a moment in the day: happy

Sunday morning in our dismantled kitchen, and our friend Brad is due any minute. He and Stephen are going to be patching this skeleton of wood with drywall. Quick I go upstairs and look through my pens. Grab a pink one. I take it downstairs and, alone in the kitchen, I go over to the crisscross of bare wood that frames the space where the walls used to be. I lean in over the space where the sink used to be and draw a tiny happy face on the wood. Two dot eyes and a curve of mouth, size of a ladybug. 

I go to another spot and get close in, put a happy face on the rough side of a two by four. Cross the room, another happy face. Dot, dot, mouth.

On one length of wood, I write, horizontal,

Hi

Hi

Hi

I wonder if Stephen or Brad will see it. Or if they'll (more likely) cover it up unnoticed. I make sure to hit all four sides of the room.

Dot, dot, mouth. Dot, dot, mouth. Little bits of positivity planted in our walls.

H

A

P

P

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K

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Dispatches from the pet hospital, the book launch, the design awards, and more; or, A very full week

Actually a week and a half, because while I was thinking about how full one week could be, another half week went by.

Sometimes all that happens in your week is that you set up an air conditioner and a couple of book cases. Then a new week starts and a Monday work day is followed by the seemingly mundane fact of a small bit of foam on the floor of your office upstairs. I said to Stephen, kind of jovial: "Someone yorked on the carpet" and went to clean it up.

Tuesday, after at least two more, increasingly weighty pukes the night before and another I found in the morning, we were off to the vet where they took blood and X-rays. Nicholas wasn't eating and was in obvious distress. On the way to the vet, me in the passenger seat with Nicholas curled on my lap, I saw a billboard advertising a medical study to stop dogs from being poisoned, followed a little farther by a building off the freeway called something like Cherished Pets, touting itself as a "pet cremation and funeral center."

Wednesday. All tests negative and Nicholas still not eating, not drinking, looking up at me on shaky, spindly Chihuahua legs with tail tucked. The vet said go to Dove Lewis for an ultrasound. We knew Dove Lewis from the time, years ago, that Nicholas ate a bit of a dog toy and it lodged in his intestine and he had to have surgery, and this was looking scarily similar to that time. Driving to the place, Nicholas curled on my lap again, Stephen said, "Oh god, I never saw that before," passing by Cherished Pets.

Park the car, head up the pavement to the animal hospital. The wall along the walk is all individual bricks engraved with the names of beloved departed dogs and cats.

Green vomit on the floor of the animal hospital. Ultrasound. Animal Planet on silent on the big screen TV in the waiting room. Consultation in one of those little rooms, and yes: obstruction in the intestine. The very jolly animal doctor said, "We're going to get him into surgery and get that puppy out!" Would the vet really have said "puppy"? I don't know. That's how I remember it.

We were back to Northwest Neighborhood Veterinary where it just so happened to be our vet's surgery day. We left Nicholas there and Stephen dropped me off at work, where I looked at spreadsheets for about three hours and waited for Stephen to call from home saying the vet had called to let us know whether Nicholas had survived.

You can't help it. You look at the phone and picture the way it will ring and how Stephen's going to have to tell you the vet called and she's sorry, there was nothing she could do.

The photo on my computer desktop was Nicholas. I sent an email. The little profile picture in the corner of the message was Nicholas. I jumped on the project management program we use and made a comment on a to-do list of one of our graphic designers, and the little profile picture next to my comment was Nicholas.

I picked up my phone to check for messages in case something awful had happened and Stephen couldn't bear to call me and could only broach the subject in a text.

It was 6ish when the phone rang. Heart pounding. Stephen's "Hello!" was cheerful, so it must be OK. He said he'd called the vet and they were still in surgery, so he had to leave now to pick me up in time to get to the vet before they closed. We drove over. We waited. The girls behind the counter were all cheerful so it must be OK.

When they finally brought him out after surgery, Nicholas was belly-shaved and dopey, the tip of his tongue peeking out of his mouth. We took him back to Dove Lewis for an over-nighter, and drove home to sleep alone. I went to the store for comfort food and we sat in front of the TV and I ate half a frozen pizza.

Thursday. June 1, my nephew's 18th birthday. It was also the day they announced the PubWest Design Awards. Crazily, I won the gold in the small format cover design category for my book cover of Jamie Yourdon's novel Froelich's Ladder.

I'd never won anything before, except for the Easter egg coloring contest at the grocery store when I was a kid, and that time I'd tied for first place with a girl who made rainbow-colored starbursts all over her egg.

There was a link to the PubWest awards page, and people were sharing it on Facebook and I was so honored, but I couldn't concentrate on anything but Nicholas. When we brought him home, we took him out in the backyard to pee and he immediately threw up in the grass. The last time he had this surgery, the recovery was just as bad as the stress of the surgery itself, with lots of hours of doggy distress and a trip or two back to Dove Lewis because he seemed to be healing up so poorly.

Dr. Prull said the critical thing in this first day after surgery was that he eat and keep it down. We gave him some of the special diet the vet gave us. He refused it. We let him rest. We gave him some of the special diet. He refused it.

Finally, Stephen called the vet and left the message that he wasn't doing well and wouldn't eat. I sat in my office upstairs with Nicholas at my feet in a nest made of his doggy bed covered in towels and blankets. The pain medication made him sleepy and he didn't seem to be in as much discomfort as the last time, but he wouldn't eat, which meant we couldn't give him his antibiotic and we thought for sure we'd be taking him back to Dove Lewis for the night.

I said to Stephen,"When she calls back, let's ask if we can try giving him cottage cheese," which was part of the bland diet they'd suggested before the surgery.

Stephen said, "Just try it."

So I did. And he ate it.

Joy. It wasn't until Nicholas started eating again that I finally shared the lovely news about the award. Clicking share was somehow like saying cheers and sipping champagne to Nicholas.

Friday. Saturday. Sunday. Me at my computer doing design work, sometimes with Nicholas in his nest on my lap, sometimes with him asleep at my feet. The ritualistic feedings, hiding pills, squirting antibiotic in his mouth with one of those syringes. At night Stephen slept in the bed and I slept upstairs curled up on three pillows on the floor with Nicholas in his nest next to me with the cone on. He had one of those blue cloth cones, but he still hated it, and I'd wake up here and there in the middle of the night always to find him lying, eyes open, staring at me.

Other bits of life happening around all of this. Our realtor gave us fresh cut peonies for a vase on our dining room table. I had a visit from writer Alex Behr with an advanced reader copy of her book Planet Grim and a handmade pillow as an extra thank you for the design work I did on her book cover. On facebook there were pictures of more advanced readers, this time for the second in Jeff Johnson's Darby Holland crime series, which I also did design work for. There were literary readings we couldn't go to. And protests and antiprotests in downtown Portland, and don't even get me started on politics, with tweets and covfefes heading into Comey's testimony.

Monday. Back to work while Stephen stayed home with Nicholas. It was the first time I'd left him since the surgery. At the door on the way out, Stephen made an impatient face before I could say anything and said, "Don't worry. I can take care of him." In the car, I put on my seat belt, switched on the radio and put the car in gear, one hand out instinctively to protect Nicholas, invisible, in the passenger seat, as I pulled out of the driveway.

From work, I emailed Stephen at two hour intervals asking for progress reports.

Tuesday was a scheduled day off because I was speaking to a graphic design class at PSU. It was a wonderful hour and a half in which I showed slides of various book covers and outtakes and told stories and took questions about inspiration and process and working with publishers. There were, oh, fifteen to twenty students, all eager and interested. They asked lots of great questions. It was fun to talk about my self-taught, DIY process, fun to tell them that they undoubtedly had more skills and knowledge, already, than I do and yet, look what I can do, meaning my gosh, look at what they can and will be able to do.

I told about the first time I used Adobe Illustrator: "I was so excited about the program, but there was something wrong with it! There was a pen tool but when I tried to draw with it, the line turned into this weird object, and there was an eraser, but it wouldn't erase anything in my pictures!"

Big laughs from these students who knew exactly what I meant. I felt glowy inside. These were my people.

Wednesday, a full week since the surgery. Nicholas in his bed on the kitchen floor as I cooked breakfast and lunch. His recovery was so much better than the time before. So much better. He rarely seemed uncomfortable. He rarely seemed at all interested in the incision place. I worked all day and then that night was the first time we left him alone by himself, to go out and celebrate Bradley K. Rosen and his novel Bunkie Spills.


I spent years in Tom Spanbauer's basement reading, critiquing, and having a love affair with that book as I sat next to Brad at the workshop table. Brad's reading that night at Powell's City of Books has got to be one of my favorite book launches ever. (Thank you to Laura Stanfill for these pictures.)

One hundred plus people packed the place and Brad's reading was quirky and hilarious and heartfelt, and he had complete, self-deprecating command of the audience. Doug Chase's intro was perfect. Brad's entrance, playing a harmonica like Bunkie, was perfect. His "reverse moment of silence" where he got the whole crowd to holler admiration to Tom Spanbauer, was better than perfect.

And it was an evening of such community. His Dangerous Writing friends, other writing friends, musician friends, Oregon Country Fair friends, family.

So much to pack into little over a week. And more, still. Some things I feel jinxy to talk about, some things that I feel best to just give a quick line to because of their import. A loved one's pregnancy. A loved one's senior class project, which I just read. A loved one in the hospital. A loved one getting married (today) (now). Yesterday was the ten year anniversary of the death of Stephen's father, which I can't quite believe. Ten years. Last night we got together with the family and went around the room and talked about him and told stories. What everyone said: I'll just say it was beautiful.

Saturday now. Me on the computer. Nicholas curled up in his bed at my feet. This morning, as I slept in (in bed with Nicholas for the first time since the surgery) we had our first hummingbird visit to our garden.

a moment in the day: building

Sitting at my computer unshowered on a Saturday, tinkering with the front cover for the book City of Weird. I'm so deep inside that place that I don't see the room around me, or the clutter of papers on my desk, the jacket I left on the floor, only this deep, dark fantastical world I'm building out of pixels. Reds, blues, yellows, shading and shadows. World-building makes you a kind of god. Right now, I'm building a city, I'm building a monster.

Click of my mouse, and over that, the hammering of a fellow world-builder. Bradley K. Rosen is in our backyard, putting French doors on the garage that's going to be Stephen's artist studio. I like that Brad is building the opening through which Stephen will be soon doing his own world-building.

I also like that the power is on. I need electricity today. Last night, luckily just after we'd finished watching a movie, the power went out due to high winds. The entire neighborhood dark. I walked Nicholas in the frozen front yard. The wind was a freight train through the trees and Nicholas kept moving in and out of the little glow from my cell phone flashlight, appearing and disappearing in the black, tail tucked, not happy, still taking his time to find just the right place to pee. I had the leash around my wrist and squeezed hard in my hand but I still felt like he would slip from my fingers and be gone.

We went to bed wearing extra layers, listening to the wind and to the world flying apart outside.

This morning, walking Nicholas again, in the light, I surveyed the damage, such as it was. The garbage container was overturned and the plastic wheelbarrow. There was a thin sheet of metal that used to be attached to the fence between our house and the neighbors', loose and flapping in the breeze. But the tiny pumpkin, healthy and left over from Halloween, is still sitting on the porch.

carmen at the portland opera

We had fantastic seats for The Portland Opera's dress rehearsal for Carmen at the Keller Auditorium. Front row, pretty much center in the first balcony. Perfect to get a wide view of the action and great for my date for the evening, a friend who's a musician, because we also had a great view into the orchestra pit. Waiting for the performance to start, we were talking his expertise: percussion, tympani, the exactness of rhythm. He told me of the importance of the tambourine. He gave me beautiful insights into, and way heightened my appreciation of the triangle. Seriously. When the show started my body plugged into the current of that rousing first overture and ran circuits directly to the gorgeous little ping of the triangle and the smash of the cymbals.

I'd never seen Carmen all the way through but after having supered in The Portland Opera's last production of Carmen, this show felt equal parts completely new to me and like an old friend. I knew the story inside and out and not at all. Not, at least, as a viewed-in-chronological-order thing. Seeing it this way, from the outside, all the way through, with those gorgeous sets and costumes and lighting, wow what a show.

Even though it was dress rehearsal, the singers were for the most part singing full out, and beautifully. I thought Sandra Piques Eddy's rich, hefty mezzo fit Carmen's role really well. All the singing was beautiful, particularly Chad Shelton's Don José - and the fabulous chorus whose voices filled the Keller up. It's a production all about bigness - all those voices, the lovely sets, the added touches like the flamenco dancers (who did a fabulous percussive turn during the changeover from act three to act four). There's also a whole lot of sexy in this production. Sandra Piques Eddy is very sexy as she taunts Don José, particularly in a moment when she's sprawled out on the steps of the factory, tied at the wrists, a prisoner who's nevertheless turning that rope into something extremely seductive.

Of course, my star of the show, or at least the performer I'd really come to see, was Stephen, who got to super in this production (his second Carmen) (jealous). When the solders came marching down the ramp from the top of the stage in their big hats and orange plumes, both my friend and I leaned forward in our seats, trying to spot which one was Stephen. He'd told me his was the only hat with a brass button on it, and yep, there he was: I could see that button flashing into the balcony.

But I would have had an absolute blast at Carmen had I not had a husband in the show. It's a huge, gorgeous, beautifully sung, beautifully played, beautifully staged production and of course one of the most accessible operas in the world to boot.

[Look! There's Stephen dead center in back, tallest of the picadors.]

There are two performances left: Thursday and Saturday. More info is here. If you go, look for a brass button and listen for the triangle.

songstory night

SongStory was the first lit event I've ever produced.  Such an interesting, different experience from being in a reading without coordinating it. One of the things I noticed as I sat watching the show unfold Wednesday night was a sense of... can I say ownership? How about wishful ownership - like it was my right to pretend I owned each one of those performances, those readings, those tremendous stories.

[photo courtesy colin farstad]

I couldn't have asked for a better night - a big crowd and no last minute crises. Someday Lounge is an excellent venue. They can pack a lot of people in there but it's really intimate with low lighting and little candles on the tables and a balcony for more seating. Here's the red curtain waiting for the show to start, before all the readers had made it to their seats down front.

 Emcee Stephen O'Donnell.

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

How lucky am I to have a husband who would offer to take care of all the intros for me so I could keep my mind on my own reading and on the rest of the coordination of the event? I wrote up the initial intros but Stephen did a lot of work expanding on them and making them his own. He makes a great master of ceremonies with his lovely speaking voice and charm - plus, note the sexy sweater vest.

First up was Bradley K. Rosen, reading an excerpt from his novel The Bunkie Spills. It was fun to listen to the slow build of laughter as people realized his narrator was talking about making music with one's urine stream. Bunkie speaks surprisingly beautifully and music-savvy about pee...

First off, you got to be open to it. You got to open your ears up real wide and you have to open up your imagination so it can hear all them notes coming into your ear canals and you can imagine a fanfare of clarinets and violins and bells and whistles and drums and trombones and tambourines and trumpets. All them tonal essentialities of a symphony. You can get all them different tones out of your urinactic stream by concentrating real hard and moving it from the middle of the toilet water and out to the edges of the bowl and around and back again. You can use your hips if you want. A gyration of sorts. A slow groove. Like you was fucking a butterfly.

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

 I liked going from the mangled poetry of Brad's narrator to the sumptuous poetry of Lidia Yuknavitch. She read from The Chronology of Water. I didn't know what she was going to read until she started reading, but I'd been hoping she'd choose this piece. It's beautifully layered and intensely sexy.

One night he put a blanket on the floor and told me to wait and when he came back he was a big 10 years younger than me beautiful man carrying a cello.

"Jesus," I said. "You play cello?"

He played Bach. The sixth suite.

I cried. Possibly the puniest sentence I've ever written.

I cried for the force and strength of his body brought to the brink of tender in his fingers straddling the strings. I cried for the violence of hitting as it fell away into the tremor of holding a note. I cried for the man of him - the size and shape of my father - the brutality of muscle and artistic drive - brought to the cusp of such beauty. Bach. But mostly I cried because I could feel something. All over my body. Like my skin suddenly had nerve endings and synaptic firings and ... pulse.

[Oh my dear lord.]

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

When Courtenay Hameister got up on stage, she pointed to me in the audience and said, thanks a lot for making me follow Lidia Yuknavitch. I thought to myself, yeah, I sure as hell wasn't going to follow her. [Producer gets to arrange the program so that she opens the second half so she doesn't have to directly follow any of her fabulous readers. Producer is smart that way.] Then Courtenay launched into her essay "My Sister's Husky Too" and killed.

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

Courtenay always kills, with whatever she does. I read her essay in full before the event, and it was so great just in my little head - but combined with Courtenay's impeccable timing and delivery on stage it was even better.

I was glad we’d agreed to play New Year’s Eve, as it gave me something to do. I’ve never dated much because as a rule, I hate people, so my New Year’s Eves are generally not the grown-up proms they are for some. My favorite New Year’s EVER was playing dirty scrabble with five drunken word nerds who almost came to fisticuffs over whether the word “poon” was acceptable. (Side note: it IS.)

Additionally, I’d been dumped a few months prior by a really attractive, sweet sociopath and the breakup had lead me to eat some things. So as I was putting on my holiday bustier before the show, I noticed that the fancy silver hook-and-eye closures were straining a little harder than they used to do their job. It didn’t help that the other backup singer was a size two, and we often dressed alike. Her bustier made her look like Kiera Knightley in Pride and Prejudice. Mine made me look like an 18th century barmaid trying to smuggle a passel of puppies home to her kids. 

So as we stood in the echoey gym bathroom in front of the mirrors, I felt a lot like my awkward 16 year-old self, but now I didn’t have that whole “You’ve got the rest of your life ahead of you” thing going for me.

During intermission, Cymbalman arrived at the entrance to Someday. I wish I had a picture or two of the audience playing him as he wandered through the place. I know people were taking pictures, but none have come my way yet. I love to stand back and just watch people. Some are totally shy about it, afraid to take the mallets from his hands, afraid to give more than a soft ching-ching or two to the cymbals all over his body. Others really let him have it.

Stephen was not only emcee for the evening but Cymbalman-rangler too, escorting him up the stairs since those tiny eye holes in his eye cymbals don't leave him much room for peripheral vision - and then Cymbalman did a bit of percussive performance on stage.


Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!




Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!

Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!
Crash!



[cymbalman photos courtesy leann o'rourke. psychedelic colors courtesy me having fun with paint shop pro. except for the first shot. that purple is just the lights.]

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

I was the first reader after Cymbalman had his bow. I think it's fitting that I followed him because I think of Cymbalman as a clown - in the best sense of the word - and the essay I read was all about my decision to become a circus clown - and the overblown childhood strivings that led me there. My strivings were always grand and timid at the same time, and when I discovered the anonymity of clownhood, I'd found my calling. I see this in Cymbalman too - not only his anonymity but his combination of cacophony and quiet.

[photo courtesy lidia yuknavitch]

Alone in the house, my bedroom door locked, I sat on the edge of the bed in an endless rhythm of strum, each chord a smash of sound with the click of the plastic pick hitting the strings. My cockatiel, Punkin, sitting and sharpening his beak on the wood of my antique washstand, started a quick-paced chirp, low in his throat, along with my music. Of course he wasn’t in tune and he wasn’t in rhythm, but as long as I kept strumming, he kept chirping. I decided this could be some exotic, foreign instrument, like when George Harrison introduced the Beatles to the sitar.

I like this picture Lidia took of me. The combination of lights and iPhone make me look like a faceless yellow phantom, some character from an old movie about the future, complete with some sort of beam of light shooting down onto my head from the mother ship.


Next up was Vanessa Veselka, reading a funny, edgy, very moving piece called "Flora in Pregnancy," which had a landing that left me a little breathless. Listening from my seat, I was glad I hadn't followed her either.

My midwife says I should look at my pregnancy as an opportunity to get closer to my women friends. But I figure they’ve had their chance. Ten years of punk shows, basement parties, and having sex with all the same people should have been enough to break the ice.

                         

“Don’t you have any female friends?” asked my midwife.

            

 “None I’d let near a child.”

[both photos courtesy leann o'rourke]

 Vanessa has a delicious rock 'n roll way of reading, all casual with the mic in one hand and pages in the other. I wish I could put these two pictures of her together and make a flip book.

[photo courtesy leann o'rourke]

Kevin Sampsell closed the show, reading from A Common Pornography. I was kind of delighted to hear him read about his own youthful strivings for musical grandeur - so similar to mine. Both of us read about recording our own music - in the bathroom where the echo was better. Although between the two of us, only Kevin was innovative enough to add percussion to his recordings by banging on the toilet seat.

Our first "album" of punk rock songs was recorded on a cassette player in his bedroom and bathroom. Just Terry and me. We decided to call ourselves Neon Vomit. He was good at creating some heavy riffs based on my smallest suggestions (usually just me saying, Can you do something like this - and then imitating a guitar part with my clenched mouth) and then I would yell the lyrics in my best Rollins imitation. There were no drums but sometimes we would bang on the toilet seat for percussion.

The grand finale of the evening was Kevin using our old relic of a boom box and his own relic cassettes to play some actual Neon Vomit recordings - not only that, but he gave the best lip synch performance ever, rocking out all over the stage as his teenager self. It was hilarious and awesome.

[photo courtesy b. frayn masters]

I want to say thanks again to all the readers, to Someday Lounge, to Bob Priest and March Music Moderne. To Stephen for being emcee and helping coordinate. Thanks, too, to Leann O'Rourke for taking some great pictures of the event.

March Music  Moderne is going on all through March with an outrageous lineup of musical events. Check out their calendar here.

[photo courtesy me]

[one more picture for good measure. emcee stephen contemplating the boutonniere he made from the lost cymbalman feathers he found lying in the someday lounge green room after the night was over...]