over the year's lists and wonder whether it's possible that I only read about 80 books this year. Surely that's too small a number. My father gets out the Asti, pours glasses for us all.

The pictures I'm giving you to close out 2006 come from a huge batch my father and I took during an drive out this evening to catch the year's last slants of light.

And now the ball. And now the new year.

Welcome to 2007, everyone.

And then? And then? And then: day four.

And now I am on leave.

Pigs and pictures: day three.

Reading Terminal Market, 12:02 p.m.:

Dr. S's camera: (click)

Man behind meat counter: "Don't take a picture of my little brother! He's camera shy!"

Dr. S: "You're selling your little brother for $15.00?"

Dr. S's camera: (click)

Man behind meat counter: "Don't take a picture of my little brother! He's camera shy!"

Now, I'm wondering how much longer we could have traveled in that circle.

Armies of sweetness and light: day two.

This afternoon, I started thinking about gardens, fantasizing havens and green safeties and careful quiets. I am doing my best to carry calm and openness around me like stature, like a field, like an envelopment, to make easier what can be made easier, to make more pleasant what strains others. The market, the flowers, the honey, the chocolates and orchids and mangoes and neon proclamations all in rows and piles. Abandoned walls signed in cryptic images. Shades of blue on broken brick. My lunch hour behind a camera. My devouring the scent of voices, the silhouette of wings. All goes well, and yet it will be two more days before you hear anything substantial from me: I am swimming; I am anchoring the relay; I am closing the distance in an event that is almost over. In another distance, another train passes, echoing. And echoing.