The animals outnumber me

I have trouble with ambition and the minutia involved because I’m too interested in sitting in the backyard with my new 80-pound, 8-year-old German Shepherd. She runs along the fence with the neighbor dog, bowing down and barking when Neighbor Dog sticks her nose through the slats.

There’s homework, but first I need to drink this coffee (so good!) and look up what aristolochia means because I heard it on a West Wing episode.

I’m working on a senate campaign and the to-do list is endless, but there’s my old, dear friend drinking a beer on the stairs, taking a break from the poker table running in our dining room. His wife - my best friend! - is almost five months pregnant, and he’s a little drunk, but his giddiness is real.

I have to research for a class, and maybe I should be putting in extra hours at the office so I can fuel any back-end political hopes I might have, but Chris’s favorite hoodie is missing, and I need to excavate the basement to find it. In the basement there’s a drum kit and an organ we found by the dumpster, and I need to play both, just for a few minutes.

Now it’s not like this is ADD, and it’s not like this always makes me happy. I’m a little tortured by the lack of focus and the sensory overload, and it can make me crazy, and it can push me so far in my head that I don’t come out for weeks, but I’m learning to accept something.

I wanted to be president when I was young. Or an astronaut, or actress, or writer. The last two, maybe doable. The first two: I will never be president. There is a pine green house behind my garage I never noticed, and now I’m thinking about its contrast with the snow, and I am not an intentional flake and I’m not some dippy solipsist, but I’m stuck on this house, on its half-open window, on the rusty grill waiting at the back door. Forgotten for winter.

I am a woman who spoils animals, who worries for their care and takes the privilege of sustaining a life seriously, and tenderly. I am a woman who is comforted by the scars on her husband’s face and the smell of the firewood on the front porch. I taste too strongly; I can barely tolerate a hug with bare arms because my nerves are tripled, and constantly singing. I’m annoyed with everything that I don’t feel in my gut, and so I’m rarely annoyed. But this is the main show for me: everything else is done as an afterthought, an “if I must.” And, mostly, I must, and I do. But still…

A friend mused that she was disturbed because she couldn’t figure out her passion - she liked people and their stories and listening to interviews on NPR about people’s stories. What kind of passion is that? she wondered. What do you do with something like this? You chant. It is OK to be who you are; it is OK to be who you are not; it is OK to be nothing at all but a pair of eyes and a sheet of hymnal skin.

Posted by: Zosia | 03-09-2008 | 02:03 PM
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