Time Capsule: Proposal

Inspired by my sassy friend's recent time machine posts, I've been looking through a folder of things I wrote in high school. It's completely ridiculous, melodramatic, self-important, pseudo-intellectual.... Ah, adolescence! LOL.

I've mentioned before my younger self's loathing of small towns -- my disdain of banal suburbia, even -- which strikes me as funny now that I live in a town the size of my high school. Ah, well. Here's a poem on that subject, written by me on May 28, 1993 and revised on June 6th of the same year.

Proposal
I would like to live with you
(not in some small town
of scraped-up knees and garden
hoses tangled on the porch
of iced-tea afternoons
some small town
of rocking chairs where living
means nothing more than breathing
in and out)
in the small tight spaces
a few square feet of paradise
between factories and office buildings
built up in stories of spent cigarette butts
a flood of symbiotic, throbbing noise
from cars and angry neighbors
a homeless dog barking
three blocks down
a city fenced off in blocks
sectioned into flat square worlds
that rise instead of sprawl
(like some obscene quilt reaching
for its own ends)
You at the window
in artificial sunlight
You beneath neon signs
You on the corner of 51st and 4th
in your wrinkled brown suit
standing around
as the jazz man hits all the wrong notes


I recall that my writing group (which consisted of the aforementioned friend and about 10 senior citizens who met -- what was it, weekly? biweekly? K, do you remember? -- in the basement of the public library) took issue with the parenthetical about the obscene quilt reaching for its own ends. Strong language, for sure, and they didn't think the visual even made sense. I'm not sure it does, either, but I felt strongly at the time about leaving it in.

What I meant by that phrase was that small towns seemed cruelly suffocating to me -- that by living in one and never leaving, you would be smothered by the weight of your own provincialism. Or something. And actually, although I like the small town where I now live and where I hope to stay indefinitely, I still agree with that sentiment. (I just typed and deleted a nice paragraph about how this applies to my town and to DH's job, specifically, before I thought better of it. What if I'm not as anonymous as I think, and I get him into trouble? Blah!)

Anyway. Challenges of small town life notwithstanding, I find I do like the iced-tea afternoons. Though make mine a Dr. Pepper, please.


~RCH~

I resolve...

... to be more present in my children's lives. It's not enough to simply be in the same house with them 24x7; they need less tv time, I need less computer time, and we all need more creative together time.

... to lose this baby weight, dangit. Grrrr, my knees still hurt sometimes. I refuse to ever need that cane again.

... to read more. It used to be a passion of mine, but I've let it fall by the wayside in favor of lazier pursuits. I don't want the lazier pursuits to define me anymore.

I think that's it. I could (and should) improve myself in many other ways than these, but I don't want to get crazy resolving things I can't (or won't) do. So for now I'll focus on these three.

Off to play with my children now. :-)


~RCH~

The holy child

I suspect I've felt so emotional and sentimental this year because Tres is our last child, and still so tiny (but jowly!). I've had a different perspective of the nativity than in Christmases past: Where it used to be just a nice story about the birth of the Savior, now it hits me as the story of a baby -- an actual baby with fat cheeks, itty-bitty toes, fingers that curl tightly around his mother's hand reflexively, a lovely smell. It seems so much more real.

I wonder what Mary did to coax a first smile from him; are fake sneezes universal across time and culture? Did she brush her hair across his bare his tummy or pretend to nibble his ear?

I can't stop thinking of it in such specific terms. Christmas carols that mention the holy child make me a little misty-eyed this year; they never have before.

And of course I don't mean to denigrate that miraculous occasion, but it hits me more than ever now that every child is holy.









~RCH~

Quote Book Quotes

Christmas Spirit

UNO: Mom, I think you should get me and Dos lots of stuff.

RCH: You already got lots of very nice stuff for Christmas.

UNO: Yeah, but we need more.

RCH: Well, remember, it's not stuff that makes you happy. It's people -- the people you love.

UNO: We are people. So give us stuff.


Geography

UNO (while watching the movie Ratatouille): Hey, I've been to that restaurant in China!

RCH: I think it's in France, actually.

UNO: Oh, okay. I can speak lots of languages. I know Spanish and China words and Pilgrim words and Franch. [She demonstrates with some gibberish] Do you know how to speak Franch, Mom?

RCH: A little, but I don't know how to speak Pilgrim so you've got me there.


~RCH~

Christmas 2007

DH has been on call more or less since last Thursday (more when it's just him, less when he's on backup call for his PA) and will be until the end of the year. Plus the first weekend or two in January. Sigh. I had hoped Christmas would be slow -- who wants to spend time in the ER for the sniffles when you can be opening gifts or singing carols with your family? Why not just save it for regular clinic hours the next day? But of course people get lonely, junkies still jones for their fix, and people who maybe shouldn't hurtle themselves down hills on souped up sleds toward groves of trees still do, even on holidays.

He delivered a baby early Christmas morning. He wasn't supposed to; our 11-bed hospital stopped doing OB several years ago because the cost in training, equipment, and malpractice insurance didn't justify the two or three deliveries they'd been doing per year. The mother in question had received all her prenatal care from a midwife in the small metro an hour north of here, but for some reason she didn't head that direction when her water broke spontaneously. Instead, she waited around for a couple of hours to see what would happen. By the time she decided she might want to see someone it was too late to head north, even for the ambulance; a heavy snowstorm ruled out the LifeFlight team.

DH hasn't delivered a baby since his residency two years ago. The last time he did, he was in a Level 1 trauma center with well trained OB nurses, a fully staffed NICU and excellent surgical support. Here? Nada. No anesthesiologist (hope she wasn't expecting an epi!), no obstetrician, not even a hospital nursery. And if something went wrong? Yikes.

Apparently things did get a little sketchy there toward the end -- the first-time mom had trouble pushing, and the baby's heart rate dropped dramatically. But sometime after 1am a (thankfully) healthy baby boy was born. DH sent him and his mother up north by ambulance.

He came home just long enough to tell me the good news and give me the presents that had been hiding at his clinic before heading back to the ER for ... I don't remember what; probably someone's back pain. I waited up for him. He came home again at 3:30am, a little too wired to sleep right away. And of course Tres chose that moment to wake up and want to nurse. DH went to another room to lie down, but I don't know when he fell asleep; Tres kept me up until ~6am.

I awoke a couple hours later to shouts from Uno and Dos: "He came! He came! And he remembered my stick pony! THIS CHRISTMAS ROCKS!!!"


~RCH~

What the...?

I stumbled across this listing while browsing an online outlet store just now. Apparently, they're women's casual pants -- but am I the only one who thinks they look more like a diaper?



And a fully loaded one, at that. Weird.

That is all.


~RCH~

I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.

Okay, okay, it wasn't that bad; I just liked that title.

We did go to a hockey game last weekend (go Grizz! Woo!) -- my first ever, thanks to a totally reasonable and legitimate fear of a rogue hockey puck (or puff, if you listen to Uno) flying into the crowd, striking me in the head and causing my death. But DH dragged me for a good cause, a friend's birthday, and I made him promise to leap in front of me as a human shield if necessary (though as it turned out, we sat behind the goal and our seats were protected by a large net). A rogue puck did fly into the crowd at center court (or whatever) (see! it can happen!); luckily no one died.

As for the fights: There were fewer than I expected -- maybe three decent brawls over the course of the game, with a few minor scuffles thrown in for good measure. As the mother of young children, I loved the penalty box: The officials sent naughty players to a literal time-out box until they had reconsidered their actions and decided to play nicely. (Or something like that.)

We brought our girls. The older two liked the mascot -- Uno even conned a souvenir hockey puff from him -- but didn't pay too much attention to the game (which, considering the fights, may have been a good thing). Tres sat in my lap and watched the action move up and down the ice. She didn't fuss even when they blew a loud train whistle to celebrate our team's goals. What a good girl!

Overall, the game wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Any sporting event is made more interesting by actually being there, as opposed to watching it on tv -- and hockey ramps up the excitement with the risk of spectator deaths! I'd rather go to a Jazz game, of course, but if we could sit behind the net I guess I'd try hockey again.


~RCH~