Tongues in Trees

A Pastiche of Devilish Things Shamelessly Offered in Lieu of an Entirely Orginal Creation

2010-03-21T10:57:00.000-07:00

This blog post is in response to the Tarot card The Devil. I spent a great deal of time trying to work with the idea of "the devil is in the details," and this led me to look at other references to the devil in songs, aphorisms and literature, and that led to this:

"May your glass be ever full. May the roof over your head be always strong. And may you be in heaven a full half an hour before the devil knows you're dead.”

~traditional Irish toast

“Runnin' with the devil/ Runnin' with the devil/ I’m gonna tell ya all about it”

~ “Runnin’ With the Devil” by Van Halen

The devil is in the details.
~Anonymous

“The Devil went down to Georgia/ He was lookin’ for a soul to steal.”

~ “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by Charlie Daniels

ABNORMAL, adj. Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. Wherefore the lexicographer adviseth a striving toward the straiter resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself. Whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the hope of Hell.

~From The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce

The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.
~Anonymous

Whereto with look compos'd Satan repli'd.
Not uninvented that, which thou aright
Believst so main to our success, I bring;
Which of us who beholds the bright surface
Of this Ethereous mould whereon we stand,
This continent of spacious Heav'n, adornd
With Plant, Fruit, Flour Ambrosial, Gemms & Gold,
Whose Eye so superficially surveyes
These things, as not to mind from whence they grow
Deep under ground, materials dark and crude,
Of spiritous and fierie spume, till toucht
With Heav'ns ray, and temperd they shoot forth
So beauteous, op'ning to the ambient light.
These in thir dark Nativitie the Deep
Shall yield us pregnant with infernal flame,
Which into hallow Engins long and round
Thick-rammd, at th' other bore with touch of fire
Dilated and infuriate shall send forth
From far with thundring noise among our foes
Such implements of mischief as shall dash
To pieces, and orewhelm whatever stands
Adverse, that they shall fear we have disarmd
The Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt.

~Paradise Lost , Book VI by John Milton, in which Satan is credited for inventing gunpowder

Love Poem No. 7

2010-03-19T12:25:00.000-07:00

Across the ocean lives my once and future lover
and I struggle to maintain the equilibrium (or is it the equanimity?)
necessary for living suspended between that past and that future—
I mean really living and not just existing, not just waiting.

Each day I must find a way to happiness.
Most days I follow the same path.
I slowly jog along a pitted gravel alley that begins steps from my door
picking up speed when I reach the highway until,
fairly sprinting now, I come to the trail that ends at the ocean’s edge.
Panting and sweating, I gaze in all directions, vaguely aware of the compass point that, were I to follow it unceasingly, up and over waves and across miles of fluid, liquid nothingness, would lead me to the island where he is still sleeping.

I place my hands along the vertical surface of a rocky outcropping and stretch deeply.
In the rough surface pushing back against the weight of my body I feel the veins and sinews under his skin, and I can taste and smell him in the tangy, salty spray that splashes off the rocks.

I know by now this feeling, like all feelings, will fade and be replaced by others,
but nonetheless I try to hold onto it.
I am tempted to pick up a stone as a talisman to stave off that moment
when I can no longer feel what I am feeling,
but I don't.

I leave my sleeping lover and return home.
I brew a pot of coffee, feed the dog, make my bed.
My hands and nose and mouth feel and smell and taste other things.
I breathe in and out.

Later I will smile at the man at the cafe who orders
a glass of the same wine that I do
and work out a clever way to suggest we share a bottle instead.

Later I will laugh at this man's jokes and agree that it was fun
and give him my number so that I can work out a clever way
to turn him down when he calls the next day because
much later, when the sun is just setting on that faraway island,
and it is my turn to sleep,
it will be my lover's voice in my ear that makes me smile.

Night of Swords

2010-03-19T08:30:00.001-07:00

A Night of Swords

Most nights Connor was silent, or at least very quiet, at the dinner table, but not tonight. Tonight my teenage son wanted to talk, and I had little choice but to listen. I know how that sounds, like I would rather he stayed silent while I read through legal briefs and reviewed my notes as I ate the modest meal pulled together at the last minute. Dinner always caught me by surprise. It shouldn’t, I know, because it happens every night—at least the need and expectation of it it do—but nonetheless, when 5:30 rolled around and Connor wandered up from his tiny basement bedroom looking expectantly at me as his eyes caught mine across the room, I generally uttered “shit” under my breath and shoved the papers to one side of the flat surface that served as my desk and table.

Anyway, like I said, most nights he was willing, dare I say content, to read a book or listen to music while I squeezed in a few more minutes of reviewing before heading to a study session at 6:15, but tonight he wanted to talk. I know this because he cleared his throat a few times and pushed his glasses up and down on the bridge of his nose.

I hope Connor noticed that I didn’t hesitate for a second and put down the document I was holding as soon as he slid his glasses for the third time and had cleared his throat twice. (In case you were wondering, the document was an APA amicus brief in re: Boy Scouts of America, National Capital Area Council v. Pool 809 A.2d 1192.) It’s true that I kept my pen in my hand, but I only made a quick note of the place on the page where I had left off reading.

“Mom,” Connor said when he realized I was no longer reading. “I am going to run.”

By run, Connor did not mean run for ASB president. He meant he was going to run 100 miles from Auburn to Lake Tahoe. He was going to go through three pairs of socks, a change of shoes, gallons of Gatorade and Gu. He was going to sleep standing up in 15 minute stretches, he was going to piss and crap on the side of the road, he was going to stride determinedly up 5% grade inclines and sail down the other side. He was going to run in the Western States Endurance Run, the youngest person to qualify for this—for any—ultramarathon.

“So, you know what this means, right? You have to talk to dad. He’s going to try to stop me but I am going to run.”

I knew what this meant. And there was no way I was going to let Connor’s dad stop him from running. He might be a successful plastic surgeon while I was a lowly law student, but I had two things going for me: I’m right to encourage Connor’s running and I am much better with words. He might know how to wield a scalpel, but my weapon of choice was mightier than a sword and I had the aphorism to prove it.

“I’ll talk to him tonight,” I said.

Connor looked at me for a long minute. “What about your study session?”
“Screw it. I’d rather argue with your dad than with Pete and Amil.”

Tonight would be good. I hadn’t had a good toe-to-toe battle with George in months. Tonight woud be good—it would be a night of swords.

Herman's Hermits

2010-03-19T07:45:00.001-07:00

The backpack my daughter picked out for her first day of school did not have a Disney princess or the pink Power Ranger on it. In fact, it had no characters, just character. It was a faded red backpack that had once belonged to her older brother. Much too big for her tiny frame, one of the buckles that locked the shoulder straps in place was broken and the strap had to be tied in an awkward knot to keep it from slipping off her shoulders.

Her brother used that pack in middle school, and he had customized it in a way that reflected his various interests: There was a decal for Sector Nine skateboards across the bottom of the pack and two hand-drawn Active logos. Small round pins with the names of bands he thought were cool were arranged in neat vertical rows on the shoulder straps. The pin that started the collection was one he found on an old army jacket of his dad’s: Herman’s Hermits. It was kind of a Herman family joke having to do with the seemingly genetic disposition the family had towards oversized personalities, but Kevin just thought it was cool that his last name was part of the band’s name. There was one final embellishment, one that Erin surely didn't know about when she asked Kevin, by then a junior in high school, if she could have his old backpack and one Kevin must have forgotten about: inside one of the pockets, where he apparently though no one would see, he had written F U C K in block letters.

I didn’t know about the F U C K when Erin chose the backpack, and I’m not completely sure it would have made a difference if I had known, but I might have covered it up with a sticker—I’m pretty sure I would have done that—and that would probably have prevented the entire chain of events that led to us packing up the contents of our suburban Orange County house and moving to a small town on the central coast of California.

But I get ahead of myself. On that first day of school, before she put on the backpack, Erin looked like any other kindergartner in Yorba Linda. Her hair was in two braids, each tied off with a blue grosgrain ribbon. She wore a pink top and a light blue denim jumper (with her red Attack of the Killer Tomato soccer shorts underneath) and new white Keds.

Erin liked lots of things that other five-year old girls liked (although she was only four-years old, her birthday being the last possible date that would allow her to start school that year). Her favorite game was Pretty, Pretty Princess—especially when her dad and older brothers played with her. She had a menagerie of Littlest Pet Shop figures on her dresser and each week she saved a portion of her allowance to buy a new Beanie Baby.

But Erin was not like most kindergartners. She had started reading at three—completely unprompted by me or her dad—and by four she was reading the newspaper. I was caught off guard by this. We had lots of gender neutral picture books and because she had three older brothers, many early reader chapter books that would appeal to boys, but I didn’t know what to buy for a four-year old girl who read at a 10th grade level.

I shouldn’t have worried though. A girl who can teach herself to read at three will find reading material where others don’t think to look, and Erin discovered the stash of technical manuals for the television, computer, microwave, and other appliances that we kept in a basket on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in the family room. Honestly, we should have thrown them out because neither Ben nor I were the type of person to actually read a manual to figure out how to operate a machine. We tended to buy electronic appliances that were self-explanatory and only used those functions that were intuitive. Plus, having three sons ranging in age from 12-16 meant never having to learn how to operate anything.

Erin started reading those manuals one day, and for some reason she found them interesting.

“Mommy,” she would say. “Did you know you could program the VCR to record America’s Funniest Home Videos?”

Or, “Daddy, did you know if you hold down the TIME button on the microwave, you could set it to the right time of day?”

Both of these functions were the kind of thing Ben and I couldn’t be bothered to learn, and since the boys had their own television in the basement and they didn’t care about the time of day on the microwave, we had lived happily without recording the painful slips and gaffes taking place across America or using the microwave as a watch.

Erin changed all that.