emlocke

Category: Thoughtful

  • Karma Chameleon: Water Daily

    Tessa says I’m collecting good karma to save for later in my life. Maybe so, but I’m not getting my hopes up. Maybe that’s the point. Bad days (and bad days all in a row) feel like the world’s reminder not to get my hopes up. Be satisfied with a good parking spot and move on. Okay, so I’m the only person I know who’s actually won a free liter of Coke under the bottle top. And I’ve won three. Lucky, right?

    Do you make your own luck? I just try to take care of myself, and between the gym and the banana fritters, I’m not doing so bad. If more karma is coming my way, good or bad, there probably isn’t much I can do to stop it.

  • Chapstick is Not Life Gloss

    Read my lips. When I’ve completely given up on the world, you’ll know it because they’re chapped. The crack down the middle, the white, ragged-edged flakes that rake on the back of my hand are the most outward physical symbols of my defeat. I’m too worn out to go looking for the ‘schtick (why bother). I’m dehydrated (too much coffee and not enough water). I’ve probably been napping (breathing through my mouth when my room gets warm in the afternoon). I’ve probably been chewing at them, peeling layers away until raw patches of red are another wound on display.

    You can’t smear fruity lip gloss on those defeated by the world lips. The sugar stings in the spots where you can taste blood. You need the protective, albeit waxy coat of some purified balm to seal off the damage. It smooths away the prickle but puts up a shiny rampart to ward off any new foes.

  • Too Much Metaphor

    If you pull the tab and the tiny staple out of a dry tea bag, dump out the leaves and light one end on fire with a match or a lighter, and let it go, it will soar upward out of your hands, dancing a flitting to and fro, a gauzy hot hair balloon ablaze in the air until it withers away to a weightless mound of ashes. This is an old camp trick, somewhere between ‘don’t play with matches’ and a s’more factory bonfire. It will ignite with the same instant, vital explosion as a roman candle, but so gently that it’s noiseless over the camper’s awed gasps, and then it will be over. The spectacle begins and ends with the same immediacy.

    If only it could dance above you forever, the scent of dry tea leaves in the air. But it is only after the spent ashes have drifted to your feet that the awe sinks in and you realize what has transpired before your eyes. If the beautiful flame never burned away, we would not recognize its impermance or remember its momentary glow like a special secret. It doesn’t have to be a bittersweet ending. The life of the flame is more beautiful just for having been at all.

  • Rosa Lee

    My aunt e-mailed to tell me that Rosa Parks died yesterday at 92. She said that she remembered that I did a project on her life and times when I was younger. If my presentation on Rosa Parks (there were several, in fact, one in which I dressed up to play her role) made an impact on my aunt, who lived on the other coast when I was in elementary school, it was only because Rosa Parks left such an impression on me.

    She was 42 on the day that she sat on her bus and politely gave the driver permission to call the police and have her arrested because, on that day, she would not give up her seat. She was charged with disorderly conduct because she sat quietly, primly, and said, “you may do that,” rather than stand up and herd to the back of a bus with the others who were asked to move. She said, “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old…no, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” Tired enough to wake up and say something, do something. To stand up for the first time, by sitting down.

  • Watching for A Grand Slam

    Baseball season, for me, starts a little earlier every fall. Once a sport that I followed only on a game to game basis, in a moment of small talk with someone wearing the NY emblem screen printed on a t-shirt or stitched on a cap, or to distract myself from the whirring of the elliptical pedals in the gym, every game has become all extremities crossed for luck, a navy blue t-shirt hem frayed from being fidgeted between anxious fingers, and “what’s the score?”

    I used to memorize names and lingo. As long as I knew what to look for, I could identify a big moment when I saw one. I knew who to applaud and who to fear, I liked saying “grand slam,” and if I paid enough attention to the little blue diamond in the upper-left hand corner of the screen, I knew when to cross my fingers and what play to cross them for, chanting under my breath, listening to the on-edge watchfulness in the commentator’s pauses.

    Of course, it was all a scam. The whole time, I just tried not to cheer or gasp at the wrong moment, metaphorically kicking the ball between the other team’s goal posts.

    It is through this hold-your-breath patience that I learn to love the baseball game a little more each season. I like that, with a little observation, I can predict the next move with a certain degree of accuracy. I like that everything you need to know fits into that little baseball diamond graphic in the corner of the screen. That leaves more room for the impatience, the fan hysteria, the grudges, the surprises, and the grand slams.

  • I Still Remember

    New York City means a lot to me. For most of my childhood, between day trips to Broadway or the Met, it was a far-off place, a special occasion, and a million things I could never touch or see or do. The city had never felt so close as it did on September 11th, 2001. These days it seems more possible. People I know live there. I could live there. The millions of things are closer to my reach and across the border from home, or a few hours drive from school, they are more tangible. But there is still the sense that is it so much greater and deeper, in more ways than population or square footage, than I can comprehend.

    It is many homes and one home. Many businesses and one business. Many neighborhoods and one neighborhood. Many destinations and one destination. It is a hum through every district, a collective sigh, a chain reaction of laughter or shouting bouncing back and forth across an island. It is strength in numbers.

    It is gray pavement painted with taxicabs, neon signs, graffiti murals and storefronts all illuminated by the sun’s glare off skyscraper windows and a traffic light on each corner. It is a drive across the Brooklyn Bridge at every time of day or a walk along the Hudson or through Central Park during any season. It is one tree growing in Brooklyn and many, many trees, growing along sidewalks, defying urban concrete with roots and leaves all over the city, year after year. It is the evolution of the unofficial capital of the United States and a beacon to those who seek it around the world.

    Today, during the Weissman Center presentation, “New York Stories,” between clips of footage from PBS‘s 14+ hour documentary on the history of New York, the blue screen projected with the pause symbol and the word “STILL” in the upper-left hand corner. In the moments between full color and black and white images of the city, past and present, this silent background spoke volumes. I am still shocked, still scared, still wounded. I still remember. I still believe in New York.

  • Flood

    I’ve had a headache since yesterday. It feels like caffeine withdrawal, but it’s centered in my sinuses. It aches with an almost audible twinge between my eyes like I’ve been watching too much TV. I have been. Watching New Orleans fill like a bathtub. Watching parking lots fill up with people, hot and thirsty and tired, just exhausted. Watching a doctor’s eyes fill with determination as he reports on the pitiful state of his crippled hospital. Watching a grandmother’s eyes filled with betrayal, gasping, “We’re Americans.” My headache flares every time I fight back tears. My eyes flood and spill over.

  • Storms

    Someone pressed ‘play’ on the thunder audio effects tonight and let it run like a soundtrack for more than half an hour. The strobe lightening was running, too, making everyone in house look like they were moving with a slow-motion stutter as they hurried to shut off computers and air conditioners. I opened the window and tried to make a movie.

    Today, New York released thousands of first hand stories from emergency officials who were on duty in the city on September 11th. Fears, heroics, serendipities, calamities. In the past four years, I’ve heard people from scattered geographical locations tactfully, and not so tactfully, argue with one another about who September 11th affected the most. I have even wondered whether I would have been as scared and shaken as I was on that day if I had grown up in another part of the country, some place where I didn’t feel so close to New York that I expected to see blazing smoke rising over my own backyard. It is clear today that the men and women who told these stories, who are all a part of these stories, lived a September 11th that no one else will ever know. They are the survivors. But now, under a file number and a name, we can read and remember and reach for understanding.

  • I’m Allowed to Laugh at Myself, You Are Not

    My mind wandered while I fixed lunch today and for absolutely no reason at all, I remembered one of the ever numerous faux pas I committed as a younger girl attempting to win the affections of her crush-of-the-minute. As I arranged baby spinach inside my whole grain wrap, I giggled to myself with that wryly amused sort of laugh that consists of one backward gasp (exhaled, not inhaled) through the nose. I proceeded to grin for approximately eleven seconds before the usual former-crush-cringe poked a chilly finger right between my shoulder blades. That’s eleven seconds longer than I have ever chuckled at such a recollection before.

    Proud of my immense growth of character, I immediately began waving my proverbial “I’m Blogging This” flag. But by the time I reached this “Create Post” window, all courage was gone. Today I learned that the day when you can finally remember the social mortifications of early teendom and begin to laugh at yourself is not the same day you can hop online and describe the well-intentioned romantic advances of your youth on the internet, no matter how many people read or do not read your blog.

    Still, it is progress that those memories are becoming more amusing and less melodramatic. I wonder how much time will have to come between me and the shameless attempts at flirtation before I will no longer avoid the grocery store on Saturday afternoons (I never fail to run into the mother of some poor unsuspecting boy of whom I was terrifically fond when we were in school together). It seems to me that it will be a milestone similar to the day when I am finally grown and mature enough not to be embarrassed if I try to walk in the ‘out’ door or push when it clearly states ‘pull.’ I just hope it doesn’t take quite that long.

  • I Don’t Like Carrots

    If you can judge how someone loves you based on whether or not they know how you like your eggs, then I say the same goes for fruit and vegetable consumption habits. For a certain someone, I am willing to go to any lengths to prepare a fruit or veggie so that it satisfies even the most particular eaters.

    To me, the bundles of cream colored seeds that sprinkle themselves everywhere when you cut open a bell pepper are pretty harmless. I run the pepper under the tap, filling it like a cup and then pouring it out (I have yet to attempt drinking the pepper water), washing most of the seeds down the drain. The ones that cling to the striated walls inside don’t bother me. But my mom will rinse each individual slice of pepper clean of seeds before she’ll eat it.

    And it was as if the boys I took care of last Spring had never seen a whole apple in a dining context. They recognized the traditional contents of a Thanksgiving cornucopia. The teacher’s desk on the first day of school motif was also familiar. But they liked their apples sliced as thin as crackers and left untouched any pieces without a smooth crescent whittled away from the core.

    Strawberries, too, were inedible in their natural state. Though Brian was always impressed by abnormally large or mutant specimens, it was off with their heads before he would indulge. It seemed a little sad to cut away every tuft of leaves, nature’s version of a popsicle stick.

    I don’t think I’m picky, but a banana is that much more appetizing when the bitter strings are pulled away, and I’ve never met a carrot I was crazy about. As for my eggs, I prefer french toast.