The Ladder Herald

Some Birthday Photos

We had the best time with the jumpy house at Jonah and Zoe's birthday party. The guys even let us jump on it to break it down at the end of the day. Amazing cupcakes by Anne, and even wine for the grown-ups, thank god. Perfect weather too. (Of course there was a lot of let-down the day after. Sigh.)

And now we have a boy who is five.

This is J waiting as the jumpy house got inflated:

Rye got to try it out before the big kids took over:

Grandma Sharon and Aunt Cake feed Rye blueberries:

Having a good time:

Isaias and Jonah:

Pinata time, Jonah gives Zoe a pep talk:

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggg:

Lord of the Flies:

Boys wait for cupcakes:

Goodbye jumpy house:

Wellness

We have it.

Gabe's biopsy was negative. Hurray!

We celebrated by taking our sons to the local Pasta Pomodoro and destroying their restaurant. I felt like a rock star trashing a hotel room. "Room service? Bring me prosecco by the glass!!"

This morning the clouds are all lit up in the sky and the boys are safely trashing our own house. Rye is inexplicably fascinated by an unopened tuna can. Jonah's way of cursing us out when we misbehave is "You're a butterscotch!"

Spring break kicked my ass, man. I vow: never again without elaborate plans for the children's distraction and entertainment.

Koshland Park Community Learning Garden & My Heroine, Barbara Wenger

My first real job in San Francisco was working as a community organizer for the Neighborhood Parks Council. I met all these heroic people who were volunteering their time trying to fix up their neighborhood parks. One of my favorite's was Barbara Wenger. I loved how real and funny she was, and Barbara was doing more even than the average parks activist: she was (and is) working on a group of parks in her neighborhood, Hayes Valley/Western Addition, as a way of doing social justice, urban greening, and community building for her neighborhood. Barbara's approach has been to use art, gardening, and to involve the neighborhood Zen Center, elementary school, and the local housing project residents (especially teens) in all the work. It's a very amazing group.

I am really excited to have been asked to come on her Board—my first meeting is in April. Meanwhile, I've been reading about their Peace Wall project and the Community Learning Garden, which has a great blog:

Koshland Park Community Learning Garden

We are a unique community and school garden in Koshland Park. Our mission is to grow food with a deep commitment to building community and teaching respect for our Earth. Through the garden we teach organic gardening and nutrition to students from John Muir Elementary, offer green-job training to Western Addition teens, and hold fun and educational events for the surrounding community. We are located on the corner of Page and Buchanan in Hayes Valley, San Francisco. Come visit us soon!

Koshland Garden Blog

And here's a little video about the Peace Wall on You Tube:

Peace Wall in San Francisco

The Hayes Valley PARKS website:

Hayes Valley PARKS group

Cheers!

(image from Koshland garden blog)

Daily Quote from Dimitri

My friend Dimitri is sending out a quote to his friends each day. They are wonderful! Here are a few I've liked:

Man’s earthly task is to realise his created uniqueness. As a Hasidic rabbi called Zusya put it on his deathbed:
“In the world to come they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?”

- Martin Buber

*

Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not easy.

- Aristotle

*

I'll bet he would add you to his list if you emailed him: wind70@sbcglobal.net.

Tonsil-Free

10:20 PM, Friday night. Home and Gabe is sleeping now, all doped up. The tonsils are out, and we are settled in for a week's wait to recover him and to hear about the biopsy. The Indian surgeon (named Jacob Johnson!) said it looked like a bad infection in there and probably not cancer. Yay!

The boys are fine, and sleeping cozily. Gabe's Mom did everything, everything, plus baths and cookie-making.

I am so grateful to be home. I get frightened when we go into the hospital. Maybe it isn't fair to the people who work there, but I always feel like we've entered the machine.

Just before he went into surgery I recited all the poems I know by heart (it's just two) for Gabriel to try to put a spell on him.

Then when I left the hospital tonight to bring the car around the moon greeted me in perfect stillness, like the face of a child of mine, asleep. And I remembered this excerpt from Stanley Kunitz's poem, Vita Nuova, which I've quoted here before, but:

Moon of the soul, accompany me now,
Shine on the colosseums of my sense,
Be in the tabernacles of my brow.
My dark will make, reflecting from your stones,
The single beam of all my life intense.

Good night!

Avoiding

Here are two things I have been avoiding writing about lately on my blog.

1. We decided to send Jonah to the French-American school.

and

2. Gabriel's getting his tonsils out tomorrow. Part of the reason the doctor is removing them is to biopsy them and make sure he doesn't have a tumor.

I've been avoiding writing about these things because:

A. I am chickenshit.

B. I feel vulnerable about them.

C. I don't really want to face myself and figure out what I'm thinking and feeling.

~ I feel vulnerable about the school choice because I'm afraid of being judged for choosing not to be a public school advocate. I want to be a public school advocate, but I went to public schools and my parents are public school teachers and I was actually desperately miserable in them. I'm also afraid that it will make us seem like we're wealthy yuppies when in fact I do not know how we will pay for it. I don't know why I care about seeming rich—it makes me feel scared, somehow, though I do not really think it matters. I think Jonah will be the most broke-ass kid in his class. This is a word salad. Sorry. I think I need to write about it here, though. In the interest of not just making a nice blog.

~ About Gabriel's surgery I feel numb and anxious. We're in limbo while we wait to hear about the biopsy and I think my mind is conspiring to keep my fears at bay. The only down side to that is I am feeling pretty empty. I am also feeling overwhelmed at taking care of everyone, but luckily Gabriel's Mom is coming to help us. Mothers are so amazing. They are the bedrock. We.

Ok.

Some Lines From Crime And Punishment

"Allow me to ask you another question out of simple curiosity: have you ever spent a night on a hay barge, on the Neva?"

*

" 'It's in the houses of spiteful old widows that one finds such cleanliness,' Raskolnikov thought again."

*

"Do you know, sir, do you know, I have sold her very stockings for drink? Not her shoes--that would be more or less in the order of things, but her stockings, her stockings I have sold for drink! Her mohair shawl I sold for drink, a present to her long ago, her own property, not mine; and we live in a cold room and she caught cold this winter and has begun coughing and spitting blood too. We have three little children and Katerina Ivanovna is at work from morning till night; she is scrubbing and cleaning and washing the children, for she's been used to cleanliness from a child. But her chest is weak and she has a tendency to consumption and I feel it! Do you suppose I don't feel it? And the more I drink the more I feel it. That's why I drink too."

Volcano!!!

They made volcanos at J's school. So fun.

By Candlelight

Black Out Sabbath

Rufus Wainwright wants to shoot out the lights. He calls it “Blackout Sabbath,” and he’s encouraging people to unplug and live in quiet darkness from noon to midnight on June 21, the summer solstice.

During your twelve hours without power, he wants you to think about the Earth and make a list of what you can do to save it. “The New York power outage was a real profound experience for me,” Wainwright said. “I just remember such a sense of relief, and of being a human being, when everything was shut off. I had to try and re-create it.”

Cool Readings: Poetry and Psychoanalysis

I know some poets who don't like this association between poetry and psychoanalysis, but all the shrinks I know love it! Ha!

San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis: Poetry and Psychoanalysis 2008 Season

Poets and psychoanalysts share a deep immersion in language, a fascination with human experience, and a conviction that to find the most live language for that experience makes life richer and more bearable.  In this, our third series of Poetry and Psychoanalysis, we will again have three events. In each, a poet/psychoanalyst will interview a widely published guest poet about that poet's process and the making of some poems. The guest will read those poems to us and discuss them with the interviewer and the audience.

The program, which is free and open to the public, is offered through the Outreach Committee of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Please join us. Our gatherings have been lively, fun, and informal, and have brought together groups who may rarely have had a chance to talk to and learn from each other. After each event, those who wish to do so may purchase books by the poet and have these signed.

April 6              devorah major
May 4                Carol Snow
July 20               Al Young

Sundays, 4:00-5:30 p.m.
2340 Jackson Street, 4th Floor (entrance at Webster), San Francisco 

We distribute copies of the poems to be discussed, so it is helpful to know in advance how many people will attend. To RSVP, please call the Center at (415) 563-5815 by the Friday before the event.

A New Approach to Psychotherapy

Such an amazing article by David Kohn from the New York Times, about training laypeople to work with people in Third World countries who are depressed, anxious, dealing with alcoholism, etc. A survey by one doctor working at a community clinic there found that as many as one in three patients arrived with symptoms of depression. And that may be an underrepresentation.

Psychotherapy for All (NYTimes)

A quote:

"The clinic is at the forefront of a program that has the potential to transform mental health treatment in the developing world. Instead of doctors, the program trains laypeople to identify and treat depression and anxiety and sends them to six community health clinics in Goa, in western India.

Depression and anxiety have long been seen as Western afflictions, diseases of the affluent. But new studies find that they are just as common in poor countries, with rates up to 20 percent in a given year."

And another:

"After completing training, [Doctor Patel] spent two years in Zimbabwe as a researcher. He hoped to prove that Western concepts of mental illness did not apply in the developing world. Instead, he came to the opposite conclusion, that the ailments were in fact just as common and just as treatable as in the West.

[...]

At government clinics like the one here, overworked doctors lack time and inclination to ask patients about mental health. Even clinicians who look for depression may miss it. For reasons that no one fully understands, depressed patients in the developing world often complain of physical symptoms like fatigue, headache and insomnia rather than emotional problems like sadness or regret."

MapJack

This is silly, but fascinating: Map Jack

Thanks Alex! SF Usual Suspects

You Must DailyLit

The March/April 2008 Poets and Writers magazine has a little blurb about DailyLit that reminded me how amazing it is. Every morning these days I get a short (takes 5 minutes to read) installment of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.  I am slowly reading this book I have never before been able to read (though I do not understand why). Anyway, it's FREE and there are over 750 books available, including lots of classics that are the ones I want to read anyway. You will LOVE it, Internet.

DailyLit

Seen Today

Two hummingbirds on different city streets.

A smashed pigeon, red guts and two perfect splayed wings.

A child crying. And the same sadness on other faces, sometimes.

The wind turning cold and blowing trash across the train tracks.

The hanging jasmine white and blooming.

A sudden mental picture of you pacing the sidewalk, the phone to your ear. My voice is saying, "I will take care of you."

 

Public School Lottery Wipeout

I feel vulnerable writing about this but it's what's true. We didn't get what we wanted in the public school lottery. Neither did two of our close friends. There is a bruised little storm-cloud over us. Private school letters come out Thursday or Friday. We should be quarantined for anxiety at our house. Who knows what will happen?

In fact, we got assigned to a school I wrote about here during the search. "Wrote about" in a bad way. It's the one I showed up to for a tour listed on their website and they told me, "Oh yeah, our website's tour schedule is wrong. Sorry." And that was it. I had skipped a class to be there. And we never made it back because we had so many other tours to fit in.

Spring haiku

The light stays later.
Dirtier kids at day's-end.
My restlessness returns.

Quote from "The Color of Fear"

"The cure for the pain is in the pain. Good and bad are mixed."

From the New March 2008 Issue of Poetry

It came yesterday. Poetry Magazine

There is a fold-out page for Jorie Graham's poem. How does she get that??

Here is one I really liked:

Containment

by A.E. Stallings

So long I have been carrying myself
Carefully, carefully, like a small child
With too much water in a real glass
Clasped in two hands, across a space as vast
As living rooms, while gazes watch the waves
That start to rile the little inland sea
And slap against its cliffs' transparency,
Revise and meet, double their amplitude,
Harmonizing doubt from many ifs.
Distant frowns like clouds begin to brood.
Soon there is overbrimming. Soon the child
Looks up to find a face to match the scolding,
And just as he does, the vessel he was holding
Is almost set down safely on the bookshelf.

An Oldish One

A Sting

On the planet of my skull a bee pinches, digs in.
It panics, maniac, then I do.

When I get the injection, I am carrying my sleepy son
up the front stairs from the car. It buzzes the
line of my hair, tiny rabbit twisting in a snare.

I stagger, stifling a cry, wet in the eyes, lay the child
in his ladder crib, then try to fan out my hair
and loosen the bee. It seems to go free.
But now is it angry?

Don’t sting my flower! Though I can’t blame
the bee for thinking he is a beach rose or peony.
My flower child. My bee bait. Sleeping through
the attack. Trusting me to take the sting.

Rye

City of Angels

We drove to LA so spontaneously this weekend to visit our angels Sonny, Julia, Ben and Sarah Cole for a few brief hours. We marched around the coffee table to Yellow Submarine, ate pancakes & Sonny's good pasta salad, visited Kidspace Museum (which has an AMAZING baby hanging-out room that blew Rye's mind), and had a three-boy bath in the jacuzzi tub.

The beautiful Ben. (And the beautiful Sonny.)

A hike to the lakelet.

Eating al fresco!

LA seems weirdly calmer than San Francisco. Or maybe it's just the specific places we live. I felt like I went to the spa. Especially because we somehow got to sleep in the comfiest bed in a deeply dark room. Anyway, on the way home we drove by acres and acres of apple trees in snowy bloom. Here's a haiku:

Miles of apple trees,
white blossoms, and some pale pink.
Two crows in one tree.

 

Enjoy Your Observations!

Sylvia Plath's father, Otto, held a doctorate in entomology from Harvard—his specialty was the study of bees. His book Bumblebees and Their Ways was published in 1933. Sylvia Plath has several beautiful poems about bees—I think they are one of the most fascinating symbols in her work. I have an old homagey bee poem somewhere I'll try to find and post for fun.

We saw an amazing hive encased in see-through plexiglass at Kidspace in LA on Saturday. You could see them hard at their work making honey, and there was a pipe they could fly up to get outside. I hung around staring for a while.

It made me want to post a Sylvia Plath bee poem here:

The Arrival of the Bee Box

I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.