You Say Tomato, I Say Cork

At some point in my life, I’d like to publish a collection of personal essays. I expect these essays might be about Cork.

I don’t believe in a traditional God but I do place an inordinate amount of faith in coincidence. I collect coincidence the way some people collect coins. My friends know to gift me their stories. Here is an example of historical Cork, via Woody:

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth shoots and kills Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater. Years later, the famous stage actor Edwin Booth— John Wilkes’ older brother— sees a well-dressed young man slip between a station platform and a moving train. He locks a leg around the railing, grabs him, and pulls him to safety. The name of that man, unbeknownst to Edwin Booth at the time? Robert Todd Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln’s son.

So that’s Cork: a Booth kills a Lincoln, a Booth saves a Lincoln. Neither act is linked to liturgy or transubstantiation (although transubstantiation does look like it could be Latin for train station) or Buddha or the Shahada or Oprah. It’s certainly not connected to The Secret. Cork always incorporates surprise. The Secret teaches you to materialize your desires by harnessing positive energy; want something badly enough, you can attain it. But Cork is about the unexpected. You don’t light a candle or keep wish vigil. Cork just comes. If you try for it, it will elude you every time. I never prayed for a Cork board. I never anticipated not having to buy one.

Last Wednesday, because my new job as a personal assistant doesn’t start until September, I answered an ad on Craigslist to sit for five hours in an unmarked van and guard church handbells. They were worth a lot of money. Luckily I didn’t have to resort to any hand to handbell combat, but I did exhaust myself enough doing nothing (who knew leaving toe marks on a front window would prove so taxing?) so that when I returned to Brooklyn, I locked myself out of my apartment. And I had just suffered great disappointment at my corner grocery, when all I wanted after a hard day of handbell protecting was a tomato sandwich, and every tomato looked as if had been juggled, mistaken for a grape by a stomper, then thrown at a bad actor.

I was locked out for about five hours. Sometime between the second and third hours, I met my upstairs neighbor, Kathy, a 55 year old dancer-turned-therapist. She advised me on the art of breaking and entering. We tried everything: coat hanger, her old Screen Actor’s Guild membership card, edge of a plastic egg carton, even the local precinct. The cops said my door is “quite a piece of work.” I asked if they could just shoot it open. They said “No Ma’am, we can’t.” Then they left.

Because I didn’t want to pay for a locksmith, I decided to wait it out. Kathy invited me upstairs and served me white wine. We talked about men, aging, career, Iowa, Bernese Mountain Dogs, VHS. We did not talk about tomatoes. There was no mention made of tomatoes. When my roommate called to say he was finally home, Kathy disappeared into the kitchen. When she reappeared, her hands contained two of the plumpest, freshest, most organic tomatoes I have ever seen. “I grow these in our rooftop garden. Want them?”

McCall’s and Response

This is Tillie:

And this is Tillie’s creator, Jessica DeStefano:

When you lose your job the same week your man is moving back to the mid-west, it’s important to avoid sitting in your apartment listening to Amy Winehouse. Luckily, I have friends who are inventive in their distractions. Jeffery is one of the best. Last Friday we ordered Dominos and spent the better part of a thunderstorm on the National Sex Offenders website entering in the street addresses of all the places we’ve ever lived. Turns out I roomed two doors down from a pasty pedophile in the East Village. For an entire year. Also, a lot of rapists live on Montague Street. No one cheers me up quite like Jeffery!

Which brings me back to Tillie. After a few glasses of chardonnay and a serious discussion of Britney’s psychological state and its necessary corollary, Sean Preston’s yellow teeth, we turned to a 1986 issue of the now defunct magazine McCall’s. McCall’s was a monthly women’s journal always available in waiting rooms, and to an adolescent girl, was a watered down Glamour. I wanted to read about 10 Ways to Please Him In Bed but wound up with a Muriel Hemingway interview or an article on decorative pine cones. When McCall’s gave sex advice it was inevitably tame and geared toward married women who had to take their kids to waiting rooms.

This particular issue of McCall’s, which Jeffery found in his parents house in Virginia, featured a full page ad for Tillie the Frog, a collectible porcelain figurine with a plucky backstory:

“Tillie the frog is not only a delightful figurine, she represents the eternal optimist. Tillie lost her pond when it was plowed in to build a mall.

Now she is homeless, but she keeps her spirits up with her positive frog philosophies. Her most famous one is: “Your dream may be a hop away so never give up til you croak.”

I don’t know if it was the wine, or the My-Lover-Done-Gone-And-Took-My-Job-With-Him honky tonk tune I’d been whistling all week, but I hated this frog and I hated the woman who made her. First of all, I don’t believe in eternal optimism. Optimism is hard enough, but optimism unending? There must only be so much that Tillie can take. And it feels half-empty, losing your job and your lover. Er, I mean your pond.

It occurred to me that times have changed since 1986, that it’s only old ladies who would ever order Tillie, that frog philosophy has gone the way of Frogger. But then Jeffery and I discovered Jessica’s website (she also sculpts Karma the Kat and The Gigglin Piggies) and an array of upbeat money-making Tillies, circa 2007:

I have concerns. Why does a frog need Doc Martins? Why is she friends with a little girl? If she isn’t friends with a little girl, then where did she get a little girl’s 7th grade yearbook photo? Jeffery wrote Jessica a letter, sincere and commendatory, because we believe her art to be in earnest. I would like to learn how to be an optimist (maybe an occasional one?) and also, if she is truly able to support herself on frog and piggy sculptures alone. And I think Jessica might benefit from my art. My Tillies would be giving the webbed finger to the mall contractor, or drinking Boone’s farm from a brown bag with some underage tadpoles, or listening to Amy Winehouse while looking up sex offenders who hang out at the concrete pond.

(This is me as a 1986 McCall’s Borden cow. Photo by Jeffery.)

The Down Jones

I was in my favorite West Village coffee shop on Thursday when I heard that the poet Liam Rector committed suicide. Actually, I didn’t so much overhear the news as I was directly told by a former convicted manslaughterer (albeit a nice, well-educated one) who periodically asks me out for drinks.

“I hear there’s an opening in the Poetry world,” Manslaughter said. “Hey, what are you doing later?”

I cringe whenever I read about a poet suicide. Of course I feel horrible for the poet’s family and friends, for workshop students, for the genius art that could have been—but I also feel sorry for myself, for shouldering the same bar joke with it’s variant punchline: oven, bridge, shotgun. When did suicide and stanza join hands? Poets used to hang around courts, nod off under trees. Get paid to play the lute.

I loathe the phrase “become a poet” because becoming a poet doesn’t happen like on the MTV show “Made” where there is an actual final morning you wake up and you are no longer an unpopular couch potato but a prom queen who can dance. I could never point to that morning. Some days I’m just a girl who files Office Depot receipts, who won’t even bother to read the inspirational verse on my Yogi Tea bag.

The real reason I dislike poet suicide is because it makes me question poet temperament.

Based on my three years spent in an MFA Program, I can tell you that most of the poets I hung out with felt deeply, and if they didn’t talk about their emotions and wrote cold distant list poetry about biological taxonomy, well, that just meant they felt even more deeply than the rest of us. We wrote poems in Starbucks to Nora Jones, sipping on holiday lattes, but that doesn’t mean our work was cheery. If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that I rarely jot down notes on promotions or babies or on-time trains.

But feeling deeply doesn’t mean feeling depressed, either. I’ve tried my best to refrain from Harry Potter references, but I do think poems for me are like patronuses. I write them to stave off a kind of cold, and regardless of how they materialize—I’ve written a hell of a lot of otters—they spring from a positive place. Sometimes I rock back and forth when I write, like to an invisible music, like I did in 1st grade in Mrs. Pause’s singing circle when she suspected I might be mildly autistic. I’m not—I’m just happiest, most rooted, in introspection. I like poetry because it feels like undiluted introspection. I’m casting something linked to, if not the same as, happiness. Even if the subject matter is dark.

Which leads me to believe that poets aren’t necessarily prone to sadness; they’re prone to telling us about it. Is it ironic that writing about misery is a form of elation? (I confuse irony, ever since Alanis Morressette). There are plenty of stockbrokers and construction workers and chefs who kill themselves, but maybe we don’t quite expect it, being that it’s harder to spot struggle in a Dow Jones report or a brick wall or creme brule. But I’m sure I’ve been served the burnt caramel equivalent of this poem, many times.

I think I’m trying to say we all feel deeply.

Hire Love

Boss, who on Monday amicably promised to pay me through the end of August, called to say I needn’t bother coming in to work anymore. Then he left for a beach house on the Carolina shore.

Luckily, I found this clip of Oprah discussing The Secret on Larry King:

So, if you think about a book hard enough, you can star in the screen adaptation?

The Secret celebrates The Laws of Attraction, which, despite sounding like a dating handbook written by former debutantes, is actually a new age belief system rooted in quantum physics. The idea is that our thoughts carry energy, and this energy determines our experience. Which is just a fancy PHD way of justifying childhood games of paranoia—”Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” If I believe my mother’s back will really break, will it?

Oprah cried and prayed and got cast in The Color Purple. I don’t want to be in a movie (although I did just submit pictures via Craigslist to do a Sportswear photo shoot) but I would like to get paid to write. If I cry and pray and sing an old evangelical hymn will I get a call to blog for Entertainment Weekly?

Oh I know I’m emitting some low-level negative energy, enough to trigger the security alarm at H&M. But I’m tired. Tired of submitting my resume and cover letter (not even a generic one!) and never hearing back, tired of responding to Editorial Assistant ads full of gross misspellings (Come work in a fst paced environnment). Instead of Oprah inspiring me to focus my thoughts into a light beam of positivism, a smooth jet of hope, I want to jump up and down on her fine Harpo furniture. In muddy Crocs.

Yes, I secured a job in September as a personal assistant, but it isn’t enough to pay the bills. And I don’t have health insurance. There are other laws besides the Laws of Attraction— for example, The Law of Gravity; what am I to do if an air conditioner falls on my head?

Megan and I are getting together this weekend to construct wish boards. I’m sure Oprah would cream all over this idea. Basically, we’ll sit around and drink beer and make collages out of back issues of Jane in an attempt to better visualize and hence actualize our futures. It’s pretty simple what I want: a book in two years, a job teaching or writing, freedom from debt. I don’t need Tivo or a timeshare. Just simple things, really: fresh cut flowers on the kitchen table. I’d like a kitchen table.

If you see me in the next few weeks, and my forehead looks botoxed, it’s because I’m straining under the effort of positive thinking. Can you hire me? I can probably only type 30 words a minute—one-handed, mind you—but they are the right words.

You Wine Some, You Lose Some

I feel like I’ve invited all of these people to a party in my apartment—people from as far away as Rheinland-Pflaz and Worcester—and then, under pretense of replenishing a cheese plate, snuck out through the back door. I’m not sure what all of you have been doing with Trybecca while I stopped posting. I expect some of you re-read older entries; others, gone in search of a more esteemable hostess, one who doesn’t put olive pits back in the bowl, or top off unfinished merlot with shiraz.

Which is what I feel like I’m about to do. For the past few months, I’ve been sipping on a dry unbalanced blend with a tart finish, distributed by a shady and cheap vineyard known as “Summer Camp Start-Up.” I didn’t like the taste and I didn’t want to keep drinking, but it’s no easy task, standing up, walking away. Because you’ve already had a lot.

Since turning 30, I’ve been on a blurry trajectory, not realizing I couldn’t see clearly because I was f’ed up on Boss wine. Or whine, really. At some point, you internalize your co-workers, you become the place where you spend 40 hours a week. I caught myself storing a vintage of anger. I was aging it, turning it over in the dark.

Then, last Tuesday, the first tornado in over 100 years touched down in Brooklyn. I still wonder if my emotional state brought it on, somehow lassoed the sky—I was on my roof that night, crying to The Bearded Whorl (whose name is Dan—I’ve decided he gets his real name), allowing myself a thorough outpouring. That night, wind wracked the city, the streets flooded. Curled up in his arms, I dreamed (in color) my heart was an ark I was offering up as waterproof refuge to…raccoons. I suppose that speaks both to strength and weakness—to survive, but to survive sealed off. To rescue masked creatures.

I waded to work the next morning only to discover that my desk, which happened to be directly under a number of minute and asbestos filled holes (like how you puncture a jar lid so a lightning bug can breathe?), not to mention a potted plant, was underwater. Computer destroyed, documents buried beneath a thin layer of soil, I decided I couldn’t stay.

(Yes, that was my Sufjan Stevens CD.)

The Job Gods had delivered the wet threat I couldn’t. It became painfully obvious that I was not just tidying up and salvaging camp surveys, but boxing up my belongings. I dried off the office Polaroid, borrowed it over the weekend, and took happy photos of me and Dan. I let the camera teach me to live in the moment.

Dan moved back this morning to the Midwest, to a wrap around porch and an unpolluted air. I miss him. Do, and will. But I’m excited about the Fall. Besides submitting poems, I’ve been reading James Merrill, drinking white wine mid-afternoon, and working through the particulars of my new employment. I’ll be personally assisting a well-known poet. And as long as she doesn’t pull over to pee in a ditch with me in the car, she has to be better than Boss:

Then again, I’m an odd duck for snapping that picture.

Welcome to the 8th month of Trybecca. My new job officially uncorks the first week of September. Until then, I’m still in the summer camp business. Nothing to do but stare at the dregs of my current glass, try and predict the future. What do you see?