stuff wanted

Spoiled rotten.

My birthday wish, made forty-eight minutes late, is to meet some people in the next 365 days who are so wonderful, and from such utterly different stripes of life, that I am helpless to do anything but love their magnificence and eat up their enthusiasms, whether they be for spelunking or coding or phosphorescent fish or chandeliers or movies made by obscure French directors in the 1930s.

If some of them are, perhaps, suitable for kissing, that might be nice too.

I also wish, of course, for long conversations over tea with the friends I have, for family dinners and lazy afternoons, for great stories, for evenings in the theater and days in the studio. I want mad adventures, a dose of gumption, vast and wordless vistas of imperfect trees. I'd like to drive someplace in the summer with the windows rolled down, to visit a place unfamiliar, to dance away an entire night accompanied by a DJ worthy of angels and watch a sunrise arrive by rooftop. I'd like a minimum of finite goodbyes. Health, obviously, for me and mine. A distinct lack of newsworthy upheavals. I could do with a painting that stops my heart, just for a moment, and a song that sticks in my throat. I want to be useful. I want time to play.

I am greedy beyond belief, but it's my birthday, and that's my wish.

birthday

My grandpa and I share a birthday. We were born on the 14th of January, sixty-two years apart.

My grandpa managed to be one of those very few people who somehow exist as heroes and gods in the part of my head or heart that tells me stories about the way I wish the world would be. He was an icon of my personal mythologies, but also a man who sat at the kitchen table and read the paper every single morning, comforting and vivid in his ordinariness.

A little more than a week ago, he died.

This birthday is a lonely one. It is, for the first time in my life, singular.

I spoke at the funeral. It was the hardest piece of reading that I've ever done. I stood there, alone, and a thousand moments, each of them sharper and more heartbreaking than I imagined possible, flew at me, one after another.

I wish that you could have met him. He was an astonishingly good man, and I loved him.

#

A few years ago, my sister and I asked Grandpa Megs to tell us about an adventure.

He said: “No need.”

We asked him again, and he asked why we wanted to hear things like that.

Because, Grandpa, we want to know something only you can tell us.

“Like what?” he said.

Like an adventure.

He didn’t say very much at first, just rubbed at his hands and nodded his head.

“Well,” he said. “There was a boat. We built it out of totong. We were really young and we took it down the river.”

We imagined that, my sister and I: the river sliding through Anahola, the little boat made out of metal scrap, and the magnificent captain, our own Grandpa Megs, but so, so young.

“Those were good times,” he told us. “On the river, you know, with friends.”

#

Megumu Hamamura—Megs—my grandpa—was a man who I cannot imagine as anything other than himself. If we could travel in time, we would recognize him immediately—man or boy, dad or grandpa, husband or brother or uncle or friend—as our very own Megs.

He once told me about a trip he took, about the way gutters smell in Morocco, and how it feels to look at the Rock of Gibraltar from the deck of a ship on the Mediterranean Sea. He told me about hijacking the little carts that transport sugar cane, and joy riding them down the hills of plantations. He told me about how movies used to be, when he rode to them in pick up trucks, and watched the cowboys and outlaws projected on the side of a tent, all for a few cents. He told me about the proper way to make a tin can.

#

These are not my memories. I never hurtled through a cane field, or strung wire through a house, and my memories are of Grandpa, telling me the stories of his. But maybe you were there. Maybe some of these memories are yours. If you are so lucky, I want you to examine them closely. They are an endangered species now, the last of something wonderful, and we should keep them for as long as we can.

#

My Grandpa Megs wears a navy blue worksuit. He parts his hair with a silver comb, and vanishes cigarettes inside his palms. He stretches out on the floor, and crosses his legs at the ankle, or sits in the yard in front of a fire, talking to his dog, or a cat, or me. He smells like brillantine… like smoke, coffee, and well-worn clothes. He can fix anything. He can wait patiently, forever. He is a man of character, in that old-fashioned and rare sense of stubborn goodness. He is kind and curious, graceful with competence, and loves so steadily and so deeply that there’s not much that he needs to say. He takes me riding, for beaches and ice creams, and he reads all the signs in every museum we go to.

“Incredible,” he says. “All of these things. Amazing, no? The way they all are.”

I’m sure you recognize him. I’m sure that if you could run into him, my Grandpa Megs, you would know him from last week, last year, or all the time you had in his company.

#

If he were here, now, I’m sure he would say: “Enough, already.”

He didn’t need so many words to say the things that he meant.

But since this is a day, the first day, when we can all start to say goodbye together, I think he would like it if we just remembered. Tell yourself the stories of the way you knew him best. Make your life a useful one. And say the things we all said to him, many, many times:

“You’ve got yourself a good life, Megs.”

And:

“I love you.”

how to pronounce loxioides kikuichi

When you say goodbye, the day is long.

It takes the time, in whole and parts, between the black, dull dark that slips behind an eye just before it flicks awake, and the softer dark--more grey, more endless--that presses it shut when all is done and there is nothing left but still and quiet.

Say it:

Goodbye.

How round it is. How soft. How lacking in edge and point and anchor. It drifts into distance. It walks away. It leaves, at its tail, a shape that would be familiar, even beloved, if only you could see it, or if it were there.

Run hard.

Stay ahead by inches, by shivers, by the space left in the absence of a single breath. It will eat you alive; it will devour you whole. Its mouth is wide and its jaw, when it embraces you (with all the time in the world), is as crumbling and insidious as bones, turned suddenly to ash.

Dust your face. Dust your hands. Press them across every minute, all of these and all of those. Leave their tracks, both smudged and pale, on the ones dredged up from oceans where they settled and drifts where they sit abandoned. They were orphaned by breakfast, lunch, and dinner, by alarms and dates, by errands, trains, novels, love affairs, noble ventures, accidents, and plans.

Examine them closely. These are all there are. An extinct species, the last and lonely, gone.

These are your cages, golden and fine. Hold them up and see nothing between the bars. Keep them safe, like relics in stone, like bones in dirt, like long gone moments pinned still under glass. Let them rust and erode, and even when they are so old, you might hold one up, still empty as the couch unoccupied, and send an explosion of birds (loxioides kikuichi) across the long and grey.

stuff to look at

Just a quick post before dashing off to the train and Booksmith.

1. We have new designs up at Fable & Tale. Shan posted some pretty pictures (featuring the lovely Emily Jones) over at the Fable & Tale blog. Our newest design is a mermaid who reminds me of an old fairy tale book I once had with black and white woodcut illustrations.

"The mermaid met your grandfather at the Santa Cruz County fair. There was a parade, and a contest, and all the young ladies wore tails and fins of sequins, satin, pailletes, glitter, and papier-mâché. Your grandfather was so young that you would never have recognized him. The mermaid was so beautiful—he might have told you this—that looking at her made him feel like he had been caught dancing to the most shockingly fine music, played so well that it would have made you cry."
2. The fabulous Mira Cook, who is a dancer, singer, musician, and all-around awesome individual, has just posted a music video for her song "Drum Machine." And, yes, she really is that adorable in real life.

3. Emily Jiang, who is one of the brightest, kindest people I know, has a poem up at Strange Horizons. It's called "Life Lessons" and you should read it.

4. Keffy Kehrli's story, "Advertising at the End of the World," is now available for your LISTENING pleasure at Escape Pod. I love this story. I've loved it since Keffy sent it round the critique table at Clarion, and I get ridiculously excited any time it appears somewhere else.

5. Paul Berger's lovely "Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory" got picked up for a year's best anthology. He lists the entire table of contents here, with links to the online homes of quite a few of the stories. I'm linking to that, just in case you have need of any holiday reading.

***

And now I have to run for my train. And the post office. And the bookstore.

xx. M

caught in the act

San Francisco video blogger, Diane Harrington, posted a small video and review of our show here.

on why dancing is like being a time lord

If you had asked me, perhaps when I was eight, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would probably have said:

"A zookeeper."

Or, maybe: "The person who swims with Shamu."

Or: "A paleontologist."

When I was about ten, I might have said, "veterinarian" or, "jockey."

When I was thirteen, it was a foregone conclusion, and the only thing I wanted to be was a dancer. I didn't want it desperately; I wanted it with steadfastness. It was the only thing I wanted to be, the only thing I could be, and the only thing I imagined I knew how to be. Everything else was either a pleasure, an irritation, or irrelevant.

I said no to lots of things. Horses, nice guys, invitations. A four-year scholarship to the University of California. Skis, hobbies, summer vacations. Dancing was so huge and complicated and wonderful that it took up all available space.

I sometimes wonder how I could possibly have been so sure, such an absolute and fervent believer.

***

I'm reading a book right now about memory. It makes the point that time seems to speed up as we get older because things are less new. We have done so many things for so long that our minds have less novelty to savor. The edges wear off and the seconds and minutes and days slide past us.

When dancing is going well, time does funny things. Sometimes it feels like the most perfect special effect. The suspended water drops. The muffled pause inside an explosion, with every piece of debris hanging still in midair. The only other time I've felt the same endless expansion was one evening when I drove down the freeway and a car in front of me lost control, spectacularly and ridiculously. It spun the way cars do in movies, actual elliptical twirls that carried it across the entire spread of lanes, first one way and then the other. It struck the central divider and pinwheeled off again, and everything looked so gentle and so inevitable that when it swung towards me, it seemed to drift along an obvious curve and I had all the time in the world to twitch my own car the smallest degree to the side and watch it slide past. Time suddenly opened up, every edge of it unfolding, like some sort of weird, reversed version of origami.

And that, I think, is one of the reasons why I still dance.

spaces for dancing

The piece we're performing tomorrow (tomorrow! OH MY GOD.) has a really beautiful set. The stage, which is unusually deep, is divided into four rooms, each one containing a rectangular slab of white floor. The exterior borders are defined by tall panels of milky, translucent paper, and the interior ones by scrim fabric that turns green and blue and transparent under the lights.

Our tech rehearsal was an epic ordeal. For a 45-minute piece, our crew has to deal with at least 40-something lighting cues. The lights guide the audience's attention, change the pace, intensity, and flavor of the environment, and hopefully make us more beautiful than we deserve.

The audience is meant to walk between the rooms of the stage, making the choice to look at one thing or another. It should be interesting. It's both an extremely formal, artificial construct and a more casual experience than most performances that involve a proscenium stage. There will be wine and the element of chance. We're wearing white silk dresses splattered with grey and little ankle socks. We dance to stories about resolutions, sex, regret, women who turn into trees, women who turn into stone, carrying coal to Newcastle, boardgames, and petting cats. We have a crackling, insidious score.

I am so curious to know what this piece says to people. I'm not sure what it's saying myself. There's a lot of pretty movement, an interesting conceit, an appealing landscape, but what am I trying to say? I'm not sure...