At first I didn’t think it was strange. There’s a man down the street from us who sits on his stoop, and in the middle of his yard is a wire bin of golf balls, and by the sidewalk there’s a handmade sign: golf balls 3 for $1. At first I thought it was sweet, like a yard sale, a way to make a little bit of money. But there are all sorts of odd details.

What first struck me is his house is gorgeous. It’s a huge Victorian, and his house and yard are both well-maintained. There is no way he makes his money by selling golf balls.

And then there’s the fact that he’s on Liberty Street by Eberwhite, so a whole lot of cars pass but there isn’t a ton of foot traffic. There really isn’t anywhere for people to park to buy his golf balls. I’ve never seen anyone buying them.

And he’s nowhere near a golf course. I’m not sure if he knows how to play golf. My father, who sometimes plays golf, pointed out that golf balls aren’t sold in sets of three. You buy them in sets of four. So if you bought them from him, you would have an incomplete set. And if you were buying them for someone as a gift, you’d have to bargain somehow to get the fourth. 4 for $1.25? Can you bargain with someone who’s already selling golf balls for so little money, and who has so few customers?

And he’s out there all the time, though I don’t think he holds regular hours. He’s probably my father’s age, so it’s possible he recently retired, but he looks young enough that he could work for another decade or two — and I’ve noticed him selling his golf balls for at least three years. He’s out there so often, sitting on the stoop of his beautiful house, waiting for someone to buy golf balls from him. Day after day, nobody comes, and still he’s there.

But he doesn’t have a chair. Not even a cushion. It doesn’t look very comfortable. He doesn’t look happy or unhappy, but he’s always alone.

He does not look crazy at all. He’s very calm and clean and cordial — I’ve walked by and he’s waved. I asked my friend who’s 74 years old about him, because she lives down the street from him, and she told me how kind he is. I was almost screaming at her, trying to express my incredulity about this man, but she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

A month ago he had a new display out along with his simple basket of golf balls. This looked more like a Hallmark card rack. I made Steve circle again so we could see. They were more golf balls, this time in boxes, and I think some of them were colored instead of just white. He’s since removed his new display. There must be some logic.

I’m been too shy to ask him what the heck he’s doing, but maybe I will ask him. Maybe that’s all he wants, maybe that’s why he does it, just so people will come up and talk to him.

September 21st, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

September 21st, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

September 21st, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

When we did the house renovations last year, I painted a lot of the walls in the public spaces a color called Moonshadow, and this color has taught me so much. At Lowe’s, under the fluorescent lights, the color was unmistakably beige. That day, we took home a quart plus a few other quarts so we could test them out in our lighting. When we painted the walls with the samples, the rest of the quarts remained pretty much the color they promised, though darker or lighter depending on which room, which lights, and which way the wall faced. But Moonshadow in our house is a gray-blue. In our kitchen it’s a gray that’s close to white. In the mudroom it’s blue-gray that’s pretty dark in tone. In the living room it’s a solid light blue. We couldn’t use it in the basement because it became a very dark gray.  Nowhere is it beige, but there’s something beige about it nonetheless. Like an undertone. The color shifts. It functions like I think a Japanese screen might: as if the walls are backlit. As if the house is made of translucent paper and the light from outside is shining in.

But I painted the wall that you look at when you look out the window at the garden a murky green. It pushes that wall right out into the yard; it’s close to making a wall disappear (at least for three seasons).

I’ve been working on the color for our bedroom. At first, three years ago, I painted it white, but it looked undone. We had no red walls and Steve loves red, so I then painted it red. But color that is so pigmented is color that announces itself before it announces space. It shrinks the room; it makes the walls objects. It makes it really easy for the color to seem wrong, when maybe it’s the right color, there just shouldn’t be so much of it — that red has ended up working beautifully as window trim elsewhere. And plus the red scared me. So I painted the walls Dove White again.

But last fall when the leaves were turning yellow, suddenly yellow was the color that brought the outside in. I bought all sorts of quarts of yellow to sample, because I wanted it to be not a pigment of yellow but the yellow glow from the leaves transported inside. That color worked for, surprisingly, one season. Then in winter it became entirely primary — the effect was primary yellow, but the paint chip, I swear, was pretty mustard.  Fall knew that, but winter didn’t. Spring knew that okay, but summer definitely hasn’t.

So I’ve been bringing paint chips home from the store, trying to find the colors that I can see through, and the colors that shift dramatically depending on the light and the time of day. I finally found a chip that I couldn’t name — maybe beige, but maybe gray, but there’s some pink in there, too. More of a shadow of something. It blends in with the shadows of the plain linen curtains in our bedroom. And it looks like old, yellowed onion skin paper.

That’s what I painted our bedroom yesterday: Waxen Moon. I was scared, though. It was impulsive — I had thought last week that the room should be a gray-green. And painting while pregnant is tiring enough that I knew I wouldn’t be doing it again soon (note: the paint is this new non-toxic kind from Mythic, though admittedly it smells suspiciously of vinyl).

The color’s good. Steve walked in at first and didn’t like it: it might pass in some other setting as an institutional beige, and he has bad memories that I don’t have of low-income housing. Hormonal, hurt, I painted on anyway, depressed that I had picked a bad color and it was so much work, up and down the ladder, crawling on my knees to cut in above the trim.

But once all the walls were done and I put the simple curtains up, the magic happened. Mature is the word he used next — though it’s possible he picked up on my fragility and was just being nice. The effect really is not at all insitutional — the color is more complicated than the beige he’s thinking of, especially in this setting, with natural lighting, in a bedroom. And I think it’s the first room in our house that feels masculine, though I don’t know why. The room is bigger without the primary yellow pigment.  This new color is sort-of backlit, but there’s a lot of chalk on the scrim — the color reminds me of the pigment that’s blended with stucco in Italy. It’s calming, and it works how I wanted the yellow to work: it gives the room a warm glow. We’ll see how it works in the fall.

September 21st, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

It happens all the time, but still it’s a miracle: out of almost nothing comes something. There are a million eggs and a million sperm, most of them no more important than the skin we shed in the shower.

Some say the miracle occurs, life begins, when the two join, and I do think that’s pretty cool, but in our case they were joined by a doctor (because in our situation the sperm are coated with a protein that makes them unable to get into the egg). It was pretty cool that the doctor could do that, but it wasn’t poetry.

Some say the miracle occurs when that joining of the egg and sperm begin to multiply its cells, and I do think that’s pretty cool, but I have six of those frozen right now over by the Briarwood Mall. I won’t be able to use all of those multi-celled embryos (I could technically, but I would make the tabloids for it). I have to distance myself from those miracles because if I thought about them too much I would feel sad, my head would start to spin again about what I had to do to get here, and I’m not ready to feel that again.

Some say the miracle occurs when those cells join to form a beating heart. At the stage in which my embryos are frozen, they look no different than the cells of a tadpole, a daffodil, a dog, a dinosaur. At a certain point, though, those cells start to feel their calling, and then boing, there’s a head-like shape, and boing, there’s a tail that will turn into the lower body. At that point, a small collection of cells start to beat, and they recruit other cells around them to beat, and you can see it on the screen, I saw it on a screen.

But I saw two beating hearts and then one dissolved. People ask now if I had a preference, a boy or a girl, and at first I said no, because that’s true, but the truth is my preference is that it would have been a boy and a girl. But I have to believe that, while it’s cool that cells form to make a beating heart, that’s not the beginning of the miracle, because then one of the miracles died.

What I can pinpoint as amazing to me, what can’t be replicated and currently can’t be substituted, is that these cells can only keep growing inside of a human body. There’s no other environment in which that heart could keep beating, that tail turn into two legs with two feet and five toes on each. It just keeps happening, these cells keep growing, and they couldn’t grow anywhere else but inside of me. At first it was a wobbly circle, and then a shrimp, and then an alien, and now a two-pound human thing. At first no cells had volunteered to be the brain, and now just the right amount of cells have formed the brain, and then the brain became complicated enough that it developed sleep cycles, so now I feel this thing inside of me sleep and wake, not kick and kick. Doctors could do all sorts of things to bring the two components together, but they can’t create those components to begin with, and they can’t decide if those components thrive. And once the embryo is complicating, they can only leave it in the dark and wait. There are all sorts of miracles, but what I can feel is that the miracle is that dark place.

September 18th, 2009 | Category: the baby thing | Leave a comment

September 18th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

September 18th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

From Nature and the Human Soul

The Wanderer is, in Mary Oliver’s words, “determined to save the only life [she] could save.” This is not a recommendation for selfishness. This savable life is identified only by “[striding] deeper and deeper into the world” until she discovers the place where her life and the life of the world are one. She finds the place where, as theologian Frederick Buechner says, “our deepest gladness and the world’s hunger meet.” That place, that way of being in relationship with the world, is what I mean by soul. The life she saves is what Campbell calls “the core of us, the basic character of our being,” which leads to a life of fulfilling service. This salvation is an act of love, love of both self and world.

September 17th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

I know we’re not supposed to buy anything extraneous in September, I know that, and really we’re doing a good job. But then there’s my back pain at night.

Because I think this pregnancy weight has certain tipping points. Like filling a rickety bucket with water, filling it, filling it one drop at a time, and then one drop is one too many and the bucket breaks. That one drop is seemingly insignificant, but with the other drops preceding it, it causes a waterfall.

Same with this weight, over fifteen pounds of it now. One night I could sleep in any position I pleased, as I could for every night preceding it, and then suddenly I could not. For over two weeks now I’ve been waking through the night at least twenty, thirty times, trying to find a position that doesn’t register pain. I did research and then cut apart pillows and sewed them together in new shapes, and I hauled in pillows from other parts of the house, and I sewed myself a rice pillow — anything to support the weight of my stomach, to lean my back up against, to prop up my head, to put between my knees. The collection of pillows on our bed now is laughable. I feel like I haven’t been held at night for months, so separated are we by tempurpedic pillows, down-filled pillows, and rice bags.

My sister said I should get the Snoogle. It’s a pillow that’s shaped like a squished C, and it’s hard enough to support the neck but flexible enough that you could roll it up like a snail. You can lean up against the body of it, or wrap it around you, or push it up against your stomach, all while the tail of the C fits between your legs and aligns your spine and the head of the C cradles your neck. And it’s $50. And I think buying used pillows is gross. So I tried to keep making my own Snoogle experience with my multitude of pillows.

Then in prenatal yoga last week, I mentioned that I haven’t been able to sleep at night (which does not make me a sunny person) and that the pain when I wake up stays with me for too much of the day, and a sunny-looking girl in the class said that I should get the Snoogle. The yoga teacher agreed that she’s heard only miraculous stories about it.

So I looked in Meijer for a cheaper alternative and there was none. Then I went to the baby store and found it. $50. I hauled it up to the cashier, in pain from the previous night and resigned to the fact that paying $50 for something that might make me sleep seemed equally as essential as food. The woman standing in front of me was very pregnant. She turned to me and said, that thing’s a god-send.

It is. I’ve slept straight through the night three nights in a row. I don’t want to believe that I need technologies and store-bought devices, and maybe I could sew this pillow from scratch, but truly I love my squishy squished C.

September 17th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment