Found myself in a passageway this morning with a man pissing against the wall. "Miss," he groaned as I crept a wide ark around him, "I am sorry; please excuse me."
No, please excuse me, old city... I should never pout. And I should know better than to fall into the expat trap of hating a place because it pays me too little attention, or because it does not explain itself.
Sent macaroons to school with EB this morning, to celebrate her last day til September. She will return in the fall to her cubbyhole, her place at the lunch table, the familiar songs and circle dances, as a different person. Four months is a long time.
I have made some resolutions for our trip: skills I'll try to master once A returns to Moscow and I am alone with the girls among remote Spanish hills. EB seems in the throes of that preschool stage somebody, can't remember who, described as a kind of first adolescence -- intense emotions, tidal waves of feeling, passions she cannot control and questions she cannot articulate. Urged on by the books, those parenting books everybody reads, I've resolved to try to be more conscious of the difference between helping her learn good behavior and telling her it's not okay to feel deeply. I for one habitually assume that my anger should be stifled, or at least tightly managed, stored up for some more appropriate occasion, when it will be both decorous and justified. Naturally that day never comes. Instead I tend to get icily calm for as long as I can stand it, and then blow my top over something tiny: the worst possible way to "manage" frustration. I've got to show EB and Lula that they can feel hugely, powerfully, even loudly, anything short of clobbering each other.
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Two Smokes
1
It was midnight and I was writing an epic.
She came out of nowhere and handed me a cigarette.
Wanted Kids.
I was going to be famous.
2
The fish died on Wednesday.
I boarded a train that allowed smoking. Rehearsed a few lines.
We were in love, I was sure.
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