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In its immeasurable wisdom the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has now lifted the ban on bringing liquid stuff on board airplanes now that the dastardly fiends, those who would blow us to kingdom come with our contact lens solutions, have been, allegedly, caught.  However, the TSA has still retained a limit on what you can, and cannot, bring on an airplane in your carry-on luggage.  What you can bring is a single one-quart ziplock plastic bag with little bottles or jars or containers no larger than three ounces, all “fitting comfortably.” As if bottles, jars, and containers understood or experienced comfort.  I relish the lovely fact that I can now ascribe the literary term pathetic fallacy to the TSA.  Ha! 

So.  Since I am to fly to Massachusetts this coming weekend for two funerals, and I don’t wish to check anything liquid in my baggage for many reasons, but mostly because I simply do not trust the giant men who lob luggage onto the conveyor belt that dumps everything unceremoniously into the plane to treat my baggage with anything remotely resembling deference, because of this, I am now playing a weird little game of “how much can I fit in my one quart bag.” 

The answer of course is: not much.  Forget the toothpaste.  Forget the hand lotion. Deodorant?  Um…optional?  Okay, maybe not.  At the risk of sounding ridiculously vain, which dammit I’m not, I am opting for some seemingly very non-essential things over what might be deemed the essential.  So, yes, a tube of lipstick (and yes it’s pink) is going in, even as the toothpaste goes out to make room.  You can, you know, always brush your teeth with a bar of soap.  Well, think about it.  All you’re trying to do is clean the teeth.  Do the teeth care that they are being cleaned with toothpaste?  No, they do not.   Will I care that I have pink lipstick?  I probably will.  Funerals bring out the need for not only the requisite black, reminder of grief, but also the reminder of something else: life, hope, tomorrow.  Pink.

Filling this bag so everything is comfortable s like assembling a puzzle.  I nestle the little two and three ounce containers into my one quart bag and I can’t help but wonder: is this going to protect us?  And if so, from whom?  When I am a mile up in the sky, gazing down at the dark earth below, will it be a comfort to know that a minimum of liquid lies above me in the overhead compartment?  That this will thwart something horrific?  That anything will?  I have no idea.  We die when we die.  But if I am to die a mile above the earth, I will die with pink lipstick.

There are periods in a writer’s life when the words simply run out.  This week and last are one of those periods of time.  Big bout of bronchitis and sinusitis last week left me muttering and stupid until the antibiotics kicked in on Friday.  Then Friday and Saturday we filmed all day for the documentary.  Then Sunday I was a vacant shell of a human being, exhausted and caring more for staring absently at the sky than anything else.  Yesterday, the last six thousand details for the conference I’m running this week on Friday, planning with Natalie what to buy with all our grant monies, planning with Brooke and Jason for their wedding we will photograph.  Today, another six thousand details in preparation for teaching, leaving town on Friday for the two funerals on Saturday, and yes, more for the conference. 

And that’s it.  I have no words left.  None.  It’s all gone. I’ve dropped words into my journal, one or two at a time, hoping that one or another would cause a frisson in my imagination, rippling out like a rock in a pond.  But the words disappear without a trace, straight down, into a void.  I’m slack-jawed with fatigue, a weariness layered with the residue of sadness, punctuated by the flutter of paperwork, fretted by the nattering fragments of worry which wake me up in the night as surely as the whimpering dreams of my little dog Owen, who seems too to be bone-tired, running so much in his sleep after squirrels and tennis balls not caught during the day, that he awakes bleary-eyed, stumbling, wanting only breakfast and to go back to sleep, a good sleep, wordless and dark and long and restorative.

My brother likes to celebrate the odd holiday, and often he takes the opportunity on his blog to remind his readers of special days they might otherwise miss.  So, he tells us, today is Talk Like A Pirate day.  Uh huh.  That’s right.  Check out his blog, and its link to a site or two with basic Pirate talk.  If you’re in the market, so to speak, the pick-up lines are great….arrrr matey

Today is not a good day.  It is dark and rainy, I have the flu, and all of that seems an appropriate backdrop to yesterday’s news.  Last night, I learned that one of my cousins died, and very unexpectedly.  She was only 49.  A year older than I am.  Her mother – my aunt – and my mother were twins, lived not far apart for many years, and so I saw this particular cousin often. We used to play together a lot, including a lot of bowling (which I hated, she loved, and was always better at); we argued about music (I was a classical geek, she preferred pop).  I wore her hand-me-downs for many years and distinctly remember that I was wearing one of her old dresses in fifth grade when I did a flip off the monkey bars and broke my arm. A yellow windowpane plaid wool shift with a side zipper (this was the sixties) which I hated then, but would if I saw it in a vintage store now, pay good money for.

I can’t say my cousin and I were best of friends; we weren’t.  But, she was a fixture in my life, and I in hers.  What we had most in common was our mothers, the twins, and this: we each adored the other’s mother.  Her mom was my favorite aunt (still is), and my mother was her favorite aunt. And so our visits from one house to the other were always marked by the pleasure of being with the two women we loved best.  

The last time I saw my cousin was eight or nine years ago.  My mother was still alive.  It was a few days before Christmas.  I picked up my cousin at her apartment, and brought her to a Christmas concert on a Saturday afternoon, somewhere in Arlington.  We sat in the middle of a huge Catholic Church, listened to a glorious choir sing Christmas hymns and carols, then sang along ourselves when it was our turn.  My cousin and I were in different worlds by then: I happily married and living a life far away in Indiana; my cousin still living close to home, not as happy as she wished to be, nor as well.  We didn’t know what to say to one another, in fact didn’t say much at all.  But I do remember this: we stood side by side in that beautiful church, a church filled pew after pew with people, the air thick with the smells of Christmas: bayberry and pine boughs and newly lit candles.  And embracing everyone, that echoing brilliant song, song we added to that afternoon with our own voices. 

During one carol I stole a glance at my cousin; and I do wish I could remember which carol it was — was it ‘Silent Night’ as I imagine now it might have been?  I don’t know.  Perhaps it was.  Silent night, Holy night, all is calm, all is bright.  I turn and see that my cousin is smiling, quietly happy, singing the familiar words and fully present in the moment.   If I were a better person, with a bigger heart, I might have taken her hand.  I didn’t. 

When the concert was over, we stopped somewhere for coffee and cake, talked about things I no longer remember.  Then, I drove my cousin to the corner by her apartment, dropped her off, and watched as she walked down the street.  She turned the corner, and then she was gone. 

In the 1930’s, George Orwell embarked on an inquiry into the lives of coal miners in the industrial north of England; in 1937, The Road to Wigan Pier was published by the Left Bank Book Club, the group which originally sent Orwell to investigate the poverty and unemployment of the region.  The result of his work is a book remarkable for its searingly honest portrayal of the conditions, attitudes, and plight of the men and women with whom he spent time.  Orwell, as was his wont, gets beyond platitudes, romantic notions of work and workers, putting to shame many another book of similar intentions meant to “illuminate” the lives of the working class for its middle class readers.  It’s not an easy book to read, nor is it one that will endear Orwell to many readers.  Yet, it stays with you.  Much of it.  The images of the coal mines, the coal miners, the children and women scrabbling over slag heaps for scraps of coal.  The details of the poverty, how little is earned for this most difficult of labor.  And this: what pleasures remain for those who live in this particular world, a section of the book which resonates, for me, often:

The youth who leaves school at fourteen and gets a blind-alley job is out of work at twenty, probably for life; but for two pounds ten on the hire-purchase system he can buy himself a suit which, for a little while, and at a little distance, looks as though it has been tailored in Savile Row.  The girl can look like a fashion plate at an even lower price.

I cannot help but think of Wal-Mart, strutting cheap fashions (nothing over $98) this year during Fashion Week in New York City.  Fashionable clothing bought on credit that will last maybe a season, maybe a little longer, until it wears out or is out of style, and must be replaced.

Trade since the war has had to adjust itself to meet the demands of underpaid, underfed people, with the result that a luxury is nowadays almost always cheaper than a necessity.  One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs.  For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets.

A luxury is still almost always cheaper than a necessity.  For the price of a dozen eggs, a block of cheese, a loaf of bread, you can get a Happy Meal with a Super Mario toy. This month only. Hurry in.

And above all there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries.  Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days’ hope…by having a penny on a sweepstake.

At the end of the month, when there’s little left in the bank or nothing at all, a dollar will buy you a PowerBall Ticket, a few days of hope.

Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been a very fortunate thing for our rulers.  It is quite likely that fish and chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sxipence), the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution.  Therefore we are sometimes told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by the governing class…to hold the unemployed down.  What I have seen of our governing class does not convince me that they have that much intelligence.  The thing has happened, but by an unconscious process — the quite natural interaction between the manufacturer’s need for a market and the need of half-starved people for cheap palliatives.

It is quite likely too that drive-through fast food, fashion knock-offs, milk chocolate kisses, those Hollywood blockbusters, a parade of gleaming emaciated starlets, reality TV, Starbucks coffee drinks, the lottery in all its promise of hope, and yes, fireworks — all this has averted revolution just as much here, now, in 2006, as we coast, distracted and sedated by the smallest of pleasures, into the 21st century.  

In the fall of 2001, I was teaching at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.  My students then were mostly freshmen, working with me through the murky waters of English Composition.  Grammar, structure, meaning on the page.  We liked each other well enough, and by early September, three weeks into the semester, had developed the beginnings of a good classroom relationship.

And then, of course, it was September 11.  Those planes streaking through the sky in New York City, and in Washington, and in Pennsylvania, aiming squarely at their targets. The horror unfolding on television, and radio, all day long.  The fires, and the fallen, and the falling.  I remember, as we all do, specific images from that day, some from the television, some from the halls and classrooms. 

I remember a colleague, passing me in the hall, worrying aloud, asking, “Have you been able to teach today?”  Teach?  What did he mean?  He meant the lesson plan for the day.  Those were his words.  I shook my head.  No.  This is a different day.  The lesson plan is in the air, on the ground. 

I remember one class of freshmen, sitting with me in the classroom, watching the news coverage in New York City. We watched, we talked about what we saw, what we thought, what we felt.  At the end of the hour, the students left, on to the next class.  One young man stayed behind, regarding the flickering TV.  “Do you think we will go to war?” he asked. Before us, billowing smoke and chaos on the streets of New York City.  A hole in the Pentagon.  A scar in the earth in Pennsylvania.  Yes, I thought.  Yes I think we will go to war.  That is what this country seems to do.  But I didn’t say that.  This student, I knew, was a reservist.  What must he have been considering at that moment.  Life, death, his own future.  “I don’t know,” I said.  “I just don’t know.”

I remember the next day, one of my older students, a junior, a big strapping kid, football and fraternities his fondest thing most days, but bubbling up, a newfound love of writing. We talked about the day before.  “I went home yesterday afternoon and me and my buddies got a case of beer, sat around, watched TV.” Everything was cancelled; it was going to be a party, he said.  Then he paused, shook his head, lowered his eyes.  “I couldn’t do it,” he said.  “I just couldn’t do it.”  “Good,” I said.  Good.

And then, on the way home, the lines and lines of cars buying gas.  The gas station in Mount Pleasant, Indiana, that raised its price that day to $2.98, the gas station I never stopped at again.  My husband’s voice on the cell phone.  “Get home,” he said, “just get home.”  A command and a plea.  There must have been a million phone calls that day, people calling people they loved.  Are you home? Are you safe?  The world looked different.  And does so now. 

There have been some glitches with this blog’s server over the last few days, causing the blog to be down intermittently; if you posted a comment after, say, Thursday and it didn’t appear, it may have gotten lost.  I hope you’ll be able to find time to post again.  And thanks for reading…

Indiana has the worst high school dropout rate in the country: a statewide average of 13%.  I am now, absolutely, positively, certain why this is so.  As I write this, for the endless night in a row, fireworks pop into the evening sky in our staid middle-class suburban neighborhood.  Pop, bang, scream, etc.  Our state legislature has made this legal across the state.  Why?  There are many reasons, money and profit the chief of all as they always have been, and those may be worth talking about, but I know the real reason.  Here it is: the racket and spray of lights of these fireworks are, to so many, so peaceful. Yes, peaceful.  And when peace reigns, or so the theory goes, prosperity follows.  And how does it go but like this: the glittering lights and the explosive sulfurous spats are reminiscent not of war and strife and battles at sea, but rather of sweet illspent summer hours, hours spent not reading, not studying for that test tomorrow in algebra or Shakespeare or Plato, not worrying about tomorrow.  The fireworks tonight in the neighborhood conjure up memories of summer in reality and in metaphor, a stretch of long hours spent in amusement, pure indolence, when you could lie prone gazing at the sky, maybe a glowing cigarette between your fingers, maybe your fingers entwined with someone else’s, maybe nothing more in your hands than a pop and a candy bar, but always, there you were, at rest, thinking of nothing but nothing.

Sweet summers. Those fireworks bring that back in yummy waves, nostalgia nuzzling the back of our necks, and so we applaud the legislature for its wisdom.  Thank you for letting us do this all year, at home, in our neighborhoods.  It’s good for us.  It’s good for our children.  And there they are: our children.  They are watching us as we laze about, gazing at the sparkle and fizz of the night sky (or is that the TV?  ah, but, it’s all the same: sparkle and fizz) and our children say to themselves: this is the life.  This is for me.  Rest.  Relaxation.  No responsibility.  Nothing but hours stretched ahead of me with nothing to do but nothing.  

And now, the hood of night drops down and there they are, our neighborhood kids, clothed in black and draped in chains, shuffling down the streets of Richmond, long after dark, their garb and their posture protesting something, or someone, but they don’t know what, because they don’t know, they just don’t know, and so they keep slouching toward the future, wherever and whatever it may be.

When the day begins at an hour with a lot of 5’s in it, 5:45, more or less, and hours later, lo and behold there are more 5’s, 4:45, more or less, but the day is nowhere near the end.

When you realize that tomorrow starts even earlier, and ends about the same time, and the day after that is no different, and the weekend is going to be for work, not play, and probably not much extra sleep either. A great weight of pre-emptive fatigue begins to descend. You reach for more coffee, the sixth large cup (16 ounces) of the day.

When you realize the coffee you’ve been drinking all day is having little effect, and you start contemplating one of those weird energy drinks you see the teenage kids drinking, the kids with the bulging eyes and the wicked fast staccato chatter and the all-body tics, and you think: you know, I could just try one of those weird energy drinks…

When you get an email from a colleague saying that 8:45 in the morning is just much too early to do X.  You stare at the email, feel a rising desire to whack this otherwise reasonable person, soundly, on the head. Slacker, you mutter. And hit delete.

I pulled into the dirt lot in front of Sunset Meadows, the best little farm stand in the county.  One other car in the little lot, its owner, a woman about my age, standing in front of the displays.  The shelves were almost bare.  The woman turned as I walked up. ”I hate this.”  She gestured at the nearly empty shelves.  “There’s not much here.” She shook her head, sadly.  “It’s the end of the season.”   A light breeze riffled the small patch of herbs growing in front of the stand.  The leggy basil nodded.  “I know,” I said. ”It went too fast.”  We regarded each other for a moment, two women in their mid forties.  I knew what she was thinking; she knew what I was thinking.  It does go too fast.  “It”: this long weekend, summer, life itself.  

The woman left, driving slowly away.  I turned to the stand. There really wasn’t much there. In the old battered fridge that stands under the shelter, nothing.  No beans, no broccoli, no cabbage, not even zucchini.  On the wooden shelves beside the fridge, not much.  No corn, no squash, no eggplant.  Only tomatoes – a lot of tomatoes – and six heads of garlic, and a pile of green peppers.  I picked up three heads of garlic, four peppers.  One dollar and eighty cents.  I folded two dollar bills and pushed them into the slot on the lid of the hollow stump that serves as the cash box.  And then I drove slowly home.