Bread dreams

I awoke suddenly and far too early, enjoying the lingering image of a ciabatta. I had baked it, sprayed it to ensure its crunchy crust, and thumped it like an expectant belly to test its readiness. I could smell it.

Bread memories are like that. English muffin bread takes me to the kitchen of my mother-in-law, who although she could barely see could turn out bread like an ancient master. Focaccia takes me to Seattle, with J., who walked me through the delights and sensory thrills of an open market. Big fish, flung onto piles by Italian men with even bigger upper arms. Not that I looked.

And so my bread moment passed. My sensation of a hearty slipper bread, calls me to put my mind at rest and create, if only for the holiday, with my hands.

Crave

I am not much of a chocolate eater. On a given day, faced with an offering of blackberry pie or delicate mousse, I will throw it down for the berries. So all the more unusual it was that during both of my pregnancies I craved the brown:  chocolate milk with my daughter, Ferrero Rocher with my son. Long after those indulgences, a nurse de-romanticized the cravings by telling me what my body sought was magnesium.

Faced now with an elemental void of another sort, I cannot attribute it to a deficiency or cure it with a mineral infusion. The void is an absence:  the distance between my heart and my traveling first-born.  Reflecting a week into her three week journey, I could barely have imagined the longing I would have for my daughter. I will be whole again when her warm hand is in mine.

Buzz

How fast the mind wanders, especially when driving. I soaked in the colorful landscape today as I allowed my mind to hop from thought to thought, place to place, dream to dream. Along my way to Oklahoma City, I found myself in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Hot Springs, Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and home. I skated among and snuggled close to friends long gone and newly near. I arched over plates broken and hearts shorn. I wondered. I laughed. And it all happened instantaneously.

Our minds are incredible.

Canned pumpkin and road kill

I am enchanted by the good spirited checker at a grocery, which I frequent only irregularly and when there is a BOGO sale as is the case today. Chatting over my two-for-one staples, and the indulgence of canned pumpkin (which is rumored to be scarce this year), the checker and I once again discussed recipes.

This friendly banter recalled to my increasingly short-term memory the last such conversation. That time, however, the two of us were joined by another customer, a stranger, who enjoyed our discussion about stew and goulash enough to join it. Her addition to the conversation, humorous as it was, provided a potent reminder of our abundance. "I knew a gal at work whose Mama cooked up a stew every time they had a good road kill," she said.

There but for the grace of God go we. My family's protein intake tonight is not contingent on a squirrel's happenstance. May we be at peace with what we have. It is enough.

Living

I will leave it to someone else to intepret the madness of my posting two of my first-ever three blog entries about dead guys named John. (Did I mention the black dog dialogue was with a boy named Johnny?)

On a lighter note, we possibly saved a bird today. It's heron-like features were distinctive, but not enough so to allow us to pinpoint an ID in the collection of bird books we house. My spouse thinks it is an American Bittern, which, if true, would be a rare treat.

There. Two dead Johns and a bird.

Black dog

Today's sunshine gave me cause to reflect on the gloom that was starting to set in yesterday as I suffered through days of rain, gray and cold. In that funk, I recalled a poem I had written in the mid-1980s about giving birth to a black dog, emblematic of a very selfish gloomy time in my life that was exasperated by several rotten personal decisions.

The poem was barely noteworthy, as it reeked of cheap metaphors and indulgent whining. What prompts me now to think about that work was the interesting string of black dog appearances in other conversations or readings.

The first was a late-night conversation with a suitor, who told of me of a dream related to him by his still-beloved ex. She, the ex, also had dreamt of the black dog following a harrowing medical experience. The similarities to my experience were astounding.

The second was a literary encounter of the term black dog as a metaphor for the devil. It appeared in Nicholas Mosley's novel titled Hopeful Monsters*, which remains one of my favorite books. I cannot recall the context of that cite, but I recall my alarm at considering that the dog of my birth poem somehow might be construed as a bodily reproduction of evil. That disruptive thought has stayed with me for years.

And then there was Sirius Black, the antihero prisoner of Azkaban. Redemption for the black dog! As guidepost on the classic hero's quest, Sirius was maligned by the mainstream and wholly misconstrued by the ignorant. Certainly, the journey for many of us.

Find peace. Purge your black dogs as you write to live.

*(Side note:  Here's what Alibris says about Hopeful Monsters:  This Whitbread Book of The Year Award winner for 1990 is the final novel of the "Catastrophe Practice" series. Set in the 1920s and 30s it tells the story of two young radicals, Max and Eleanor, who meet, love, separate and come together again during the maelstrom of the Spanish Civil War.)

Just a boy

A dusty curiosity led me this summer to comb my memories, a local graveyard, and the records of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections for information about John. I knew him when I was ten, as I looked at him across the aisle of our fourth grade class. I heard about him again 26 years later, at a time when I was pregnant with my first child. The disturbing news that spring was of John's murder in prison. How did he go from the schoolyards of Salk to an early burial in a plot called Blessed Martin? This is what I am working out in a serious of poems, haikus to be exact, that I've shared only with my tenacious, caring writers' group. I will share. Promise.

Start already

Welcome to the e-brain. A risky venture of words and ideas. Why am I afraid? Walk with me.