Rituals: If I Must

No, I suppose I don't have much ritual to my name. What is constant when your family splits and reshuffles when you're fourteen? What can become ritual across state lines? When my fifteenth birthday was a surprise party, sixteenth alone in my father's apartment, seventeenth listening to Jonathan Larson when Clara and her brother crossed the moat to show up with a cactus.

My anti-roots please me. Truthfully. I can be a dandelion spore. Look!

I wrote a list of personal rituals today in Theatre History. We discussed the performance ritual of the Hopi people. My list was tiny and barely existed beyond 2004. It said, "Oldies, Groundhog Day, Tremblay's Candy Shop, Malcolm in the Middle, my grandmother's house near Gurnee, celery stuffed with sharp cheddar."

If I must bring children into this world, I will run with them each fall. I will eat with them each morning. I will enforce a strict policy about attending theatre each spring, Christmas pastries each December, and reflective birthdays. Stargirl is required reading. Diana Ross is figurative king. Quiet. Listen. That train is saying "Hello! Hello town!" If I must.

And, if I don't have to, I will be my own children. And I will fill myself with Hopi hopey.

Inertia

Kath & Me, Last Week

Yesterday I was looking at my planner and feeling like I didn't want to do any of it. Any of it! Not the meetings with my office, not the coaching of the children, not the fun plans for dinner, not the midnight Harry Potter showing. Literally nothing. Besides improv. Even then, I was ambivalent about driving into the city again.

I realized how little I would do if there were no consequences. I'm sure I would start with just a couple activities I liked and it would slowly wither to nothing. No matter what you do it can feel like too much. And, so, I'm grateful for my health which inspires me to run, economics that fuels my jobbing, kindness which pushes me forward into those social situations....because it's all really good for me and plain good. So, I guess I am glad. Even though as I type this I feel the overwhelming wish to never move again, I think back to yesterday and the good it brought. So, I guess I'll do stuff now.

Through the mirror of my mind, time after time,
I see reflections fo you and me. Reflections of
the way life used to be.

Timeless

Kay explaining the end of Mouse Hunt when the mouse helps the men who own the house decide to make it a cheese factory.

Kay: I like this part.
Me: Yeah, because you want to work in a cheese factory.
Kay: No...because they...they understand each other.


tried to take a nice picture of me and Kay--this is what I got

AND

Diana Ross being sung at the top of high school girls' lungs from the showers twenty feet from my bedside window at camp.

Stop in the name of love before you break my heart.


June 2010