talking to imaginary friends

One of my longstanding bookmarks takes me to a plot bank--this is a collection, not really of  story lines, but more like a random, weedy compilation of prompts that might trigger a story. 

I go there when my head feels unusually empty--I like to scroll down the list and just pick something more or less at random to write about for an hour.  It's a low-stakes game but one worth playing: If the writing stalls out it's not my fault, and, if it flies, I'm a genius after all. 

Today, though, I started getting interested in the list itself, not as prompts but as legitimate discourse that just happens to be in random order.

Listen:

  

Back from prison with some new vices,  

there's more to him right now than meets the eye.  

Grandma is convinced he's in some kind of cult. These days,

it looks  like he lives out of his car.

He sees the face of Christ in a anthill

and tries to make the car into a work of art;

He says, "The fumes from the new asphalt are too much,"

and starts assuming the role of a dead sibling.

Then he starts confessing to old sins, and we all notice,

that the puppet show plot is very close to his real life.

This is what it is like when a family disapproves,

and when a close friend begins talking to an imaginary one.

Selections from Hatch's plot bank, reconfigured.

handy dandy

I have just finished sweeping up after yet another kitchen catastrophe--I dropped a favorite mixing bowl while making stuffing for fish. 

That's probably the third glass bowl--I got a set of them as a present--and all three go into the same debit column as the two wine glasses, the blue-and-white creamer, and the nicer of my two teapots. And then there were all those Christmas ornaments last year, some of them old and lovely.

It's always the right hand, and I suppose that's the upside--I'm left-handed--but where does it end? Will I soon be typing with a little stick taped to the end of my nose?

A good hurt

Today, for the first time in a very long time indeed, I rode a horse.

The back story: In 2005, I had an accident that injured my neck and spinal cord; this led to a botched surgery in 2005, a corrective surgery in 2007, and, just last fall, a third surgery that we hoped would improve my grip and balance and ease at least some of the chronic pain. As you can perhaps imagine, I am heartily sick of doctors, neurologists, and pain specialists, although I love my surgeon, a rider herself, who has coached me and motivated me through the worst five years of my otherwise fairly cushy and comfortable life.

None of that matters today. It's not behind me, but it doesn't matter.

This morning I rode Prince, the lead character in my book, Conversations with a Prince, and, thanks to a set of adaptive reins and a patient teacher, I was able to produce an almost-acceptable twenty-meter circle. This doesn't sound like much, I know,  but Prince is a squirmy, amiable mess, so this was an accomplishment.

At first I couldn't find the the sweet spot--I felt like I was hovering in the right general vicinity of a real seat, but my crooked, weakened body would have none of it. My coach Jeannette talked me through that part in her way, and Prince talked me through that part in his. Slowly, I was able to balance on my seat bones and get my midline in the middle of my horse; I doubt there is anything nicer than that quiet moment when you feel yourself find   physical harmony with a strong, trustworthy creature who speaks a little human and you speak a little horse. And using my cripple reins--reins I  could actually hold onto--I felt for the first time in a long time that light buzz of contact electricity that, for me, signals the arrival of complicated joy. I rode at the walk and rising trot for half an hour.

Now everything hurts--neck, shoulders, arms, and (weirdly) the bottoms of my feet. But it's a good hurt. I am also dirty, covered with a sheen of silvery-yellow hairs. But this is good dirt--after I got home I spent several minutes just smelling my ratty black schooling gloves.

I've seen dogs show this same kind of focused, olfactory interest in my riding clothes, so dogs and I agree--horses smell nice, a complex mix of ammonia, dust, sweat, and something else--cardamom? Marzipan? I've never been able to identify the sweetness, but it's something you would gladly put into a batch of cookie dough.

The musical horse

One of the unexplicated mysteries in riding is why horses like human music and why so many horses have specific tastes in music. 

Big Band for a big horse

    I had a big spotted mare when I was growing up who was a fearless jumper but who otherwise unpredictable and often quite cowardly. Scatty, unfocused, and  prone to  panic, she liked Bach--I found this out quite by accident one year when I was teaching at a summer camp and brought her with me. The only station we could get on the radio there was a sort of light-classical mix, pure mayonnaise, but each Friday morning from ten to noon they played Bach. And, as it happened, Fridays morning was when I would usually work her on the flat, with Bach in the background. She would settle into the music and stay on tempo, her ears flopping to the sides like a donkey's, completely relaxed. She was my  first horse.


My last horse, before all these neck surgeries put a stop to riding, was a huge Dutch Warmblood gelding (above) who had nothing whatsoever going on between his ears. This was nice sometimes, when a spectacular lack of imagination made my life easier, but it also made schooling him up both boring and frustrating--we could work on transitions and brightness off the leg on Wednesday, and by Thursday morning he'd simply forgotten everything we'd talked about. It was as if he'd done a full system dump overnight, and all I came back to was a blank screen and a blinking cursor. 


He liked big band--String of Pearls, Parade of the Milk Bottle Caps, Walkin and Swingin, stuff like that. And like the spotted mare, he set himself inside the tempo, flopped his ears, and danced. And the four horses I have had in between all did exactly the same thing, once I stumbled over (and learned eventually to hunt for) the music that liked best.


It's easy to dismiss this phenomenon and say of course horses like music because music is beautiful. But that assumes that horses share our opinions about beauty, whatever beauty is, and these's no real evidence that this is true. I've never seen a horse admire a painting or get caught up in an interesting movie or play, for example, and I'm quite sure that the stories horses tell to themselves and to each other are very different from the stories we tell about them or, for  that matter, the stories we humans find beautiful and describe as literature. 


I've been thinking a lot about this lately, and wonder if musical preference in horses is linked to their individual body music--their natural tempo and their individual nuances of gait. One of the things that make horses so interesting is that they are all so  different--they trademark themselves, and elaborate along a consistent theme. They know who they are in a purely physical, very specific way, and their reliance on tempo is far more advanced and complicated than a cow's or or a pig's or any other domesticated barnyard creature. Pigs are very intelligent, and I'm a fan of pigs, but horses trump every species but our own in this one dimension. 

True Confessions: Why I love The People's Court

Marilyn Milian

Over  the past five years I've spent a lot of time loafing around the house waiting for surgery to heal or for some chunk of neck hardware to settle in, and one result is a secret, intense passion for the television show, The People's Court.

Featured in Rain Man and often referred to in the olden days simply as "Wapner," after the then-presiding judge, this semi-bogus show walks like a courtroom, quacks like a courtroom, but is actually a session of binding arbitration between plaintiffs and defendants who have agreed to appear on the show in exchange for an appearance fee and relief from actually paying any sort of judgment that's handed down. 

In our household, this show goes by the alternate title of My Boyfriend Owes Me a Thousand Dollars,  since this accurately summarizes what about a third of the cases are about. Couples in love fall invariably fall out of love, then use the court system to wrangle over broken cell phones, gifts that have morphed into loans, and bail paid out when the lover-turned-defendant got picked up for DWI. But there are also fender-bender cases, dog bites, home-improvement squabbles, and landlord-tenant disputes over why a security deposit is being withheld.

I like watching people argue, and when the argument is proceeding within the structure of the law, it's even more compelling. But I also like Marilyn Milian, the Latina judge who has been around since 2001. Unlike that other television benchmeister, Judge Judy, Milian cares about the law and is interested in explaining how it works; Judy Sheindlin scolds, vents, insults, and humiliates, and the spectacle is not edifying.

"See, here's how it works," says Milian. "You can make that decision, but it comes at a cost. You signed this contract. I didn't sign it--you did. And you can break it or ignore it or use it as a doily, but you have to understand there are consequences to those kinds of decisions. And you certainly aren't allowed to make money off that kind of decision."

It's fun to watch the body language of the losing parties as it slowly dawns on them that being hopping mad is not necessarily grounds for legal action. Their eyes narrow, their shoulders come up, and they cross their arms defensively over their often ample bosoms. There are rules, and the rules are real, and the rules are not working in their favor. This gives me an intense pleasure that I find very difficult to explain.

But fairness--and especially structured, evenhanded fairness--is important. Each new case seems to reinforce this essential concept, whether we're squabbling over a puppy, a broken windshield, or a slip-and-fall with injury resulting. And this fairness relies on proof--Milian reminds both plaintiffs and defendants that talk is cheap but real documentation, credible evidence, is what gets the job done. Often, when a plaintiff or defendant claims they have proof of something but forgot to bring it, she asks, "So, are you saving that for some other judge?"

I admit I'm a little bit ashamed of my liking for this slightly cheesy show, and I never would have gotten started on it if I hadn't spent so much time hanging around the house with nothing to do. But now I am well, and yet I still knock off work at four each day to watch Marilyn Milian do again what she did yesterday--demonstrate the essential beauty and logic of civil law. 

So now I've confessed and actually feel better for it. Just for the record, though, I have no appetite for soaps. I tried them, and it's no go--the people on soap operas never seem to have  anywhere they need to be in the middle of the day and they spend way too much time talking behind each other's backs. That's distasteful, and all the chatter leads to crisis after crisis but never any real conclusion--I'll take the gavel and the final ruling any day. 

The hind leg off a donkey

My husband's sister has just decamped after three solid days of nonstop talking--we listened to hundreds of hours of pressured, pointless, controlling, and profoundly boring discussion of unrelated minutiae, one incoherent topic chained tightly to the next.

She told us about every single plant in her garden, the weave of the carpet on the stairs of an apartment she rented in her twenties, the many things an old boyfriend spake unto her, the provenance of a specific stone on an ankle bracelet, the mysterious mixing bowl with the flowers on it,  how many times, exactly, she went to the store and why and who she took with her, the names and individual habits of her three hermit crabs,  and the night she spent at the Red Roof Inn and why the Red Roof Inn is superior to the Comfort Inn and Motel Six.

She was so busy talking it became impossible to do anything--when we finally got her dislodged, after many overt prompts and signals, to, say,  go for a ride on our lovely boat in perfect weather on the bright blue waters of Mallets Bay, she just kept yakking away, so utterly absorbed by all the unsaid things that she couldn't even notice her surroundings.
 
Now that she's gone, I can uncoil long enough to understand that this strange affliction is probably a kind of mania and not her fault. But it feels like her fault--the woman can talk the hind leg off a donkey.

Of course I can be intolerant and uncharitable, but my husband, in contrast, is amazingly polite, always willing to make other people's comfort a priority even if it means being excruciatingly uncomfortable himself. Yet even he had had enough when he had to listen to a lengthy disquisition on how she calculates her car mileage in this certain specific way.

What kind of life is that? Is it a life that someone would choose? Of course not. It must be torment for her as much as it is for the people around her, but she cannot simply stop. What's that old joke about the twelve-step program for manics? Alanononononononon.

I'm glad she's gone, and of course now I feel guilty in that gladness, but the peace that descended as soon as she left was blissful beyond description.

Kitchen Musician

Loomis Street Irregulars

I just spent a couple of hours poking around through CDs and on line, looking for a version of "The Home Ruler" that's slow enough for me to hear and learn from--I can play well enough, at least some of the time, but I can't for the life of me figure out sheet music. (And for those of you who can, spare me the instructive lecture; I spent a year trying to learn and my neurons just don't fire correctly.)

I play only by ear, and I only play tunes I actually like--this explains why I know only one polka. I learned "Maggie in the Woods" early on in my dulcimer career and found it deficient and glib. Polkas, for me, are like squid: Once was enough. And I think I was attracted to the hammered dulcimer, at least in part, because it's basically impossible to play "Proud Mary" on it, although now that I've said that I'm sure someone has tried and probably posted a video on You Tube.

I was thinking, as I piddled around, about the pleasure that comes of  having absolutely no musical ambition. I don't even like to perform because it makes me nervous, and being nervous isn't what music is for. Once a week, five of us gather and play--my friends Art, Tracy, Carol, and Michael, plus yours truly--and in a weird way this has become an anchor, or maybe the pivot, that the rest of my life revolves around. Sometimes we will play a potluck or a community gathering, like in this photo, and Art and Michael just did a very nice guitar duet CD, but in general, as a group, we have no ambition.

For me, music is the opposite of writing--I've never seen the point of diaries or other private scribbling, except perhaps as practice for work written for other people to read. But music is different; it seems to exist in its own right. It's enough to just play, and it doesn't seem to matter (or at least not to me), that no one else is listening. Because it's this internal, self-sustaining quality that keeps me interested, and what motivates me when I spend two hours looking for a version of "Home Ruler" that I can pick up by ear.

In my travels around the music sites on the web, I've found and bookmaked a place called the Kitchen Musician, and there I can listen to midi files all afternoon--"Crabs in the Skillet" and "Lost Farm Waltz" and "Pigeon on a Gate," this last tune being, as far as I can tell, made up of spare parts from every other reel ever written. Or perhaps, conversely, it's the first reel ever written, and it has spread its parts out over all subsequent ones. Sadly, they didn't have "Home Ruler," but that's okay--I found a version on a CD by Susan Sherlock that will probably do.

I'm about to go learn this tune, but before I do that, I want to say that I just now decided that I really do have a place in traditional music, despite my many shortcomings, right down to the purpose-built hammers I need because my grip is so sketchy. Because even though I actually play in what is supposed to be, in my house, the dining room, I think I'm really a kitchen musician. The room is just a technicality.