New Year Wishes

How happy am I to see this decade end? Oh, so happy you cannot believe. I liked it when you could name your decades, you remember: the sixties, the seventies, etc. The years 2000 to 2009 seemed sort of barren, as far as names are concerned, and the teens we're running up to don't have that much of a ring to them either, come to think of it. On that note, I leave you with this image of me kissing a boy. I was five. It was the sixties. Swinging, definitely.

Christmas, Airports and Black Ice

Picked up the little one (who is now 21 and was sized-up in a restaurant in Santa Barbara by Rob Lowe last night) at JFK. Nothing like a road trip with a little black ice, one that lasted three hours from northern NJ and went bumper-to-bumper from the NJ Turnpike to the necessary exit on the Belt Parkway. Glad to have her here, glad to be back from that road trip. Hope everyone drives safely this holiday season. And don't forget to wear that seatbelt and take the keys from anyone who's had a little bit too much.

That Time of Year

Love Christmas (not). But this year, I'm trying. Done with finals, done with term papers (last one out the door tonight), moving back to Jersey and moving, as we all know so well, sucks.
Glad that it should all be done in two weeks' time, the sorting and the packing makes me wonder how I've collected so much junk in a year's time: I'd done the zen thing and moved with just the basics...now it's time to minimalize again.
Shucks. Just when I thought I could enjoy a few weeks off.

Faces, Frozen in Time

You can pick up a box of old photographs and be amazed by what you see. Dad died this summer, and pictures of him are everywhere. One caught my attention: This one. I had seen it before but after scanning it, making it larger, it got to me. What was I seeing in those eyes, that handsome face? Frustration? Disgust? Anger that you had four kids and a mother-in-law at home? A small house and an unappreciative boss? Were you questioning your reason for being? Was the smoke curling up your nose as you took this shot? No matter. I've seen this face before.

Gosh, I loved you, Dad. Did you ever find out what you were so angry about?

Head in a Vice

School has not been easy. I wish it was. Week of midterms, broken cars and rain. My eyes hurt, in the way they do before you cry. I can't cry but my eyes hold the pain, all the wincing and none of the release.

I'm hoping this feeling goes away. In time, everything does. So tired and bone weary. Sorry to complain (but let me). Thank you.

Highlights of the Weak

So good to see all my high school girlfriends from Queen of Peace. Car broke down on the side of the road about 7 miles from Narrowsburg. I think it may be dead. I'm not. Yet. I think. This week was exhausting. So much school. So much work. But this was fun.

My Brain

I smell smoke. Could it be my head is FINALLY exploding?

No such luck. So much work. Transcribing a 90 minute lecture for a class that demands I transcribe it. This is how I'm spending the last remaining hours of my Sunday. Have an invitation to go do something fun this week and probably won't be able to accept it for all the work I have. Still, grateful for so, so many things.

Gratitude, gratitude. I think I actually just need to get laid.

Bad Girls

I had forgotten how wonderful this book is. Hawthorne's post-modernist heroine could be any woman, the description of Hester Prynne's escape to a small thatched cottage with a view of the ocean, working on her vegetable garden, living independently, a small, rambunctious child in tow. Have to finish it before tomorrow. Enjoying it thoroughly. Then it's on to the Communist Manifesto. Good grief!

Germs

I have a cold. Colds suck, generally, unless you can flush them out quickly and effectively. I feel achy and sore, and I think I need one of these.

School-Dazed

Put this in your pipe and smoke it.

Kampus Life

On returning to campus life: Schlepping to class from a parking lot 3 miles away. Surrounded by youthful beauty and thin thighs, girls who can still drink and boys who, well, I didn't like them back in the day either. Taking 18 credits this semester, doing freelance, driving to and from Narrowsburg. It all seems so pointless sometimes, a beautiful Fall day today and I'm doing homework instead of working full-time and I'm alone so much I feel like my head and spirit will explode and it all sort of sucks right now and I don't know why I'm doing this except I can't find a full-time job. And life used to be a lot simpler and more certain and I'm having a GIANT pity party and guess what? You're invited.

School

Hard to believe I'll be attending University classes for the first time since the '70s. Kind of cool but my biggest worry is wondering if I'll feel like a dork, since I am 53. On second thought, who cares. Just hope to come out of this with my teaching credentials. I'm hearing conflicting things on just how open that job market is in New Jersey.

Ten Things I Need To Do

Two months to Halloween. Three months to Thanksgiving. Four months until Christmas. Ten things I want to do before the summer is gone:

1. Explore the ancient Victorian Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Newark
2. Swim in the Atlantic
3. Shop for Fiestaware seconds at Holly Pottery in the Pokeys
4. Reorganize my home office
5. Put Tubby, the cat, on a diet
6. Put myself on a diet
7. Throw out 2/3's of my clothing
8. Sail
9. Get a labotomy
10. Take a day off

My New Boyfriend

He never complains. He's big (just like I like 'em). And he snuggles like nobody's business. His name is Tubby.

Summer

It's almost gone. It's my favorite time of year. So sweet, so short. Like, perhaps, life? It took almost until the end of August to find the perfect swimming hole. Went there without bug spray and was almost eaten alive. No matter. The white noise of the rushing river, the sun on the granite rocks, the feeling of fresh water over my legs. Today is gray so no swimming. Sadness. I made a British Summer Fruit Pudding and think I'll dive into that.

Obsessed

Enjoying the new A&E show, "Obsessed." Nice to know there are some people crazier than me. Also good to see cognitive therapy at work. People get better. I was lucky enough to do some of this work with the founders in Philadelphia. Hard work (and no navel staring).

Time for a Drive Down Memory Lane: The Belleville Turnpike, 1974

There is one road in New Jersey that has never changed, never been paved over and is still rather trippy. I recently took this route to NYC for the first time in many years. You should, too. Perhaps you can make the journey in a 1966 Ford Fairlane four-door sedan, kinda like the one I used to drive when I first got my license. It's nice that a piece of land has not been changed and for me, well, the trip was one right down memory lane.

I'm talking Hudson County here. South Kearny. Fish House Road. Pizza Land and The Meadowlands. Plans are underway to pave most of the Meadowlands over and dot it with the world's largest shopping center (replete with town home complexes and mini-malls), so this trip may not be available for long. The vast swampland had heretofore been a challenge to develop because of its naturally high water table, proximity to large rats and the unearthed carcasses of the occasional mob lieutenant or AFL-CIO official. But new, breakthrough construction techniques will soon see our favorite barren wasteland filled with all the trappings of suburbia. Which will have to share a time-and-space continuum with many restless spirits.

Start your trip at the corner of Ridge Road/Kearny Avenue following the signs for Route 7 East. Pizza Land (of the Soprano's fame, our favorte stoner haunt, the place where we would roll tabletop oregeno into joints to smoke, proclaiming we were in "Pizza Land," much to the Italian immigrant owner Fred's chagrin) will be on your left. Proceed past two of the most frightening cemeteries in New Jersey, the old Jewish one to your left and the other one, to your right. This was the cemetary you would have to be buried in (according to my mother) if your body wasn't able to be blessed by the Catholic Church. You know, if you did things like commit suicide or marry a Presbyterian. This is just past Schuyler Avenue. Sorry to say, Eagan's Restaurant is no longer there, having been replaced by (what else?) a CVS store.

You will now proceed over the hill towards New York City. It is a sight that still takes my breath away, but if you're driving you won't notice because you will be too busy dodging pot holes which, if not handled correctly, will swallow your car whole, leaving only a shattered tail light and specks of paint for forensics to use in your identification. Those large fronds swiping either side of your car are cattails, silly, and they cover the "meadows" here. The garbage dumps, no longer used, are also there, looking rather like the prehistoric burial mounds of the Bath Plains. You know you're not in England because they ooze the kind of heavy metal that has nothing to do with Metallica. Still, they look a lot better than they once did. The seagulls have all moved to the dumpsters at McDonald's. Tells you something about our modern diet, doesn't it?

I'm sorry to say that the junkyards with their frightening German shephards are no longer with us, leaving me to wonder what happens when your 1966 Ford Fairlane needs a new fender, which mine frequently did. Cross the Hackensack River over the old bridge but be careful: It still opens and two years ago, did so without its crossing lights. Two Hudson County Sheriffs officers plummeted to their deaths, may they RIP.

You will now see the Holland Tunnel just ahead. Literally billions of our now-grown children will take the left-hand turn just before it to make their way into Hoboken but don't do that, because in the '70s no one went there unless they were in the market for a stiletto blade or were a serious Frank Sinatra fan. I certainly should have because a friend of mine who bought a frightening brownstone there in 1978 for $20,000 recently sold it for $4.1 million. But I digress.

The Holland Tunnel, though no longer 75 cents, will take you to Canal Street and you may proceed to the East Village which is now scary in its own right because no one scary is there anymore. Iggy Pop couldn't take it and moved to Miami. The interior of CBGB's is in Las Vegas (where I sincerely hope the ghost of Johnny Thunders is pinching the ass of a housewife from Des Moines). Avenue A is dotted with all the trappings of mall-dom. There's even a $450 a night Bowery Hotel (SHREIK!). The bums must have moved to the South Bronx (a place I'm still to frightened to explore, but I hear they call it "SOBRO" now). I don't know if the ghosts even bother with the Lower East Side anymore.

But I do know that they still inhabit the Belleville Turnpike, Route 7 East., that frightening no-man's land juxtaposed between the town of my childhood and New York City. The trip from safety to another world, all wrapped up in a landscape of mystery and fear. This is truly the land that time forgot. Please be sure to go there on your next Sunday drive before it disappears.

Jersey Girls

Reading a good bio on Patti Smith by Victor Bockris and Roberta Bayley. Girlfriend can't play guitar but I admire her poetry and originality. "Being great is no accident," she says. Horses is one of my favorite albums of all times.
This from her collection of poetry, Patti Smith Complete, a line for a rainy day:

She traced the clouds
that formed above her adventures
they billowed and fell
like a shroud in her hand
she knew she was not very well
she realized she would never
trace them again
she walked home

Patti is from Deptford,NJ, the one town in NJ that is probably even worse to be from than Kearny, my hometown.

I don't know if she's beautiful or ugly. Ugly beautiful, I think.

Summer

It's almost here. The rain has broken for the day and it's picture perfect out my window. Narrowsburg is quiet, calm, just like it always is.

The cat is adjusting to my house. He's gi-normous. I'm glad he's here as I have little company these days. Empty nest syndrome sucks. Couldn't wait until the kids were grown. Now I miss them terribly. :(

Burn

I put your name on a piece of paper,
in ink
on the back of a list.
Lit it,
and watched the smoke curl towards the sky.

A prayer, a whisper.
I want my memories to go,
go to a place where they're safe
to sleep like silent dogs.

In years past, I burned (in no particular order):
Your picture
The roses
Your picture
The letter

I packed the ashes into the tomato plants,
took the tool and turned it slow.
And laid back down to feel the spaces
in between the grass.

Cats

I just got a cat. A big, hairy blue cat. I drove him home singing a song I made up. Lyrics go something like this, "Mama got herself a kitty. He ain't no little itty bitty. His eyes are green, he don't look mean. Mama got herself a kitty." Note to self: You seriously need a life, girl.

His name is King Blue.

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Swimming Holes

I am a waterfall wench. I jump into them, usually after the end of a long hike. This is the one I'm aiming for today. Wish me luck.

Garbage Picking for Fun and Profit

I am an avid trash picker. I scavenge and I keep. Last weekend it was a set of slightly used golf clubs. I do not golf but they were pretty enough. This week, two large cartons of barely used books. They included Selected Poems of William Butler Yeats, a Janis Joplin biography, a strange little ditty entitled, "The Five People You'll Meet in Hell" and assorted other classics.
Why anyone would toss these things is beyond me. The books seem almost sinful.