Piano roll blues, I danced holes in my shoes

Weren't another other way to be

For us low-down losers

And no-account boozers

And honky tonk heroes like me...

            -Waylon.

It's coming to me.  It's all shoring up.  I'm getting an idea of what this is going to be; what I want it to be.  All the songs I've always wanted to cover.  I want a steel guitar.  Country.  Blues.  Jazz.  A little rock.  All of the above. 

This is what Tina Turner did after she left Ike and the family.  She walked out with thirty five cents in her pocket, which was actually more than I had in mine when I walked out.  She worked for a little while, before turning to the only life she knew; singing.  She started doing covers in little Vegas-style cabaret dinner shows.  That's where Roger Davies found her, and that is when her career took off in earnest.  Not for Ike and Tina, but for Tina.  At no one else's mercy.  If it succeeds, it is on me.  If it fails, it is on me.  Either way, I'm just going to roll with it and enjoy the ride, happy that I'm doing it and that I have you with me.  Happy that you came along and tripped the cord that brought the desire back.  Happy that you see it and are a such a part of it that what had been, a few weeks ago, the work you knew, is now fake work.  Something to pay the bills while we work at the real work. 

What I wouldn't give for a cold Coca-Cola in a bottle. 

My partner in crime and success.

I voted.  I bought Carb Karma ice cream at the Ben & Jerry's on Castro.  I bought CDs at Streetlight Records on Market.

The Judds - Greatest Hits

Merle Haggard - Volume 2.

Patsy Cline - Walking After Midnight.

Willie Nelson - Stardust.

Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter and Tornpall Glaser - Wanted!  The Outlaws! 

Scratching my Country and Western itch.

It feels goooooooooooooooooood.

Go to sleep, you little baby

Go to sleep, you little baby

She's long gone with her red shoes on

Didn't leave nobody but the baby

You're a sweet little baby

You're a sweet little baby

You and me and the devil makes three

Gonna be my ever-lovin' baby...

Oh, this feels good.  When I am spent, I like to push myself just a little further; throw myself over the edge so I can enjoy the satisfaction and that ever-lovin' romance of being weary.  Weary after a long day's work.  That's all I did today was work.  For twelve hours straight, I worked, and I loved it.  Make me think that at the end of the day, some great reward will be coming my way.  I left in darkness and I returned in darkness.  The darkness comes earlier today.  I see Nut give birth to Amon-Ra and I see her swallow him up.  I watch him pass over her body all through the day until he reaches her mouth, when his long golden fingers caress the Berkeley Hills Diamonds.  I see the neon strike up at the ferry building; the letters glowing halcyon pink, supported by a hundred steel I-bars and proclaiming to all the merchant ships that they've reached the Port of St. Francis.

I'm going to let my mind go here.  I don't want it to frighten you.  I need this release.  If I release it here, I can make use of it constructively and it won't be a bother to the rest of the wealth between us.  I'm milking it for all I can get.  This is why you're the muse.

I'd like to sing you a lullabye.  A slow, Southern spiritual sung soft and low, whispered in your ear with your eyes closed.  I'd like to come so close to touching you with my lips that you could feel them against the downy hair on your ear.  Whispering.  Whispering.  Whispering in my lowest alto, breathing out the words in molasses-long sighs that find their way down your throat, sliding down like horehound lozenges.  Slipping down like slippery elm.  I'd sing to you so softly; softly like the fragrance of babies asleep in calico layettes.  Softly like cotton being carded for the gin.  Softly like the sweetest haze of Kentucky bourbon and beer.  And softly, like old women praying the rosary beneath their breath, asking Jesus for forgiveness in the front pews, with their heads bowed, whispering to Heaven and old hands.

Come fall into this dream with me.  Just for a moment while you are there and I am here and it's safe that way so explore it.  My lights are low.  I walked into a dark house; all asleep.  My boots creaking on the wooden floor, a dew of sweat in my high-collared blouse.  Now the lights are set so low that they buzz like junebugs.  The room is lit in the color of fire embers; dying orange.  Dying.  Persimmons dying after Summer has gone.  The last vestiges of Indian Summer melting into something better. 

Somewhere here in this dream, there are blackbirds and blackberries both baked in pies.  Set out in a punched-tin pie safe to cool.  At ten o' clock, you can shuff off your quilt, put on your slippers, come down to the kitchen and slice a piece.  You can set it on the kitchen table on a Frankoma pottery plate.  You can have it with a glass of milk, frosty from the Frigidaire, which hums like junebugs, like these lamps, like my voice in your ear, low, long and sweet.

Somewhere in this dream, there are all the white unguents; salt, sugar,flour, milk, baking powder, baby powder, cocaine.  There is the white of cotton diapers, so soft to touch.  There is the white of the heat lightning outside that startles the cows and the mule.  There is the white of the Bon Ami cleanser on the white of the tiled kitchen floor, and the white of my eyelet night-dress that flutters in the chilly breeze attending me from the lapse under the door.  There are the forty coats of white lime paint that have been over this place in the last forty years.  There is the white of the milk-glass I won at the county fair four Summers ago for shooting paper ducks three-in-a-row.  There is the white of the cast-iron bathtub, upholstured in lead enamel paint. There is the white of the biscuit-sack towels hanging on hooks to dry. There is the white of the Ivory soap, 99 percent pure, that washes everything in the house but my hair. 

How I'd love to put my hand to your cheek.  Just that.  Touch your face and breathe in with you.  Breathe in together, being so weary.  Breathe in together, being so spent.  Breathe in together, being so ready for sleep and for more when Nut gives birth again to the sun. 

I am a merry milkmaid!  Tra la tra la tra la! 

I have writ two posts in the last two evenings, but have not been able to put them up here as the service at home is down and said posts were writ on my laptop.  So for now, I'm taking advantage of a relatively slow morning.

The rain of the last few days has played Cinderella and swept the hearth clean (I have a script.)  The water is calm and blue as a dressing-table mirror and I am in fine, fine fettle watching jaunty white boats trawl across it.  Look there!  A red-and-white striped bouy being towed into place.  Ah!  Maritime settings do me fine!

Everything is Swiss.  I am wearing a beaded bodice over a little gray blouse and pinned my hair into a Hepburn-esque chignon with a tiny, sweet blue suede bow.  It's given my cheeks extra roses today.  I feel fresh as milk straight from the cow!  There are little cornflowers on my Alpine hill, and let me tell ya, it's alive with the sound of...typing!

Yes, Mesieurs et Medames, October has come as he comes always, catching up every loose detail in his coattails.  This year, he's had a heyday.  Ten more days until he cedes his administration to November.  November carries with him a certain magic as well, but it's second string to October.  October starts;  November has to put in the detail work and make sense of October's rash judgment and movement.  It's a game I've seen all too many times to ignore.  Well, I've seen it twenty-nine times now, to be precise.  

Ten more days for October to edit and amend, to surprise, to raise, to raze and make use of ten more infinitives.  Ten more days for the moon to be caught in a basket of branches against the night sky; Herr Oktober's mischeivous eye peering down on me and sizing up how I'm handling his changes.  I defy you, Sir!  Bring 'em on!  I accept your gauntlet thrown and raise you both of mine.  The gloves are off!  My sleeves are at my elbows and I'm ready to work at this.   

Today he knows he hasn't gotten the best of me yet.  He'll have to try harder. 

Today apples are floating in a great tin tub nestled in a bed of straw. 

Today Mennonite wives are making shoo-fly pies and setting them out on a long pine bench to cool before taking them in dachweggli to the Lancaster County Fair.

Today, nineteen years ago, my father and I are making "tombstones" out of plywood and paint for a Halloween party at which he will don a devil mask, climb over the fence and scare the bejeezus out of my friends sitting around a fire roasting marshmallows.

Today Ichabod Crane is walking cobblestone streets on his way to the little red schoolhouse, enjoying the cool sunshine, whistling to himself, admiring Miss Katrina's ample bosom, blissfully unaware of the shadow soon to fall across his path.

Today sees a little sparkle in my eye because somewhere close by a plane is touching back down after an enchantment flight and that means there will soon be much to accomplish.

I am a merry, merry milkmaid.

I am exhausted from being so on all day, but if you know anything about me, you know that I find great pleasure in the romance of being weary.  I can't remember the last time I posted three times in one day.  It's been months.  So much has happened since then, but I don't feel the need to go into any of it.  Perhaps further on.

This is a chemistry experiment.  Is it pheromone?  Is it dopamine release caused by some other physiological actor?  What is it?  What is the elusive stuff that some people have to tap my gut and in so doing, bring forth a geyser of art?

I have had two muses in my lifetime.  One was my lover, one was not.  It's not a requirement for the post, although sex with the one muse was, off and on for ten years, the best I had with anyone.  It reached a completely different level.  The other one is gay, but he made love to me often enough with his intellect.  Ours was a cerebral love affair.  He made me practically hemmorhage art and words and ideas.  He inspired ten years of doing.  Ten years of production.

I suppose that there is now a third.  One can be a muse for a decade or a minute. The circumstances don't matter.  If it seeds the clouds, it seeds the clouds.  I meet people I can love on a daily basis.  In truth, it doesn't take a lot for me to love anyone.  I have such an enormous appetite for humanity.  I presuppose love.  It is the natural assumption, which is the exception rather than the rule in a world that teaches you to presuppose disappointment.  I've been hurt; I've been broken fifty times because of it, but it is how I am.  I cannot change it.  I know a great deal of people whose intellect and talent I admire and in whom I find inspiration.  It's exceedingly rare, however, that someone crosses my path who possesses that right mix of chemical to seed the clouds.  I don't understand it, but it's delightful. 

If you can hear me, thank you for what you've done.  You're the one person out there who can see what it's wrought in the course of three small days.  You reconnected me to something I desperately missed.  How funny that you, the mosquito of a few weeks, would be instrumental in reattaching me to my past. 

I'll sleep well tonight; dark, ocean-deep sleep.  Even with the changes I don't like happening on my most recent stage, even with the uncertainty and the enormous disappointment there, I'll sleep well. 

Thank you.  We're wonderful.

Throughout all of this, I have had to fight the urge to hug you.  You wouldn't think that would present such a problem, but in the climate, with the rumors, with all of them watching, well, you know.  I have wanted to talk with you at length since this all began, and I have wanted to hug you.  I have so many questions for you.  Not about that, but about your life. 

I want to know everyone's story.

Have I mentioned that I love italics?

"I am about to inhale the intoxicating vapors of some distant smoke, hold it in and retire into the evening."

Finally. Someone who knows what to say in reply.

There is nothing to lament here.  That will come later.  I can only gird myself up against it and enjoy whatever it is right now.  Safe. 

Speak to me like cicadas speaking to night-blooming jasmine.  My ears are piqued.  I'm lit with the giddy excitement of a girl having a new dress to wear.  Which I do, which is one of the reasons I couldn't sleep.  I couldn't wait to put it on; a little calico number with olive green velvet bodice that laces up and pointed cuffs, set off by olive green crocheted trim.  I made a new necklace with olive green river pearls and a pendant cabochon of clear flourite with olive and rust striations.  This dress has a ruffle on the bottom and a sash that ties in the back.  A wench waist and decolletage.  With my hair in ringlets, and my feet shod in olive green suede bootlets, I feel like a collector doll.  I feel pretty, O so pretty! 

It's wonderful living with Joe for many reasons, not the least of which is that whenever I bring home something new, he has me model it for him and fawns over me, cooing and clapping.  Oh, I am such a girl.  Well, that's not exactly true. I am what I've always been; a tomboy in brocade. I am Joe's Barbie doll.

I inherited this love of pretty clothes from my grandma Lyda Green Barrick Castille, native of Paducah, Kentucky, who was a magnificent seamstress.  (I must have inherited my love for all things hillbilly and Appalachian from her as well!)  Lyda sewed for the entire town of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.  She had the ability to look at a fashion magazine and draft her own pattern; her spatial abilties were on the order of a top engineer.  She had seven daughters, all of them beauty queens at one point or another, and they kept her busy with orders.  Unfortunately, most of the dresses have not survived.  They became dress-up fodder for the grandchildren and were torn up.  I have pictures, though.  Unfortunately, they are in black and white and don't do justice to the drama of the dresses.  There is a newspaper photo of my mother wearing a magnificent construction of fuschia (ostensibly) chiffon, with layers upon layers of ruffles.  She was a freshman in high school at the time; the only freshman ever elected to the post of Miss Breaux Bridge High.  I love that photo.  She was adorable.  Dimples in her cheeks, pretty fillie-fresh face, big hazel eyes with long lashes and an aquiline nose, which she self-depricatingly calls the "ski-slope".  I wish I had her Priscilla Presley nose. 

I'm wearing her class ring today.  BBHS Class of 1966.  It's too big for my thumb, even, but then, my mother had five inches of height on me by eighteen.  I adore my mother.  She's such a phenomenal woman.  I'm so thankful that I'm at an age where I can see her for who she is.  All the trauma of childhood; all the petty (and normal) jealousies between mothers and daughters have melted into the stability and joy of adulthood.  It is one of the greatest gifts in my life.  Now she's the only one I tell.  She's the confidant.  She's the person I dream about having here to experience all of this with me, because I know she'll appreciate it like I do.  She is the willow who bends and flexes and weeps with me.  My father is my Gibraltar.  They're wonderful.  I love my parents so much.  I'm so fortunate to have them.

I come from a family of beauty queens, dancers, clairvoyants and prophets, politicians and professionals. 

I have dined with kings, diplomats, presidents, rock stars, prostitutes, drug dealers, mothers, fathers, devils and demons, angels and saints, and some of the most gifted kids to grace our era.  How I have loved them all!  I draw my energy and strength from them.  I am learning that every adversity really can become an asset.  Every hardship just sets another foothold in the rock wall and gives you a boost to the next inch.  And progress is measured in inches, not in miles.  A series of small goals, not the towering umbras of the enormous ones.

Perhaps I am supposed to be speaking to you.   Perhaps I am supposed to be ministering optimism and greedy hope for you, for some reason.  Perhaps we are supposed to be giving and receiving that from each other.  Every word you write me births ten more in reciprocation.  Every thought I send you births another ten on your end, I would hazard.  We are locked in a wheel of growing strength;  pistons driving some machine as yet unnamed.  What is happening here?  Am I imagining it? 

Keep speaking to me. 

Shhh. 

It's all a hush tonight.  We are above the clouds, enrobed in shadow and fog.  There is a little fire in the fireplace in my bedroom.  The veil over the lamp lets out just enough hazy light to make out sketches of the rest of the room.  It's become mine now.  There are the biographies of young Washington and Jefferson.  There are the two enormous vases of flowers.  There are the paints in a basket in the corner, the dresses in the closet, the mail on the rolltop desk. 

Something about the night feels the same as the old Boris Karloff version of The Mummy.  This should all be in black and white.  Tonight it is.  I can hear the cars on Market Street.  The pavement is wet.  If I part the blinds, I can see long reflections of the inevitable sodium vapor streetlights in the slickness of the street.  I'm hung on this.  How many nights have I reveled in being alone in my little boudoir, in how many boudoirs in how many houses in how many places? 

Moms has always had a knack for fixing up a place real quick-like.  It was a knack she had to develop.  Make a home in ten minutes or less.  Sometimes, it was do-what-you-can-with-what-you-can-procure-from-the-base-quartermaster-or-the-ACS-(Army Community Services)-office.

I'm only now beginning to discover how deeply the Army life affected me as a child, and set in place some elements of my personality that will always remain as they are.  Early on, I developed a fondness and desire for protocol.  The very word makes me feel content and secure.  There are ways of doing things that will smooth over the differences between people and act as a lubricant to discourse and interaction.  What a gift to society!  I wish there were more protocol in civilian life.  Protocol would keep the queues at the train station actual queues, instead of the free-for-alls that they are.  Protocol would dictate that every senior citizen and mother with child never had to want for a seat on the train.  Protocol would demand thank-you notes for every producer of gratitude.  Grace.  Protocol is grace.  

The Army set into me a deep patriotism, before "patriotism" became an offensive word.  Patriotism to me isn't blind belief in the superiority of one's mother country.  It is merely a respect for the history that eventually brought you into being.  Respect for the uniqueness of your mother country; not its superiority.  America is utterly unique.  I still hold dear to my heart the notions of American individualism and ingenuity.  There's an audaciousness about being American.  When I think of the concept of being American, I think of Mark Twain.  Of Edgar Allen Poe.  Of Abraham Lincoln.  Of Will Rogers, Garrison Keillor, Stephen King, Dolly Parton, Steve Martin.  There is such character in being American.  There is such humor in it.  Yes, we've always been hypocrites - but we should laugh at ourselves about it!  I grew up believing - truly believing - that I could do anything I wanted to do because I was an American.  I know this idea is out of vogue right now; perhaps even contemptuous, but I am, in many ways, an old-fashioned girl and it appeals to me.  It was indoctrinated in me at a very young age.  I couldn't help but be moved by the military tattoos I attended; sitting in the reviewing stands next to my highly decorated father, resplendent in all his brass and ribbons, watching a drum-and-fife corps march the parade ground playing The Army Song.  To be American is to be optimistic.  It is to be clever and charming; magnetic and irrepressible.  It is to be unsinkable, ingenious, self-made and ox-strong.  It is to be determined, ambitious and electric.  It is to be bawdy, salty and a little cocksure.  It is to be elegant in a woodsy, down-home, Lewis and Clark sort of way.  It is to be smart.  Not just intelligent, but one better; smart.  We haven't lost this.  I see it all the time.  For some reason, we've just become uptight and ashamed to call ourselves what we are.  Yes, we've made mistakes.  Every nation on earth has; every collection of people has, every individual has.  But there is still so much to be grateful for in the gift of American citizenship.  It is a gift.  There was a time in my life when I would have gladly revoked mine, but now I have a deeper appreciation for my membership in this fraternity.  I am, dare I say, still proud to belong to it.  To be American is to be a renegade; a loveable rogue who always succeeds, no matter what adversity is placed in his path. 

I am an old-fashioned girl.  I put on perfume before going to bed.  I have a crush on Charles Lindbergh.  What in the hell am I doing in 2004?  Well, this way, I can have ALL of it.  Col. Lindbergh and my laptop, too.  Twenty-three skiddoo!

See?  Smart.