Category: Ordinary Muse

Yes, it’s now 6am. I’ve been awake since 2:30am. It’s not a bad thing. I finished another story in the span of two hours. Now it’s time to crawl under the sheets and sleep one hour before my son wakes. Outside in the garden, our strawberries, just blossomed, and our carrot sprouts are covered under a blue bedsheet. Radio reported possible snow. It’s May. It’s not a bad thing. I prefer to live on earth, taking time whenever it’s given, to help things grow, to blossom.

My son and I constructed a Japan Railways Yamanote subway (runs in Tokyo) costume from cardboard boxes, paper and paint. This is his favorite train of all trains, hands down. We got the idea from a Japanese TV commercial he loves on YouTube. Here he is testing out the pilot study. We will try to find a black cap and a nice black suit at the thrift store, so he looks the part of the train conductor.

Yes, I am well aware no Minnesotans will realize what he is dressed up as for Halloween. They will think he’s a bus, probably, or the lightrail at best. Yet as long as my son knows and I know and his dad knows–that’s just fine with us.

[Front view… but it still lacks kanji detailing which station its running toward on the loop line in Tokyo…]

Side view–still lacks door detailing and we’ll be adding better shoulder straps so the thing won’t tilt like this anymore….

This is the subway’s parked view (sans legs).

Minneapolis Grain Belt Brewery

My son wrote this sentence of his own accord yesterday, and he does sum up two of his passions in a succinct manner: “I love trains and computers.”

His ability to write and read has grown incredibly, much faster than his ability to speak. I think (but I’m guessing here) that the printed word, as a visible object, makes more sense to him, and he seems to process his world around him more quickly when there is a picture, a tangible object, a demonstrated action, or a written word to accompany any sounds or speech.

I am also quite pleased that he loves going to the library and reading books as much as I do. We go each week to a small brick library called Pierre Bottineau, which is made from a renovated wagon shed from 1893 and millwright shop from 1913. The library is tucked in the shadow of the locally famous Grain Belt Brewery [more like a castle], which is now owned by an architectural firm that restored it to its past grandeur. The only thing I dislike about this very cozy building is the freezing air conditioning, but I have adapted by trying to remember to wear layers and bring a sweatshirt along, too.

Alright then, folks, below are a few of my son’s recent renditions of his beloved trains. He really enjoyed scanning all his drawings into the computer, and he did this all by himself after I showed him once.

But if you say ice cream, that’s an entirely different thang….

My son was thrilled to get this Care Bear puzzle for his birthday. He can now do up to 100 piece puzzles, often finding how the pieces go together faster than I can.

I am back in a nation who believes in daylight savings, so for a few weeks I didn’t need electric light bulbs while shuffling about the apartment from sink to cereal bowl to coat to shoes, and I didn’t need to peer across the park on heightened awareness to see if I walked alone or if someone shared the sidewalk – other than the omnipresent rabbits and squirrels.

But daylight savings cannot lengthen the time the sun wishes to shine on us, and as days shorten, we have slipped back into the eerie darkness of mornings, where each step is careful and each street light is abuzz with nervous activity. The trees wave their thin arms and bony fingers about in the wind with longing.

Insomnia visited me last night and I can’t shake the feeling that there are more bureaucratic nightmares to accomplish than I have the mind and hands to tackle. Times like this, I wish I could leap ahead into my sixties, tug on a pale green elbow-worn sweater and settle into the upholstered chair of my grandmother Lucille. To be her as I remember her, the one who had time to cook from scratch and make things with her hands, from malted milk shakes poured into blue, red and green aluminum cups to knitting neon-colored ponchos for her mousy-haired granddaughter. How lovely it would to be to have the time to create from what we discard rather than to create what we discard. It is a gift to be able to fold torn magazine pages into the skirts of angels.

Here my son sits perched on top of the sofa right before bedtime.

I am here at work early, earlier than most folks, and when the sun rose at 3:30am, I did, too.

I am wondering if I have entered that stage I’ve heard the elderly often do, of waking early without the need of alarm clocks. Normally, I am not so eager to rise up in the morning, but these days I have no choice: my brain is up and active without any prompting.

I like waking up early, though, because the rare gifts of silence and peace settle over the world. I step out on the veranda and in the field the grass sparkles with dew and the clouds drift across the bright blue sky calmly, as if nothing bad ever happens. The neighbor’s rooster says it’s true.

Even if this quietness is not always at my side throughout the day, at least now – when most people are fast asleep, dreaming their fragmented and shuffled pieces of past, present, and future – I have that overwhleming sense that all is well and all will be well, too.

In a few minutes I will be that person who walks around the classroom actively waving her arms and speaking at a volume unnatural. This is teaching, or rather trying to get others motivated to teach themselves.

But now in a spare moment of solitude and window light, I am as quiet as the books and ceramic cups. The words I form here to fill this space are only to motivate me to find a better path to be-ing. The way is actually quite simple and clear, yet it seems I need to be reminded of it daily….