that's mrs. mediocrity to you

I try not to worry, really I do. It seems like a colossal waste of time.

But sometimes, it all comes creeping in on me…the little niggling fears, the stress, the doubts, the thunder.

And then I am there, in the Land of Worry, and just like Oz, I can’t find my way out. The what-ifs become strong possibilities, the might-nevers become probabilities. It keeps me up at night, if I let it. And I try not to let it, but there are moments of weakness, we all have them, and then I am there, eyes open, wondering, pondering, wasting good sleep.

I worry about my health and money and my husband and my kids and my parents and my future and my past and what I ate for dinner (potato chips, so?) and my knees and my garden and that thing I said to so and so for which they will never forgive me…

I never meant to be a worry wart. And most of the time, I’m not.
I look on the bright side, I strive to be happy, to let things go, to know, in my heart, that the only person whose behavior I can really control is my own.

And yet, here I am. Both my sons smoke cigarettes. I worry. My parents are getting older, I worry. Things are slow with my graphics business. I worry. I’m feeling nauseous a lot lately. I worry. My husband seems distant. I worry. My basements floods. I worry. What if I’m really just wasting my time? I worry. You probably
don’t want to hear about this. I worry.

Each worry works its way into my mind and takes up residence, even though I have made it perfectly clear that no invitation was extended. I ask them to leave, and they smile, saying, “Yes, perhaps tomorrow.” I beg, I plead, “I need sleep,” I say, and they pat me on the head, “There, there.”

And don’t even get me started on the big things, the things that you can worry yourself sick about, the government, the environment, health care, retirement, natural disasters, Lindsay Lohan. (Okay, just kidding about that one.) I can’t even go there, to the big worry room, because I just know I will never get out.

Oh hello, Mr. Worry. Won’t you come and sit on my lap for a bit?
I’m going to give you a little hug and maybe even a kiss.

And then I’m going to squash you like a bug.

Oops, sorry. That was downright mean.

I’ll have to worry about that, later.

a circle is a line

whose end creates its

beginning.

::

Now is the Moon’s Eyebrow.
When my son was little, we had that book by Cooper Edens.
I have always loved that line.

Another book, The Vanishing Pumpkin by Tony Johnston.
“Please do,” growled the ghoul.
I have always loved that line as well, I used to say it out loud
all the time. People looked at me funny.

And this one, from the same book: In fact, she fairly flew.
This happens when I run, every once in a while.

The Sky Jumps Into Your Shoes When You Take Them Off at Night.
Another book, also by Cooper Edens.

The Caretakers of Wonder. Another one, same author.

Why don’t they write books like that for adults?

Books you can barely find these days, treasures that lie forgotten.

Words change your life, sometimes.
You read them and they imprint themselves on your mind.

Her pupils were two black thorns turned inward.
The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike.

The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham.
A book I have never forgotten.

Lines that speak to the soul in you, written from the soul of
the writer. This connection that keeps humans, human.
Speech.

My cats talk to me, they express their needs, their desires.
But that nuance of words and language, that is for the artists.

Almost, I would rather read Vincent Van Gogh’s letters
than look at his paintings. Almost.

How many combinations are possible, with words?
At some point the human race will start to repeat itself.
It has to, or else invent more words.

But fire speaks the language of us all.

This is not open to interpretation, it is fire.

It has kept us all alive.

Besides, now is the moon’s eyebrow.

::

What’s your favorite line?

It’s easier to go forward than in reverse.

You can’t always stay between the lines.

Manners are extremely important.

Enjoy the journey, and the view.

Getting lost isn’t such a bad thing.

There are times when it’s okay to go fast and
times when it’s important to slow down.

Everything is more fun when there’s music.

You never know what’s around the next curve.

There are signs everywhere.

Being first isn’t the most important thing.

You won’t get very far on empty.

It’s a good idea to let others know where you’re going,
even when you think they aren’t looking.

The road less traveled has a lot more bumps.

We all have our blind spots.

There will always be hills and valleys.

Don’t block other people’s paths.

So much depends on the weather.

Sometimes you have to let your hair down,
and let it blow wildly in the wind.

in a car is all it takes to clear my mind. four hours of nothing to do but drive and drive down this endless asphalt ribbon. my hardest decision will be which music to listen to next. four hours of singing, loud, uninhibited singing, along with joni mitchell, bob dylan, cowboy junkies, counting crows, alison krauss. four hours of not caring what people passing me think as i belt out all my favorites, feet tapping, head bobbing, mouth wide.

four hours of trucks and cars and vans and jeeps and buses
and motorcycles, and one helicopter being pulled by a camper.
never saw that before. of watching for hawks and spotting two herons and counting crows as i sing a counting crows song and
then smiling to myself about that. of eating m&m’s and drinking
a coke, which I only ever do on long drives.

four hours not distracted by internet or television or telephones or anyone else’s voice. four hours of looking ahead, not behind, not up, not down, not at everything that needs to be done. four straight hours of straight hard thinking.

four hours of sky and horizon, trees and wire, whizzing by so fast you don’t see it. but it sits there, in your mind’s eye.

four hours of enjoying the ride.

four hours twice within 28.

eight hours in a car, with my thoughts and my music.

and none of those thoughts were of time.

the mirror never lies.

but everything in it is backwards.

::

My garden is singing the thirsty blues. My pruners have been sitting out on the picnic table for a week. It hasn’t rained, so that’s okay, but really I should go out there and put them away. And the hummingbird feeder is broken. I meant to look for the old one and put it out for them, but I haven’t, yet. Poor thirsty hummingbirds. Perhaps today.

I started one book that did not grab me. I am five pages into another. Each time I start to read I fall asleep. I will have to try another, I want one that I can’t stop reading, so I can stay up late and pretend I’m fifteen. Man, it’s hot. Not hot in here with the air conditioning running and running and running, but man, it’s hot.

I don’t even feel like eating. Well, maybe just ice cream. A dip top. But you could never eat a dip top in this heat, you’d have to run back to your air-conditioned car, and even then it would probably be too late, chocolate would be dripping all the way to your elbow.
I might go get one anyway, eat it right at the counter while I wait for my change, so fast an ice headache rips through my forehead.

And I really should do all this laundry that is piling up on me.
But it’s too hot to fold clothes from the dryer. All my cats do is sleep, and I had crazy wild dreams last night. I hate sleeping in air conditioning, I feel like I can’t breathe, even with a small fan blowing air directly onto my face. And I can breathe, but still,
I wake up in the night feeling like I can’t, sweating even though
the room is cool. Like my body knows how hot it is out there.

I would love to get up and go outside and listen to the crickets, sit in one chair with my feet up on another, and blanket myself with cool night air. But I don’t, the mosquitoes would carry me away, and no one would be able to find me in the morning. Which could be kind of funny, I wonder where they would drop me off? Maybe the neighbor’s around the corner, when I got too heavy.

In the mornings I drink hot tea. I don’t care if it is too hot to drink hot tea, I drink it anyway. Today it will be 93º and I think I am going to go running. I love to run in the heat, there is nothing in the world as good as that kind of sweating, feeling my body release the things it has been holding onto, stress, impatience, tension.

All of that will be gone when I am done, and I will stand there,
glistening, while life drips off of me onto the ground.

And then I’m going to go and get that dip top.

Some things a girl just can’t do without.

Millions of miles have been traveled along this route.

The path I run on is an old rail trail that has been converted into a footpath. The markers have been left in place and I love that, both as a way to mark my own mileage, and because they make me think of the history of this place, all those trains, people, cargo, that have been here before me, all their stories, the lives and loves and loss and possibilities.

My mother’s father, my maternal grandfather, was at times, a hobo. This same track continued on into the town my mom grew up in and passed through an area near their backyard. She has told me stories about him, and the other men he sometimes brought home from the train. Bapa, as we called him, was also a drunk, in the very old-fashioned sense of the word, before they were called alcoholics. He was the Wild Irish Rose in a paper bag kind of drunk, and we didn’t see him much when we were growing up. He wasn’t a nice drunk, he was a mean drunk, and for that reason my mom kept him away from us most of the time.

He died when I was quite young, but the strongest memory I have of him is a day when he came over and sat at our kitchen table with his booze and he did get drunk, but not mean, and then my mom and the four of us kids had to help him upstairs to the bathroom. There are fourteen steps, and we went up two, down one. It took us about an hour to get him all the way to the top and by that time we were all crying tears of laughter at the things he was saying, and because we didn’t think we would ever make it to the top.

My other memory of him is that he always said, “Capiche?” after he told me something. And while I had no idea what it meant at the time, I somehow loved that he said it.

So I think of him when I am on this trail, wonder if he passed by this way, what stories he could have told about the people he met, the places he went, how he became the person I knew. I wonder how many times he passed this marker that says South 83 and thought that soon, he would be home.

My father’s father, my paternal grandfather, was among many other things, a well witcher. If you don’t know what that is, it means that he could take a divining rod, most often a Y-shaped tree branch, and find a well, deep underground. I never saw him do it, but my dad has, and he says that Gramps really could find water this way. This is one of those things that some people believe in and some people don’t, but I choose to believe that he could do it, that there was something special about him, this part of his legacy.

He was a tiny man, barely five feet, and always hunched over because he had polio when he was young. He probably didn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds. But he was a tough old man, he worked his whole life on a farm, hard labor. He was always working, always fixing something, always in his work clothes.

I don’t have too many memories of him either, he also died when I was fairly young. But I remember that when he and my grandmother visited, he always brought a paper bag of candy. He was kind, and gentle, and quiet. He was an old-fashioned man, a country man, a man who made do with what he had, who never got rid of anything in case he might need it one day. He was a man who could find water with a stick.

And I think of him too, now, when I am on this trail, and I keep seeing all these Y-shaped branches.

The trees along this path, that fold their arms above me and around me as I move through them, are trees that might have been saplings back then, when my grandfathers were alive.

These trees hold many secrets, and sometimes they whisper,

telling stories of those who’ve been here before me.

And I listen. I always listen.

red, white, blue.

yours, mine, ours.

everything.

::

this post is part of you capture: America

When I run, I break everything into thirds. If I am planning to go six miles, I focus only on the first two. Once I have made it that far, I focus on the next two. I know that once I cover those, I will be two-thirds of the way to my destination, I will have already gone twice as far as I have left to go, and then the last two seem easy.

On days when I struggle, I split just the segment of path directly before me into thirds. If I make it to that first tree, then I can make it to the next one, and then the distance to the last tree will feel like nothing. I have covered more miles than I ever thought possible by breaking them into thirds.

And if my life ends up covering a fairly standard number of years,
I am now in my middle third.

The first third was a bit of a struggle, there was so much to learn, to figure out, so many mistakes to make that caused sore muscles, injuries, time waiting to repair. Sometimes I just wanted to stop. Sit down. Give up. I hadn’t learned discipline. Or tenacity. Or patience. I hadn’t settled in for the long haul.

I am past that phase now, and glad of it. I am warmed up, I have my stride, there is a rhythm to my days and I move along at an even pace most of the time. I am on the straightaway and can take time to gaze around me. I am no longer worried about whether I can make it. I’m moving close to the halfway point.

And as I move on, further down this path, this path we call life
that we live and breathe and burn through so quickly, I wonder if the last third will be the easiest one, not downhill because that hurts my knees worse than anything, but leisurely, graceful, steady. The one where I feel that I could go on forever.

Well, okay, maybe not quite forever.

But at least just to that next tree.