Urban Wilderness Death March

Yesterday was so beautiful and cool and fallish that, after mowing the lawn, I told Grayson to put his shoes on (okay, and to get out of his pajamas) and we headed out to the Sutton Urban Wilderness area here in Norman.

When we lived in OKC, G and I regularly went up to the Martin Nature Park in the northwest part of the city to enjoy the trails and trees and turtles. But since we moved to Norman, we haven't been out trail-tramping. I'd heard that the Sutton Wilderness had nice trails, so off we went.

Well, it does have nice trails. They are clearly marked, and there are nice trees and a good sized pond. We were trekking along, taking pictures, enjoying the cool weather, and all was well. The path diverged a few times, and each time it did, I let Grayson decide which direction to go, assuming that eventually all trails would lead us back to the trailhead at the parking lot.

Not so.

I'm not sure how we did it, but we ended up on the frisbee golf course that abuts the Nature Park. This is not, in itself, a problem, except that there does not appear to be any rhyme or reason to how the golf course is laid out, and we got hopelessly turned around and could not find our way back to the nature trail. Eventually we found ourselves inside a large barren fenced area next to the nature park, and after walking all the way to the eastern end of it, thinking we could hit northeast 12th street and just trek back along it to the Sutton parking lot, we discovered that it was gated, chained and locked. Now how did we get locked in?

We backtracked to the frisbee golf course, and walked in circles for awhile (with Grayson leaning on me and groaning about our eminent demise all the way) before we encountered a bike trail that took us to the dog park down the road from where we wanted to be. From there we made our way down 12th street back to where we started.

It was not exactly the peaceful nature hike I had in mind, but it did give us a good hour and a half's exercise in the fresh air and sunshine.

What I think about when I should be working

Last night I dreamed in French. It was the strangest thing, to be thinking and speaking in a language I'm really not fluent in and haven't practiced in 20 years or more. The dream was complex and absorbing... all about some competitive reality-show type situation I was involved in in Paris. I was younger, ambitious... speaking French.

I woke feeling heavy and stuffed with wool, my head still partially wreathed in Français, feeling vaguely disappointed, vaguely robbed. Of what, I don't know.

Today I can't seem to concentrate. I move papers around my desk, open email, close it. Move things around again. I realize the restlessness inside me is coming from something that wants to get out. Maybe it's all that language I rolled around with in my sleep. But something in me seeks an outlet.

Today is Mabon: the pagan festival of Thanksgiving and the beginning of fall. Fall has always been my favorite season, despite – or maybe partially because of – its faint sense of sadness, of nostalgia. I love to see the trees begin to change color, and to notice the shortening of the days, week by week... descending toward winter's dark heart. I love the excuse to stay indoors and read books by the window, and finally being able to cook big pots of hot, steamy comfort food that I can freeze and feast off of all winter long. So welcome on those cold, wretched days when you can't think of anything to cook, or your cupboards are bare or you're just too tired or too disheartened to think of preparing anything.

But it also makes me restless... wanting to be doing something... creating something... maybe changing something.

Twice at this time of year we have found Monarch caterpillars curling up to begin the transformation into butterflies. That's how I feel. Like curling up and liquifying inside a beautiful gold-flecked chrysalis – to emerge remade, a creature as different from my past self as the orange and black Monarch is different from its pajama-striped and earth-bound larval form.

I wonder if it hurts the caterpillar? Or if it just enters into a kind of hibernation until it wakes up in its new body. It's a bit painful to me. But mine is because I'm not, of course, transforming. I'm going to wake up tomorrow and the day after that as the same old caterpillar. Eating and making my way back and forth along my twig. I suppose it could be worse.

So I toodle back and forth on my metaphorical twig... twitch my shiny black antennae and think. lately I think these things:

I look at all the lovely houses in Norman – large and small – and I want to live in them. I long for Home. I jealously compare their paint colors, garden designs, architectural styles. I peer in open windows as I pass them at night to get an idea of what kinds of lives are going on inside them. I lust after them and have to tear my eyes away from them when I'm driving to keep my focus on the road. Like mine were the eyes of a dirty old man next to a nubile young starlet in a low-cut dress. I want a home for reasons I can't even express or understand. Everything feels temporary without it. Nothing is mine. Radio stories tell me that now is not necessarily the time to buy... that Americans all around the country are reconsidering the value of home ownership. But I itch to own my own home again. And I feel frozen in amber until I do. Incapable of moving forward, futureless, inert.

I think about books: all the beautiful, wonderful, piled up books in my shelves and on my tables. I would spend part of every day in the book store or library if I could. I want to open them all and read them simultaneously, sucking up the stories and the information, feeling the words roll around in my mouth and mind.

By the time I was in 3rd or 4th grade, I no longer articulated language in my mind as I read. The words went more or less straight to my brain, without being "spoken" in my imagination. But somewhere in college that ability went away. I now feel each word wanting to escape through my lips. Gray used to tease me for whispering as I read... mouthing the words. But I love the way they feel, and I want to enjoy them, like smooth pearls along a string. I want to both take them into me and ride along with them. Sometimes I can't settle on one book, but have several open at any one time, moving from one to another as the mood takes me. And I think about them... which ones I'll read next, which ones I should read...

I think about Life a lot. And I think about Love: what the odds are of its permanence... how you know. (You don't.) I think about what I should expect, what I believe in, and how to know what is real. Sometimes I feel sure I've got a grip on it... and sometimes I'm sure that I do not. This irks me and I worry it like a rough tooth in my mind. Is love a feeling or a choice? Can you create and maintain it out of whole cloth, simply by determining that you will?

Sometimes I think about Quantum physics. I don't really understand it, but it fascinates me. It's magic... explained! That takes me back to books: what I should read to get a better grasp on it... whether or not I should move on to that or go back to Jung's Man and His Symbols, that I was reading before I picked up Aftermath about 2012, that I was reading alternately with a book about the Gaia theory for awhile. There are unfinished books on Buddhism, creativity, writing, spirituality. Books of essays and short stories and self-help books and books of poetry (which I buy even though I'm really bad at reading poetry). From there I feel guilty about all the unread books and want to stack them all up on the coffee table and start plowing through them, one by one.

All in all, it would be more restful to just think about work.

A Brief Pitiful List of Things I'm Tired Of

I'm tired of being broke.
I'm tired of not knowing what direction to go
I'm tired of waiting
I'm tired of missing the things I don't have anymore
I'm tired of not loving myself just fine the way I am, and the way I expect everyone else who loves me to do.
I'm tired of not caring enough about things, so they end up getting lost or broken or spoiled or mishandled or worn out or tired of me.
I'm tired of not believing in anything anymore

I'm tired of this list...


Here's a flying pig to make you smile, instead. This pig makes me happy.

Tuesday Grayson and I drove out to Wildcare to deliver Grayson's donation of critter chow. There had to be 80 to 100 pounds of bird seed, rabbit chow and cracked corn. It took three people a couple of trips to unload all of it.

The staff was helpful and welcoming, and of course grateful for the donation. I could tell Grayson was proud. And I was proud of him.

One of the staff members took G around the entry building and let him see some of the animals in residence: a red-eared slider with a head injury. An orphaned opossum. Some doves or pigeons with a virus. There were several hawks, an owl, some ducks and a porcupine. There was a young roadrunner that raced back and forth the length of its cage that Grayson was very interested in. He's never seen a real roadrunner before, just the one on Wile E. Coyote. He asked lots of questions and the staffer was kind enough to answer all of them very thoughtfully. Grayson offered to help feed all the animals, and was disappointed to learn that he can't volunteer until he's 16.

Then a woman came in with a bat that had been captured in someone's home. At first we just peered into the little fabric tent in which she brought it in, but she was nice enough then to reach in and bring it out so we could see it better. She identified it for us as Mexican freetail bat, and pointed out to us the adorable little mousey tail that gives it its name (the tail hangs "free," rather than being attached by a membrane to the body as it is in other bats). Then she gently turned it around so we could see its wonderful little face with its big ears and upturned snout. "It looks just like a Ferengi on StarTrek" she told us.

It was a good experience for us both, and I'm grateful to the folks at Wildcare for making it so. It's amazing what they are up against, managing, feeding and rehabilitating these orphaned and injured wild things. It's an heroic and noble undertaking.

From there we went right out to Target so Grayson could spend some of his birthday money on a new Nintendo DSi and a game in which huge insects and scorpions do battle with one another.

Now we are Ten

Grayson celebrated his tenth birthday yesterday. It was a pretty low-key celebration, as compared to previous years, because the big party with all of his friends will not occur until Sunday. But he opened presents in the morning and we had dinner with my folks last night. (Golden Corral – G's choice)

So now he is ten. Double digits. And time to start thinking about some Things. Things like when to have The Talk with him. The sooner the better, I'm guessing, though I am loathe to do so just yet. This is a kid who still believes in the Tooth Fairy and Santa. I'm just not ready yet to drop that bomb on him.

I'm sure this is the last year he will still Believe. If he still really does at all. He may be pretending for my sake, which is sweet too.

This is a difficult time for a mom. Well, for this mom. I so want to hold on to his little boyness just a little longer. And at the same time I look forward to finding out what kind of teenager – what kind of adult he will turn out to be. Just not yet... not yet.

He's into reading the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels right now. An odd series upon which the odd movie was based. I've read the first three, to see what it is, exactly, that I'm putting into his ten-year-old hands. It's pretty benign. But there are a few Issues that come up. Couples climbing into bed together and talking about sex. (not doing it... just talking about it. The Word comes up, anyway.) And the Gay thing... which is not really much of a thing to Grayson, since he was raised (I hope) in a very accepting family with gay and lesbian friends, whom he accepts as a matter of course.

And, as I've often said, I'd much rather he saw sex on TV or in books than violence. But it does bring to mind that the time is fast approaching when Gray and I will be obliged to explain the birds and the bees to our little boy... and the changes he can expect as he begins to navigate the murky waters of adolescence. So far, it's barely lapping at his toes. I suppose I should talk with him about it before it begins to creep upward. So to speak.

Sigh. It makes me sad. I knew I couldn't keep my little boy forever. But it seems to be going so quickly!

But meanwhile, he's still a sweet, creative and bright boy. Totally engaged in graphic novels (here he is diving into one yesterday morning when he opened a set of four Scott Pilgrims) and Pokemon cards and playing games on his Nintendo right now. When he got the new Pokemon game at dinner last night, we could all tell that our outing was essentially over. He couldn't wait to get home to play it! And that's essentially what he has done during his waking hours at home ever since.

In which there is a long weekend, a great deal of water, and then a lot of little spiders

Lovely long end-of-summer weekend. I took Friday off to spend some time with Grayson. He wanted to go visit his old daycare center at McFarlin church, so, after lunch, we packed up a box of old toys to donate (a la Toy Story 3) and visited.

The school was in the middle of nap time, so the classrooms were all closed and quiet. But we were able to drop off the toys, and visit the room where G attended Pre-K four years ago. It was the same, but different. I could tell G had mixed feelings about it. I think he wanted it to be exactly as he remembered it. But it seems in the past four years there have been a lot of retirements, so many of the teachers he remembered were gone. The room was mostly the same, however, and he looked so tall and big compared to the 4-year-olds who came up to us to show us toys and how high they could jump. G just looked at them with a sort of bemused face, awkward and quiet.

Finally we knocked quietly on the 2-year-old room to see if Mizumi was still there, and thankfully, she was. She was Grayson's favorite teacher. A diminutive woman from Japan, who always kept her Japanese/English dictionary on hand, and somehow worked a type of magic on the kids in her care. Grayson adored her. I was grateful to her that when she stepped out of the room, she acted as if she remembered him, squealed joyfully and gathered him up into a hug, while he grinned sheepishly. He's as tall as her already. He didn't have much to say, but it turned out that Mizumi did, amazingly enough, have some memory of Grayson. In her Japanese accent, she did say she remembered he was "always such a good boy, very quiet, love books, very smart."

It was a good visit. Grayson's first experience with nostalgia and the way things can be the same, but different, from how you remember them.

Friday afternoon, before I left him with his dad, I took him to this trading card exchange shop called Kirby's World. Oh. My. Gawd. This place was Geek Central. I expected it to be a bit geeky, seeing as how it's billed as a place to trade and purchase Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh cards, and engage in "tournament play." Gack. But I also expected the clientelle to be under 15. Not so. With the exception of Grayson and myself, you'd think that one of the pre-requisites for entering the place was to be aged 20 to 30, with a quantity of greasy black hair, uniformly dark, rumpled clothing, an unhealthy skin tone, a slight paunch and an overall aspect that just screamed "I speak Klingon and live with my mom." I spent most of my time there praying that my son did not turn out like within my sightlines.

Grayson, on the other hand, was in Geek Heaven. He purchased $8 worth of Yu gi Oh and Pokemon cards... the cheap ones at 25 cents each, not the $10 or $20 cards. Seriously. Then I hustled him out of there and hoped I could engage him in some nice interior decorating classes, underwater basketweaving or interpretive dance. Anything to keep him out of that place.

For myself, I spent Saturday through this afternoon at Lake Texoma with Bob, lounging at my folks place. The weather was perfect: cool breeze, warm sun, and water at a nice temperature that's just cold enough to be refreshing at first, but warm enough to lounge in for hours. It was a most excellent way of sending off Summer.

The season has turned, however. Despite the warm days, there's a new feel to the air. The mornings are almost chilly. There's a sense of fall. I've noticed Monarch butterflies beginning to appear, traveling through Oklahoma on their long journey south. I'm ready. This weekend was a nice, last, hurrah.

Now I'm home again, trying to motivate myself to return to the world of the Responsible. Grayson's birthday is Wednesday, and I have yet to purchase all of his gifts, much less complete the requisite planning for his party at our house on Sunday. I need to look up some games or something. I've no idea what to do with a house full of 9 and 10-year-old boys.

Another momentous thing occurred over the weekend.

Perhaps I've failed to mention it, but we have a resident spider in our bathroom. Her name is Elizabeth, and she's small and brownish and lives in the folds at the bottom of the shower curtain. She builds a little ramshackle web every evening and catches flies and click-beetles and gnats. I don't bother her because she doesn't bother me. I have this sort of arrangement with most small spiders that make their home in my home. I figure they're doing me a favor by eating pesky insects, and as long as they can be counted on to keep to a limited area, as Elizabeth does, and not to build webs where I will walk into them, and never ever to turn up inside my shoes or on my pillow, they can be allowed to remain.

Well, Elizabeth created an egg sack last week. Just when Grayson's class at school is reading Charlotte's Web. So, rather than destroy it, (which, by the way, I was strongly advised against, since the little spiders, if they were close enough to being born, were guaranteed to come swarming out all over me) Grayson and I decided to put it in a jar for him to take to school.

They hatched over the weekend, and we now have a jar full of the cutest itsy teeny spiders you've ever seen.

Having read Charlotte's Web, and not having seen Elizabeth in a few days, I sort of assumed she had expired after laying her eggs. But on closer inspection of my shower curtain recently, I discovered my mistake. Not only is Elizabeth alive and well, but she has laid another, larger sack of eggs on my shower curtain. I have to wonder how many eggs the old girl has in her.

Tomorrow Grayson will take the first litter, in their jar, to school to show to his classmates. After school, the first jar will get opened and left out in the yard for the little Elizabeth's to gain their freedom. The new egg sack will get relocated directly out doors. I mean, I'm not running a home for unwed spider moms here. Too many more of these and Elizabeth herself may get her walking papers.