End of the Semester Slide

About this time in the semester—only two or three weeks to go—I turn into Gollum. I’ve been cloistered in an office, either at home or at school, grading papers pretty much non-stop. My skin is hanging in dehydrated bags and has paled to a milky-grey, my eyes are bugged out, only the muscles in my pen hand are still functioning, and I’m referring to myself in the third-person: “Shall we make a fourth pot of Italian roast, Precious? Those crème brule truffles will keeps us awake, darling.”

By 3 a.m., the comments I make on essays have gone from “I love the way you relate the story’s setting to its exploration of existential angst,” to “No clear connection between this paragraph and your thesis idea” to “verb tenses shift here” to “nice font” to “your paper is a rectangle.” In those wee hours, I can hear my synapses crackling as they sizzle and burst into flame.

In addition to my typical end-of-semester anxiety over the whole idea of judgment (grading), I’m also battling guilt over all that goes undone while I’m sequestered—laundry, dusting, Thanksgiving dinner prep (we’re having 15 for dinner at the Row this year), Christmas decorating, knitting & shopping, a holiday letter, attention to spouse, children, friends, parrots, dogs and peacocks, and my own writing. Imagine June Cleaver (picture Gollum in an apron) at the dining room table, dustballs drifting in the drape-filtered light, s/he’s strung out on coffee, doing Beaver’s and Wally’s homework day & night, with nary a pot roast or game hen in the oven for Ward—that’s me.

This weekend, I have 2 stacks of revised essays and 3 stacks of quizzes to grade, 2 stacks of first drafts to comment on, 2 extremely late papers to comment on (what WAS that assignment again?), 2 databases to retrieve student information from for scoring, and woefully behind gradebooks to update.

So how will I spend this gorgeous November day? Maybe I’ll clean parrot cages while Ray hauls up the Christmas stuff from the basement. Maybe I’ll put up the tree, lights and decorations, so the family (most of whom won’t make it back to SD for Christmas), can share in the cheer. Maybe I’ll blog. Maybe I’ll venture outside into the sunlight (with dark glasses, skin slathered in SPF 150), to see if the world’s still turning. Maybe I’ll bake some ginger cookies. Maybe I’ll rearrange my stacks of papers, sorting them numerically by student ID #. Maybe I’ll dust. Maybe I’ll practice my gee-tar.

At least we’s got our priorities, straight. Hasn’t we, Precious?

Our Little Darwinian Hothouse

It’s late fall at Uncannery Row. The ground is covered with leaves in that perfect late stage of crunchiness. Farmers are combining late into the night, and the corn and soybean fields are shaved almost bare. Squirrels, when they aren’t running from Yogi, the Great Hunting Schnoodle, are carting off black walnuts as fast as their fat legs can carry them. No sign of barn cats for a while now; they may have gotten tired of Yogi’s pestering and skulked off to find a more cat-friendly acreage. But something’s eating the cat food I keep putting out in the pyramid shed…

Speaking of food, the repercussions of my meddling in Nature have come home to roost this fall, so to speak. I may have mentioned before that there were 6 peacocks here when we moved in a little over three years ago—they came with the house. When we bought the place, I asked the previous owners how to care for the peas. She said, “Oh, they take care of themselves. I toss a little cat food out once in a great while when I’m feeding the cats.” So, that’s what I did. Toss a little cat food out, maybe a little too often. Then I noticed the peas would saunter into the yard just after I filled the feeders, to catch the spillage. I thought to myself, “Self? Why not toss a little bird food on the ground every now and then, so the peas can have their own?” Then one day I noticed the peas gorging on spilled field corn in the road. I thought, “Self? Why not add a little cracked corn to the bird food, since the peas like it so much?”

Yesterday, I counted 22 peacocks in the yard. They’d heard me take the metal lid off the bird food can, and they came RUNNING. Watching 22 peacocks run at you is like starring in your own Roadrunner cartoon, in fly-lens perspective. And if I so much as turn in the direction of the pyramid, where the cat food is stored, the peas FLY in, a honking aerial assault.

Peacocks aren’t supposed to get their train feathers, those “eye” tail feathers for which they’re famous, until they’re around 3 years old. And although they can breed in their second year, the boys can’t usually attract the mostly stuck-up hens until they have that swanky train (the pea-quivalent of a red 1975 Camaro). And breeding season is usually Feb-Sept or so. But we now have three 1-year-old black-shouldered males, each with a sprinkling of teeny tiny eye feathers they shouldn’t have yet, high-stepping back and forth on the back patio daily. In mid-November! It’s evolutionary hyperdrive, I tell you, probably resulting from excessive protein (cat food and corn), or Gore-bal warming (no seasonal cues to signal breeding seasons), or both. Directly or indirectly, it’s my pesky meddling in Nature. I might as well be out in the yard stocking an all-you-can-eat Atkins/South Beach pea-buffet while firing off a dozen aerosol cans.

Calculating the possible future pea-population is dizzying. The cost of corn. The hopscotch over pea-droppings. The no-room-at-the-inn Roosting Tree. The “Crazy Pea-lady” sniggers at the Co-op elevator. So today, while Yogi conserves hunting energy in Ray’s lap, I’ll be in the greenhouse grading papers, watching our bulked-up peas clumsily leapfrog in the yard, bickering over leftover bird seed. I will try to tone down my interference. I will try to appreciate and let alone the beautiful balance of Nature. I will sit on my hands if I have to. From now on, I will only feed the peas, cats, dogs, little birds (and occasional wild turkeys) on days ending in “-day.” Honest.

Why I'm the kind of woman who keeps a parrot...

Mark Twain said, “She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.” I’m not sure Twain meant this as a compliment, but that’s how I’m taking it. I live with two parrots—Stella Faye and Polly Hester.

A little history. I bought Stella, a Congo grey parrot (often called African grey parrot), from a breeder in Ohio who treats her companion parrots like the precious children they are. I bought Stella before she was hatched—that is, I was on a list, waiting for a baby, after making it through a rigorous application & approval process. Stella was a domestically bred, handfed baby, and the breeder sent her to me on a plane when Stella was 4 months old. She came with a baby book, toys, a Congo grey stained glass suncatcher, and a kilogram scale to track Stella’s weight (the best way to monitor a bird’s daily health). Stella is tame and will be 13 this Christmas.

Polly Hester is a lilac crown Amazon parrot, a rescue bird. She was given to me by a woman whose daughter had kept Polly shut in a back room for a year before giving her to the mom, who then gave her to me when her husband took sick and she didn’t have time to care for Polly too. Polly isn’t tame but tolerates my affection, and our best guess is that she is 17 or 18.

Parrots can live 50 years or more, so believe me, I study my human kids’ interactions with the parrots, gauging the kids’ potential as possible godparents for our feathered girls.

Now I’ll tell you why I’m THAT kind of woman.

1. Duh. Parrots can fly. Because Stella is an occasional feather chewer, her wings are not clipped. She adores spending time out of her cage, and watching her fly lets me fulfill, at least vicariously, my own secret desire to fly. I was the little girl who jumped off porch railings, shed roofs, tree branches, etc., believing that gossamer wings would magically sprout from my shoulder blades. I am not startled by the sight of a 1+-pound grey parrot flying directly at me, her head down and back flattened out, then making a pinpoint landing on my shoulder. I am in AWE (and envious as hell).

2. Parrots can talk. Parrots are such social creatures that they will learn a skill totally unnatural for their species in order to engage with their human “flock.” That would be like Americans traveling in Paris actually learning French…not too likely. Stella refuses to be “taught” language and only learns what she likes. I have been singing a little ditty to her since the day I brought her home, and she has never sung a single note of it. But she’ll whistle “Popeye the Sailor Man,” by gum. She has an amazing repertoire of sound effects, including the microwave, phone beeps, smoke alarm, dog barking at a distance, tapping on a coffee grinder, clapping, and after our recent bout with flu, a tuberculin cough she practices ad nauseum. She can call out “Marlene?” in Ray’s voice, then answer “What?” in mine. She can do a long one-sided phone conversation, complete with “Hello” at the beginning, occasional laughter, rising & falling inflections, and “Bye” at the end. When she wants water, she makes the sound of a bubbling fish aquarium. She reminds me daily that she’s a good girl and a goofy bird. She can ask for pasta, chips, cheese, TV, or time out from her cage. In English.

3. Parrots can FLY.

A poet friend of mine in Canberra, Australia, S. K. Kelen, had a poem accepted for publication recently, a poem inspired by my fascination with birds. He's published a half dozen books of poetry and gave me, in one of his poems, my nickname for the South Dakota winter—Jack Blizzard. You can see his "Jack Blizzard" poem at http://poetry.poetryx.com/poets/43. This was my first foray as poetic muse, and I’m incredibly honored, so here’s the poem, reprinted here with the poet’s permission…

BIRD WOMAN OF THE DAKOTAS

One Dakota woman calls the river’s
Bluff and drives to the Badlands.
On the back seat of her car
Is a caged Sulphur-crested
Cockatoo—a dream come true.
‘Oh, those crazy Aussies...’
And the glossy photographs of galahs!
Back home her attic is full
Of budgerigars and finches
A tame woodpecker
This big white parrot
Will rule them all.
Clouds curl like open hands,
She sees the river
And a hawk dip its wing.

S. K. Kelen

Sisters of Perpetual Disorder: How to Make an Egg Roll

Put 16 women (and several bottles of plum wine) in one room, and a strange kind of music happens. It’s the sound of a half-dozen simultaneous conversations and a chorus of responsive interjections—Oh no…Really?...Oh my lord…You’ve GOT to be kidding—all punctuated with bursts of laughter, coughing jags, even snorts. Women drift easily, effortlessly between conversations, ducking out of one, joining another, returning to the first, adding a single note to a third. If you step back, close your eyes and just listen, you’ll hear a lilting, rolling song.

That’s what I noticed at a recent installment of the Sisters of Perpetual Disorder potluck movable feast. Sixteen of us (see totally candid shot of our feet) cooked up an oriental storm for the dinner’s Asian theme. The food, as usual, was incredible and included rice, spring rolls, bean curd, curried shrimp, two chicken dishes, Asian ribs, a tartlet tower, lemon tart, coconut pie and much more. No fortune cookies—we make our own fortunes, thank you very much. Potluck leftovers for all. But those songs, that music women make when they’re together, that’s the real sustenance of the Sisters dinners. SPD “greatest hits” moment: one woman, after finishing a bite-sized white chocolate tartlet, rolled her eyes, sat back, and said, “Mmm…I think I need a cigarette.” And she’s a non-smoker.

The dinners so far have been mostly women over 50, but we’re hoping some of our younger women friends will come next time. The Sisters could use a few young recruits to keep the Order going and to add some thrilling spiky crescendos to our song. The novices could learn a thing or two from our sage femme life experience. Plus, they could give us an elbow jab before we doze off face-first in our mu gu gai pan.

How to make an egg roll? Give it a little shove.

Octever

In South Dakota, there’s really no autumn. There’s only
W I N T E R, spring, summer, and a brief interim from the end of summer to the beginning of full-on winter that I call Octever, a combination of October and whatever. September is still mostly summer. We’re still harvesting, canning, cutting flowers. And we haven’t turned on the heat yet. But from October on, it’s a different story. (One Halloween—no kidding—most South Dakota towns postponed trick-or-treating for several days to wait out a blinding blizzard.) So from October until Jack Blizzard settles down over us for the long haul, it could be in the 70’s one day, in the 30’s that night, in the mid-40’s and snowing the next day, and a balmy 55 that night. It could be pouring rain, or we could have sustained winds that blow laundry off the line. Octever keeps plains people on their toes.

At Uncannery Row, we got the last of the tomatoes cooked up into pasta sauce, got the last of the cukes salted & dressed, and brought in the houseplants that summered in the yard. And, in homage to our Mother Earth News roots, we finally put in a wood stove. I can hear my grandma’s mumbled, under-her-breath comment in my ear: Why on earth would you WANT something we couldn’t wait to get rid of? But seriously, Grandma, there’s nothing as cozy as a warm wood fire, the smell of burning wood, and a mug of Sumatran coffee warming on the iron stovetop. In my 20’s—my previous wood-stove life—our safety precautions included love and idiot optimism. Now they include a firebrick surround, a regulation fire extinguisher, chimney brush extensions, and two smoke alarms. Funny how age can make one so cautious in some ways and absolutely reckless in others (like eating dark chocolate truffles for breakfast or spending perfectly good money on glass finials).

We had a brief snow about a week ago. Then we had a week of steady drizzle and cloudy skies. Oh, Octever. By the time the sun peeked out yesterday, Ray and I were about ready to climb up on the barn roof and jump—a person can only take so much gloom. On the other hand, it’s decent of Jack to give us a little pre-winter taste; it forced us to drag ourselves around in the sleyn (sleet + grey + rain) preparing for the inevitable—shovels out, parkas aired, down quilt at the ready, snow boots by the door. We’ve stocked the larder (does anybody say larder anymore?) with half a lamb and a deer our friend found already neatly packaged out in his field (I have to believe that to ward off bad Bambi flashbacks), and our summer’s garden bounty is put up in jars or in one of two freezers.

I’d put the spinning wheel by the wood stove, don my flannel cap, and work on my stash of merino and camel hair, but I’m afraid the whole prairie life scene would cause a rift in the fabric of time…

Road Trip Reverie Rewind

Whenever I take a road trip by myself I think, “Self, this would be a good chance to do some centering, to meditate, to reintegrate body, mind & spirit.” And this is always my intention. But Ram Das, 70’s guru of be-here-now-ness would be horrified at the way my mind skitters off and dances from one bizarrely random thought to another—little vignettes of mindlessness. So as the prairie rolls past and my mouth is chanting ohm nama shivaya ohm, here’s what’s going on in my brain…

Those sunflowers look like tired soldiers. Or dug-up Chinese imperial guards. Or puff pastries on sticks.

Mmmm…I’m hungry.

If Dave Matthews had come to dinner back when I invited him, we’d totally be best friends now, and he’d be stopping by once in a while for coffee and a game of cribbage. Bet he’s sorry.

Supermodels walk like Lipizzaner stallions.

I shoulda stopped to take a picture of that. I shoulda stopped to take a picture of that. I shoulda stopped to take a picture of that.

How did I miss Laura Nyro back in the 70’s? Donavan…hmm…I still don't know what to make of him.

I could live in Kennebec. Wait, no I couldn’t.

We should turn our place into a B & B. Every outbuilding could be a guest room, with names like “Barn Room,” “Grain Shed Room,” “Loafing Shed Room,” “Chicken House Room.” Ray would have to paint “don’t harass the peacocks” signs.

Deep-fried tofu: delicacy or oxymoron…

If I had it to do over again, I’d try out for Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour. Or be a Shindig dancer. Or be “best grip” on the set of Man from U.N.C.L.E.

What’s a “best grip”?

Samsara. All life is suffering, leading to cycles of birth, death, rebirth. This is a day or a lifetime or a thousand lifetimes.

Who named Pukwana? Were they just goofing around but the name stuck?

Cool. If I tilt my head and squint, that foggy bean field looks like the ocean. I shouldn’t do this while I’m driving. Cool.

Prairie dogs have feelings, too.

Jesse Winchester sings like an angel-boy. Keb Mo is hot. Bonnie Raitt is hot. Mexico is hot. I'm hot. Those mudflaps are hot. 

I don’t care what she names the new baby. I’m calling him/her Viggo/Violet.

Are we there yet?

Cormac McCarthy isn’t writing books fast enough to suit me. I should email him.

In a truly just world, pear hips & big thighs would be en vogue.

Mmmm…I’m hungry.

Are we there yet?

West Meets Beach [Party]

I just got back from the Western Literature Association annual conference in Spearfish, SD. I was one of four women poets reading on a panel. Our friend, Kathleen Breem went too, to read an honest-to-gosh scholarly paper she’d written. You can see us in the pic, L to R: Lori Roarpaff, Linda Orbatch, Peg Pearlman, me (Marlene) and Kathleen.

We had an awesome time. For one thing, the Black Hills all dressed up in their autumn frills make me cry like a little girl. For another thing, the four-day combo of western literature and good friend silliness was delightfully surreal—imagine Willa Cather and Cormack McCarthy co-starring in Annette Funicello’s “Pajama Party,” where the crazy kids make a campfire, drink whiskey shots, and yak about western literary archetypes. And boys. And girls. AWE-some.

In addition to literary goodness, I got to meet up with friends Bob and Deardre, who live in the Hills. I got to cruise Spearfish Canyon, stick my head in Spearfish Creek at the traditional baptism rocks (Ray and I have been blessing ourselves in the creek for about 20 years now, whenever we’re in the Hills), buy truffles at Chubby Chipmunk in Deadwood (mmm…crème brule truffles), throw peanut shells on the floor at the Chop House, hear a great band & dance out a few kinks. If you wanna know what a room full of English majors (including me) looks like dancing, check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8UI_X-Mk1M

As much as I love the Hills, I was glad to get back to the flatland. I’m strangely soothed being able to see to the horizon, under a sky dappled with clouds and so vast that I remember my smallness.

So now I’m back, further behind than ever, multitasking to the point of implosion, trying to freeze a mental picture of golden aspen in my mind’s icebox, and trying to figure out how I can make a living rambling around the country reading poems, laughing with friends, and working on my dance moves. There must be a government bailout program for that, right?