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Pah Rum Pumpum Pum
This Christmas I was (am) very poor. To be fair, I’m one of those annoying people who doesn’t have to be poor. I work part-time from home, and home obviously doesn’t have to be one of the most expensive cities to live in. Over half of my income goes to rent; a tenth of my income goes to my ritzy yoga studio membership. Legitimately-poor people don’t get yoga memberships. But if I can’t eat it or learn from it, I can’t justify going further into debt for it, and somehow I’ve never been happier.
I wrote to my family members in November, asking for help buying the ticket home.
As you’ve probably discerned I’m low on income this season/year/lifetime(?), so I was thinking about getting craftsy this Christmas in lieu of spendy. Is there anything in particular you’d like knit (mittens! socks! pom-pom hats!), written (odes! sonnets! college entrance essays! greeting-cards!), web-design’d (headers! blogger account set-ups! social-networking presences!), radio’d (radio!), baked (pumpkin bread! cookies!), or created in some other handy fashion?
If there’s one thing I have, it’s time. And if there’s one thing I love, it’s glitter glue.
The following two months were a little intense, with their share of 5am finishing touches. But also, super awesome. Suddenly I was off the internet, catching up on episodes of This American Life and The Moth, learning how to divide heels and add stitches. I was doing things with my hands. I guess I’d kind of forgotten I had hands.
Scarf for Jan (Larger and other view.)
Story for Dad (Larger and other view.)
Collage for Paige (Larger and other view.)
Socks for Mom (Larger and other view.)
The whole experience got me thinking. A friend of mine works at the North Bennet Street School of craftmanship, and in December they were having an open house. She invited me to stop by.
And now, suddenly, I work in their gallery once a week, selling student work and supplies: the tiniest saws you’ve ever seen and a million different chisels and awls and clamps and ninety-dollar chrome rulers. The majority of the supplies we sell I’ve never seen before, couldn’t tell you how they could be used. The other day I was tittering in the back room, dusting what appeared to be decapitators while Italian opera merged from the speakers overhead with the alarming, muted buzz of wood-sanding two doors over. I’m trading my time, organizing safety goggles for a cloth-case bookbinding course in February.
Possessed
For much of my life, I have loved to lie on my bed and just stare at my freaking beautiful, glorious bookshelf. Occasionally I’ll think about what it’d be like to come home with myself on a date for the first time — the joy it would be to roll over in the morning, to see all of those amazing titles in this new partner’s possession. The Fact of a Doorframe. Nazim Hikmet, Kepler’s Witch. “You like Grace Paley?” I would gasp gushily. “You keep The Voyage of the Beagle next to your bed?”
I think I would fall in love with myself, right there.*
*Assuming, of course, that I was not completely weirded out by anything in that “self-help and sexuality” section.
How These Skills May Benefit You Later in Life
I.
I am surrounded by third graders, and I am playing the role of silent typist. My job
is twofold:
1.) type what they say
2.) act the mute
Small detail: hilarious typos
are encouraged.
II.
“What does Alien Gus look like” the storyteller
asks, his eyes as big as fists, “use
simile, no blah words,
is he orange is he purple?”
The third graders
are overwhelmed with possibilities.
The room is very still.
Then, someone suggests
he wears a fancy suit.
What Else Can’t I Do Without You
When I was a little girl, it annoyed me that my mother sang so often. Cooking banana bread, doing the dishes, making her way around the house: her voice floated through the freshly-painted rooms like a cloud of golden pollen. The songs she sang were ancient and full of imagery — all of them songs I’ve never heard since, with topics concerning the moon, saying grace, and royal women mistaken for swans in the forest, pierced by the hunting arrow of their lovers. She never trailed off or faded out. She didn’t falter on a single word or note.
I wondered how she could bear being loud like that, making everyone aware of her presence. As a child, I was anxiously quiet. I would close the door to my room and knit my brow, attempt to read. I worried that my friends would walk by and hear her.
As we grew up, my mother sang around the house less and less. Now I’m around the house less and less: some years only for a week or so around Christmas. This year a cousin of mine was getting married, and we were going to meet up in Little Rock for a few days instead of St. Paul: but on the day we were scheduled to leave, it wound up snowing a few inches in Boston and antagonizing everyone on the East Coast so thoroughly that all domestic flights were cancelled.
Jurvis and I got on the phone with our travel agent (because travel agents are amazing and completely worth their thirty dollar booking fee — even for part-time public radio employees). But Bob couldn’t help us on Friday. “There’s just . . . nothing,” he said. “I mean, if you want to put down another eighty bucks to guarantee you a seat on a flight tomorrow, we could arrange that, but to be honest, I think those flights are going to get cancelled too.” He looked up Amtrak schedules and Greyhounds: we briefly discussed the option of renting a car and driving the whole way. “Yeah, no, I guess that’s farther than I thought,” he sighed. “If you drove for twenty-two hours straight, with no breaks for sleeping or eating, and also taking for granted that weather conditions would be ideal — you might make it in time for the reception.”
I was standing on the Charles/MGH subway platform when we were trying to figure all of this out, a flurry of tiny snowflakes spinning around our hunched shoulders while the river hid glassily somewhere below. Cars weaved across the bridge. Every five minutes the red line roared by and I couldn’t hear a word he said. “Should we get back on the train, then?” I shouted at Bob. “Should we be heading to the airport, to arrange this in person?”
He thought this would be the best idea considering the craziness, yes. When we got off the phone, I stood there for a moment, staring into the dizzy white air. “I’m not going to make this wedding,” I realized.
Every Christmas since I’ve left home, I have stood next to my mother on Christmas Eve and sang with her. Unitarian services at first, then the family majority voted Lutheran, but I would always make sure to elbow stepbrothers, children and boyfriends out of my way so that I would be right next to her, and the confident pleasure of her voice. It presses into your palm, cues your turns, so that suddenly everything seems effortless and you’re wondering how you just did that: and then she begins harmonizing with you and you think everyone else should just quiet down for a moment so that they can appreciate the two of you, singing like that.
She called me on Christmas Eve, but I was in a used book store, hunting down old science fiction for my boyfriend, and told her I couldn’t talk right then. I called her back late on Christmas day.
“Mom, I had to sing without you last night,” I said. “It was terrible. I realized I don’t know how.”