Far Too Close to the Bone

Corduroy Dog was sick this week. And not just a little bit. I plied her with scrambled eggs, lamb chops, turkey, peanut butter, leftover meatloaf, ham, hoagies, Parmesan and special (extra yummy, they say) dog food, but she only ate three bites in two days. She drank water, but couldn't keep it down. When we left the vet on Monday morning, I had to stoop and lift her compliant body into the car. Even her fur looked sick. Finally, her temperature is back to normal and she ate five hamburger buns, a chicken breast, seven green beans and a lamb chop before going to sleep last night. When she's finished her antibiotic, we'll go back to the clinic to have another x-ray and an ultrasound to determine if some suspicious-looking patches on her lungs are cancer or snot. Cancer or snot. That could be a metaphor for life. When we have bad things happen to us, we've just got to wait and see if they'll turn out to be cancer or snot.

Snot, of course, isn't pleasant and it can make us feel as if we're dying. But in the end, it's only snot, and when the ragweed dies or the virus runs its course, we'll be back to normal. Cancer, on the other hand, has to be dealt with aggressively and with determination to be cured. If it can be cured at all. I realize that what I've been dealing with for the past few months, that black cloud that's been over my head as I dwell contentedly in the quotidian* below, is probably cancer. I think my prognosis is good and my will to survive is strong, but it's going to take some effort to fully recover. I see signs of life when I realize I still do love people who I can't talk to anymore and when I realize that the hope that died has been replaced by a new hope I hold for myself.

When I went to Montevallo to register yesterday, there was hope. When I realize that the life I always wanted is starting to bloom around me, there was hope. When I realize that I'm still able to talk to God and that I still want to be part of a church family, there is hope. In spite of everything, while I no longer believe** people are good at heart (or anywhere else for that matter), I realize I'm still going to be able to love some of them and walk with some of them as a part of a church. And that, perhaps, is the greatest miracle of my life.

*The word quotidian is one of my new favorites. Elizabeth Dewberry used it in an interview I read recently (wow, Elizabeth Dewberry has had her business on the Internet lately!) when she was discussing her relationship to then-husband Robert Olen Butler. "But what I needed to know," she said, "Was how we would manage in the quotidian." It was so delightfully pretentious that I had to claim it as my own.

**Among the things I no longer believe are the notions that we were created to suffer and that God derives some twisted pleasure from seeing us thrown under the wheels of life. I don't know why I feel the need to add that. Perhaps it's because those ideas are also cancerous.

***It's sad that I make footnotes for my blog. I wonder what my thesis (which, by the way, I have to start working on NEXT SEMESTER!!!!!) will look like. I think I have a sad little footnoted brain.

Montevallo Confederation

Since David and I moved to Southside, we've noticed that a startling number of our dearest friends were students at the University of Montevallo. This afternoon, I was informed that I'll be joining their number later this month. This is a huge redemption for me. God is faithful to me.
WOOT!
Go ANGRY TEAPOTS!!!

The Thunder Storm

Today, I remembered that Friederich Burgmuller is good therapy. When I play alone, I sing along. One of my very favorite Burgmuller pieces is called "Ballade." When I play it I sing "NowI'mveryangry. NowI'mveryangry. Ha. Ha. Now I'm GLAAAAD!!! I'm GLAAAAAAAD!" (Here's a video of a little girl playing it, so that you can sing at home, too. Try it. It's good for you.)

My poor little piano hasn't been so abused in its entire life. I love my piano lessons because my teacher has an elegant grand piano that makes a beautiful sound--much better than my little spinet. Sometimes, my teacher plays her little digital piano and I play the big piano and we play duets. I love to see how loud I can make her piano get. I feel that if my piano was a person, she'd be a little old lady named Dottie and she would say, Do you have to mash my pedals so hard, sugar? My piano teacher's piano would be a man in a tuxedo named Captain Picard and he would probably, in an English accent, make fun of how poorly I play. Frankly, I find your Beethoven to be a bit twee, he would say. And I would say Shut up, Captian Picard, or I'm gonna mash your pedals.


P.S. They say that if you look into a mirror and say "Bloody Burgmuller" three times, a little Asian lady will creep up behind you and play a duet with you! I can't wait to try it.

“Every age has its own characteristics. Right now we are in an age of religiouscomplexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In itsstead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activitieswhich occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart.The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and theservile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testifythat we, in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcelyat all. If we would find God amid all the religious externals we must firstdetermine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity. Now as alwaysGod discovers Himself to “babes” and hides Himself in thick darkness from thewise and the prudent. We must simplify our approach to Him. Wemust strip down to essentials (and they will be found to be blessedly few). Wemust put away all effort to impress, and come with the guileless candor ofchildhood. If we do this, without doubt God will quickly respond. When religionhas said its last word, there is little that we need other than God Himself. Theevil habit of seeking God-and effectively prevents us from finding God in fullrevelation. In the “and” lies our great woe. If we omit the “and”, we shall soonfind God, and in Him we shall find that for which we have all our lives beensecretly longing.” A W Tozer, The Pursuit of God, 1948

She's Filled With Secrets!

I've been writing a lot lately. I'm trying to put together some coherent body of work to use as a pole-vault to another goal. It's the dirt-work, if you will, of a greater ambition. It's good for me. It makes me feel like I have a purpose. And most of all, it makes me feel connected with other art. And that makes me feel alive. This weekend, David and I went to the Carver Theater to see the short films made as a part of the Sidewalk Scramble for the Sidewalk Film Festival. To be honest, we only went because our friend Jason had edited one of the films, but we ended up enjoying ourselves immensely.

This year, scramble participants based their five-minute films on the work of a particular director (Quentin Tarintino, Sofia Coppola, David Lynch, M. Night Shyamalan and Woody Allen), an assigned phrase and a particular object. With two exceptional exceptions (Jason's film and an interesting tale of corporate evil called "Branded") the Tarintino and Shyamalan imitations weren't very notable. Woody Allen had a good representation in a film called "Cutting Teeth." But my favorite films were based on those directed by David Lynch. Most of the directors had the same idea in copping the backwards-talking dwarf from "Twin Peaks," but one in particular had an irregular dream scene (what is a regular dream?) and even a reference to Garmonbozia! (You're gonna have to find out on your own. I really don't think I can explain it, except for that in my mind, it's going to be HARMONbozia from now on!)

Last night, I even had a dream about the Twin Peaks dwarf. He shuffled into our bedroom and said "This is where the pies go to die."

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Suicide...Lite

Sometimes, when people talk to me about theology, I want to kill myself a little bit.

Sad. Sad. Sad. And True.

The Artist in the Art

Boom-Go-Round, Remy Hanemann (At the Harleyville Project)

This is a photograph from the Matthew Marks Gallery. (That's Nan Goldin's gallery representation in the U.S.)

I had an opportunity to see an exhibit of photographs by Nan Goldin at the Chicago Institute of Art back in November. I didn't like them. I dismissed her work as cheap porn shot in "available light." Her work is cheap porn shot in "available light." Some critics are quick to point out that she used a slideshow exhibition because museums and galleries weren't really interested in photography back in the late seventies when she began to work, and she could exhibit a slideshow in indie film festivals. I think that's silly. I think she exhibited her work at little sticky-floored porn theaters. I didn't know anything about Nan Goldin back in November. I know a little bit more now.

She describes her work best: Every time I go through something scary, traumatic, I survive by taking pictures. You also help other people to survive. Memory about them does not disappear, because they are on your pictures. It is about keeping a record of the lives I lost, so they cannot be completely obliterated from memory. My work is mostly about memory. It is very important to me that everybody that I have been close to in my life I make photographs of them. Because these pictures are not about statistics, about showing people die, but it is all about individual lives. In the case of New York, most creative and freest souls in the city died. New York is not New York anymore. I've lost it and I miss it. They were dying because of AIDS.

It makes sense to me now. I get it. In that exhibit, I saw pictures of beaten women, dying men, people in the shower, people having sex. She even took pictures of herself having sex. In a sense, she made a record of her life in photographs. And then, she shared her life in whatever way she could. Perhaps, and this is where I could go off the existential rails, she thought she would cease to exist if she couldn't show her work somewhere. Anywhere. I still don't like Nan Goldin's work. Sorry.

This makes me wonder about what draws us to art in the first place. I consider the work of two artists I admire. One of them made beautiful sculptures in public places. He made iron reflect the sky and interact with the environment in which it was placed. I don't know him, though. I just know his work. And I like it. Another, makes art from iron scrap that looks like various weapons of mass destruction. He makes crazy little bombs and missiles and adds wheels and tires and propellers. What he ends up with are wonky little vehicles that look like toys (if toys could blow up and kill you.) I like his work. But, I also like him. So, is it possible that I like his work because I like him? Can the two be separated? I'm not sure. It might be that this is a conundrum even more readily applied to writers. Maybe.

You know who I don't like? Thomas Pynchon. I think he's having a big laugh at us. Somewhere, nobody seems to know where, Tomas Pynchon is sitting in a fancy living room drinking Courvoisier giggling at all the academics pretending to get his work. The joke is that there's really nothing to get. Sometimes, the emperor really is naked. But then again, I've never read an interview with Pynchon. I've never seen a picture of him. He's never given any explination of his work. So, I look at it in a vacuum and I hate it. But would I hate it if I really liked him? I don't know.

How much of who I am goes into what I do? Can something be just craft, or do we fingerprint things in an unavoidable way for better or for worse? Is art really art if you don't know the artist? (And wow, could I go off on the theology of that. )

The Flotsam and Jetsam of a Life

November 1976: A Little Girl's Answered Prayer

January 1986: The Restlessness to Come/An Explosion in the Sky

September 1995: The Ugly Ducking Deceives Herself By Finding Something True

December 1999: The End of Something Big/The Despised Day of Small Things

September 2001: The Confusion to Come / An Explosion in the Sky

October 2002: Resolution

May 2003: Confirmation of a Course

February 2005: The Green Green Rabbit Trail to Boneyard Beach

Let's Encyclopedia Brown This..Ahem...And Some Random Observations

I just saw 1408. I was the only person in the theater. I was so frightened that when it was over, I grabbed my bag and ran out of the theater waving my arms like a little kid playing Red Rover. Someone somewhere is laughing at the security tape of me sucking my thumb and running out of there. This movie is worth the $$ to watch in the theater.


Here are some things I've been thinking this week as I've been watching the Operation Rescue people protest. I haven't seen any NOW protesters. I heard that OR picketed Briarwood on Sunday and told the Birmingham News that they had permission from "a senior pastor." That turned out to be a lie, however, and apparently, no one from Briarwood was at all thrilled or inspired (to anything other than irritation) about the protest. This reinforces my belief that these people are crazy and tend to play a little loose with the truth. I'm also hearing that my neighbors who were actually here for the Eric Robert Rudolph bombing (it was about 5 blocks away from here) are a little traumatized by all the hoopla happening this week. And so am I, actually. Anyway...here's some randomness.

I'm starting to believe that the end of the world might actually be near. I see the harbingers of that great Apocalypse in Revelation. And they aren't in the candidacy of Barak Obama or Hillary Clinton. They're in the church, in our homes, in the heart of Christians. Perhaps the black doom I've been taught to watch for on the news and in Supreme Court opinions has been hiding in the church all this time. "We're Christians!" We say. But we don't read the scriptures. We don't speak to God. We don't believe in the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. We don't believe in anything but "Social Justice." And the problem is that we don't even believe in that.

Yesterday, I saw a woman blowing a ram's horn by the fountain on Five Points. This is a battle cry to end abortion! She said. I saw little children leaning over a wall at Vulcan Park holding a banner with a picture of an aborted baby for passers-by to see. End abortion now! And, I realize that this is the way the world has always been. Mothers have always sacrificed their babies to idols whether it be Molech or college. This is nothing new. What's new, I reason, is the flaccid response of the manic Christians who drive their cars with their pro-life bumper stickers and take pictures of grief-stricken teenagers being hauled into abortion clinics so they can post them on their blogs. The evil in America is us. The evil in America isn't the New World Order. The evil in America is us. And I feel crazy creeping through the streets like the black plague.


I need Jesus to return to save me. I need him to save me from sin. I need him to save me from Hell. I need him to save me from you. I need him to save me from myself before this world makes me stark raving mad.

T Minus 30 Years: Houston, We Have Liftoff

I always cry when I see yellow footage of the Apollo launches. It's something about American hope during that era. Maybe it grew from success in a collective push to defeat the common evil of Soviet communism. Maybe it grew from the naive ideas that America would always be for Americans, that our destructive impulses could never compete with Nature's power to heal itself, and that our consumer urge was propelling us toward greatness like a Saturn V rocket. Anyway, it makes me emotional. We don't hope like that anymore.

In my favorite view of what I think was Apollo 8, you can see the towers that tether the rocket to the launch pad give way in succession as the rocket rises toward the Wild Black Yonder in a cloud of fire and ice and steam. I don't know what those towers are called. My father-in-law, who is a genuine rocket scientist, does. To me, those towers represent fear. If my life were a Saturn V rocket, I would be prepared for liftoff.

If I were to name five of my greatest fears, I would realize that each one of them has come to fruition over the course of the past few weeks. I've faced demons and giants that have haunted me for years in a very narrow span of time. I've found them to be every bit as daunting as I imagined them to be, but I conquered them all. I'm left in the rather uncomfortable place of being without excuse. There really isn't anything left to dread. Of course,there are always unexpected disasters, but the old mountains, the really old demons, the fears I've treasured and fed and cherished all my life are conquered. I think there might be nothing left to do but launch.

And yeah, I editied this a lot. My previous draft really, really frightened me. And I try not to scare myself.

Listen to the Mandolin Rain

So, Bob Riley asked Alabamians to pray for rain. And it did. And it has been ever since. And all the grass on my street is growing tall, but no body can mow it. Because it won't stop raining. All of my roses are going to bloom again. My tomatoes are blooming again. My allergies are acting up again because everything is growing tall and green under the rain.

And I admit, I was as cynical as everyone else. I'm starting to really believe that God could do any miracle you can think of for everyone to see and if you didn't believe in him already, you wouldn't then either.

Susan Returns to the Piano

So, this is kind of embarrassing, but one night I was sitting at home and the little Story and Clark piano that sits against the wall in the living room said "Hey Chick. What am I here for?" So, I called Miss Jane, my piano teacher from childhood and she started giving me lessons. I have my lesson right before a very tiny girl with a giant music bag and uneven ponytails. I love her and I would like to keep her, but she loves her parents. She can play the piano better than I can.

I am trying to make my out-of-practice fingers play a song called "The Heart Asks Pleasure First" by Michael Nyman. They are struggling. They hurt and rebel, but they are starting to remember how to play. I admire people who can play the piano very well. I would like to be able to play as well as Bruce Hornsby. My fingers say I've missed my chance, if I ever had one. My piano says thanks for the attention. It hasn't been played regularly in something like 40 years.

Here is a video of that song. It was in the movie, The Piano.

Stay Home, Southsiders!

So, Operation Save America (formerly Operation Rescue, I think?) will be protesting the Planned Parenthood on Highland and New Woman, All Women Clinic on Southside (the one that Eric Robert Rudolph blew up) this weekend and next week.

The National Organization for Women will be protesting the protesters.

I think I will not be leaving the house. New Woman, All Women is a creepy place. I wouldn't take Corduroy Dog to a vet that looks like that. Every now and then, someone comes out of there on a stretcher and gets taken away in an ambulance with their medical charts pinned to their shirt. It is disturbing. Another thing that is disturbing about abortion clinics in Birmingham is that they kind of have a tendency to screw-up abortions. Operation Save America kind of creeps me out too, or at least Operation Rescue did. NOW also creeps me out. This is going to be a pretty creepy weekend, altogether.

Maybe we could get NAMBLA and PETA and James Dobson and Pat Robertson, too. It could be Birmingham's First Annual Convention on Crazy. Our entire city council could be some of the featured speakers. Valerie Abbot could give a speech about why she doesn't care about the crack houses in Southside, but writes silly letters to national chapters of silly fraternities when their members leave beer bottles in the yards of their unofficial houses. I always get so excited when we can entertain the nation with our crazy Southern antics. Let's ketch us a rattlesnake. I hear them fat uns fries up nice.

Oh, and if anyone can tell me WHAT is going on in that video clip on the OSA blog, I'd appreciate it.

UPDATE: Alabama’s favorite Senator, Hank Erwin and Alabama’s favorite Judge, Roy Moore will be speaking during our Thursday evening rally, July 19, 2007. I think an artery to my brain popped loose just now. Hank Erwin actually had an hour-long discussion on his radio program about women and tattoos. The question was "Can a woman with a tattoo be a godly woman?" People were fired up.

UPDATE AGAIN: When you get tired of Saving America, you can Save Wal-Mart! It's the same organization!

I'm done. For real. (If you subscribe to this blog, do you get an e-mail every time I update? If so, I'm sorry.)

Redemption for Rice

Some of the best advice I ever got regarding books and reading was from Mrs. Janney in the eighth grade. Read the first fifty pages before you make a judgement, she said. I still follow this rule. Last week, I read the first fifty pages of two of Anne Rice's vampire novels. I didn't finish either. Now, I know some people really love her books and, I admit, her attention to historical detail is meritorious. But, frankly, I think they might be harbingers of the Fall of the Western World. Seriously. When the appetite of the American reader is so easily whetted by the skillful substitution of superfluous erotica for good writing, the end is near.

So, I don't know why I stared Christ the Lord. I certainly didn't expect to finish, and I wasn't sure I could suffer fifty pages. But what I found in those first fifty pages, and in the two hundred sixty-nine to follow, was a work of art. There were times during my read (which took place in one spot on my comfy leather sofa over a period of a day and a half) when I had to remind myself that I wasn't reading the inspired Word. It is a craftsman's book, written by a skilled master of the language and capable of opening a hole in the head of the reader to expose her to a side of reality not previously considered. Rice writes the childhood of Christ, detailing how he came to discover his divinity as his ability to understand the will of God developed. Up until now, the best answer I had for the question all of us must ask (How did Jesus know?) was something like "Well, how did you know you were a girl?" I finally feel I have some sort of a real answer.

In the portrait of a very real boy, I saw a glimpse of divinity and gained a sense of the wonder of the Nativity that I hadn't considered. That God would make his son venture to earth as a baby and trust him to the care of ordinary people is more amazing to me then ever. To me, this fact dignifies the human condition in a way we long for. It purges the last hint of gnosticism from the religious ambrosia I've been concocting unknown all these years. Christ came to earth as a Child. A gift of God to be nurtured and cared for by ordinary people. To me, this is as much evidence of the love of God for his creation as Christ's eventual death on the cross. Rice offers a precious gift with her story of a boy-Christ growing in wisdom and knowledge. Come and wonder with me, she says, knowing as only a lover of Christ could know what joy comes from the contemplation of the greatest mystery of all: Christ came. Christ died. Christ will come again.

I wrote many novels without my being aware that they reflected my quest for meaning in a world without God. Anne Rice

Also Tune In When....

Susan meets Beau Guff Stuff A Son and prays he doesn't make her look like a tool. (I am comforted by the fact that no one on his website looks like a tool...except for maybe the baby in a bucket. I don't want to be photographed in a bucket. Perhaps I can avoid this.)

edit: No bucket.

Tune in next week when....

Susan goes to Becker Iron & Metal looking for interesting scrap iron! AND, ruins (if "ruins" means "to make authentic and 89% more cool by dirtying up and banging around") her extra stompie Frye Boots!

Good Evening, My Nemesis

I came home from the library with Louis Theroux's new book Call of the Weird. Theroux is a documentary maker from the BBC who has developed some kind of fascination with American Weirdness. This book is a follow-up to his series of documentary-ettes called Louis Theroux: Weird Weekends. Of course, I was compelled to dive in immediately, so I made a cup of coffee and sat on the porch to read. (It occurs to me that only a weird person would drag coffee out on an Alabama porch in the summertime.)

I looked up just in time to make out a familiar figure walking up the steps to the house next door. I couldn't resist. Laura, I said. Are you looking for your cat? She told me that her cat had gone missing when she had to go away. I assured her that her cat, albeit now the baby-mama of some wild ghetto kittens, was fine. The neighbors had been feeding her. She was relieved and walked down the street to find her.

She looked good. Beautiful even. A little less emaciated, still thin. Shiny hair. A denim skirt with a white t-shirt and a belt and espadrilles. Lipstick. She wouldn't have looked out of place at the Big Church on Sunday, but I'm willing to bet she would have felt it. You look good, Laura, I said. She told one of my neighbors that she'd been in rehab. I can't think she has been there nearly long enough, though. She's living downtown, now, with the same boyfriend. The cynic in me thinks she's clean for a week or two, but I hope that maybe, just maybe, this will be it for Laura. Godspeed, Girl. Angels on your body.

It comes at a weird time for me. Someone in the neighborhood set up a Google group for the folks living down on 15th Avenue. It got pretty popular pretty fast, and now there are something like 80 members of which I am one. These are some strange folks. Mostly upper-middle class, many yankees, most democrats. I'm not sure why they're here, though. Most of them seem to hate the Southside. The buzz of the past month has been about a house at the end of the street occupied by a group of fraternity boys from UAB. Or, more specifically, the beer bottles they leave in the yard, the window they broke the "illegal" fence they erected and the "party basement" they are building. (Just how the posters know about their basement is unclear.) Let's make a petition, one poster implores us, to get RID OF THEM! I have an image in my mind of a reality show: Survivor Southside! Better pick up your trash, or your neighbors will VOTE YOU OFF THE STREET! It sours my stomach. It literally makes me want to thump somebody. Right up a side of they head, if you know what I mean.

I want to reply to their posts, but I'm not sure how much difference it would make to them that I would literally have to walk past four crackhouses to get from my house to the frat house and we live about 300 yards apart. (Not to mention the felony sex offenders.) I want to hold their faces under water for just a minute and say You KNEW this wasn't a nice neighborhood when you MOVED here. WHY EXACTLY DO YOU STAY? It's the Paris Hilton scandal of the neighborhood and the "media" can't leave it alone to cover, for one measly minute, the fact that every night of the year someone is cooking a fix under a bush somewhere on their street. I don't think there was this much reaction when the police found a murder victim in the alley behind their houses.

This makes me think of the marvellous idea someone had to move here and plant a church for the city! For Southside! We'll LOVE our neighbors! What a bunch of naive crackers we turned out to be. What a colossal failure. The best of my life.

Iron Pour P.S.

And yes. It's true. David and I participated in our FIRST IRON POUR on Sunday. So, of course, there is more to follow about that. And of course, my hubby is HOT in welding leathers and a hard hat. Handling molten iron. Whew. (Even my friends said so.)

Two Faces Have I

All of the art I've wanted to make lately has had some sort of dual nature. Some sort of perfection contrasted with some kind of deformity. I'm dreaming of a perfect wing and a broken wing. I'm thinking of an angel's face with a scar running down the middle. My next sculpture is going to be a tree with a broken limb. An iron tree. That's a contradiction in itself, maybe.


I'm a creature of contradictions. I guess we all are. Something in me wants to bring evil to myself. I want to eat too much. I want to drink too much. I want to watch too much television. And that's a good day. Sometimes, I want to get in the car and just drive till I can't anymore. At the same time, something in me really wants to take two handfuls of life. I want to do art. I want to write. I want to be with friends. I want to celebrate my marriage. I want to pray. As I walk this path, I pray that Jesus will draw me to the life. I pray that he will save me from the dark. It scares me to admit that there is something inside of me that wants to kill me. But, I know it won't. It can't. Maybe that's what this "being saved" is about. Saved from hell? Sure. Maybe even better, though, is being saved from that three-stranded evil (flesh, devil, sin) that's wrapped around my soul. Saved. Delivered. Entirely. No matter how hard I try, I can't won't kill myself. But I might always want to.

I think I've really grasped life twice in my life. The first time was when I begged God to save me. The second time was when I married David. I want to live. And I want to live abundantly. I have life and death set before me. I choose life. Now, I pray I'll be able to make the little lifeward movements my everyday existence requires. As a habit and a way of being.

Amen.

Hey Little Bird, Fly Away Home. Your House is on Fire and Your Children are Burning.

The world is on fire. The smell of burning timber from South Georgia, East Alabama, and Central Florida has made a home in the Jones Valley and obscures the buildings and the television towers, Sloss Furnace and the far side of the Valley. I can't see farther than about 11th Avenue. The smoke is in my hair and eyes and it burns my nose when I have to go outside. David and I visited the Okefenokee Swamp something like four years ago this summer. I don't like the idea of the cypress and cedar and lilies and mosses burning, burning, burning all through the days and into the nights. We need some rain. Please God, we need some rain.

Lately, I've had the idea that something is very very wrong with the world. The very things that make us human, or at least remind us that we are, are missing. We don't talk like humans. We don't eat like humans. We don't love like humans. We don't fight like humans. This is a nation of automatons fighting over half-million dollar houses in manicured neighborhoods still longing for something. We bow to the idols of religion and community when what we need are friends. Perforate community and put it on a roll. What I need is one good friend. Or two. In this respect, I am a wealthy woman.

Blackberries Grow on My Grave

So, it's been a while since my last update. Several of the happenings of the last 19 days beg to be remembered, but I'll focus on one. Last weekend, we went to an iron pour at Sloss. It was the culmination of one of the summer's first open studio sessions, and there were something like ten artists actually suited-up and pouring. There were also a handful of Old People who had participated in a class offered by the Birmingham Museum of Art and were standing behind the safety line to observe iron being poured into the sand molds they made. I don't call them Old because they were advanced in years, but because they appeared to be cultured to near-death. They wore years of season tickets to the symphony, classes at the BMA, and museum-sponsored galas and banquets on their faces like they had been stamped there by a power hammer. Their presence confirmed my long-held suspicion that pretension is aging. I dare go as far as to say that Pretension Kills. I wonder at the prospect of making a mold and watching someone else pour the iron and crack the mold while you watch. In my mind, that's the art of the process. If it doesn't require a hard-hat and a welding jacket, it probably isn't much fun. And that's my opinion. Life necessarily means dirty hands. .

I think the wilderness is trying to imprison Sloss in a tangle of poke weed and blackberry bramble. Like a battalion of slow-moving infantrymen, the green encroaches on the casting shed and the old bath-houses now used as artist studios. I'm not referring to the refurbished number two furnace where you might go to see a concert or be scared out of your wits at a haunted house. I mean the old number one furnace on the other side of the blower-wheels and towers. The casting shed of the number one shelters something like four small furnaces, several mig and arc welding rigs, a forge or two and a large crane used for the metal arts programs. Here, iron is still poured at Sloss, and I think nature wants to bury the scar of it under green tangles and Virginia Creeper. There are still signs posted for the last men who worked at Sloss in 1971. Protect your hands. Your wage earners. You owe it to your family. Two soft, white hands are clasped together under the words. I wonder if anyone but me sees the irony (ha ha) in that. I made some jam from the Sloss blackberries last week and although it might be my perverted sense of taste, I swear it adds a metallic twang to my brown toast. In the end, when all of our industrialism has amounted to nothing, the world will end under a tangle of blackberry brambles, Virginia Creeper and poke weeds. Just ask Walker Percy.

On another note, here's a very cool exhibition in Auburn. My neighbor is one of the artists. You must go.

Tomato Heaven

There are something like seven baby tomatoes on my German Queen this morning. One of my neighbors calls it a "Drag Queen." She says that would be more appropriate in this neighborhood. When she tells a joke, one of her eyes does a little half wink and her mouth kind of puckers up. She plants sticks in her yard and they grow into Oak Leaf Hydrangeas. That's her spiritual gift. I think she sneaks around at night and takes cuttings of other neighbor's plants and makes them grow in her laboratory. It doubles as a kitchen. I imagine her mug-shot. She'd be posed front-side-otherside with gloves and garden shears.

I've a Better Bush plant as well. It's not an heirloom like the German Queen, but it works it's heart out making smallish red fruit out of air and soil and water. (And Miracle Grow, of course.) Last weekend, I planted a Super Fantastic and a Mr. Stripey. I'm wishing them well. They're my friends and I'll have to learn how to salvage their seeds to bring them back next year.

The hollyhocks are growing brilliantly. Last year, their flowers were pure white, but this year I've got some pinks too. They came off the same seed, so I'm not sure how that is possible. It makes me happy and reminds me of Marguritte who gave them to me two summers ago. I've got more than I can manage and I'm happy. I hope Marguritte is doing half as well as her hollyhocks.

The sunflowers look like weeds in the flowerbed. I wonder how long I can continue to grow unruly weeds in my flowerbed and strange vines in 5-gallon buckets on the front stoop before I get a letter from the city.

Maybe,Baby, The Gypsy Lied

Somewhere up north of here, there is a field full of strawberries in the middle of the sky. The best berries hide in the middle of the rows shaded by green-leaf fans and white flowers with buttercup centers that remind me of the dumplings with the buttery middles my father tried to steal from me when I was small. Pay seven dollars and walk down a sandy path past the Old Lady with Her Bum in the Air. (Don't say "follow the old lady bum!" Because that bum belongs to someone's mother.) Pick quick and try not to think of what it would be like to be a migrant picker. That just makes your back hurt. By this time tomorrow, I'll have jam. And shortcake. I left a bucket on my neighbor's porch. He spread them out and took a picture for his Big Love Thing who lives very far away and likes to eat strawberries and beef jerky for supper. He has sad eyes. She'll be here to stay soon. I'm glad about that.

Today as I drove back over the Mountain toward home, I saw the sun fall like a crimson comet into the western part of the city. Now, the moon is coming up under Vulcan and the WBRC sign, just to the left of the first tower. It's almost time to sleep, so I'll put on my white pajamas and crawl under my quilt. Lately, I've been sleeping underneath just the quilt. It makes me feel loved. Tomorrow for breakfast, I'll have strawberries and bread left on my porch by a kind stranger. I'm not used to affection of that sort. It feels like a massage: theraputic and a little painful. I hang on the cusp of anger and acceptance. This feels like grief. I send it to the Cross. Amen. Good Night.

Is that Me baby, or just a Brilliant Disguise?

I had just finished paying for two bottles of Safer spray and twenty pounds of soil when the rain started. The people in the checkout line scratched and pecked like yard chickens when the wind picked up and the clouds moved in. I think it's going to rain. Do you think it might? I hope I can get to the car in time. Where are the Venus Flytraps? Can someone bring them to me? I don't want to get out of line! The Holy Spirit and I shared a joke at their expense: do you remember that time we..? Yes. I remember. Are you going to make it rain? I might. Bring it. Bring it like you did back then. And the sky, ripped apart by His laughter in lightning, opened up and the rain fell down on the asphalt and the cars and the people who covered their heads inadequately. Sinners in the hands of a mirthful God. In the liturgy for Whitsunday, Jesus says ...and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. It's a strange and intoxicating thing to have the only Son of God be manifest. If it's something we're able to share with others, I haven't been able to. If it happens in community, I haven't seen it. I believe there's a margin between what human fellowship can offer and what a body needs to hold itself together. No matter how we idolize our human communities and try and make them stretch across that black expanse, they always snap back into their prefabricated shapes and forms. They can't span the distance and cover a lonely human soul. And that, I believe, is evidence of a merciful God. Because it's in the gaps and the margins that Jesus chooses to manifest himself to those who love him and are loved by the Father. No church, no community, no sermon, no communion, no sacrament is as sacred to me as the jokes we tell each other when the Holy Spirit and I are alone together. It's Jesus manifesting himself because I love him. And he loves me.

Neighborhood Part 11

Laura's belongings are piled up on the sidewalk. A model ship, clothing in tiny sizes, laminated posters and other detritus sit abandoned under the Chinaberry tree collecting rain and becoming bedding for the feral cats who make Southside their home. Piles like hers are all over Southside. I used to think they represented irresponsible neighbors who just dumped their junk in the street as they moved, but it finally dawned on me that they're the scars of hasty evictions. The piles look like junk because all of the tenant's valuable possessions have long since been traded for drugs or found their way to one of Birmingham's pawn shops. Each pile represents a person. Laura's pile is the collected flotsam and jetsam of her life. Her clothing. Things she treasured and couldn't trade. Marks of her identity under the rain, under the wind, under feet, under cars as if her life were a mark on a chalkboard that could be removed with one swoop of the landlord's eraser. I don't know if it's wrong, but I'm glad she's gone. And I don't blame the landlord for evicting her. She didn't leave him with a choice. It's just that I feel compelled to eulogize her murdered future somehow. Here lived Laura. She is a wrecked shell of a human being, but she is still a human being. She murdered her dreams, but she still had them. Once upon a better time, here in this house, under these Chinaberry trees.

I've learned a little more about Laura's dreams over the past weeks. In an unsurprising twist of fate (unsurprising only because nothing is very surprising anymore), I discovered I have a friend who worked with Laura before she relapsed back in January. My friend actually found Laura a little intimidating. I found her intimidating, too, when I used to see her leave her apartment in a suit and heels off to her marketing job. She was a graduate student. Intelligent, reserved, serious. As I sat on the porch barefoot in my husband's shirt and ratty jeans, I felt less than her somehow. She had a purpose and a plan. I had a lawnmower and a monkey's job. Laura was my friend, my friend remembers. Never in a million years would I have believed she would come to this. One of my neighbors remembers Laura refusing an offered beer. I used to have a rough life, she said, and I don't drink anymore. She used to tell the neighbors that there were a lot of bad people in our neighborhood and we laughed, thinking "well, you're the bad people, Laura." But now I see what she meant. She was afraid she couldn't stand up under the pressure of available heroin and available clientele.

So, in the end, she didn't make it. She's alive if you can call it that, somewhere in south Florida serving a four-year sentence for prostitution and possession, but she didn't make it out of Southside back into life. Heroin addicts refer to the time when your drugs are gone and you're junk-sick as "nighttime." So, it's nighttime for Laura, and maybe hope comes in the morning. Somehow, I think I've been fascinated by her life all these weeks because it's a metaphor for what's going on all around me. But unlike Laura, I feel delivered. I feel that somehow God looked at my little family and said That's enough for Team Smith. And I know I don't deserve it. I'm not better than the people facing the wrecking ball, but that knowledge doesn't stem my gratitude for being spared. I'm tempted to think that God spared us because David deserved it, but that isn't true either. I think he spared us because he's good. He'll lead us into difficulty many more times as we walk this earth, but he won't let us be destroyed. Ever. He promised and I believed him.

I had a dream that David and I were standing on the edge of a cliff. He took my hand and said "Just don't let go," and together we leaped off our security into the Wild Blue Yonder. And God said it was good.

When The Lord Made Me, He Made A Ramblin Man

A 59-year-old man showed up at a Wal-Mart in Tuscaloosa with a suitcase and went inside. Ten minutes later, surveillance cameras caught him climbing into a yellow taxi and driving away. For almost two months, his family didn't know what had happened to him. Was he abducted? Did he have some sort of mental break? There weren't any answers to their frenzied questions. It turns out that the taxi bore him to the Tuscaloosa Greyhound Station where he boarded a bus bound for El Paso. He didn't say why. He just went. Fifty years ago, he might have just hopped a box car down at the rail yard to the sound of a harmonica's lonesome waw-waw-waw as the city rolled away. News reports didn't indicate if he had any plans to come home.

It was a bad thing to do. His family was worried about him. He's a bad man, but I understand. I feel it as I sit at a fashionable pre-fabricated restaurant with a group of people I know little and understand less. I feel it when I look at the same sink full of dishes I washed yesterday. I feel it when I see a private jet span the blue distance between the television towers above my happy cottage. I feel it when I'm cornered by the pleasant conversation of a person who isn't all that pleasant. It's a feeling of wanting to go. Not somewhere, just away, and maybe not even forever. I saw an open box car flashing down a track in our neighborhood recently and I imagined running along beside it, throwing my bundle and pulling myself up. I thought let's just jump in there and see where we go. I was almost kidding. I feel I've been seeking some kind of freedom my whole life. A few times, I've tasted it. I used to drive my car along the highway between Auburn and Tallasee just to watch the river pour over the Alabama Power damn. The dark water under the glimmer of the bug-flecked streetlights made me tired. The highway flickering by under the sporadic light of honkey tonks and auto body repair shops made me sad. Freedom, in that sense, isn't what I wanted it to be.

The mystery I'm starting to unravel is that freedom is the fortitude to stay put until the restlessness passes. So, here am I, anchored for the course. Not free to jump a train, but free to stand and be delivered from all that makes me want to.

Copper Bob

They call him "Copper Bob" because if you look at his face in just the right light, you can see on his skin the greenish cast of the copper he's been sculpting for twenty-five years. His studio is in an abandoned limestone quarry somewhere north of town. He's a stooped man, permanently fixed in an almost subservient posture. He doesn't make eye contact readily, but when he does, I can see the little boy he used to be still suspended in mischievous blue eyes hidden in a mass of curly honey hair. I can see the little boy in his art, too. A copper frog swings on a copper trapeze suspended from a copper limb. A copper gnome hides in a copper knothole. A copper sunflower dances in a passing breeze.

I'm learning the subtle differences between the iron and the copper sculptors. Iron artists work in casting teams of something like ten people. Everyone counts. Everyone matters when you're melting iron in a 2800 degree furnace that just might be named something like "Old Grumpy" to indicate it's propensity to blow up in your face. There's a feeling of glory and wonder at the human accomplishment of channeling nature and doing something you just, by all logical summation, shouldn't be doing. It's electric. It's sexy. It's overwhelming. Even the clothing cast iron sculptors wear belies the testosterone surge of man (or woman)-over-nature creation. Their leather jackets bear the mark of where they come from. One might say CHICAGO. One might be a picture of a fairy and and bear the mark ICPO WORLD FAMOUS FOUNDRY. I once saw one of them throw back his face shield and light a cigarette off a cooling sculpture. He reached for a swig of beer before he went back to tap-tap-tapping the furnace to start it's molten flow. Their casual approach to possible incineration lends them a mystery I haven't felt since I was ten years old watching a lion tamer at the circus. Immediately, I think I've gotta get in there. They say that the ghost of an old iron man killed at Alice Furnace more than a hundred years ago continued to haunt the catwalk at Sloss up until it closed so he could see the tapping of the furnace. My neighbor says he's still there on iron-pour days and that his shadow darts between the buildings trying to get a look at what they're doing. I can't imagine what it must have been like to watch the tap of Old Number 2 from the First Avenue viaduct. The old furnaces can't be used now, but I'm grateful for their 8-foot replacements like someone who has never seen the sun is happy for the moon.

Well, I meant this entry to be about Copper Bob, but I'm too smitten with the iron to write about the copper. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you: Susan in face shield pouring iron. June 22. Can't wait.

Iron Pour

The Destruction and Redemption of a Wannabe Artist Soul

On a trip to New York in the summer of 2000, I met an art student from Jamaica Queens who told me that I had no ability to evaluate art. What education do you have? she asked. What ability do you have? What experience do you have? You don't know anything. To be honest, that seven-year-old statement from a girl whose name I can't remember and whose face I wouldn't be able to recognize again lodged somewhere in my soul and crippled my abilities both to look at a piece of art and appreciate it or to walk away from it unimpressed. Actually, it was the second great undoing of Susan, artistically speaking. The first came after a bad experience with an elementary school art teacher. In the end, I became a writer. Writing is my terra familiar, my br'er patch. I critique it and praise it with absolute confidence. I like this. I say. I don't like this. I'm not obliged to qualify or explain. It's true that I've been Institutionally Certified to have an opinion about literature, but if some student of literature were to emerge from Queens and ask me to justify my basic right to have an opinion about writing I would say simply: I can read. And then I would step on her face with my supercool Frye Boot.

Fortunately for the crippled artist in me, God is Haggo'el, the Redeemer. I remember walking into the Birmingham Museum of Art for the first time in more than fifteen years and being surprised at my ability to have an opinion. I see Mary Cassatt's sketches and I appreciate them. I see Albert Bierstadt's Looking Down Yosemite Valley and am raptured. I get this. I think to myself. I get this and it's my right. So what qualification do I have to appreciate this painting? I say simply: I can see. Over the subsequent months, I see more redemption. I realize that my house sits amid the houses of an art professor, the metal artists, a photographer, a chef, and an artist in clay. Art invades me. Everything is beauty. I get a street education in high art courtesy of Haggo'el and learn I'm not half as stupid as I allowed myself to believe. This weekend, I got to take a field trip. (It was the second I've had recently, but the first deserves a post of its own.) So assaulted were my senses that I experienced complete overload and neared a visual meltdown. I saw many artists. I want to write about three.

Ol' 55 (Or, have you noticed that I keep naming these posts after Tom Waits songs?)

One of my neighbors is a college professor. I don't know what he teaches, but I tell everyone that it's Rockabilly Ethos. For his final, you have to go to a Brian Setzer concert and learn how to roll a pack of Camels in the sleeve of your plain white t-shirt. For extra credit, you can tattoo a teardrop at the corner of your eye. On Saturdays, he throws a deep cuff in his blue jeans and whacks away at his yard with a scythe. Sometimes, he wears a shirt. I always take that as a sign of a good weekend. I just saw him drive past his own house to look at the collection of motley plants growing accidentally and very much on purpose in his front yard. Intentionally careless, he sweeps his pompadour back into place before he kisses his wife hello. She, incidentally, looks like a cast member from Thirtysomething. The best thing about this neighbor is his English Bulldog. His daughter named it Pickles. He would have named it Daddy-O, I bet.

My father says it was great to be a teenager in the 50's. To me, it sounds like a lot of fighting down by the San Antonio River, finishing concrete, cursing in Spanish and peeing off bridges. He says he went to a bar with a Mexican man he worked with called Blacky Salazar when he was about thirteen. The bartender gave him a Lone Star and he drank it. I guess they both figured that after a man's day at work, he deserved a man's beer. He says that about halfway through that beer, the doors opened and a couple of Texas Rangers strutted in. (Now, I assume they strutted, because that's what Texas Men do. They strut. Think George W. Bush with a few extra pounds and a heap more sense.) Up went that beer, he recalls, and in it's place down went a Big Red. After a few minutes they decided the bandito they were looking for had crept down towards Laredo and back over the border and they left. Up went the Big Red and back down went the beer. I like that story. I asked my dad if people actually called each other "Daddy-O" back then. "Only if they wanted their asses kicked," he said. Three cheers for Dad and three cheers for the asses he kicked down by the San Antonio River back in '55.

For I am a Rain Dog, Too (Or, Not So Fast Shorty: Neighborhood Part 10)

The rain is a wild thing running off the roof and on the broad and curling tomato leaves and the concrete and the air conditioner and the broken glass lying in the side yard. The dry mint leaves strain from their pot to breathe the mist. They will end their lives floating with ice in sugared bourbon, and I think they can't have higher ambitions. The bus strains up the hill. Black in the back, white in the front. This phenomena bothers my husband tremendously. He averts his eyes when the bus breaks down and the transit authority brings out its vintage replacement. It's too much. he says. I can't bear the sight of it. Rights so hard earned are forgotten upon realization. The rain runs off the hood of my sleek new car and makes me glad I won't have to wash it. I can't see the top of the second television tower through the fog, but I know it's there and it makes me glad. When I was small driving on the 20-59 through the city, I looked at those towers and thought being able to see them from your house to be the epitome of urban chic. I cling to that belief as I crane my neck to make them out, one to the left and one to the right, over the trees. The wind growls across the top of Red Mountain, along the coal-road past the iron ore. A train rumbles past Sloss. My wind chime struggles to escape the fatal embrace of a Confederate Jasmine. God is in His Heaven. All is right with the world. Somewhere. But not here. Not just now.

Last night, I dreamed of being eaten by a giant fallopian tube with a snarling ovary face. I dreamed of stepping on a dirty needle as I padded barefoot through the grass. I dreamed of rifles and pistols waltzing Matilda through the back yard. I startled awake and flew up the well of sleep to see a million white lights flitting about my room haphazardly like schizophrenic Tinkerbells. Well, this is just great. I thought to myself as I reached for my glasses and saw the whirling lights of an ambulance brought into focus. I wrapped myself again in my quilt and brought the hem over my eyes to block out the lights and siren. That's when the rain began.

Yesterday, Jackson interrupted my conversation with Tom Collins as I sat on the porch with a friend. His appearance didn't bring the usual cold shiver of dread. It should have. He looks older to me now. My fuzzy head only permitted a few of his words to sink in. Extradition to Florida blocked. Time elapsed. Released. Somewhere in Birmingham. Tonight.

Will Ferrell's Landlord

Will Ferrell's Landlord

The End. (Neighborhood, Part 9)

Jackson wanted to talk, so I walked across the street to his car. "Well," he says,"she's gone." Paul, her boyfriend, is in the Hoover jail. No one came to bail him out. Laura's mother picked her up underneath the spreading Chinaberry branches. There's a sheet of plywood nailed over the doorway. Gone, gone. She's long gone. Gone from Alabama, she ain't never coming home.

Two purple finches dart out from under the heavy branches of the Tulip Poplar tree. The doves who made their home on the mine-trailing pillars holding up my front porch teach their babies how to fly. The sky spreads golden over the interstate and fringes itself with pink. A migrating Broad Winged hawk makes a last swoop through the clouds between the television towers on Red Mountain and I see WBRC light up. I'm suddenly tired. Soul and bone tired like I used to be at the end of a day of horse breaking. It starts in my back and envelopes me like a hug. I'm going to sleep well tonight under the spreading Chinaberry branches.

Jackson tells me what they found in her apartment. A half-starved cat, a few rigs, a plugged toilet. Somewhere, evening starts for Laura . If she can, she'll tie up and nod off. If she can't, she'll be cold and junk-sick. Night will fall. Jackson says she had a wedding picture in her apartment and she looked more beautiful than Brigette Nielson. (In the Rocky days, he clarifies, before Flava-Flav.) David comes home and I hug him for a long time. Our metal artist, drives up and his pretty speckled dog jumps around in the front yard. Corduroy makes friends.

I see another junkie walk up the street and hide in a shrub when he spots a patrol car waiting for him. I see another. And another. If this were a screenplay, I'd make the camera draw back and take a panoramic shot of all the junkies all over town working for a fix before darkness overtakes the city. Life and Death stake their identity on the existence of each other.

Good night track marks. Good night hot rigs. Good night all-night brawls. Good night tac. rifles in my back yard. Good night, Laura. Good night, Me. Good night Birmingham, I couldn't love you more.

The Best Friend You've Got is a Railroad Track (Neighborhood Part 8)

STONEYO was picked up on some outstanding warrants last week. Jackson said he admitted being a loyal customer of Laura. I couldn't resist a toldyouso, so I didn't. I imagine he struck out on his tiny motorcycle for parts unknown and less hot with the wind in his hair and a needle between his toes. Laura doesn't have many clients anymore. I think she must be on the last legs of a desperate downward spiral courtesy of her friend, China White or more probably at this point, plain old black tar. She's not a day-tripper now. She's a gutter junkie with some experience. Laura's boyfriend was last night's collar. He, too, had some outstanding warrants. When the cops finally got inside her apartment, they found Laura's boyfriend and his girlfriend. Laura, they said, was hidden under some dirty clothes in the closet. The word is that she's officially been evicted, but apparently, it takes three months to evict someone Hallelujah, Amen. One of the artist neighbors beat it back to Michigan last week. I've just had enough of this, he said. So have I, but I'm invested. On the heels of a quick pleasedtomeetyou, his girlfriend said I'm spending the night in Memphis with or without you. I can't dig this anymore. I was sorry to see him go.

Jackson patted the boyfriend down and put one hand over his head before shoving him in the back of the car. It was a learned gesture. I know in my heart that Jackson doesn't really care if he bashes his head on the roof of the car or not. He just doesn't want to get stuck with a hot rig. The girlfriend lit a cigarette in the darkness and tried to make her battered car start. When it wouldn't go, Jackson fired up his bullhorn and said Ma'am, you're gonna have to release that emergency brake. She was so flustered that he had to help her find it with the bright beam of his Maglite. She beat it down the street, ashes glowing. I imagine I won't be seeing her again. When she arrived that afternoon, she had smiled at me as she slid over to the passenger side of her car to let Laura's boyfriend drive. She seemed to think she was some kind of teenager on a date, and I guess she might have been. Tough luck is a hard lesson. I never smiled back. After the arrest, Laura tottered down the street on four-inch high heels, her face hidden in her sleeves. I watched this scene from my front porch while eating a hamburger with spinach and tomato. Cops inside, Cops outside but with better reception.

The day before, I met Laura's uncle as I hugged the artist and his girlfriend goodbye. He's an attorney and he told us how worried he was about her. Her son hasn't heard from her in weeks. He's apparently so upset that he's dropped out of school and moved in with his grandmother. They don't know where she is. They don't know how she got there. They don't know how to get her back. He tried to give us his phone number but we didn't want it. I don't know what he expected from us. I'm sorry, he said. I'm sorry for all of this. After he had gone, the remaining artist observed the contrast. I'm the neighbor who can't sleep. He's the family who can't sleep. I hope they get her soon. For all of our sakes.

A Fragment of My Childhood: The Story of the Days When Carole King Sang Children's Songs Instead of Four Poofy Australians in a Big Red Car

Hit the Dirt! (Neighborhood Part 7)

I think I should put Jackson on our Christmas card list. He's become a regular feature in the small circle of my life. Yesterday afternoon he pulled to a stop at the curb, and when I started to speak to him, he shook his head and went back to scrutinizing his notebook. After a few minutes, he flipped it closed and drove further up the street where he parked. My New Friend the Cast Iron Sculptor looked quizzically at me when I took him some lemon chess pie a few minutes later. I dunno. I said before he asked. I guess it's just that time of day. Seeing the police, talking to the police, questioning the police, and being questioned ourselves is something that happens almost every day now. Laura hasn't been seen in a week or more, but when I saw him at the Southern Conference on Cast Iron Art on Saturday, my neighbor told me he heard her moving around in the dark and waterless apartment at night. I imagine she's become some sort of Kafka-esque beetle creature thriving on heroin and waking up at night. I wouldn't be surprised to see she'd grown a few hairy and segmented legs if I met her on the street. I don't know how you can live up there without water, he said, but he cut the hose she was running from his faucet to her window anyway. I don't blame him. I hate her, he says, and I agree, much to my own chagrin. I told my neighbor about my conflicting emotions. A body can only take so much before compassion wears thin, he said. This is true. For all of us who aren't Christ.

I came inside to make supper and I walked into our bedroom to get my white apron from the end of our bed. For some reason, I had left the curtain open. I almost never do that, but so hungry for the sun and the green Chinaberry leaves was I that I broke with tradition and let the sunshine in. As I went to close it, I found myself eye to eye with one of three cops standing in my back and side yard with drawn rifles. Get away from the window. Get away from the window now, one of them said. I flattened myself on the floor and pressed my face into the heartwood boards in my bedroom. I crawled into the kitchen on my belly to avoid being caught in the crossfire that might have ricocheted through the window and all around the bedroom where I sleep. From this vantage point, I found my missing slipper hidden under the bed and realized how far I have traveled from where I first began.

I didn't want to move here. I wanted to stay in Vestavia Hills in a safe little ranch house near the supermarket. But moved here we did with the encouragement of friends who no longer speak to us to be close to a church that no longer wants us. It was a foolish move. And I suppose I'm a fool, but as I watch my tomatoes grow on the front stoop and laugh at my brother-in-law's story of having been reprimanded by his neighborhood association for having let too many sticks fall in his yard, as I see the sparks fly from my neighbor's furnace at Sloss, as I laugh too loudly over too much Southern Comfort on my front porch, as I smell barbecue cooking at the neighborhood rib joint at six in the morning, as I see plants first introduced to my flowerbeds fifty years ago start to sprout again, I realize that I'm home. I'm home. I'm home sandwiched between a wannabe rock band and and a motley crew of iron artists who always have dirty hands. I'm home in a yard with a garden unplanned and a freedom to sit on my front porch and swig straight from the bottle. I'm free to laugh too loudly. I'm free to not be nice. I'm free. Sometimes, I'm on my face on the floor, but then again, sometimes I'm not. I was mislead into this Egypt, but what Evil meant for evil, God meant for good. No church or person will ever help this city, but by the grace of God, maybe this city will help us.

Lodged--Robert Frost

The rain to the wind said,
"You push and I'll pelt."
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged -- though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt

Why People Do The Things They Do

She did things differently from the rest of the Melanies and Scarletts. She didn't wait for the husband to have the baby. She had angels tattooed on her arms and shoulders. She was always different from the rest of us, but nobody every told her that so she didn't know.

I joked with her in Sunday School. One time, I hurt her feelings and she cried. In high school, she gave me a book about seals. She was reaching out. I didn't hear. Years later, I saw her with her beautiful baby and I didn't bother to write her number down. I should have. I should have. She was my friend. She was reaching out. But I didn't hear.

I don't know what goes through your head to make you do something like that. I would have tried to help. But I didn't hear. I heard the news this afternoon in a casual way. I won't be seeing her again. I should have done what I could have done to share the burden then. I will always be sorry for that.

Dood Looks Like a Lady (Neighborhood Part 6)

I believe spring finally bested the tenacious tentacles of winter this weekend, but not before the cold rolled over the city like a lion bent on picking off the fresh shoots and tender buds of our roses, hollyhocks, tomatoes, and trees. Of all my plants, the Don Juan roses on either side of my front steps faired the worst. Their red blossoms bent dejectedly underneath the rain and cold almost touching the grass. Gardeners have a rule of thumb about how things should grow after they are first planted. It's first year no, second year slow, third year go. Unfortunately, my roses were going. I hope they recover. I tied them up and said a prayer before I went to get the hose to water the tomatoes. As I rounded the house, I heard Laura and her boyfriend fighting through the upstairs window next door. This isn't about you! he said. Of course it's about me! she answered. I imagine they were fighting about his mother. She was the one to set the police swarming around the house on Sunday night with guns and flashlights and curses. Apparently, she doesn't fancy the idea of her 24-year-old son shacking-up with a 44-year-old I.V. drug user. There isn't anything she can do, though, but watch his life uncoil before her eyes. The police told her not to come back. I started talking to Corduroy as loudly as I possibly could. I think she's tired of them. She just looked up and went back to worrying her lamb shank bone. A very tall man on a tiny red motorcycle pulled up the street and meeped "shave and a haircut" on his feeble horn before shooting around the corner and disappearing. A few minutes later, he was back in a familiar white Chevrolet. His license plate says "STONEYO." He's come to deliver the wake-up shot just like he does every evening at the same time. He pulled over just before Jackson pulled up.

Officer Jackson calls his beat "the party L," because it's roughly comprised of the area between 20th Street and the 5-points bars, to the part of Magnolia Avenue abutting Brother Bryan Park. On any given night, Jackson is called upon by the city to confine the homeless, keep the drunk fraternity boys from fighting, and keep the rich people dining at Frank Stitt's Highlands Bar and Grill from being so afraid of the homeless and the drunk frat boys that they drive back over Red Mountain before they let go of any more of their money. He laughs about it. I imagine he laughs because he knows that as soon as he gets some experience on Birmingham's mean streets, he'll accept a position with Mountain Brook, Vestavia or Hoover for twice as much money and 75-percent fewer crack houses. In my opinion, he's a government cat-hearder with a gun. He isn't really allowed to fight crime, but he does his best to harrass it away. In so doing, he often takes some time away from the L to drive up 20th Street and make good on his threat to make it a miserable month for Laura
. She's never happy to see him coming. As much as I like him, I'm not always happy to see him, either. It always means drama; the kind of drama that takes five hours and means no sleep.

I tell him what I've been seeing. He tells me what he's been seeing. STONEYO overhears and bails out on Laura and her wake-up shot. She's going to be sick and cross within an hour. He never comes back. I tell Jackson that one of the artists found a pile of used rigs next to the trash can the week before. So, she's shooting, I say, thinking she was a meth-head. She must be far-gone. Jackson says she's always been shooting and that her drug of choice is heroin. He sees other known junkies in and out of her apartment all night long and into the morning. This must be why the artists have taken to sleeping in their studio at Sloss Furnace. I can't imagine what would be bad enough to make them sleep at Sloss with the ghouls and ghosts of unfortunately-smelted iron workers, but apparently, it's Laura. I live next door to Sid and Nancy and it isn't as cool as I would have thought when I was embroiled in my Sex Pistols obsession. A tall blond woman comes down the steps and climbs into a red Chevy Blazer. See that woman? Jackson asks. She used to be a dude.

The Ballad of A Junkie, Neighborhood Part 5

Lately, when I return to the city, or even back from the Old Library where I go to hear the friendly murals whisper to me under the pendulous lights that always seem eager to illuminate my way, I inevitably come back to the whirling blue lights that mean things aren't well next door. I hear the cops shouting in the darkness, their voices traveling up the beams of their half-mile lights to her bedroom window. This is a hot house, Laura. And if you don't come outside right now, things are going to be a hell of a lot hotter. This is going to be the most miserable month of your whole miserable life. I hear her stumble in the darkness and curse. Sunday night, she dropped like a cat off her back porch and landed on the neighbor's porch below. These neighbors represent a treasured faction of the Old Guard. They're artists in cast iron and steel, a remainder of the vibrant artistic community Southside used to be before we were here and before those who were here before us were here. I imagine Southside in the seventies. It's the Southside that existed for Jim Reed before he had to pack his Fond Memories and Old Books and move them down to a space on 3rd Avenue. I imagine that back then, the whole world between 20th and 14th Streets was Jim's Museum of the Weird South, home to writers and painters and bangers-on-pipes. I recently learned that Dennis Covington once lived here in a rundown Tudor on Green Springs Avenue. I drive by that house on my way to buy Fresh Mozzarella at the fancy Publix and I think oh house, if only you could tell a tale of the artists who lived here and what they did to pass their time. I imagine that the stories it could tell about Dennis Covington would be acceptably pornographic, if such a thing is possible. Acceptably pornographic and redemptive like the story of when his wife fell down before the Lord after having aborted a miracle baby because it's parentage was disputed. I knew at that moment, she writes, that I was forgiven. And to her, forgiven means no consequences. I wish that's what forgiven meant to me.

I know that Laura found no forgiveness from the Birmingham Cops who wasted their flashlight batteries looking for her feather-thin frame between the Chinaberry trees on Sunday night.

Little Known Facts About Me

For a brief time, I worked at Village Photographers in Auburn taking Zaps. The second or third time David and I visited RMC, I saw a guy that looked familiar. Finally, it dawned on me that I had seen him, not at church, but at a frat party in Auburn saying, Hey Zap Girl, take a picture of my butt! I guess he started to take his pants off, but I didn't stay around there long enough to make sure. There are two, no three, things you can count on when you are in this line of work:

1. Many of your co-workers will know something about Dungeons and Dragons.
2. There will always be a picture of someone naked or partially naked somwhere in the rolls you shoot on any given night.

3. There will always be a shot of white chicks making gang signs.

The Ballad of Junkie( Neighborhood Drama Part 4)

Officer G. is as round and dark as a plum. On his belt he carries a tazer equipped with a small camera used to record the spastic gyrations of everyone he subdues. I suppose the camera was added after Mayor Kincaid got bent out of shape when a few people died after having been tazed. The police called that Collateral Damage, the City Council called it Unacceptable. (If Representative John Rogers called it something, it would probably have been "Mushhumphaloa Acrakcadoah," or something like that. None of his constituents would have any idea what he had said, but he would have said it with such conviction they would have rubbed their chins and said "That's right. He sure is right about that." and gone on with their business.) The new camera protects the citizens and gives the officers at the South Precinct some pretty funny home movies to watch between their shifts. I can only imagine the knee-slapping good time they have watching some cracked-out kid involuntarily invoking the aid of Saint Vitus as he "flops like a fish" on the pavement. G.--officers refer to each other and themselves only by their last names--explains the tazer to the small group of neighbors between the pansies and tomatoes on my front stoop. "It goes pop pop pop pop!" he says. "And that's when you know to get the hell out of the way." Without having to be asked, he Pop! Pop! Pops! the tazer at a nearby cat. The cat escapes startled, but un-tazed. I think Officer G. would like to have the footage of a tazed cat, poofed out like a cotton ball, to show back at the South Precinct at the end of his shift.

G. was just starting his second shift, 11-to-7, after having finished the 3-to-11 shift thirty minutes before. "I need some MO-NAY!" he says. I wish I had some to share. He shows us the other crime-fighting tools he has on his belt, and explains that most of them were purchased with his own money. Flashlights, night-sticks, handcuffs, guns. His police cruiser is ten years old and showing its age. As he talks, I realize that when his car was new, G. was still a sixteen-year-old offensive lineman at Jackson-Olin High School. When he finished his 30-minute interview with my neighbor's much younger boyfriend, he comes to ask us "What did he do now? I can't figure it out." I have the strange suspicion that Officer G. talks just a little too much.

Some three hours earlier, David and I followed 18th Street over the hump that is Red Mountain back into the belly of the city. One of my favorite views is a panoramic vista of the Jones Valley along that route just below the statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge. Birmingham creeps through the valley and up both sides as if it sprouted from a seed dropped by the need for iron just after the Civil War. I used to have a pastor with a small son who greeted the buildings and the rusted-out furnaces by saying "Hello City! I'm back." I understand. Although it is the world of my youth and experience, I always feel the world outside the city is the place I go to thoroughly embarrass myself. The way I dress, the way I talk, the way I think, the way I walk are just a little different. I've always subscribed to the theory that architecture and environment contribute to human identity. Now I know that if theories can somehow be substantiated by empirical evidence, that one has been. Two years in, I'm different.

The change started as imperceptibly as a morning glory vine creeping up the window. As odd as it sounds, I think it happened over time as I was forced to deal with the homeless. As I was forced to deal with the poor. As I was forced to deal with the drug-addled, the HIV positive, the neglected, the mentally ill. In and of themselves, it isn't so very hard to address issues such as poverty, disease, and destitution. But I'm always flummoxed when I start to wonder how Christ marries these issues. How is Christ manifest in the homeless? How is Christ manifest in the life of a beat-cop who doesn't make enough money to pay the rent after he's purchased his own equipment? When you live in the World Beyond the City, you drive away after a night's boozing and stop thinking about Roosevelt who lives under a bench at Brother Bryan Park. You stop thinking about Fred up the street who sells cocaine out of his apartment. You stop thinking. Here, though, they are always with you. You cannot escape. And as much as you want to change them, as much as you want to help them, they turn around and change you. They hand you a dubious gift wrapped in a dirty newspaper and all that is left is a humble acceptance of something you can't give back. Finally you learn, maybe years later, how much you owe them for that. Thank you city. Thank you neighborhood. Thank you Christ, Healer of the World, who causes the morning glory to grow across my broken window. Hello City! I'm back. I'm back to be embraced by those who don't know how much of a stranger I really am.

(Of course, to be continued....)

One More Silly Post

Am I a terrible person for thinking this is hella funny?

My Drawing Shows I'm Losing My Mind

This is my drawing. What does it say about me? Well, I'm pretty sure it doesn't say anything good. This is my last silly post. Tomorrow, I'll update you on what happened to us over the weekend. (Hint: think MORE police cars and MORE neighborhood espionage.)

When Good Frogs Go Bad

The Art of the Swindle
Letters to the Editor

And by Frogs, I mean my favorite jejune Frenchies Foucault and Lacan. (Amid others.)

Neighborhood Drama/Neighborhood Bonding Part 3

Elvis at Three, Howard Finster, 1982

Neighbors I've either not met or haven't spoken to more than a few times in the two years I've lived here came over just to say "hey" and watch the free entertainment unfold. In retrospect, that my Southern upbringing would carry over past the belle days of my bridal teas to the day all of my neighbors would gather on my front porch to see one of our junk-sick neighbors get arrested is bizarre on the level of Flannery O'Connor's leg-stealing Bible salesman. I realize with mingled dismay and delight that my life just might be worthy of a Tennessee Williams play. I've arrived.

Like old soldiers at the VFW, we share our stories. We have seen the men come and go. We have heard the late-night fighting. We've seen other police cars on other nights take other men away in handcuffs. We wonder if the police see what we see. We doubt our conclusions, but the evidence seems irrefutable. We can't be sure. We can be sure, and we are. My neighbors and I are a wall of eyes in the Darkness. We're watching. We're seeing. And our collectivity makes us formidable. Our unabashed curiosity is the product of privilege. We're not afraid because we're the ones with the real weapons: money, education and political pull. It doesn't take long for one of the cops to be ensnared in our unified gravity. He tells us that the undercover cop had been watching a house on another street for weeks. He'd just had the opportunity to make a significant bust when his collar took off down the street, our street, running. He tries not to address us in police easyspeak, but I think he finds it easier to address us in his own vernacular. Two black males. One white female. One used rig left behind the bushes. Two years ago, I would have thought that a rig was something you put in the middle of the Gulf to drill oil. We moved here from Mountain Brook. I couldn't be paid enough to move back.

The police made one arrest. One black male. He had injured his arm. Thus the ambulance. Whether his injuries were from poking himself repeatedly in the arm with a dirty needle or from having a 240-pound cop ride his body down the sidewalk like a surfboard, we'll never know. I guess it's just comforting to know that they'll treat your injuries before they'll throw the book at you. They weren't even looking for our neighbor. They weren't watching, as we had hoped, for the return of her yellow cab. Like the Older Brother, we watched for her return with mounting enthusiasm. Oh, God, please don't let them leave before she comes back. I prayed. I justify this by telling myself she'd get some treatment in prison, but in Alabama, she's more likely to get scabies. This I know. We knew she'd be coming back up the street soon. We'd be there to witness the ultimate Walk of Shame.

As we speculated and watched the cops tie up the loose ends of their search, we made a few jokes about how this would never end up on the news. Within moments, we spotted the satellite truck of one of the local stations lumbering down the street. Seemingly contented to spectate, they never braved the world outside their truck. Sissies. The next morning, they covered a minor pot bust in Vestavia Hills further proving my theory that the Weird South has gone out of fashion. The rest of Birmingham lives in Outer Suburbia. They prefer stainless steel and whitewash to the broken asphalt redrock of the city. They go to bed at night and thank God that they don't have to live on our side of Red Mountain. We go to bed at night and thank God that we've found a bubble of freedom in a city of century-old pretension. Our neighborhood collects those people with means enough to live elsewhere if only they could brave the neighborhood bylaws. Give me trash on the street and broken sidewalks, but please don't tell me what kind of bushes I've got to plant in my own front yard. We're the last remnant of the Weird South in this Southern City. Welcome home, Howard Finster.

As we laughed, a yellow cab rolled truculently (if you're of the sort who believes inanimate objects can, indeed, be truculent) up the street. The driver looked nervous. A dark head emerged from the rear window for a split-second before it was laid flat against the back seat. It looked like no one was in the cab at all as it rolled past her house toward 5-points. Like a shot, my neighbor ran to the window of the nearest police car. There's someone in that cab. There's someone lying flat in the back seat of that cab. Before she finished, the police car reversed cutting off all escape. She loosened her muscles to let them better absorb the impact of being pulled by her arms and forced on her feet. She tottered, but regained her balance before they started patting her legs for weapons and drugs. They got the cab driver, too, but he didn't look as used to it. It's a wonder to me what skills human beings unconsciously learn from the life they lead. Whatever she had, was already smoked or thrown out of the window. She wasn't going to jail that night. They let the cab driver go and he sped down the street. I figure he was saved by feigned ignorance once, but I doubt he'll be tempting the Fates a second time. Since then, I've seen her travel by taxi several times but never again with the same cab company.

Our narrator, Officer Sims, returned to fill us in. He told us that she's a known meth user and prostitute. They're working her case. They're closing in. Every day, I see less of her. She stays in her apartment until about 5:30 then goes off in a cab for less than 20 minutes. She often has clients just before then. She often has clients late at night. I write down a description of their faces and their cars. Sometimes, I get their plate numbers. I call the South Precinct. I'm known there by now and I worry that they think I'm crazy. I think they must know that I'm a Gentrifier who moved here from Mountain Brook. I pour tea. I polish silver. But I don't know proper etiquette for having my neighbor arrested for tricking. In my mind, I'm SuSu Crimefighter. I'm Huggie Bear. I'm a force to be reckoned with. Maybe, I'm a fool. (But I surely do have mad skillz, y'all.) She must feel the heat.

The men look right at my eyes and I look right back and spit on the ground. They look away because I Am More Fierce Than They Would Expect. I'm a little suburban white woman, but I have anger on my side. And I'm angry. I wonder if they have wives or girlfriends at home. I wonder if they have mothers in big hats at church on Sunday. I wonder if they have children. I want to slap and pinch and kick them in tender spots like the backs of their arms or the underside of their legs. I want to intimidate them like they try to intimidate me. I hate them irrationally. I think there must be something instinctive initiating me into the Universal Sorority of Women that makes me hate who they are and what they are doing. I think the initiation is powerlessness. I've noticed that really big men, really strong men, really smart men aren't usually sexist. It's the small men, the weak men, the men who are stupid who hurt women. In that way, they're like spiders. It's the little ones that bite. Sometimes, women just get bitten, and unless God has something mighty awful planned, we're just going to have to move on. In the faces of those men, I see all the times I was powerless. I see all the times no one stood up for me. I see the Liar who let me take the fall for something he did because he knew I had no recourse. Because he knew I had no recourse. So bound is she by addiction and madness and parole violation that she has no recourse. She's a rabbit in a cage. My heart cries out for Mercy.

I have a tiny inclination brewing in my heart. It's a tiny desire to lose my mind just a little bit and float into the Great By and By. It's a tiny desire to stand on my porch and say REPENT, THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS AT HAND! If I hadn't already, living here makes me realize that only grace stands between me and destruction. Only mercy guards the door to Perdition. Only Jesus can solve problems like these. And in my heart, I know He's coming. And he's going to make it Right.