The Fallen Lives of Leaves

Every year has a November, but have you seen the leaves that I have seen? That every leaf is veined and numbered and not one falls without notice?

The Law of the Letter

Barnson, Misery. I stared at the back of the student’s windbreaker as he sat in front of me during the field day events and struggled to decipher the butchered English. Next to him sat several guys and gals with the long-eared Playboy logo on their jackets, over their hearts, where friends back home in the States might wear alligators or horses. Did they understand the emblems they wore like badges? I chuckled and then, eureka! Branson, Missouri!

One of the joys of teaching English in China was reading all the butchered English from my students: on signs, in books, anywhere that English was printed. We affectionately called the mistakes “Chinglish.” One day I passed a crew of workers putting up a sign on the Bureau of something or other. They had all the letters but not in the right order. I salvaged the crew leader’s reputation from criticism when I stopped and had them change Bareuu back to its proper spelling. Little did I know I saved him from future legal problems.

Last month, Fox News ran an AP story that caught my attention. In an effort to crack down on irregular English, Chinese authorities have laid down the law and beefed up security surrounding Beijing in anticipation of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. Apparently, private businesses and others who have dealings with foreigners are simply not following the rules.

According to Liu Yang, head of the Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages Program, a language hotline is in the works to encourage the public to report nonsense English. The standard by which each case is judged is to be found in a two-pound stack of regulations detailing proper English usage in advertising.

The problem, however, is not just with advertisers. Evidently the taxi drivers are also failing in English. Liu said Beijing taxi drivers must pass an English test to keep their licenses. But he acknowledged, "The taxi training courses are not working effectively, and there is a problem of taxi drivers missing classes.” Despite the problems, Liu said one-third of Beijing's 15 million residents speak some English, a claim that was challenged by a local reporter from China's state-run CCTV.

"I think 5 million is a big number," the reporter told Liu.

Liu stood by the figure, but conceded the vast majority of the English speakers fell into a category he labeled "low level."
Said Liu, "They can have very simply conversations, like: `Who am I? Where am I going?"'

This blogger wishes she could have simple conversations in English, like: “Who am I? Where am I going?” For more fun, read this then scroll down the link for some more classic “Chinglish.”

Derecho

The morning after the storm, we walked along the creek, hoping for signs of the cleansing rain, marveling at the broken tree limbs, the high water debris along the creek banks, the carpet of leaves torn from their branches and strewn like confetti under our feet. We stopped to examine a dead bird with flies on its belly, most likely fallen from its nest or tossed by the wind against a tree. Only days before, we'd saved a bird ensnared by string and caught in branches of spruce. It limply lay in my cupped hands as I unthreaded the twine, in and out, between bird feathers and a delicate neck. The girls hovered like nervous mothers, gently stroking the head with a fingertip until it sensed the release of string and flew free.

I wondered how many others had been displaced or killed by the strong Derecho winds that toppled their trees and wrenched apart carefully woven homes. The branches, split, cracked, hung in helpless surrender, upside down to the sky. We walked in surreal silence, that morning after the storm, and stopped along the banks of the creek, watching water runnel and pool and rush ahead. Bethany began whimpering: fire ants. I snatched her up and stuck her feet in the cold creek water, my feet now lodged in the mud, feeling the stinging bites between my toes. I tripped over rocks trying to get in the water and set Bethany down, whereupon she lost her footing and sat in the mud. She looked distraught and I had to laugh. "It's an adventure," I said. "I don't want to go home, yet," she said.

Further up the path, our resident cardinal flitted among a broken Live Oak but Bethany's eyes scanned the ground. "A ladybug!" She tried to capture it, with fingertips that had stroked a bird's head, but it scurried behind leaves and we headed for our own home, untouched by winds. Bethany skipped down the path, forgetting the ant bites itching her feet and legs. From the parking lot I heard an argument. A domestic dispute. Angry words, obscene epithets. F words and B words, and Bethany stopped. "Let's go," I commanded, hurrying down the walk, angry at the invasion, angry for the words crowding out our reverie, lost innocence, the fall, strings in trees, Derecho winds.

poets, essayists, and eye candy

Wow. Bret Lott, I love you, man. The Southern Review is publishing my two favorite poets, together, in the same issue. Is this rare? Consider that neither poet has published a volume of work. To catch their poems, you would first have to know when and which journal they might appear and then you ante up for one, maybe two poems. I have in my possession only three of Margo Berdeshevsky’s, xeroxed. I’m luckier with Allison Smythe. She is a longtime friend and critique partner and I am the blessed recipient of many more delicious lines and in the know on all her acceptances. Still. Having them both in one fine journal (and able to say I’ve shaken the hand of the editor) well, that is both rare and fine.

Another friend and nonfiction critique partner, Lisa Ohlen Harris, recently gifted a book to me by a writer of essays that she promised was near as good as reading Annie Dillard. I had my doubts. A slim volume, The Green Heart of the Tree, by A. S. Woudstra, is a compilation of essays written at a bamboo desk on the northwestern coast of Africa. I love these essays. Every word. I hesitate to tell you anything at all about them for fear you might presume familiarity and not buy this book. But these are some of the best essays I’ve read in a very long time. I love an intelligent and sensitive narrator; one who is well-traveled, understanding, a conduit by which I see and taste the red dust of her dirt road. Oh please buy this book. It is deliciously good.

And now for some deliciously good eye candy, revel in what Spring brought to us two weeks ago and only thirty minutes south of Dallas. It beat my beloved Washington-on-the Brazos annual retreat outside of Houston, though I missed meandering those paths with old friends.

Primaries

The world is exploding in color and vibrancy and I cannot possibly keep up. I'm three or four blogs behind, with news and muse vying for attention, pushed to the back burner to stew some more because the immediacy of Spring will not, cannot wait. The birds have my attention these days (you'd think I've never before seen the siren red of a cardinal) but lore says a pair of them brings love into your life. Along with rock doves, black-capped chickadees, bluejays, and mockingbirds, the cardinals' songs serenade and woo us. Rarer stil the pair of shy mallards down the creek and the brief reign of the wisteria, though no sign of the racoon or egret or hawk from last year.



Spring is clarifying: The pollen and dust washed away by the rains; the newly clothed trees rocked by March winds; the world once again able to breathe with new-leaf oxygen. In these moments, the fog lifts from a depressed stupor, my eyes come into focus, and I live in the urgent now. Look to the ant, to the damselfly, the rabbit, the moon.

The Beautiful Ache

My friend Leigh McLeroy has released a new book titled, The Beautiful Ache, published by Revell. I will buy it because I know Leigh, and I will like it because we like so many of the same things. I will recommend it because she is a writer's writer; she studies the masters and thinkers and poets we all admire and I am sure you will appreciate my recommendation.

Or I can point you to this interview by Glenn Lucke, over at Common Grounds, and let you make up your own mind. This is one of the best interviews I have read in years, in part because instead of giving Leigh a prescribed list of questions, Glenn actually responds to Leigh's answers and presses for further thought. I felt as though I was eavesdropping on a heated debate tucked in the corner of Taft Street Cafe.

As Glenn explores some of the topics in Leigh's book such as the Ache for Adventure, the Ache for Worship, and the Ache for Love, he won't be satisfied with sound bytes and convenient answers. Trusting in their longtime friendship, Leigh replies honestly and poignantly and gives the reader a true flavor of her wit and wisdom.

The interview is posted over a three-day period and the best part (for writers) is in the third installment. I wish every interview I read could be this much fun.

i "heart" u

Thank you, Secret Valentine. Your box of truffles turned a terrible, horrible, no-good day into something sweet.

Building a Memory

It started in the carpool line. Rain pelting the windshield with little white balls of sleet shifted. Snowflakes as large as dumplings fell into a child's hair and didn't melt. The boys stopped and looked skyward. The parents giggled. We woke up this morning to world like sifted sugar on chocolate cake. Snow angels, ice balls, holly berries, red-breasted robins, icinged gazebo. We warmed our fingers by a fire and drank hot chocolate. This morning, it's all ours.

Building a Mystery

I've been on a Sarah McLachlan kick since I "discovered" her Christmas cd in Starbuck two months ago. I'm a little late, I know. I wait until Sunday mornings to prepare esl lessons for the UTDallas graduate students from China who visit our church to learn about American culture and practise their English. The editors at Relief hyperventilate as I stall and reread submissions up to the very last possible minute. And two days ago, I dimantled the cone-shaped fire hazard occupying the tv stand. While the girls lay prone on the carpeted floor watching reruns of Curious George, the four foot tree I'd bought on my way home from work late one December night had dried to a crispy version of last summer's drought. So it wouldn't disentegrate into the carpet, I lifted the tree, light as straw, out the back door before removing the lights. The stubble on the concrete, a barren crop circle. A fact of gravity and lack of water.

I have a problem with procrastination. It is a confession I make with no real knowledge of how to change or if I should. Procrastination is a fact in my life and why is the mystery. The when of my memories is as mysterious as the acts themselves. While others work to build a mystery, I follow the winds of change. It's a condition abhorant to proverbial wisdom. I think that wisdom calls it sloth. Which windows of opportunity have I missed while my tree dried and the ornaments collected dust?

mysterium tremendum

Your best guess on the origin of this mystery.

News Buzz

Relief Journal has just posted the author lineup for the Winter 2007 issue due out in February. Take a peek here at the awesome writers who will be messing with your head in just a few days.

mudmen

When building men, the snow seems a purer medium, I suppose. Unless, like the Emperor Qin, you desire an army of terra cotta warriors to command in the netherworld beyond Xi'an. Or, like God, you desire a friend made from terra firma. But a child's need to create transcends having the best materials. It's still three parts snow or mud formed by hand, placed one on top the other until a pyramid of sorts, a stocky, rounded man, appears. Rocks for eyes, sticks for arms, leaves to crown the head, breath to warm and mold the clay into sentinels of art and joy and need.

On Ice

We were on tinterhooks all weekend, waiting. Venturing out for a drive to the mall in the freezing rain, we'd hope the roads wouldn't ice before we got back. On Saturday, the saturated trees began to bead and then freeze, suspended on the branches by a molecule strong enough to resist gravity. The ice storm never really materialized in this part of north Texas, though our neighbors to the west might disagree. The glazed roads mirror the street lights and the cars fish tail on the ice but the world has not stood still. Not like the winter morning in Houston years ago when I awoke from a dead sleep. A hundred miniature windchimes echoed in the stillness, an eerie quiet that seemed louder than the chimes. No cars hummed along the roads, no doors slammed, no dogs barked, no sirens signaled danger. I felt raptured from the dead and followed the sound of the chimes to my window, nearly frosted over with a thousand dendrite flakes. I opened the door and let in the cold stillness, squinting my eyes against the light. The air breathed in chimes, tinkling and shimmering tiny bells of sound. It was the trees. Iced and glazed with tiny daggers they bowed their limbs in the wind, brushed their frozen nakedness against the nearest neighbor, and sang like winter fairies.

Late this morning, the world is melting and drips a slow and steady percussion. A chickadee flits to the Christmas wreath still hanging from the eaves and nestles in the cherry-red bow. I want to wait some more, in hope, to be raptured from the dead. The world has not long enough stood still.

speaking with tongues

Thank you Dave Long (Faith in Fiction) for the link to this article in last Sunday's New York Times. I am taken with the processes by which our minds create and think and expound. We often forget the importance of the tongue - that the spoken word is the power by which God creates. Imagine God typing a memo to Michael: Bring me dirt that I may form man.

And for more on the typeset word, check out my new "button" to Shelfari (scroll down and to the right) which allows me to display my library. I'm still in the process of loading the isbn #'s, but it's way more fun than keeping my list in a suitcase! What's on your shelves?