Comma Dot Comma

It was iron deficient. It was brittle. Its aged branches hung over the roof and creaked ominiously during storms. Its roots pressed up against the house and snaked under it. The trunk was about five feet from the front wall. It was only a matter of time until Something Bad Happened, so we signed its death warrant. The executioner came, muscles bulging just like they do on the billboard photo. He had his big truck and his posse and his ladders and his saws.

It was also one of the reasons we bought the house. It towered over the neighborhood, about three stories high with a trunk so wide we couldn’t reach our arms around it. It was a good thirty years older than the house itself, a tree that had seen the neighborhood creep up the hill in the 70′s and absorbed the sight with stoicism and aplomb. It kept one whole side of the house cool on hot days. And, being a eucalyptus, its leaves smelled great. This is Phoenix and a real tree is a treasure, except when it is a menace. A menacing treasure was our tree.

When I got home from work yesterday, all that was left was the edge of a root butting against the house and a pile of fragrant red sawdust. Alas! It was as if Dr. G smiled at me and his four front teeth were suddenly missing. It is sad to be the Destroyer of a tree.

See it here: http://commadotcomma.net/blog/2007/08/26/joining-the-landed-gentry

I’ve got a few days off from my regular job and I am spending them…. working. I’ve got two online creative writing courses that I will begin teaching (thanks for the edit Karen) come Monday, and there’s always more to do to get online courses ready than one imagines in one’s little mind when one chooses to watch movies instead of working on curriculum for multiple weekends in a row. Both courses are getting into ship-shape order now, and I’m feeling that start-of-the-course excitement. We are gonna have some fun! It has just occured to me that, since they are online, anyone could sign up, not just my fellow Phoenicians. Eight weeks, with one assignment due per week. The first course is Beginning Creative Writing, where we will work on memoir, poetry, and short stories. The second course is Beginning Poetry, where we will do five different poems (nature, persona, list, strange, rhymed) plus some revisions. I know it’s late notice, and I must confess total ignorance about the availability of space, but hey, if you’re interested, check it out. http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/workshops/index.html

There is this depressing thing at my work called a body fat meter. It measures what percent of your body weight is fat, water, and other tissue by measuring the electrical resistance in your bare feet. It prints out a receipt helpfully listing the percentages and total pounds in each category. The machine is not super-accurate but in a way, it is kind of fun to have a receipt listing my percent body fat, right where sales tax would be listed on a grocery receipt. I get on this machine every six weeks or so, and no matter how much my weight changes (ok, it doesn’t change MUCH), it always declares that my percentage is one point above the desireable range. That’s the depressing part.

Since my golly-I-need-new-pants high point in mid-December, I have begun erratically exercising more and erratically enforcing a one-food indulgence-per-day rule for myself. I occasionally endure the cheerful encouragement of the free fitness trainer at my work; he is excellent at knowing when I am plotting to quit my weight lifting reps too early. If I seem especially stubborn on this point, he will ever-so-kindly swap my weights for the next size down and make me keep going. He is unaffected by my black stare of doom, which communicates the message, “I am old enough to be your mother, youngster, so don’t even think of bossing me around again.” I would have had to begin childbearing when I was 10 yrs old for that to be true, but you are allowed to mentally exaggerate when you are resisting others’ attempts to help you get healthy. (It’s a human right,look it up on the UN website).

Unrelentingly Cheery Fitness Trainer and I have fortunately eliminated the need to buy me new pants (I wonder how he would be as a personal shopper? As far as I know his wardrobe consists entirely of sweats and basketball shorts). But that darn “desirable range” percentage point! Why must it elude me?

Two movies worth watching side by side: Ushpizin and A History Of Violence. In the first, an Israeli flick, we throw our lot in with a man who has repented of his life of crime and, with his wife, joined an orthodox community to study the Torah and start a family. Two characters from his old life suddenly appear to disrupt his hopes of a new start. In a History of Violence, which stars the fantastic Viggo Mortensen, we throw our lot in with a man who has repented of his life of crime and settled in small-town, family-values America to raise a family. Characters from his old life suddenly appear to disrupt his carefully maintained existence.
The two films could not be more different tonally—Ushpizin is brimming with Divine Providence and optimism that good will prevail. The threats that come Moshe’s way certainly feel real, but they never overshadow the sense of God’s beneficence in the midst of trials. And it’s pretty funny; an outlandishly expensive lemon serves as a key plot point, for example.
A History of Violence, on the other hand, starts at its emotional feel-good high point and deteriorates from there. I’m sensitive to onscreen violence and spent about a third of the movie with my eyes closed (Note: this movie has extreme violence so may not be a good option for everyone). God’s presence is faint and oblique; Tom, it seems, must save his own life, destroying every connection to his old ways with any weapon that comes to hand. “What can I do?” Tom asks at one point. “You can die,” says the other guy. You can guess how well that goes over.
For the man in each movie, the violent past is always looming. He thought he was free, but it has hunted him down, insisting at every turn that the new man, the gentle family man, is false. The brutal man is the real one. It brooks no arguments and gives no mercy. He has fled to the safest place he can find and it is not safe enough to protect him or his family from his old self. What is a reformed criminal to do to keep (or lose and then find again) redemption? I like these two stories together for the way they trace different answers to that question.

In this issue, you get to hear the authors read their poems aloud, if you wish! Topics include Marco Polo, psychological tests, unicycles, IV nutrition, and many other fine, rhymed items. Check it out at www.unsplendid.com.