Nifty Ways to Leave Your Lover
February 7, 2010
1. Gauge
2. Unhook
3. Disengage
4. If Impeded Indeed, Then Secede
5. Succeed
6. Exceed
7. Proceed
8. Give What You Took
9. Stay Unshook
10. Stay Off The Hook
11. Rim Shoot
12. Buy Tap Shoes
13. Shuffle
14. Step
15. & Ball Change
16. Grieve
17. Unlink The Ball And Chain
18. Divide The Belongings
19. Get A Receipt
20. Cleave
21. Turn On Your Heel
22. Turn Up The Heat
23. Leaf Through Sheaves
24. Heave
25. Open A New Account
26. Count
27. Agree With Everything
28. Muster Courage
29. Eat Nothing But Mustard
30. Go Hunting For Salamanders
31. Buy Alligator Shoes
32. Spend Your Pesos In Some Gumball Machine
33. Scream
34. Jump
35. Swagger
36. Sashay
37. Hush
38. Shush
39. Push
40. Unpack
41. Unweave
42. Make Believe
43. Drink
44. Swallow
45. Drop
46. Breathe
47. Lose The Ring
48. Choose The Thing You’d Rather Do
49. Rinse
50. Repeat
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
In Praise of Aunt Arlene and Bright Green
January 23, 2010
In my childhood it seemed improbable – or perhaps impossible – that bright green: neon, aqua, teal, or green-glass, seaglass, plastic seawater, or artificially enhanced bottles of blues and greens like Aqua Velva, Listerine, Scope or Listermint could be real.
Moss green? Sure. Olive green? Sure. Brown green? Sure. Brown paper bag green? Sure. Brown cardboard box with fungus green? Sure. Natural organic pond sludge with wormwood eating mushroom spores green? Sure.
But never, ever the aqua neon green of my dreams.
It was only in the magical realm of netherfamily members called relatives that I learned that things could be bright, neon green.
Everything I could find to touch or eat at Aunt Arlene’s was gooooood. And gooder than good. Good. Magically frosted and colored with Red #2, Yellow #5 and Green Number Please.
Load up the station wagon! Good Golly Miss Molly, have we got to go!
To this day, I slide back into deep sentimentality when someone calls me fruit loops. Call me crazy, but I do not mind being called after the most fantastic food invention ever.
That cereal could be circular and multi-colored felt like a magical discovery, and yes, I was a test case card-carrying enthusiast. I knew for sure that sugared cereals and multi-colored candies were indeed magically delicious.
The day my mother joined her health food co-op cohorts in a protest against the cereal companies for pushing sugar cereals on children, I thought for sure that life as I knew it (when lucky enough to be at Aunt Arlene’s) would soon be over. If the hippies had their way, my delightful neon green would be taken away from me.
Aqua fresh, I learned, was the toothpaste with striped green and white swirls not unlike that magical once a year thing – peppermint candies.
If the protests against artificial colors had their way, I would lose my main vice of eating bright green toothpaste, gazing at bottles of blue and green liquids, eating Apple Jacks and Fruit Loops and impossibly magically delicious green foods. But what I feared most I would lose were spice drops and spearmint leaves – a sort of pungent sugared glittery gum drops that tasted like the toothpaste in Aunt Arlene’s medicine cabinet.
In the bathroom at Aunt Arlene’s there was a medicine cabinet with a mirrored sliding door. Just one slide of the door would reveal a Narnia of magical green Aqua Fresh and Close Up toothpastes, Aqua Velva aftershave bottles and the blue and green Listerine mouthwash bottles. It was my own private Isla Negra bottle room. I gazed at the greens and blues as if they were oracles or wishing wells, until someone banged on the door and asked if I was okay in there.
Instead of the glowing bluegreen Aqua Fresh or the magically green Close Up toothpaste, at our house we had a paste for toothpaste called Shaklee. It did not even come in a tube but a sort of trapezoidal bottle the size of a mouse one had to squeeze hard. And eventually a long, thin white excretion would come out of the small hole as if the result of a very albino mouse’s efforts to poop white poop. Shaklee was only available from hippies who knew hippies who knew hippies complicit in the pyramid scheme to sell Shaklee to other hippies.
Everything in my life was itchy.
I wore natural fiber pants of handwoven wool, or hemp or rough raw organic cotton someone named Dinah at the yogurt shop wove at home with her own combs and loom under her spider pants wearing her clogs and macramé vest.
I ate bread made of rocks and seeds and grains and so much fiber that I believe my digestive tract will be clear until after I die.
In my morally correct and environmentally conscious small life, there was no marshmallow fluff or cotton candy, no smooth polyester taffeta or slick of mineral oil, no fiberfill or Smooth as Silk, no Skin so Soft, no Aqua Net or fabulous hold, no KoolAid or Crystal Lite, no Ding Dongs or Ho Hos or Little Debbies, no Twinkies or Jif or Laffy Taffy, no pink plastic Barbie extravaganza, no acrylic tumble dry fuschia velvet, no extra shiny ribbons and certainly no neon green or Aqua Velva in my life.
No, everything was morally correct and environmentally sound. And itchy.
My life was very full of shredded wheat and a deep-seated doubt that any other green, other than mossy brown earth green, could be real on earth.
As a child, I was quite sure that heaven would be spun of spearmint sugar, a patine on which I could ice skate forever, wearing my acrylic polysester neon aqua ballgown. An eternal life made possible by Blue number 2 and Yellow number 5, and that fantastic minty green that made me feel, well, so alive.
And this is why I pause for a moment to thank my Aunt Arlene, who, unknowingly, through her medicine cabinet, her cereal cupboard and her candy dishes, gave me a brief swim in my sea of artificial green joy.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
Madjao
January 21, 2010
It is long overdue that I sing the praises here of my good friend, Madjao.
Who is Madjao? He is a French Hip Hop, or Pop, or Hip Pop singer. On his web site he says he sounds like himself, and if you don’t like it, you can go fish.
So, how did a French Hip Pop singer who barely cares if you like his music become the best friend of Ole Laura Hartmark from Small Mallbany? Funny you should ask.
It was not long ago that I was expected in Morocco to meet what would have been my new in-laws. The man I had been in love with for four years, my sweet and patient brilliant scientist, my cross between Jeremy Irons and Mister Rogers, my favorite Fulbright Scholar, my sometime Pygmalion, waited for me to arrive to see if I would pass muster with his old and blue-blooded family. I had studied, prepared, worried, combed down each strand of hair and fussed about whether I would indeed pass muster.
I did not know if I would pass muster. I was closer to passing out.
And why yes, I did skip out of the airport in France. I did not show up at all.
I fled, full of adrenaline flight instinct, and rocking my colicky panic with the tap sway of my soles on concrete. I took flight. Just not the flight listed on my connecting ticket.
So I called my friend, my pen-pal, my favorite singer, the French-Moroccan pop star Madjao. I had never met him but I was a self-professed fan of his music.
When he answered his portable phone, I yelped in my FrEnglish:
“Je suis arrivee en France! I am supposed to meet my fiance in Morocco. But I, um, did not go. And here I, um, am.
And so Madjao gave me refuge for a while to figure out what I had done, and what I must do. I ate trout. I drank chocolate. I swept the floor. I hummed. I swatted at gnats. I wandered dusty streets in a forgotten medieval village.
Little did I know that foisting myself on my favorite singer was part of a deeper spiritual path. I was seeking guidance, undoubtedly, and something led me to Madjao. For Madjao knows something of how people collude in accepting a path offered to them, which may not be the right path.
You see, where you plan to go, where you think you should go, and where your heart leads your feet are often two very different things.
Or, as Theodore Roethke writes in his poem, The Waking:
I think by feeling, what is there to know? I go by going where I have to go.
Fishing on the banks of the Ardèche river, Madjao smoked and talked to me about how sometimes a woman accepts a birdcage for a home. Becoming used to entrapment and silence, she eventually locks herself in that birdcage, and even holds the key herself. There is no need to even close the door to the cage. A fully silenced amanuensis will simply refuse to cross the threshold and fly free. She becomes her own jailer. She offers herself, like Scheherezade, as a willing prisoner.
We should have been more silent than we were on that riverbank. The fish might have been frightened away.
In spite all of our talking, we caught an impressive trout. Even the fish seemed to agree with us.
Madjao carried back to the car a fish for everyone in the village to see.
I carried a key that no-one could see. The key was simply the permission to open doors that we sometimes shut on ourselves. Armed with one fish and one secret sense of liberation, we left the banks of the Ardèche.
There was no ulterior motive in Madjao’s support of my derailment. Deeply in love with his muse, Beatrice, Madjao was my host, my friend, my ally, my soul-brother at a crucial turning point.
Madjao went straight to his muse, Beatrice, to loll away the afternoon in private as only French lovers know how to do. I went back to Madjao’s apartment to sweep, and hum, and tinker with an odd birdcage I found in his apartment. I put a cat candle inside of it, and just watched it, waiting for the cat to move. Of course it did not move. It was a candle. OK. I am weird. But what would you do on a sudden vacation? Please do not tell me you never space out and stare at idiotic things you have arranged. I surely do.
Unsurprisingly, Madjao wrote the book on demanding that we live in the world that we need, not just the world that is offered to us.
Madjao sings, “Mister Prime Minister, you changed from Francs to Euros, but when I balance my account, I am always at zero. Mister Prime Minister, I have lost my job. Now what shall I do?”
Click on the below video to hear how OhHellNo is done in French:
In every life there comes a turning point, a pivotal event. For me, it came in the form of an elfish pop singer from France who sat on the banks of a river and listened to me.
So on the other side of the Atlantic I have a friend who sees me, who recognizes me for who I am. He is indeed my brother from another mother. And although he is not close to me geographically, he has the capacity to be right there, immediately, in some spiritual world I cannot quite locate. Perhaps where we are, exactly, when he is “with me” is irrelevant.
Or to quote a ridiculous movie I darenot credit:
A fish may love a bird, Monsieur, but where, really, do they live?
There are many loves, the highest form of which is often Agape. And it is this agape, this other love, that gave me the clarity to make a turn from my path, off my path, and accept not knowing what would come next.
For this, for all of this, I thank you, Madjao.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
What Love Is
January 16, 2010
When I wonder what Love is, I keep hearing a mangled version of the Philip Levine line:
You don’t know what work is.
Pablo Neruda & Matilde Urrutia
You don’t know what LOVE is.
But I do know what love is not.
Love is not capture or conquest. It is not keeping someone, requiring that they do this or do that. It is not gaining or finding anything for ourselves through another person. It is – or should be – simply being pathetically mortal together, keeping company in this short and terribly heartbreaking journey called life.
(And yes, as soon as I echo a Prince line, I will not be able to resist adding a Prince video to this blog. Excuse me, while I press this Prince button:)
I believe that love is being brave enough to grow close to someone while knowing you will ultimately lose that person. We are made to fail, to disappoint each other, and ultimately, we are made to die. Loving in the face of this – This, I think, is what love is. And this is why it takes such enormous courage.
Love is also an affinity, a symphony, as it were, wherein one is able to transcend the physical world – if ever so briefly – and linger somewhere in the stratosphere for some moments.
I know that the passionate love for religious figures such as Jesus can be deep.
Jesus on the Main Line by Glenn Patscha and Ollabelle
I have a relative who confesses to wanting nothing more than to lock herself in her bedroom at the end of each day to sip a glass of wine and talk to Jesus. If that’s not personal relationship with one’s savior, I do not know what is.
The Sufis say that love is God, and a yearning for the Beloved (God) is prayer.
I cannot argue with this.
On the contrary, I am intrigued by mystic poems such as Al Burdah, in which the old Sufi poet describes being cold and falling asleep. In his dream, the prophet Mohamed comes and drapes the Sufi with his cloak. When the Sufi awakes, he is covered in a real cloak. Muslims throughout the centuries have harked back to this poem as enduring proof of the Prophet Mohamed’s love for those who have faith in him.
Mystics of all three monotheistic faiths have posited that that God can be seen, or glimpsed in any human being.
The muslims warn to be kind to all living beings, especially after dark, since we cannot know who is an angel or djinn in disguise. Likewise, Christians believe in the idea of angels in disguise.
Perhaps it is the divine in one another that causes us to yearn, to slant and lean to reach to touch one another. I think this must be true.
Our passion for religion wanes when it gets in the way of our passion for each other.
What I know for sure is that the yearning intrinsic to love can never be satisfied. It is not meant to be satisfied. Just when one hunger is sated, it morphs into another hunger, yearning or disquiet.
And just as quickly as one can find a feeling of love, it can be gone. That’s part of the deal. It’s what we sign up for when we dare to love.
As Tennessee Williams writes,
Life goes by too fast. Almost before we know it, it is over. And then we meet the other. Oh you know, we have just got to hold on, all of us, just as fast as we can.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
I am Russian and My House is Falling Down
January 14, 2010
Yesterday I knew myself to be a proud indigenous nomad, a Laplander, Sami, or Sapmi, in ownership of my first house.
Today I am Russian, and my house is falling down.
Yesterday I believed intuitively that my love of winds and walking, my love of sled dogs, of running and moving and adventure was literally in my blood. I believed that my mother’s family – ditch-skiing with a rope tied to an old Chevrolet in frozen Minnesota – was re-enacting a centuries-old behavior. That my uncle’s alcoholism was wrapped in the expressions of a centuries old fierce and wild resistance to being landed.
I have always been an imaginative sort.
And I was wrong.
I believed that I was proudly descended from Shamans.
After all, my grandfather taught my mother to recognize birds by their calls, and to find the sweetest wild blackberries in a bramble. Surely I was descended from nomads with our almond eyes and black haired aunties, our paper cutting cheekbones and our love of laughter.
But I have always had a love affair with the myths I spin in my own mind. If I think a story is worthy of a book, I usually think it is true.
And surely I had bought a house so old and steady it would calm my nomad heart and teach me, once and for all, the art of sitting still, no matter what bird call on the horizon my heart yearned to hear.
But today I am only Russian, and my house is falling down.
I have been stepping over a spongy, trampolining floorboard for a year now. I thought nothing of it. After all, it is an old house in the core of an old city. Things creak, and slope, and slide.
It just took one carpenter to come look at my floor and tell me of my overburdens, of my insecurity.
He told me that my yoke is carrying too much weight. Right where the stairs should be ascending, weight is descending. The overloaded load-bearing wall can bear no more. There are unhappy secrets in the chaseway. A joist has been compromised. The support beam is in fact just a floating beam. I will need L-plates to re-attach the joists to the beam. I will need load-bearing columns capable of carrying the stress of of five hundred thousand pounds.
Today I learned that without more support, my house will certainly sink into itself and crumple like the embodiment of discouragement and despair.
But I thought I was fine like this. I thought I had made all the right decisions.
I was wrong.
The decisions I have made on my own were flawed, at best.
I am Russian.
I am what the old babushkas in Brighton beach said I was.
You are Russian!
No, no, no… just Norwegian! I would mumble a hundred times to their scrunched and frowning faces.
No matter how I resisted, they claimed me as one of their own.
For three years the same two dozen old women spoke to me in Russian every day, and every day for three years I told them I was not Russian. They just shook their heads. And spoke to me in louder Russian.
It is not that the Russians could not have traveled into Norway.
It is just that I refused to believe it was possible. Not because I know anything about the topic, but simply because the Russians I knew bothered me. They got under my skin. There was no way I was letting them migrate into the history of my ethnicity.
But I am with whom I have been fighting. I am those same women smearing lipstick on their lips, curling their eyelashes and smoking behind Little Odessa deli counters. I have the same blood as those women I despised in the mob-owned delis that paid off the New York City health department so they could do whatever they pleased. Or so it seemed to me. I am those same women: with yellow and orange hair dangling cigarettes from lipsticked mouths, standing close as chickens and gossiping.
Our animosity was so intense that when I spoke to them in English they punished me by giving me ground pork when I asked for turkey; and ground beef when I asked for lamb.
One particularly resentful deli worker dismissed the ground lamb right in front of my fingers and shouted at me, That one is not for sale! just to remind me that I was not in charge. Not in Brighton Beach.
I hated them. It is not that I hate Russians. It is not that I am prejudiced against them.
It is just that I hate them. It is just that I am prejudiced against them.
They are so loud, they have so much vodka, and they appear to be having much more fun than the Norwegians.
I should have accepted the story that I am only Norwegian. I should not have gone hunting for the source of my difference. Today the results of my DNA analysis came back from the lab in Utah. They are finished, finally, separating the strands of DNA in my spit.
And what they have found makes me want to spit again.
Today I am suddenly Russian, and my gene markers point straight to the Romanovs. Romanticizing myself as descended from nomads, it is somehow just desserts to learn I share blood with murdered Russian royalty.
Today I am only Russian, like the old babushkas that followed me in the Brighton Beach fruit markets, pulling at my sleeve, patting my hair and filling my basket with apples.
One day I was shopping in Brighton Beach and my basket was knocked into my arm, bruising the skin on the inside of my elbow. Thunk, thunk, thunk! I turned to see who was jostling me and found an old Russian woman, throwing apples into my shopping basket.
I was afraid she might be crazy. She repeated the same words in Russian over and over again.
I do not speak Russian, I am sorry! I finally said in my neighborhood-taught 10-word Russian. The old woman mustered up a few words in English. “These good, my daughter! You buy! Only crazy not buy”
Of course I bought the apples, annoyed, afraid she would follow me home if I did not. I had thirty yellow apples. Most of them went bad.
I should have seen it at the time. I was too close to be unconnected. A familiarity, an animosity, a resentment, a possession, a grasp and yearning to claim and belong. I hated them as they resented me. And yet, somehow, I chose to live there. And I chafed against those Russians with all of my heart.
Yesterday I believed myself to be a proud nomad. Today I see that I am nothing but the smoking, drinking, eating, Slavic drama queen of my worst dreams.
The realization surrounds me. My grandmother’s name was Olga – and why wouldn’t it be? Of course Olga is a name that appears in Norway. Not so much in Lapland. Sometimes in Norway. Everywhere in Russia. We are what we appear to be.
When I was pregnant with my daughter the blood pressure test made me faint. I woke up to a circle of faces: clucking, cooing, Russian nurse faces. It was the only clinic in Brighton Beach. They had brewed black tea for me with sugar cubes and pushed a plate of sugar cookies at me.
Dizzy, afraid to stand on my own feet, I asked, Can I stay here for a while?
Yes!
they all scolded, almost in unison.
Of course! You have to stay!
I did stay.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
Sidi Ahmed
January 11, 2010
When someone such as Sidi Ahmed comes to a home, time stops. Corners bend. Window sashes fly open. Doors blow closed. And the home fills with a sweet heavy smoke, thicker than the smoke of a pyromaniac’s craziest dream.
Then Sidi Ahmed scolds and cajoles into empty air:
Yallah, Zeit! Zeit al Djinnoun!
A choir of men in collusion lined up against the wall murmur and hum: Aiwa! Allahu Akhbar! and Al Rahman Al Rahim! Amin! as if to say, just go on, Sidi Ahmed, just go on.
And when it is time to go, Sidi Ahmed says,
Protect me from the evil thought that I should be paid for God’s work.
The mother of the epileptic will push plates of cookies made with orange flower water at Sidi Ahmed. Sidi Ahmed will refuse them.
The next day Bachir will leave two chickens outside of Sidi Ahmed’s shack, which is just outside of nowhere anyone knows.
Sidi Ahmed’s wife will leave the fire on the ground and the ouiza in the teapot and the bread on the stone and take the chickens, blessing Bachir. And then blessing Bachir some more.
It was Immouzzer or Ain Sebou or just Sefrou. Sidi Ahmed lived far from nowhere, nowhere anyone knew. Only Bachir knew.
Bachir was known as a trustworthy man, and so everyone knew Bachir.
My husband was not Bachir.
My husband was a well-dressed man. My husband tamed his African curls with hair gel, and made them lie straight.
My husband drove Sidi Ahmed home. My husband ran over a dog. He killed the dog with one thump and yelp.
He did not pause, or brake, or swerve. He just drove over, and then on.
So let the American ask the wise man one question, my husband said. We rattled and bumped, careened and swerved down from Ain Sebou or Immouzzer or just Sefrou. I found my voice on the car floor. It had been resting there, I suppose.
I asked Sidi Ahmed why my husband had held a pigeon by its wings, when I had seen Bachir let a pigeon rest on his palm that very same day.
Sidi Ahmed said, But this is a stupid question.
Sidi Ahmed threw up one hand, as if flicking an olive pit out the car window. Who knows? Maybe that bird just did not like him.
Sidi Ahmed turned to look at who would ask such a question. Sidi Ahmed locked eyes with me. Sidi Ahmed paused. Sidi Ahmed turned around in his car seat again.
My husband laughed.
The year I left my husband, Sidi Ahmed died in his sleep.
I cried until my lungs caught fire. I cried until my shoulderblades ached and snapped.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
Wind
January 1, 2010
… Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind
… is bearing me across the sky.
-Ojibwe saying
It is the darkest time of the year, and the temperature has been below zero for some days.
This month, I can count on two hands and one foot the number of loved ones dragged down by darkness, cold, sickness and in some cases, death.
I was thinking of these people while driving a deserted highway blowing with snow.
Suddenly, in my headlights, a coyote.
The coyote cantered across the lonely deserted highway with a great sense of mission.
As if he had always been there, there he was: a truly wily coyote, smirking and sneaking light-footed against a gale of subzero wind.
It was clear that this was no mere lost or panicked dog. Utterly nonplussed by the cold, he simply sashayed straight for the opposite guardrail with an aplomb known only to the feral and furtive.
I thought of Mikhail Baryshnikov: “Only the good dancers can make it look so effortless.”
I fell in love at first sight with this coyote’s grace, his unswerving sense of direction, and his seeming glee in the face of the icy wind and darkness that was blamed for the depths of despair this December.
In fact, it is not a cold wind that blows no good.
As the Sufis say, A little wind clears the eyes.
And then they say, Huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.
When an icy wind picks up, nothing wicked this way comes.
There is nothing better for waking up and propelling forward than a cold winter wind.
Of this I am sure.
I have begun thinking of wind.
I love to be in the middle of a great, swirling gust of wind. There is something not bracing but embracing about wind.
It is as if…
…as if air itself had decided to work against gravity and cradle us left or right, lifting our weight ever so slightly, lending a hand.
The more I think about it, I believe that it was an understanding of wind that aided that coyote in cantering against highway traffic in the night.
This love affair that I have with wind – even the coldest winter wind – whispers through my mind and lifts the hems of me. It recalls words of wind that have carried me, sotto voce and subconsciously, for years:
The Sami poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää sang ever so simply, boldly:
It was not the wind you heard. It was me. My voice.
Happy New Year.
May it bring a well-fated cold, cold wind that blows so much good.
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
Story Told on the Longest Night
December 20, 2009
Story Told in 3 Nancies
December 20, 2009
R.I.P. Nancy
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this nearly wordless blog post.
Save the YMCA in ALBANY, NY
December 15, 2009
Why should you care? I suppose you would only care if you depended on the YMCA for affordable child care, afterschool, programs, summer camp, snow day childcare, school holiday childcare, health and wellness programs, community outreach or any one of the scores of programs that create and nurture a caring and connected society for working families in Albany, New York. I can’t list them all here. I have my head down on the desk. I don’t want to look up until you tell me the YMCA will not die. I close my eyes during that part of the story when I know that everything that I hold dear is about to die.
Of course, if you have a car and money you can go out to the suburbs somewhere to get these same services. At a higher price in many cases. If you can. If you have a car. And the time to drive out there. Or if your child’s school bus goes there. Or if… IF.
I know you want to leave me, but I refuse to let you go.
Please become a member of the Albany YMCA. Or consider donating. And pass this message along.
I just have one question: If this YMCA closes, where will all the kids go?
Laura Hartmark is a writer and is glad you took the time to read this blog.
