Bog people

I'm in the very last moments of the finishing time, the part that if this was a dream I'd wake up with the red hot sensation that I have to go present my work AND I HAVEN'T PREPARED.

And I'm not ready. I've had some time over the last couple of days, and just canNOT concentrate. More than monkey mind, twitter, hummingbird mind. I'm in this weird social vacuum, where F is off kayaking with Eldest Daughter, and just about everyone I hang out with in town is away doing something debauched or cottagey or friend-supportive... and I'm reliving the tailing days of my first MA, 19 years later.

Then, I'd moved back to Windsor to live with my mom for one term (after being on my own for several years) to finish up some course work after my foray into the astonishingly underpaid world of academic publishing hadn't exactly been congenial to writing a thesis I wasn't all that into anyway. Another example of shoveling the bulk of my production into the butt-end of a degree. I was in the middle of an unsettled love affair, and my lover had moved back to TO for the summer.

So I was housesitting, for a month for a prof in my dept. Theoretically, I was cat-sitting. And... the house was vile. VILE. There were stories of how they'd once had 9 cats and had a Room filled with newspaper that served as a litter box. Now there were only two threadbare cats, but the scent of the soggy past clung, and the bathtub was so filthy I didn't even want to have a shower in it. Cat hair everywhere, including on the dusty collection of medieval instruments in the living room. Lutes and dust mite larvae.

The cats were a little resentful of my presence (litotes). None of the doors in the house would close firmly -- thick paint, bunchy carpets, warped wood -- and the older cat in particular -- Charlie -- would hurl himself against the bedroom door at night until he'd launch himself onto the bed. There I'd be, asleep, then there I'd be, hurled into the nightmare of hissing, drooling, angry cat. I developed asthma I didn't know I had.

Theoretically, the cats would "go out in the back yard and come back when you clap your hands and call out "kitty kitty round up." They never came back. Mostly, I found myself under the porch, trying to grab this elderly but agile cat by his giant cat feet. They were, of course, fully clawed and teethed, these cats. And I was fully gouged, track marks of bad judgment in arranging my life.

Against all of this, I was supposed to be writing my final paper. It was on Seamus Heaney, and it had something to do with the poems about the bog people (I was fascinated by the preservation through centuries, the stories that rose to the surface based on the simplest artifact, like the iron age murder weapon), but I can't for the life of me remember what I actually wrote about. I knew that I couldn't make myself focus on it. I tried the kitchen table (eyed by the cats I kept "forgetting" to give their 7 daily vitamins shoved down their throats in pats of butter), I tried my usually trusty library, I tried the back yard. I finally ended up writing this damned paper in pencil on long narrow-ruled paper in a creepy doughnut shop. When I finished, I toted it back to the House of Spores jubilantly... then set up my typewriter and realized that somehow I'd smudged out half the writing with my sweaty little hands.

I managed to decode and make stuff up, and trotted off to hand in the paper to Tom. And the day I did that, I came back to find Charlie... bald. Bald and forlorn. The other cat (much less memorable) had licked the hair off his head. I didn't know much about cats, but I knew enough to find the vet's number Colin had left me, who said "bring him in."

That simple command, of course, required me to go into the CELLAR of this reeking, dusty cottage and retrieve an ancient, heavy cat carrier that looked like a lobster trap and was festooned with sharp pokey bits. And to ... FORCE this ball of demon-cat into it.

When I left Charlie at the vet, I located a previously unknown well of callousness. SO LONG SUCKER rang through my head, and even when the vet called the next day and said he'd done a biopsy but thought Charlie had a malignant tumour and I should let his people know -- I didn't. Care. That cat did not merit my sympathy.

But there I was, left with... a vacuum of time. No more bog people, no more death-dance with charlie, just the subdued other cat who generally left me alone. And the weird completion of a degree with no go-forward plan, a tenuous love affair with someone in another city, friends all out of town, no job and no real home base. I wanted to celebrate, but there was no one to play with. And I was still trapped in this fusty, filthy house until Charlie's People could get back from england.

I needed space to let what was next emerge... and I turned to the mindless kind of obsession that I gravitate to when I'm anxious. A complicated jigsaw puzzle of an escher image. So for two days, I leaned over the (greasy) table in that (grimy) kitchen in that (dusty) house and put together a complicated puzzle of birds turning into fish (or the other way around) and listened to the CBC. There was an ideas program about Mazo de la Roche that I was fascinated by, not having realized that the melodrama of the Jalna series had been mirrored in her life.



So I made the puzzle, and the people came home, and I collected by $200 or whatever for cat-sitting and packed up my Hyundai Pony and drove off to find the next part of my life. Coughed the cat hair out of my throat and never saw charlie again.

This is all alive right now because... I'm in this same space. So weird to realize this. My own mostly dust-free loft (notwithstanding the decaying plants), but a people-free weekend, and an obsession with knitting a complicated sweater instead of carving into the meat of my presentation (which is NEXT FRIDAY, PEOPLE!!!), staying up late reading blogs about ranch wives, letting the frets about what the hell to do with the next part of my life hiss and drool at me in the middle of the night. Not exercising, eating popcorn for dinner. I can't quite locate the equivalent of that sketchy doughnut shop for the last push on my presentation, on the revisions to my diss. Afraid, maybe, to hand in that paper and find that I'm no closer to a life in tandem, in the right place, with the right work, than I was in 1989. Me, bog person, preserved.

The paradox of sox

At one of the first national sessions I went to for my school program, there was a woman sort of drifting from one seminar or event to another who wasn't taking notes, and who didn't have the same air of *anxiety* that wafted off the new students. Instead, she was carrying a big fluffy pile of knitting -- some reddish fuzzy yarn. At that point, I hadn't touched a needle or crochet hook in at least a decade -- but something about the way that she wielded this knitting so casually, her chin set in a posture of curiosity without need, that sparked a burst of envy in me. She was in the conversations but not avidly Trying to Learn.

It was an aspect that I yearned for -- not a reductionist "being done the program" stance, but the presence of mind to participate without the jittery need to Get As Much As Possible from it. Sara did her Final Oral that week, and the undercurrent of contentment that she carried the knitting with matched the calm pleasure she presented her work with.

I must have tucked away that image of Sara's knitting until it popped out about six months ago. I bought my sister yarn and needles for christmas, and paused for a minute in the store. When I was in portland, I kept seeing yarn stores and having an unmistakable yearning to go in, buy some needles and yarn, make a simple scarf. I finally did it a couple of weeks later, and now, I'm making relatively fancy socks.

I'll be done these before I go to Kansas City in 10 days for my own Final Oral and graduation (provided I don't have some other ridiculous screw up -- the first sock was perfect but I had to completely frog the second one and start over because of Inattention and Stupidness -- the Life Lessons of Knitting), but I will certainly be toting something around on needles as I drift from seminar to seminar. The mini narrative of that fluff of knitting in sara's lap obviously became an emblem for me of how I wanted to do this final student week -- engaged and not anxious, navigating complexity, poised.

I'm not quite done the rewrites (how tired is everyone around me of hearing this??). Got a lot of feedback this week I need to absorb, assimilate, distill. Turn the mucky blend of how I can now talk about my work into a single malt. But the paradox of the socks -- what looked like a distraction was actually a frame for getting me to a poised finish.

Floating

I've been reading other people's blogs a fair bit lately and realized with a sigh that this blog has never had a niche, a shape -- it hops around from flippant asides to Deep Thoughts to sheer neglect for months and months. Much like every journal I've ever had.

One blog I read has evolved in a fascinating way from a pure knitting blog to little postcards of her life in portland with her baby and husband and burgeoning garden, although, as a writer, she's very clear that this is neither her serious writing nor her real life. Yet, it's an engaging keyhole. In some ways I think I wanted this blog to be that -- but like everything else that I do in my life, it's about surges and mercurial shifts. But that's me, and so that's what comes out of my fingers.

I think I've never been very good at focusing on just one thing -- like right this minute, what I want to write about includes the blister on my leg that I got on my ex's mentee's Honda Rebel exhaust on friday (which reminds me of a scar on F's arm, and thinking about how our lovers and friends come to us marked, and then my cousin Liz, who burned herself on a moped exhaust in Asia), the turbulence of thoughts about possibly moving and what that means, my observations about how other people make decisions like condo buying, fear, anxiety, history, independence, coffee (more coffee), why I take on more work than I can do, how on earth am I going to really shape my post-doc life, why am I feeling so resentful of my well-meaning committee, Aine and her amazing warmth, how it is I become friends, how much I am loving becoming friends with L, what is it I look like from the outside, and of course, the core core stuff I'm trying to grapple with.

Instead, I focus on the feeling when I lift my road bike up. Pure joy. The lightness of power inherent in it -- knowing I can fuse with it and ride 30, 50, 100 miles. I feel like I rise up when I heft it, and I'm instantly transported into someone who moves, someone strong. Sky ocean strong blue, light and perfect.

I believe that this bike gives me more joy than any material thing I've ever had in my life. Not my hot boots,,

not my first ipod, the perfect bra, not my favourite piece of art ,

not even my first running shoes (which come a close second).

A lick of honey on my soul.