Itchy Palms

Have you ever experienced itchiness so drop-everything and get-down-to-it you end up biting your palm? Not drawing blood, mind you. None of your kinky middle school settings in a dark, dank wood with corn starch makeup and extended eye teeth sensuously pulsing against the ever-so-closed lips... Nope, just downright primitive cat and dog to hell with scratching that damned itch, I'm going to bite it to death. Will that cancel out the chance money is coming my way? What a strange association, as if playing the palm of one's hand like a flamenco guitarist suggests to the observer a certain money-lender in Venice by the name of Shylock who dwelleth in the country of Shakespeare's imagination. It's a profound sensation, itchy palms. What could it be? You won't or most likely won't be receiving mosquito bites on that toughened epidermal region with its Mound of Venus, plains and deltas, not to mention the life line and all those cross-hatchings representing children. I remember well the full-bearded chiromancer, Karl Marx come back as a gypsy, up three steps inside his caravan, okay, the image is coming in stronger now, I'm seeing Portabello Road on a Saturday during that market of elbows and musty books among the vegetables. He took my palm and suddenly, disarmingly, took on a rather paternal, caring tone. He gave me assurances that my time had not yet come and that I would likely excel at some unspecified sport much to my own surprise. I'm still waiting. But it's enough that he was on my side. He actually got the number of children right, if you count a miscarriage and an abortion, two memories which sadden me instantly and deeply with their memory. My two beautiful daughters bring me back right away to the light. How we tuck those painful experiences away and grow thick skin overall, as if each wound, each splinter of fate will eventually get swallowed up by that first point of contact we call our skin. No wonder it presents us with insatiable itches from time to time. I'm afraid the money explanation goes empty handed. I'm here gnawing like an animal on my own hand, tasting and attempting to devour some small demon who works his or her way from inside out. After a small frenzy where nothing like a protein or a carbohydrate materializes, I stare at my outstretched palm, a bit reddened beneath my Line of Intuition. I'm looking at a map of my destiny as if it's day one. So many lines and no signs to go by. How am I ever going to find my way?

Wounds Too Fresh For Panache

Re-reading March 11 NYT review of "Scottsboro Boys" came across the critic's bottom line for why the musical doesn't quite click, that the racial issues are still "too raw," too close, even though events date to 1930s...all that time past and wounds too fresh for "panache"—Realizing how self-indulgent my reflection here...I can see how the "Much Ado" chapter I'm stuck on brings me up short in the same way, though personally and most idiosyncratically—allowing (somehow choice comes into this) a kind of [Altan's Moll Dubh A'Ghleanna plays while I write this] contrived reluctance to leave the edges where they are—now thinking of my precious "immediate" audience especially Jack W who would be interested in the structural "factoids" as TF described them but also the work world the way it was for me back then and how it changed...TF, sitting in that Stinson place we rented, put me onto Bill Bryson's style of writing "what's in front of him" and later on dropping in those interesting factoids...how "Much Ado" is about so much spinning of wheels and the betrayal with too quick endorsement is my own somehow and poor theatre history, a beautiful woman told to hide her calloused hands, for surely she has worked hard and with every conceivable medium all these millennia...the set onstage in "M.A." becomes the book imagined, the book I cannot access because I have screened it out—cannot reach it, get to it, made it too precious, the elaborate construction overlaid on the original—wasn't that the root challenge of the RSC? Balancing interpretation w/the play's truth. I suppose the literati would say "presenting" that truth to this generation, the current mode, "making it accessible" and so on. Now it feels I'm really making a big deal out of nothing.

The Nested Dolls

When my oldest daughter was visiting a few months ago, I saw she had taken down the nested dolls from our library shelves. I said nothing. Gave her that moment happily, or rather, left her in peace. There she was in that cave of books, a kind of nourishing egg itself, with the grandmother doll opened and all the others in a row on the table. My daughter perched there utterly self-contained, absorbed. From where I stood briefly, passing through, it was a benign, far look. After all, there was childhood with its smooth, rosy and complete complexion split open before her, beings within beings, she herself growing a human being within herself, her own body a nurturing, soft cave now for the new life. It is a miracle, this opening and opening to the life within. And that's something rather peculiar or specific to my daughter, the act of opening. As a child there wasn't a door, a drawer, a box or container she hadn't explored. You could say she was our little Pandora, lifting lids and covers to peek beneath, curious, irresistibly so. Did she release ills into our world, our small world, to run rampant through the house as if we lived in that Greek story? I'd say not. I'd say there was a simple, matter-of-fact sense at the tips of her fingers. What's inside? I don't recall her hoarding like a magpie, no more than our other children with their secret caches and stashes under the stairs or in the too-small-to-bother-with crawl spaces. What's inside? Oh. That. And move on to the next. Perhaps its that cool, detached curiosity which allows her inside the medical profession where it is very useful to ask questions, take a look, satisfy curiosity, and move on to the next possibility. But I won't deny her a moment with her childhood Babushka, the nested Russian dolls. You can imagine the wood turner handling the light wood like egg shells, pinning, spinning, trimming, hollowing out and measuring within a hair's breadth, till the two halves fit and come apart with a squeak. It's quiet in the library now. She has them all undone, the story lined up, generation after generation. Next, the painter with her fine-tipped brushes, outlining arms and scarves, eyes and a distant look to be varnished, glossed up, durable. How long, how far she traveled with her precious cargo within? Mother. Daughter. Granddaughter. And that place held by the one solid piece of this curious puzzle, the newest story carved neat and never entered by the turner's knife. Still so shiny after all these years is the core of this assembly, this putting together and taking apart, this opening up and closing with a final squeak. This is my daughter's moment.

Bee Pollen Catcher

My bee friend called this morning asking for pollen. I togged up with da kine hat&veil over long sleeved shirt, trousers tucked in socks, long gloves. Interrupted a flurry of foragers when I took out the wedge holding open the pollen catcher door. Jiggled the drawer back in place. Shut the door and stood back a ways to see how they took to our second installment. We collected so much pollen our first attempt, two weeks back, that we left the drawer out until we finished off what we had. Turns out I'm sensitive to it...trying to figure out why...mango going off? I'm allergic to mango sap. Maybe that's it.

Wind's calmed down a bit yesterday and today after a week of what my wife calls a punishing wind. True enough, leaves are shredded in the path of the trade wind. Some big palms' new fronds have snapped. Branch down on the driveway. Ironwood tree fallen onto hau. We're due for more wind plus rain next week.