Vacation Diary
Day 1:
We went in two cars. Miguel was going to let me go by myself with Mom and Dad, but then decided that he wanted to come for the weekend. He was sad that I didn’t want to be with him the whole week, but really, I just wanted to be able to be alone for a little while and not have to be stuck in the middle when he and my mom inevitably disagree about everything. ARRRRRGH. No such luck, or rather, we drove down in two cars so that he can go home after the weekend. And all was well…but we shall see.
Lunch in Santa Monica with friends of mom’s. Second time in two weeks we eat “Argentine” food with them. I say “Argentine” because really it was a failed attempt. Not bad food, just not Argentine. I had salmon with a lemon vinaigrette that pretended to be a béarnaise.
Leaving there was a great band, incidentally Argentinos, called “Los Pinguos”. Really good, really really good. Made the awful, horrendous LA traffic almost bearable. That and of course I wasn’t driving☺ What else did we listen to? Jack Johnson (soooo sexy – kinda like a mix between Ben Harper and Nick Drake) Silvio Rodriguez. Wait, could I get in trouble for writing about a Cuban musician? Cuba is a sanctioned country and he has spread anti-imperialistic rhetoric since the sixties. Uh oh… can’t have that, now can we? . And another guitar virtuoso, Pierre Bensusan. Yup. Nothing else. All men. Thankfully I did bring the IPOD along with charger and all for later.
Epic choices upon arrival at this very strange time-share in the middle of a desert waste land? Just whether to watch CSI or SVU. CSI won because we all agreed that we have seen just about every Law and Order made. Ohhhhh mindless television. I get to be happy about it for a few days or at least tonight, right?
Day 2:
Slept late. Not enough though, I was somniferous all day long. Breakfast (lunch) was at a little divy place - Greek/Mexican/American/Jewish?. Miguel had a strange version of huevos rancheros (they fried the tortillas but didn’t put them underneath the eggs – some people). Isabella had pancakes (I hate fake maple syrup humph double humph, why make corn taste mildly like something it is not??? Not to mention the implications with transgenic corn etc.) Mom and Dad both had Reubens and I had a gyro… heavy on the goatiness☹ Ah well, what more can you expect a place that evokes its ambience from the murals of a Mycenaean village and strange Hellenic plates scattered aimlessly about, next to the television angled out for maximum viewing potential (see, already annoyed with the boob tube). We journeyed out in one car and Isabella was already cranky, not a good sign from a child that is always happy. Against all logic, there were no publicly accessible hot springs (everything is privately owned commercialized crapola.) Blahh. Missing San Miguel and “El Escondido” where the hot water poured straight from the splitting earth onto your head. So Miguel was about ready to explode and I was a close second, we ended up at an art museum in Palm Springs. There were some interesting pieces, but I was in a particularly sad mood and contemplating the angles in which my blood would spatter and my bones would break if I just nudged myself over the edge of the metal and glass balcony. Of course these thoughts had to be controlled and once I was reunited with Isabella and she ran across the sculpture garden yelling with glee “mommy mommy” and throwing herself into my arms, to let me know that she was no longer mad and wasn’t I happy about that, I was indeed snapped back to reality… It is really my own fault for wallowing, and the book too. “The Hours” – Michael Cunnigham. The movie had the same effect on me, but the book is even more imposing of sadness than the movie. It reads quickly despite the excessive visual lushness, but there is so much sadness that I feel wrapped up in it, as if I too am an additional interwoven character. I found the book on my shelf, I think it was from a free pile somewhere, and I picked it up because a friend from high school mentioned that another mutual friend was Phillip Glass’s (composer of score for the movie) personal assistant. I think that was why it caught my eye. Funny, some people are doing important and exciting things. Mom cut out the wedding announcement of another soccer buddy and homeroom homework help seeker. She looked so happy. She’s an attorney and so is he. I wonder how long that will last… All I wanted all day long was to sit and write and write and describe how the billowing black smoke emanating from an unknown source (Hotel Indio – later found out) polluted the limpid desert horizon, and the way the sun played of the rocks, almost intangibly colorless on one side and with a darkening verdant grey on the other. I wanted to describe the asynchronous motion of the wind turbines and their precarious perching along the plain and on the mountains above, overlooking the highway as if they were bizarre flamingoes, white instead of pink, but still one legged, or perhaps lurking carrion eaters? No, they were too beautiful for that.
Of course I didn’t write those things, and after all what would l tell about them? What would be interesting about a mere description of reality, a reality probably distorted by my own petty focus? Instead I wallowed a bit in melancholy, which would be fine if I were alone, but each time I try to draw into myself, Miguel takes it as a personal rejection, and each time I try not to hurt him with my indifference, I hurt him more. I am truly a horrible excuse for a wife and I am having a terrible selfish stage. I fear that this stage may last some time, because as it would happen (I acquired the Woolf’s “A Room of One’ Own” in the very homeroom in which my homework assistance was always required by dear Chrissy) I think that not only do I need a room of my own, but perhaps a time-zone of my own. Ha Ha. But I just wish that it were ok for me to disappear, as it is I feel like I am constantly on fire, with a splitting searing pain, just entering the ebullient water and being yanked back out before my body can accustom itself to the new temperature.
How poetic. No, just selfish. I must be. Maybe I always have been. The more I am vying for space, the more it seems that other people’s needs gobble the secretly carved and crafted emptiness in half the time it took to ease myself backwards. Back up against a wall.
Finally after a family dinner in the kitchenette (mesclun salad, sincronizadas and fresh guacamole with Negra Modelos) Miguel and I went to the movies to see “Ocean’s Twelve”. Ok. Not exactly high art but entertainment in the true sense of the word. Beyond the eye candy (both male and female – mmmm George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones and the sexy man with an accent who I don’t recognize but could melt listening to) it was so silly and more old school “mission impossible” than the awful remake of itself a few years back. I left smiling having forgotten totally my own sadness. I know that’s cheap, and that in real terms, the quality, well, it is what it is. But I never claimed to be anything but silly anyhow, so why shouldn’t I take pleasure in what other mere mortals do?
Quick, I better go to bed before my mood turns again!
Day 3:
A good mood can only last so long, it would seem. That and sleeping in the awful crack between two twin beds shoved improvisorily up against one another to create the visual illusion (but certainly not the physical one, as evidenced by my wretched night’s sleep) of a king size bed. Isabella sleeping diagonally and pushing me over when Miguel is trying desperately to be romantic and I am feeling anything but. That’s not fair. I was trying to be the reciprocating partner, trying to return the love that is so kindly and sweetly and genuinely offered, and failing, like in so many ways I fail, this is truly just the icing on the cake, but failing because I suddenly can’t take the smothering closeness, and the pushing child-feet and the expectant breath and the twisted awful sheets and the evil crack into which I feel my life sinking. The morning was lost to fitful sleep and more reading, but we went out, leaving Isabella behind with happy grandparents, to hike in Joshua Tree National Park. I have always wanted to go here, ever since my early teenage obsession with U2 and my love of the album which bore its name. I often wonder why I can’t just give myself over to the moments instead of feeling a deep dissatisfaction with the world. The park was spectacular, but I get entangled in the petty details, in the “I want to go this way and you that”, or the “why can’t I be alone, or the why can’t I think about things other than the regrets I am feeling”, the ones that roll over me in waves, that make me feel like my life will never be the way it should be without the realization of the one thing I want and can’t possibly possess. Of course that thing is a changing thing, but I am still left holding the short end of the stick. Or at least that is how I feel. Miguel said that it seems like there are too many things going on in my head at once. (If he only knew!) and that it lately seems that while I am physically present, my mind has wandered off somewhere. A truer assessment of reality has probably never been made, but there is just nothing I can do to ameliorate the situation, it seems that my train of thought has blasted through the deepest crevices of my cerebral caverns and is going full steam ahead to the inevitable train-wreck that wiser people than I tried to avoid at all costs. My train it seems has left the station, but like Arreola’s mystery train (El guardagujas), it is probably better to just give up hope about waiting for it to arrive (much less on any particular schedule) that, or be prepared to conform one’s self with what one is dealt. Perhaps that is the biggest problem for me…when given the vertiginous freedom of alternative possibilities, I go into crisis mode. Perhaps that is why I married so young – to force myself into a world of limited possibility. And then something snaps and I am deeply and profoundly shaken, and I know that my doubt and conflict only serve to inflict pain on the one person who actually gives a shit about me in this world (no, not just one, I am sorry, I don’t really mean to say that, there are several, and I am being, perhaps, equally awful to all). But maybe that caring and that constant scolding are just reminders of all of the ways in which I fail to be the person that I wish I were, or that I could be, or that I could have been had I been stronger, not so weak to seek out the comfort of another - the weakness of the flesh, the need for warmth and security. I think my crisis stems from the realization that I have never been an adult alone! Nor has he. We have only ever been adults together and that is a horrifying thought. That the individual me who was me before I was an adult is screaming to come out and being shushed and pushed back in because she doesn’t generally agree with the coupled me. The dependent me. What happened to the girl who could take care of herself? The one that managed to find her way to an unknown house in Quilmes in the middle of the night when deposited by a bus in a dark park in Buenos Aires, and still take the test spectacularly the next morning.. Now I take care of myself and others, but at the same time I have relinquished something ever so much more, I am also bound up in being cared for, even if I wish that I was cared for less. Ridiculous. How many women wouldn’t beg to be adored by their spouses, desired, sought out despite the struggles, despite the years, despite the extra unflattering pounds that make one want to disappear (even when she knows that uttering those thoughts are going to result in chastisement (self and other)). What is wrong with me? Why do the big things matter so much less than the grating daily little things. Why do I dream of getting up one morning and walking and walking and evanescing into the mist, and rematerializing somewhere far off, exotic, where I would have to learn a new language in order to make communication just a little more difficult and therefore a more worthy endeavor?
I am feeling utterly unworthy of anyone’s love, and a bit like a feeble-minded child whose caring parents pat her on the back and say “there there dear, it will all be better in the morning.” And I want to believe it, I do, it’s just that I have far too much experience with this sort of thing. In fact I am coddled by parents even now, but I suddenly feel like some strange alien that sprung fully formed from the womb and resembled her creators very little. I don’t always feel this way, but today I do.
Day 4
Got better sleep last night. Frown my libido has died as suddenly and mysteriously as it reared its ugly head. I think that this is probably better, but I can’t help feeling a deep sense of loss, as if maybe this was the last chance for me to awaken. How terribly tragic and probably false. Went sampling dates with Mom, Dad and Isabella. Miguel went off for a long hike in Joshua Tree by himself. Part of me wishes that I took the hike, but most of me was so happy to be alone this afternoon, and feeling so marvelously shrouded in solitude, that I believe that it was much better for both (all) of us. It was like a weight being lifted, the stress ebbing from me in a fifteen minute nap, the sickness that wants to inhabit my lungs being allayed for another day? Of course I read like a fiend, stories and stories and more stories. I watched Isabella walk with muscular purpose and I felt that I had for a brief moment the perfect opening sentence, but then the word that clinched it (began with an “s”. I think) slipped away and I was left with only the image of the muscularly self-assured walk of my five-year-old, demanding in her singular presence, purposeful and deeply content and alive. Swimming together in the pool with my mom, and then me when I was torn away from my book (guiltfully sneaking an extra story, and only half paying attention to her – in my defense as a mother, she is an excellent swimmer and of course her grandmother was really the one watching her), her smile, her filling physical presence, her embrace and kisses, reminding me of all things beautiful in this world. She is amazing, brilliant, perceptive to her mama’s needs. When I asked her if she preferred to go with just Bobie and Zadie or if she wanted me to go along she responded “I love being with you mommy, but on occasion, I like to go places with just Bobie and Zadie”. Release, freedom. It is amazing how much perspective and peace are afforded with a few simple hours with no pressing needs and silence, a book full of stories and the endless possibilities of a fantasy realm free from inquiry (inquisition?) from others. A few blessed moments to think, and feel outside the neatly painted lines of appropriateness, with no fear of interpretation or misinterpretation and no complaints about the strange smile that invades my countenance when my thoughts wander away.
And then when everyone came home, I was ready to face them with cheer and food preparation Then of course, more recriminations☹ Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
Day 6:
Morning-
I was too exhausted last night to write. Exhausted from what? Not much. Miguel, Isabella and I went out to swim, but that only lasted a little over an hour, then Isabella left to swim again with the g’rents and Miguel went out, supposedly for short excursion to buy my present (which I insisted that I didn’t need but am glad that I didn’t insist too much!). Well, his little excursion took several hours, but that was ok, I read essays edited by Laura Flanders – “The ‘W’ effect”. Being outraged is ever so much better than wallowing in self-pity, which is probably why some people I know are constantly being outraged. I, myself, get tired but little doses are enough to keep me going. So Miguel and I went out for drinks in Palm Springs, and besides the obnoxious vacuous façades it would have been fine. We found ourselves in a restaurant with live music – covers of CCR, the Eagles, Los Lobos and Jimmy Buffet to name a few, but after to heavy-handed Margaritas the old politics came out and lead to us dredging up all our past mental and spiritual infidelities (lacking any real physical ones). We sat in the car for about an hour hashing out all the old issues (which was also, cleverly, a way for him to sober up before driving home.) I had been so pleased… he had read my mind and gotten me a digital camera so that once again I would have my own pictures, my own thoughts, my own reality…(I had secretly been lamenting all the things I lost, just the other day and among them was my camera – which Miguel broke in San Miguel when he brought it into the enclosed cave of the hot springs against my pleas, and then of course we shared a camera – a wedding present – but sharing a camera is a metaphor for everything else – the authorship gets all mixed up and you feel like you either have to relinquish your claim on the photos altogether, or you have to find a way to mark your territory) but then… oh well, why bother, it ended well enough, I guess. And we are really trying, it is just so hard. Just dig deeper. That’s what I keep telling myself. And the moments when he looks over at me, and brushes the hair from my face, he massages my ear lobe, I see my life reflected in his eyes and I feel utterly ashamed of myself and naked and invaded all at the same time.
Evening:
We took a hike into 49 Palms Oasis with the whole Dann (damn) family. It was impressive that there were no Joshua trees, but an abundance of red-barrel cacti and then the amazing pools of water in the middle of the desert, and the aviary life that sprung from the date-palms, some scarred from the burning that actually gives them new life. It was a beautiful amazing hike, and after, we headed home, making it back in a record 3 and a half hours (instead of the roughly seven it took to get there). We listened to music all the way home – same as on the way down. We were making plans for the band that is in its nascent stages. It was so nice to be home… I have been thinking about what I can do, where I can focus my outrage, how I can bring my particular skills to the table to make some kind of difference. I think I may have a plan too... Now I get to go to bed in my very own bed, and I won’t even complain about a small person’s foot in the middle of my rib-cage. And, maybe I will make up for lost time…
We went in two cars. Miguel was going to let me go by myself with Mom and Dad, but then decided that he wanted to come for the weekend. He was sad that I didn’t want to be with him the whole week, but really, I just wanted to be able to be alone for a little while and not have to be stuck in the middle when he and my mom inevitably disagree about everything. ARRRRRGH. No such luck, or rather, we drove down in two cars so that he can go home after the weekend. And all was well…but we shall see.
Lunch in Santa Monica with friends of mom’s. Second time in two weeks we eat “Argentine” food with them. I say “Argentine” because really it was a failed attempt. Not bad food, just not Argentine. I had salmon with a lemon vinaigrette that pretended to be a béarnaise.
Leaving there was a great band, incidentally Argentinos, called “Los Pinguos”. Really good, really really good. Made the awful, horrendous LA traffic almost bearable. That and of course I wasn’t driving☺ What else did we listen to? Jack Johnson (soooo sexy – kinda like a mix between Ben Harper and Nick Drake) Silvio Rodriguez. Wait, could I get in trouble for writing about a Cuban musician? Cuba is a sanctioned country and he has spread anti-imperialistic rhetoric since the sixties. Uh oh… can’t have that, now can we? . And another guitar virtuoso, Pierre Bensusan. Yup. Nothing else. All men. Thankfully I did bring the IPOD along with charger and all for later.
Epic choices upon arrival at this very strange time-share in the middle of a desert waste land? Just whether to watch CSI or SVU. CSI won because we all agreed that we have seen just about every Law and Order made. Ohhhhh mindless television. I get to be happy about it for a few days or at least tonight, right?
Day 2:
Slept late. Not enough though, I was somniferous all day long. Breakfast (lunch) was at a little divy place - Greek/Mexican/American/Jewish?. Miguel had a strange version of huevos rancheros (they fried the tortillas but didn’t put them underneath the eggs – some people). Isabella had pancakes (I hate fake maple syrup humph double humph, why make corn taste mildly like something it is not??? Not to mention the implications with transgenic corn etc.) Mom and Dad both had Reubens and I had a gyro… heavy on the goatiness☹ Ah well, what more can you expect a place that evokes its ambience from the murals of a Mycenaean village and strange Hellenic plates scattered aimlessly about, next to the television angled out for maximum viewing potential (see, already annoyed with the boob tube). We journeyed out in one car and Isabella was already cranky, not a good sign from a child that is always happy. Against all logic, there were no publicly accessible hot springs (everything is privately owned commercialized crapola.) Blahh. Missing San Miguel and “El Escondido” where the hot water poured straight from the splitting earth onto your head. So Miguel was about ready to explode and I was a close second, we ended up at an art museum in Palm Springs. There were some interesting pieces, but I was in a particularly sad mood and contemplating the angles in which my blood would spatter and my bones would break if I just nudged myself over the edge of the metal and glass balcony. Of course these thoughts had to be controlled and once I was reunited with Isabella and she ran across the sculpture garden yelling with glee “mommy mommy” and throwing herself into my arms, to let me know that she was no longer mad and wasn’t I happy about that, I was indeed snapped back to reality… It is really my own fault for wallowing, and the book too. “The Hours” – Michael Cunnigham. The movie had the same effect on me, but the book is even more imposing of sadness than the movie. It reads quickly despite the excessive visual lushness, but there is so much sadness that I feel wrapped up in it, as if I too am an additional interwoven character. I found the book on my shelf, I think it was from a free pile somewhere, and I picked it up because a friend from high school mentioned that another mutual friend was Phillip Glass’s (composer of score for the movie) personal assistant. I think that was why it caught my eye. Funny, some people are doing important and exciting things. Mom cut out the wedding announcement of another soccer buddy and homeroom homework help seeker. She looked so happy. She’s an attorney and so is he. I wonder how long that will last… All I wanted all day long was to sit and write and write and describe how the billowing black smoke emanating from an unknown source (Hotel Indio – later found out) polluted the limpid desert horizon, and the way the sun played of the rocks, almost intangibly colorless on one side and with a darkening verdant grey on the other. I wanted to describe the asynchronous motion of the wind turbines and their precarious perching along the plain and on the mountains above, overlooking the highway as if they were bizarre flamingoes, white instead of pink, but still one legged, or perhaps lurking carrion eaters? No, they were too beautiful for that.
Of course I didn’t write those things, and after all what would l tell about them? What would be interesting about a mere description of reality, a reality probably distorted by my own petty focus? Instead I wallowed a bit in melancholy, which would be fine if I were alone, but each time I try to draw into myself, Miguel takes it as a personal rejection, and each time I try not to hurt him with my indifference, I hurt him more. I am truly a horrible excuse for a wife and I am having a terrible selfish stage. I fear that this stage may last some time, because as it would happen (I acquired the Woolf’s “A Room of One’ Own” in the very homeroom in which my homework assistance was always required by dear Chrissy) I think that not only do I need a room of my own, but perhaps a time-zone of my own. Ha Ha. But I just wish that it were ok for me to disappear, as it is I feel like I am constantly on fire, with a splitting searing pain, just entering the ebullient water and being yanked back out before my body can accustom itself to the new temperature.
How poetic. No, just selfish. I must be. Maybe I always have been. The more I am vying for space, the more it seems that other people’s needs gobble the secretly carved and crafted emptiness in half the time it took to ease myself backwards. Back up against a wall.
Finally after a family dinner in the kitchenette (mesclun salad, sincronizadas and fresh guacamole with Negra Modelos) Miguel and I went to the movies to see “Ocean’s Twelve”. Ok. Not exactly high art but entertainment in the true sense of the word. Beyond the eye candy (both male and female – mmmm George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones and the sexy man with an accent who I don’t recognize but could melt listening to) it was so silly and more old school “mission impossible” than the awful remake of itself a few years back. I left smiling having forgotten totally my own sadness. I know that’s cheap, and that in real terms, the quality, well, it is what it is. But I never claimed to be anything but silly anyhow, so why shouldn’t I take pleasure in what other mere mortals do?
Quick, I better go to bed before my mood turns again!
Day 3:
A good mood can only last so long, it would seem. That and sleeping in the awful crack between two twin beds shoved improvisorily up against one another to create the visual illusion (but certainly not the physical one, as evidenced by my wretched night’s sleep) of a king size bed. Isabella sleeping diagonally and pushing me over when Miguel is trying desperately to be romantic and I am feeling anything but. That’s not fair. I was trying to be the reciprocating partner, trying to return the love that is so kindly and sweetly and genuinely offered, and failing, like in so many ways I fail, this is truly just the icing on the cake, but failing because I suddenly can’t take the smothering closeness, and the pushing child-feet and the expectant breath and the twisted awful sheets and the evil crack into which I feel my life sinking. The morning was lost to fitful sleep and more reading, but we went out, leaving Isabella behind with happy grandparents, to hike in Joshua Tree National Park. I have always wanted to go here, ever since my early teenage obsession with U2 and my love of the album which bore its name. I often wonder why I can’t just give myself over to the moments instead of feeling a deep dissatisfaction with the world. The park was spectacular, but I get entangled in the petty details, in the “I want to go this way and you that”, or the “why can’t I be alone, or the why can’t I think about things other than the regrets I am feeling”, the ones that roll over me in waves, that make me feel like my life will never be the way it should be without the realization of the one thing I want and can’t possibly possess. Of course that thing is a changing thing, but I am still left holding the short end of the stick. Or at least that is how I feel. Miguel said that it seems like there are too many things going on in my head at once. (If he only knew!) and that it lately seems that while I am physically present, my mind has wandered off somewhere. A truer assessment of reality has probably never been made, but there is just nothing I can do to ameliorate the situation, it seems that my train of thought has blasted through the deepest crevices of my cerebral caverns and is going full steam ahead to the inevitable train-wreck that wiser people than I tried to avoid at all costs. My train it seems has left the station, but like Arreola’s mystery train (El guardagujas), it is probably better to just give up hope about waiting for it to arrive (much less on any particular schedule) that, or be prepared to conform one’s self with what one is dealt. Perhaps that is the biggest problem for me…when given the vertiginous freedom of alternative possibilities, I go into crisis mode. Perhaps that is why I married so young – to force myself into a world of limited possibility. And then something snaps and I am deeply and profoundly shaken, and I know that my doubt and conflict only serve to inflict pain on the one person who actually gives a shit about me in this world (no, not just one, I am sorry, I don’t really mean to say that, there are several, and I am being, perhaps, equally awful to all). But maybe that caring and that constant scolding are just reminders of all of the ways in which I fail to be the person that I wish I were, or that I could be, or that I could have been had I been stronger, not so weak to seek out the comfort of another - the weakness of the flesh, the need for warmth and security. I think my crisis stems from the realization that I have never been an adult alone! Nor has he. We have only ever been adults together and that is a horrifying thought. That the individual me who was me before I was an adult is screaming to come out and being shushed and pushed back in because she doesn’t generally agree with the coupled me. The dependent me. What happened to the girl who could take care of herself? The one that managed to find her way to an unknown house in Quilmes in the middle of the night when deposited by a bus in a dark park in Buenos Aires, and still take the test spectacularly the next morning.. Now I take care of myself and others, but at the same time I have relinquished something ever so much more, I am also bound up in being cared for, even if I wish that I was cared for less. Ridiculous. How many women wouldn’t beg to be adored by their spouses, desired, sought out despite the struggles, despite the years, despite the extra unflattering pounds that make one want to disappear (even when she knows that uttering those thoughts are going to result in chastisement (self and other)). What is wrong with me? Why do the big things matter so much less than the grating daily little things. Why do I dream of getting up one morning and walking and walking and evanescing into the mist, and rematerializing somewhere far off, exotic, where I would have to learn a new language in order to make communication just a little more difficult and therefore a more worthy endeavor?
I am feeling utterly unworthy of anyone’s love, and a bit like a feeble-minded child whose caring parents pat her on the back and say “there there dear, it will all be better in the morning.” And I want to believe it, I do, it’s just that I have far too much experience with this sort of thing. In fact I am coddled by parents even now, but I suddenly feel like some strange alien that sprung fully formed from the womb and resembled her creators very little. I don’t always feel this way, but today I do.
Day 4
Got better sleep last night. Frown my libido has died as suddenly and mysteriously as it reared its ugly head. I think that this is probably better, but I can’t help feeling a deep sense of loss, as if maybe this was the last chance for me to awaken. How terribly tragic and probably false. Went sampling dates with Mom, Dad and Isabella. Miguel went off for a long hike in Joshua Tree by himself. Part of me wishes that I took the hike, but most of me was so happy to be alone this afternoon, and feeling so marvelously shrouded in solitude, that I believe that it was much better for both (all) of us. It was like a weight being lifted, the stress ebbing from me in a fifteen minute nap, the sickness that wants to inhabit my lungs being allayed for another day? Of course I read like a fiend, stories and stories and more stories. I watched Isabella walk with muscular purpose and I felt that I had for a brief moment the perfect opening sentence, but then the word that clinched it (began with an “s”. I think) slipped away and I was left with only the image of the muscularly self-assured walk of my five-year-old, demanding in her singular presence, purposeful and deeply content and alive. Swimming together in the pool with my mom, and then me when I was torn away from my book (guiltfully sneaking an extra story, and only half paying attention to her – in my defense as a mother, she is an excellent swimmer and of course her grandmother was really the one watching her), her smile, her filling physical presence, her embrace and kisses, reminding me of all things beautiful in this world. She is amazing, brilliant, perceptive to her mama’s needs. When I asked her if she preferred to go with just Bobie and Zadie or if she wanted me to go along she responded “I love being with you mommy, but on occasion, I like to go places with just Bobie and Zadie”. Release, freedom. It is amazing how much perspective and peace are afforded with a few simple hours with no pressing needs and silence, a book full of stories and the endless possibilities of a fantasy realm free from inquiry (inquisition?) from others. A few blessed moments to think, and feel outside the neatly painted lines of appropriateness, with no fear of interpretation or misinterpretation and no complaints about the strange smile that invades my countenance when my thoughts wander away.
And then when everyone came home, I was ready to face them with cheer and food preparation Then of course, more recriminations☹ Oh well. It was nice while it lasted.
Day 6:
Morning-
I was too exhausted last night to write. Exhausted from what? Not much. Miguel, Isabella and I went out to swim, but that only lasted a little over an hour, then Isabella left to swim again with the g’rents and Miguel went out, supposedly for short excursion to buy my present (which I insisted that I didn’t need but am glad that I didn’t insist too much!). Well, his little excursion took several hours, but that was ok, I read essays edited by Laura Flanders – “The ‘W’ effect”. Being outraged is ever so much better than wallowing in self-pity, which is probably why some people I know are constantly being outraged. I, myself, get tired but little doses are enough to keep me going. So Miguel and I went out for drinks in Palm Springs, and besides the obnoxious vacuous façades it would have been fine. We found ourselves in a restaurant with live music – covers of CCR, the Eagles, Los Lobos and Jimmy Buffet to name a few, but after to heavy-handed Margaritas the old politics came out and lead to us dredging up all our past mental and spiritual infidelities (lacking any real physical ones). We sat in the car for about an hour hashing out all the old issues (which was also, cleverly, a way for him to sober up before driving home.) I had been so pleased… he had read my mind and gotten me a digital camera so that once again I would have my own pictures, my own thoughts, my own reality…(I had secretly been lamenting all the things I lost, just the other day and among them was my camera – which Miguel broke in San Miguel when he brought it into the enclosed cave of the hot springs against my pleas, and then of course we shared a camera – a wedding present – but sharing a camera is a metaphor for everything else – the authorship gets all mixed up and you feel like you either have to relinquish your claim on the photos altogether, or you have to find a way to mark your territory) but then… oh well, why bother, it ended well enough, I guess. And we are really trying, it is just so hard. Just dig deeper. That’s what I keep telling myself. And the moments when he looks over at me, and brushes the hair from my face, he massages my ear lobe, I see my life reflected in his eyes and I feel utterly ashamed of myself and naked and invaded all at the same time.
Evening:
We took a hike into 49 Palms Oasis with the whole Dann (damn) family. It was impressive that there were no Joshua trees, but an abundance of red-barrel cacti and then the amazing pools of water in the middle of the desert, and the aviary life that sprung from the date-palms, some scarred from the burning that actually gives them new life. It was a beautiful amazing hike, and after, we headed home, making it back in a record 3 and a half hours (instead of the roughly seven it took to get there). We listened to music all the way home – same as on the way down. We were making plans for the band that is in its nascent stages. It was so nice to be home… I have been thinking about what I can do, where I can focus my outrage, how I can bring my particular skills to the table to make some kind of difference. I think I may have a plan too... Now I get to go to bed in my very own bed, and I won’t even complain about a small person’s foot in the middle of my rib-cage. And, maybe I will make up for lost time…
posted by ilana at 1:47 a.m.
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