Alison McGhee

Long Time Passing

Posted on by alisonmcghee

toddler-doug-in-doorwayHere is what you remember from the 60’s:

1. Some of the high schoolers, who were huge and terrifying to the elementary- school you, wore black armbands.
2. At the yearly high school talent show, something you lived for because you idolized those huge and terrifying high schoolers, a girl with long dark hair and a muslin granny dress sat in the center of the stage with a spotlight shining down on her head and played a guitar and sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
3. At night the news had a running count of how many soldiers had died in the Vietnam War. Note: you think you remember this, but it’s possible that you don’t – it’s possible that you read about that somewhere and turned it into a semi-memory, which seems to be the case with much of what you think you remember.
4. Drawing peace signs and writing LOVE and LUV in big squishy letters in your notebooks. Note: This might actually have happened in the 70’s. You just can’t be sure.
5. An organic farm commune a few miles away from your home, named “Earthdance.” You and your family had your own giant, mostly-organic vegetable garden, but you sometimes went to Earthdance to buy homemade bread. This was in the days before Sister #2 set out on her quest to become the New York State Bread Baking Champion and began filling the house with homemade bread.

Here is what you do not remember about the 60’s:
1. The day that JFK was shot.
2. Peace marches.
3. A sense of anger on the part of youth against their elders.
It all went right over your head, pretty much, the entire decade of the 60’s. And then one day the 60’s were over, and it was the 70’s, and you were in middle school. You were growing wildly, so fast that your bones literally hurt. You lay curled in bed at night, holding your thighs and knees, which sparked with pain. You lost weight because you were growing so fast.

Here is what you remember from the 70’s:

The 60’s were just past. It was the bare beginning of the 70’s. But you knew that you had missed out, and you wanted what you had missed. It was your goal to be a hippie. You decoupaged Desiderata and hung it in your room. You tie-dyed some clothes, including a yellow hat which your sisters scoffed at mercilessly. You tried to teach yourself how to play the recorder, the better to sit in a field of daisies playing  “Blowin’ In the Wind” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”
Hippies sat in fields of daisies, living in the moment and playing the recorder, didn’t they? They did. Surely they did. And they wore tie-dye yellow hats.

Sister #1: Where are you going in that yellow tie-dye hat?
You: For a walk.
Sister #1: In that yellow tie-dye hat?
You: Yes.
Sister #1: What’s that under your arm?
You: Nothing.
Sister #1: Oh my God. Is that your recorder?
You: (no response)
Sister #1: Oh my God. Are you going out in back of the barn to sit in the field and play that thing?
You: (no response)
Sister #1: Oh my God. Sister #2! She’s heading out into the field again to play that recorder!
Sister #2 (from kitchen, where she is kneading bread): Is she wearing the yellow tie-dye hat?
Sister #1: Mais oui!
Sister #2: Oh my God.

So it went, that summer. Something about a recorder, something about a field of daisies, something about a yellow tie-dye hat. Sister #2 went on to become the New York State Bread Baking Champion that year. To the best of your memory she never baked another loaf, once the trophy was hers. Sister #1 made a granny dress out of checked orange and white cotton. And in the face of steadfast opposition, you kept wearing your yellow tie-dye hat.

Mayhap you, too, wish to reinvigorate certain words of your acquaintance?

Posted on by alisonmcghee

hubbard-squashThat there to the left is a Hubbard squash. Have you ever seen one? They’re bluish, lumpy, and extremely large. They belong in the prehistoric section of the farmer’s market, along with certain heirloom tomatoes, turtles, and blue, green and purple potatoes.

Did you notice I slipped “turtles” in there? I did, because turtles have always struck me as prehistoric, and certainly deserving of their own section in a farmer’s market.

Neither Hubbard squash nor turtles have anything to do with the topic of today’s post, though. Neither does the title, although I would like to take this opportunity to urge you all to devote some time and energy to bringing back a good word, a word to your personal liking, a word that may even as we speak be lying in a dusty attic, forgotten, ignored.

A word that hasn’t been asked to dance in a long time. A word that even now is leaning back against the wall and mayhap thinking something along the lines of I knew I shouldn’t have worn this dress and Why would anyone ask me to dance? I wouldn’t even ask me to dance, were I someone other than myself. I am the sort of word wanted by no one, desired by no one, not even for the tiniest of flings.

Take a word like mayhap. Mayhap is a fine, fine word, in my estimation. Mayhap you agree? Mayhap you too shall decide to strike a blow for justice, and begin using mayhap in your everyday speech.

Mayhap you will find yourself pleasantly surprised by how subtly enriched your life becomes, once you branch out beyond the everyday.

Where was I going with this? Originally, nowhere. All I wanted to do was use  “mayhap” in a sentence, if only to remind myself of my vow to restore it to common parlance. And yet now I have used it in many a sentence, mayhap too many, if you’ve managed to read this far.

And what of the Hubbard squash, you ask? Expecteth thou a recipe? I hope not, because thou shalt not be getting one, at least in this blog, at least not of the Hubbard squash variety. Nay, sir, I think not. Should you require a recipe for Mister H I urge you to consult a blog more food-ish than mine.

While I do not wish to disappoint any Hubbard-ites out there, the sole reason this particular photo appears to the upper left of this entry is because I was searching through my files and came upon Lord Hubbard, above, and decided to include him on the off-chance that he, too, was lonely. That he, too, had spent too much time propped amongst the spiderwebs and old trunks. That he, too, had suffered the long indignity of a dance during which he stood next to the refreshment table, drink in hand, smiling brightly as the couples spun past.

And now the hour grows late, the fire burns to ashes, the raven is tap-tapping at the window, and the Victorian speech mannerisms are beginning to bug even me.

Forsooth! It is too late to think of writing the post that I opened up this page with every intention of writing.

Mayhap I’ll write it on the morrow.

Is This Where We Are?

Posted on by alisonmcghee

little-luke-and-devUntil about half an hour ago I would have responded, had you asked me if I kept a journal, “No. I don’t keep a journal.”

Because I don’t.

If you had persisted, and asked me, “Did you ever keep a journal?” I would have said, “Yeah, when I was in fifth grade. It was one of those tiny little diaries that you lock with a tiny little key, and every entry was about a) the boy I had a crush on from kindergarten through senior year, or b) my tiny little baby brother, just born that year, whom I adored.”

I might then have followed it up by saying,  “But as an adult? No. I never kept a journal” –

forgetting entirely about the years when, in fact, I did keep a journal. They were what I think of as the years of blurred-ness, back in the nineties mostly, when I had the three tiny little kids and I was trying to do a million different things at once. Which I still am, but in a slightly less blurred fashion. Or so I hope.

Anyway, back to the subject. Which was what? Oh yes, something to do with keeping a journal. I was looking through old files, of which there are perhaps thirty trillion or so on my computer, and which I figuratively drag from one computer to another computer as soon as the old one breaks down, which, if you’re me, is a maximum of every two years because I am to computers what some people are to watches. They stop working in my presence, possibly because they know I need them so damn much.

Back to the subject again, which is the fact that I do have journal entries, quite a few, dating back many years, journal entries that I had completely forgotten about. And I’m here to tell you that it can be simultaneously horrifying and comforting to see how much you haven’t changed, deep down, lo these many years.

Have my children changed? I’m talking about inside, way down deep, from the beings they used to be, housed in those tiny little bodies that now are bigger than mine.

I’m guessing not. I remember being tiny, and wondering about the same things that I wonder about now, a lifetime later. These are the wonderings of my son, then age six.

“Mom, somewhere in the world, right now, a ship is sinking, a house is on fire, and a person is being robbed.”

“What if there was no time?  What if there was no past and no future?”

“I feel short.  I feel very, very short.”

“What kinds of things haven’t been invented yet?”

“I feel nothing.  I feel as if I weigh nothing, as if I feel nothing, as if I can think of nothing.  Nothing.”

“Mom, what if we’re all, all of us, just characters in a book, and someone is writing us right now?”

“Where do spirits live?”

“How high is heaven?  Does it come before outer space?  Is it lower than the clouds?”

I wonder how I answered him, back then. Did I answer at all?

Or did I just listen and then, late at night or at dawn the next morning, write it all down.

A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a tiny mechanical horse

Posted on by alisonmcghee

little-creatures-on-the-buffetWe have called you here today, Alison, for a reason.

And what might that reason be?

Don’t get that look on your face. This is for your own good.

Nothing that begins with “this is for your own good” is ever any good. Also, there are so many of you and only one of me.

But we are tiny mechanical creatures and you are 5’10”.

5’10.25″, thanks. And could you tell me if the comma should actually go inside the quotation mark there? It just looks so wrong when I do it that way.

No, we cannot tell you, as we are tiny mechanical ungrammatical creatures skilled only in leaping, flipping, scuttling rapidly, dancing in a robot-like manner and spinning about in circles while lying on our backs.

So can I go now?

No. We’ve asked you here today to explain yourself in the matter of the pound cake you served at a gathering in this very room approximately one month ago.

What about it?

So you remember the gathering?

Yep.

Do you remember bringing the pound cake to the dining room when it was time for dessert?

Yep.

Do you recall telling your brother, who is, we believe, 6’6.5″ tall, in response to his delighted exclamation of “Wow! That looks just like our mother’s pound cake!” the following: “It is our mother’s pound cake! I followed her recipe exactly!”

Yep.

And do you feel that was a truthful statement?

Yep.

(TINY BLUE MECHANICAL ROBOT ABRUPTLY BEGINS A ROBOTIC DANCE. TINY MECHANICAL MONKEY ABRUPTLY BEGINS LEAPING BACKWARD WHILE STILL CLUTCHING BANANA.  BOTH ARE QUICKLY SILENCED BY THE TINY MECHANICAL BUMBLEBEE.)

We ask you now to take a look at the pound cake recipe, carefully written out on a recipe card in your mother’s distinctive backward-slanting lefty’s handwriting and stored in the small wooden recipe box next to the Jim Beam in the cupboard above your stove. Is this the recipe that you followed “exactly”?

Yep.

So you changed nothing about the recipe, then?

Nope.

(SILENCE, FOLLOWED BY AN ABRUPT CONCATENATION OF ALL TINY MECHANICAL CREATURES, WHIRRING, HISSING, LEAPING, FLIPPING AND SPINNING.)

Okay! Geeze! Maybe I changed it a tiny bit.

Yet you still feel justified in referring to it as your mother’s exact pound cake recipe?

Yep. It’s called “tweaking.” Ever heard of it?

(SILENCE.)

You guys are too uptight.

(SILENCE.)

Are you actually accusing me of lying to my own brother?

(SILENCE.)

You know what I don’t like? I don’t like your beady little eyes all staring at me.

(SILENCE.)

You know what else? I’m going to leave the room now. That’s because I can. Unlike you, who are not people with legs but who are, instead, tiny mechanical creatures perched precariously on a window shelf where an errant cat could knock you to smithereens with a single swipe of the paw.

(VAGUE WHIRRINGS AND CLICKS OF DISPLEASURE, MIXED WITH AN UNDENIABLE HINT OF FEAR.)

Hey, I know – maybe I’ll go make a pound cake.

Les yeux sont le miroir de l'ame

Posted on by alisonmcghee

min-first-day-homeHer photographer friend Dani loves faces best. Eyes particularly. Dani laughs and shakes her head, surprised that after a decade of taking photos she is still and always drawn to eyes.

What can I say? They’re the window to the soul.

Her youngest child notices hands, the size of someone’s palm, the length of their fingers, the presence or not of rings, what those rings are made of.

Hands are expressive. Her mother’s hands, for example, are almost a part of her voice, the way they move when she talks, describing shapes in the air.

But the older she gets, the more she herself is drawn to eyes. Or maybe she always was, but she was more distracted before, by everything that surrounds eyes, all the other possibilities of the body.

Now, though, the eyes have it.

She thinks of an old man and woman she used to know, in the town where she grew up. Every Sunday she would talk to them at coffee hour after church. Early on she was taller than both of them. They were small and finely made, kind and talkative, dressed for church, and she loved them both.

The old man’s eyes were blue and kind, and he gripped her hand when he spoke. The old woman’s eyes were bright blue, clear and sharp, and she smiled when she looked up. They are gone now – where are they? – but she thinks of them often, and when she does, it is their eyes that she sees, looking up at her, seeing her.

Back then, she used to be surprised at the brightness of their eyes. They’re so old, was her teenager sense of them, but their eyes are so alive.

Now she thinks, They weren’t old.

She thinks, No one is ever old.

What is happening, now, is that she is starting to see people as separate from their bodies. Good looks, grace, strength and muscles and power, the way a person moves in the body he’s been given, all of that she still loves, and notices, and appreciates.

But the body no longer truly corresponds to the person it houses, in this new phase of life. Bodies are disappearing. Bodies are dissolving. When she looks at people now, what she sees is their eyes.

Some places I like to visit

Posted on by alisonmcghee

still-lifeThe web is large and intricate, and completely beyond my comprehension – how do these words get to you, anyway, you whomever you are and wherever you may be? – but most things are beyond my comprehension, and I do them anyway.

Take driving, for example. I have no idea how my car works. Here’s what I can do: put in gas, check the oil and add more if necessary, check the tires and add more air if necessary, wash it, vacuum it, and speak to it encouragingly. Yet I zip around in it as if I were fully in control.

Which I’m not. Of much of anything.

But back to the web. Like most of you, I have my favorite sites bookmarked. Here are a few that I particularly like. I offer them to you in case you might like them too – and if you have one to suggest, please send it my way.

Here is a tiny story, the sweetest story I’ve read in many a day (and by sweet I mean tender and lovely, as opposed to saccharine). Enjoy, and if you like, sign up to follow the blog itself, as it’s quite a wondrous, ever-changing creation.

This is an entrancing site, well worth the few seconds it takes to download Google Chrome so that you can use it. Type in a childhood address, sit back, and wait. Indescribably moving.

I tend to follow the same orbit in my circlings of the web, and sometimes I want to be surprised, taken out of myself and faced with something new. If you are like me in this way, click here and go where it takes you.

Do you love poetry? Then you are a person after my own heart. There are many sites devoted exclusively to poetry, and I follow a bunch of them, but this one combines personal narrative with poems chosen by the writer, most of which I already know and love. Enjoy.

And finally – for today, that is, because I’m just setting down a few of my favorites – this site belongs to one of my favorite authors. Funny and sharp and cool, with an enviable design.

Have fun.

For most this amazing day

Posted on by alisonmcghee

granny-and-grampa-on-the-farmAs she left the church of the non-churchy a few weeks ago, she was a little late in joining the line of people filing out, because she had to gather up the strands of wool and knitting needles and stuff them into the bag containing the Scarf of Endlessness, so named because she does not know how to cast off, meaning that she will be knitting it for the rest of her life.

The scarf could also be called the Scarf of Continuing Mistakes, given that she cannot remember how many rows she’s knit and how many she’s purled, nor how to tell the difference between the two, and also she keeps dropping and adding stitches at random, but that’s a topic for another day.

Anyway, because of the scarf mess, she could not follow her usual routine, which is to leap up and exit the church of the non-churchy rapidly, before, God forbid, she might have to talk to anyone.

She loves this church because it is so beautiful, in its word and song and sermon – yes, even the sermons, even, especially, the sermons, which she still finds kind of shocking – and most of all because of its acceptance, even of people like her, who sit in the pew knitting away on a mistake-ridden scarf and then leap to their feet and exit rapidly without partaking of the social hour.

As she stood in the line of people filing out of the church, holding her program in one hand, ready to deposit it into the reuse-it-for-the-next-service basket, she noticed the necklace the young woman in front of her was wearing. Or rather, she noticed the chain of the necklace, since all she could see was the back of the woman’s neck.

She stood behind the necklace-wearing woman, clutching her program in one hand, mess of a scarf in the other, anxious to be out in the sun, idly observing the fragile gold links of the necklace and the way they curved around their wearer’s slender curved neck.

Then time did one of its  weird, loopy, out-of-time pauses, and everything slowed down.

The church, with its enormously high ceilings, hushed. The murmurs of the congregants hushed too. The dust motes in the air hung suspended in the golden light of the windows. The woman in front of her took one step forward, and she did too, still looking at the necklace.

But now everything was different. She saw the necklace, and the wisps of light brown hair escaping from the clips that held it to the back of the woman’s head. She saw the earrings the woman was wearing, dangling stones on hoops, and the pattern of her sundress.

She looked at the man in front of the woman, and the mother to the left holding the child’s hand.

Someone loves them, she thought. Or she didn’t think it, but that was the feeling that came flooding through her. Each one of these people is loved. Cherished.

But it wasn’t entirely that, even. What was it? She stood there, feeling as if she might cry. This feeling was too huge. She couldn’t hold it inside herself. Everything surrounding her, and every aspect of the people in that room with her, was beautiful. The old man, the young woman, the child, all of them filing out through the double doors.

She could love all of them. She already did, on some level that was far below the surface of her life. That was it. Not that she did love all of them, consciously – she didn’t know them – but that didn’t matter, because this was a feeling that was beyond her. She didn’t matter in this equation.

The beauty of the sensation – that all around her was such tenderness – was unbearable. She was too small and human to hold it beyond that one moment.

Time started up again. The woman with the necklace reached the recyle basket and dropped her program into it, and she followed suit. Out the doors, down the marble steps, and outside.

Now, weeks later, she closes her eyes and tries to remember the sensation, conjure it again. The church, the dust motes dancing, the sudden hush and pause, the certainty of love and its possibilities.

Book Give-away

Posted on by alisonmcghee

It’s publication time for the brand-new “Bink & Gollie,” a book for young readers that I co-wrote with Kate DiCamillo, and to celebrate, I’ll be giving away three copies. Bink & Gollie contains three stories about two friends, one tall and skinny, one short and loud. We had tons of fun writing this book and I hope you have fun reading it.

To be entered, either send me an email or hit “like” on my Facebook author page. Rest assured that even though I can’t reply to everyone individually, your name will be added! The drawing will be this Sunday night (September 5), and I’ll mail the books out on September 12, so that you get them by the publication date.

BONUS: For every new friend you encourage to hit “like” on my Facebook author page I’ll add your name to the hat twice. (What a deal!) Just tell your friends to let me know you sent them. Please forward this email  – my goal is to have 1000 Facebook friends by the end of September.

DOUBLE BONUS: For each friend who “likes” my author page, I’m donating $1 to Life and Hope Haiti, a wonderful, tiny non-profit that built and supports the Eben Ezer school in northwest Haiti and provides education, food and medical services to the students and their community.

Here’s what Amazon has to say about Bink & Gollie, and here’s the link to Life and Hope Haiti.

Thank you so much for your support. Happy reading!

You May Find Yourself in a Beautiful House

Posted on by alisonmcghee

condo-dining-roomShe had a dream last night that she’s had on and off for the last ten years.

The dream goes like this: She’s in a house that she lives in and knows intimately.

But she discovers a whole new part of the house that she never  knew existed, and she goes through it, exploring, and wondering at all the space that has been there, all this time, unbeknownst to her.

The original dream always takes place in a dream-created house, a perfectly round house with bedrooms off the central round hallway. The dream-created round house has a thatched roof and seems to be built up in the air – on stilts, maybe? and it is always dark and cool and shady in the dream-created round house. And the previously undiscovered section is full of sheet-covered furniture and dust.

But last night’s dream was a variation on the original house dream. Last night’s dream took place in a house she used to own, a small white stucco house that she lived in for ten years.

This was the house on Girard Avenue, the one in which she lived before she was married and after she was married, the house she was pregnant in, the house to which she brought two babies home from the hospital and then another one from a far-off land.

It was a small house, a bungalow, and all the rooms were small. Two small bedrooms in the back of the first floor, two more upstairs. A bathroom on the main floor. A tiny kitchen with no dishwasher. She used to do four sinkfuls of dishes a day, back then, when the babies were all babies and toddlers.

Over time, they added a room and a very small slanted-ceiling bathroom upstairs. They finished part of the basement. They redid the tiny kitchen and added a dishwasher and a new refrigerator.

They sold the small house and moved to a bigger one, which conversely had fewer rooms, although they were much larger, and which, strangely enough, did not have as much room for guests.

Since that larger house she has moved four times, despite the fact that she loathes moving, and now she lives in another house entirely, an interesting house in the same neighborhood.

She has always lived within six blocks of that very first small house. She’s tried, during the four-move-era, to force herself to move to a different neighborhood (cheaper, closer to children’s friends, etcetera), but she can’t. She loves her neighborhood, what can she say. She’s rooted here.

The old small house is only three blocks from the house she lives in now, and sometimes, when she’s out walking her dog, she walks past it. Twice now, in the past three months, she has seen the family that bought it coming out of the front door.

She and the wife of the family recognize each other and smile and wave when this happens. The children of the family, unborn when their parents bought the house, are now twelve and ten.

But back to last night’s dream. In it, she was back in the small house on Girard Avenue. Everything was the same as it had been when she left the house and she greeted each room with a combination of loneliness and happiness: oh, here you are again, and here you are too, you’ve been here all along, hello, hello.

Except that there were more rooms. There were five bedrooms on the main floor alone.

And there was a whole wing to the house,  a wing that she had never before noticed – a spacious living room, a family room, another room-room, two bedrooms down a hallway, and a large bathroom. She wandered through this wing, admiring all the space and wishing so much that she had known about it when she lived in this house. She never would have moved, had she known.

The two additional bedrooms were messy. Linens needing to be changed, comforters thrown in a heap, no decorative efforts whatsoever. Same with the big bathroom. All that could easily be changed, though. A few weekends of garage sales and flea markets and thrift stores – her favorite activities – and this whole new big wing would be transformed.

And then there would be so much space. So much space for anyone who wanted to live there or come visit. Plenty of room and privacy for her parents, her sisters, her brother, her  nieces and nephews, her far-off friends – anyone. Come visit!

She woke up.

Why does she keep having this dream? One of her sisters writes down every dream she has, the minute she wakes up. This is a good idea, she thinks, so here she is, writing down this particular dream.

Does the dream mean that there is more room in her house and mind and heart than she thought? Has she ignored all the space and place that’s been there all along?

She wants those empty rooms. Every time she wakes from this dream she wants,  wants, wants all that space. But if it’s there in the dream then it must already be here, somewhere, in life, right? There must be an invisible door somewhere, a door that she can press on and then twirl through to find all that calm and peaceful and empty space.

How can she find that door?

You may find yourself  in a beautiful house. You may ask yourself, how did I get here?

Prompted by a line from a poem by Wyn Cooper

Posted on by alisonmcghee

“The stars have fallen onto the sheets, fallen down to sleep with me.”

Lines from poems scroll continuously through me. Beginning at dawn, when I wake up, and throughout the day, lines from poems come to me, recite themselves silently in my head, in my voice, like song refrains spoken not sung.

Without poetry I would be a lost person. Remembered lines and fragments calm the wildness of my heart, absorb it into their own wildness and wilderness, translate it into words, corral the inner chaos and make it bearable.

Without poetry I might have to set fire to myself, to make the fire go away. Bless you, you poems, you tiny mantras placing slender arms around the day: I care. I want you.

Which is itself a fragment from a poem. Like all the below, which have been through-threading themselves throughout my mind ever since I woke up today.

* * *

detail-from-masaccios-expulsion-from-the-garden1

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. What I do know is  how to pay attention, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be  idle and blessed.  . .

Whatever leads to joy, they always say, to more life, and less worry.

It is difficult not to love the world, but possible.

The life I didn’t lead took place in Italy.

But one man loved the pilgrim soul  in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face.

Come up to me, love, out of the river, or I will come down to you.

Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I’m telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

What will you do with your one wild and precious life?

Today would be your birthday, and I send my love to you across the bridgeable divide.

Sometimes it is necessary to re-teach a thing its loveliness.

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

Last night as I  was sleeping I dreamt – oh marvelous illusion – that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.

At night we consoled ourselves
By discussing the meaning of homesickness.
But there was no home to go home to.
There was no getting around the ocean.
We had to go on finding out the story
by pushing into it —

The sea was no longer a metaphor.
The book was no longer a book.
That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.

I am not done with my changes.