Month: April 2015

Ah, it’s baseball season – about which I know virtually nothing. However, since we have a pair of raccoons living in our yard, when I ran across this little short from 1931 about baseball-playing tanuki (狸 or たぬき) – or Japanese raccoon dogs, as they’re called – it appealed to me on a number of levels. This whole clip reminded me of nothing so much as author Alan Gratz’s trip to a “besuboro” game in Japan a few years ago.

Tanuki in Japanese culture are like foxes were once considered in American lore – as trickster gods or spirits. Considering the sheer amount of mess a raccoon can make, not to mention a pair — if tanuki are anything like them, I understand why.

And, if they played baseball, I’m sure they’d cheat like this, too.

fine, fine, I forgive you

lumbering bandit
your lawn-digging unearths bugs
at least you eat them

Yesterday, my mother sent me this picture from her phone.

These are my sister’s old braces – molded specifically for her infant-toddler-child-girl-woman legs and feet, so we can’t pass them on, only recycle them. Mom couldn’t bear to do it when she was small, so they’ve been in the attic for the past decade, a silent testament. Like the pencil marks on my friend Bean’s kitchen doorway which track the progress of her daughters, now both in their late twenties/early thirties, these are a witness to how much the years have changed the Bug. This is a record of the surgeries to correct the tiny bones, of the structuring forced on her dimpled limbs to enable her feet to lie flat, her ankles to support her weight, her back to stretch out, her body to stand tall. At nineteen and fairly petite, there aren’t dimpled elbows and knees left, and there probably won’t be too much more lengthening of those femurs, but stature from other directions – cognitively, of course, because every teen needs cunning and guile – wisdom – confidence. But what records do we keep of those? How do we know when we’ve become what we’re meant to be?

“running” your own life takes practice

stand up for yourself
don’t let them walk over you
just put your foot down

we’ve “stumbled onto” a solution

you don’t stand a chance
’til you can stand on your own
so take the first step

roll on you crazy diamond

“I’m fun-sized, not short,”
she takes this life in her stride
while finding her feet

Yep, that’s my girl.

“I think that black people have been conditioned for so long … to only look at the level of representation — are we visible? — that there was an inordinate pressure that that visibility is positive. I hope that we’re getting closer to black people being able to engage their image of themselves as art, which means complication, which means you do some good stuff and you do some bad stuff because that is what it is to be human. …

You need the variety, Steve, you need it. We exist in the middle: We’re not demons or angels — we’re human beings. And so that is what needs to be reflected in the art of our nation.

Today’s Morning Edition on NPR was an interview with novelist and television screenwriter Attica Locke about representation in the African American characters she writes. She was talking about the challenges of writing characters who stand in for the many – which it seems happens often. People look at one person of color – or one gay person, or one Jewish person, or one autistic person — and that one person is EVERYONE – every female person of color, every male Jew, every differently-abled child, every gay woman that person has ever experienced or encountered… which is why, when I was growing up, it was hard to hear so many times that “people are looking to you, looking at you, people are watching, people see you…” because it felt like I was responsible for how and what people thought, and who can grow up straight under that kind of pressure? Many are the crooked trees.

Yet, a bent twig can be a positive thing – at least that’s what second generation graduates of Mills College are called. Bent twigs, based on the aphorism, ‘’Tis education forms the common mind, Just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.’ according to Alexander Pope’s Epistles to Several Persons (1732). If the twig is going to bend anyway – and it will, we have an insistently pushy world – the best we can do is shape it strongly.

These poems are for the nephews, five and seven now, flexible little twiglets stretching up in a windy world with acid rain and thin soil

sans leaves, still lovely

a solo sapling
savoring its solitude
shows silent splendor

dig your roots in

bend in the wind, but
don’t rustle for every breeze
sink deep and grow straight

branch out

crowned head and shoulders
above the crowd, you will be
noticed. stretch taller

competing with yourself

regardless how tall
looking up shows you new heights
aim high. race mountains.