Laura M Gibson

lemon queen

Posted on June 3, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

This spring has been full of firsts. Spotting meadowlarks and mountain bluebirds. Watching a pair of screech owls raise their clutch. Rescuing a kitten from the engine of my car (a story on its way in another post) that rode around smashed on top of the manifold for at least 75 miles and lived to tell about it.

Of course, the explosion of life in the natural world is largely about work done behind the scenes beforehand, which is the case with so many other things, and also with fiction.

Blue Earth Review has been kind enough to say yes to publishing “The Lemon Queen” in their latest Spring Issue, Volume 12. As always, I’m deeply grateful and tickled that another creation is out in the world.

Categories: fiction, publishing, short story, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: fiction, publishing, short story, writing | 4 Comments

screech

Posted on May 15, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

For the last few months, I’ve been watching a pair of small owls hunting at dusk in the neighborhood.

While they’ve spent the bulk of their early evening hunts flying into and out of the horse chestnut tree across the street, the pair seems especially to hanker for mice in the backyard next door. That house is empty, the yard a brown tangle of beds gone fallow and some iron monkey bar-looking structures. From the back deck, while I’ve watched the owls’ tandem swoops in the gloaming, I’ve come to know their calls to each other. The lilting tremolo, the barking chuck, the soft hoots.

Early last week I was in the backyard watering when I heard a low, bouncing whinny. It was mid-day. I looked up into the maple and spied a grayish mass on one branch, roughly the size of a housecat, and thought maybe Arturo, bigger than ever, had reasserted himself as the squirrel yard boss. But it was no rodent squatting on the branch of the maple. It was three screech owlets who sat huddled together, their feathers still a tufted, downy gray. They sat blinking sleepily, leaning against one another while I had a proper look at them and while their parents stood guard not too far away, chirping at them, no doubt, not to engage with the human.

image: jessica burtnick – http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/fpPhoto.html?photo=117816421

Over the course of last week the babies filled out. Their feathered ear tufts darkened a little and their yellow eyes remained open much of the day. I stood below their roost and made conversation while they stared unblinking, occasionally responding by swaying and bobble-heading, trying to get a bead on what sort of threat I was.

In the scheme of their life span, the owlets are pre-pubescent. After they hatch, they learn everything they need to know in five weeks. This week they are awake much of the day, begging to get off their branch and go do something even though the sun is high. The adults admonish, hush them by cleaning their feathers, let them shuffle to another branch, maybe chirp at the squirrels who roughhouse nearby. Sometimes the owlets split up and sit alone. From where I stand on the ground, I can’t tell the adults from their young now. They blink down at me, unfazed. They’ve got my number.

Aware that I’m at risk of sentimental anthropomorphizing, I know their presence in town is just nature adapting. Still, I feel lucky they’ve chosen our tree in which to spend their days, and even luckier that I can witness them leave this perch to go hunting. Well before dusk the owlets register their discontent, flap their wings, peck at each other. In the loud correction of the adults there is exasperation, as if to say, “We are sit-and-wait predators. When you can perfect that, we’ll see about driving.”

A half hour or so after the sun goes down, one of the adults leaves first and flies to the fence and then calls for the owlets to stay behind. There’s a lot of thrashing and tomfoolery in the branches. The babies fight, fidget, bark out into the night for the adults. They want to fly, and they can – they navigate within the branches of the big maple just fine. But it’s not yet time for them to hunt solo.

Their impatience is raucous.

At our own house we are teaching Owen, 15, how to drive. Being a passenger with him is alternately terrifying and rewarding. He insists that he’s an excellent driver already, that we’ve got nothing to worry about, but he has trouble with road awareness. He hugs the white line and argues that he IS in the middle of the lane when I suggest that’s the best place for success. I’m white noise, a goathead pricker in his sock, a dog whistle he cannot hear. He’s impatient to take the reigns of his life, raucous and flapping like those owlets, who, each night, get less and less obedient about following directions.

Last night, a full moon, the owlets flitted out of the tree as soon as their parents left and took their squabbling to the roof of our house, to the top of the neighbor’s van. I could hear one of the adults talking to them a few yards over. After short consultation, the babies decided they had better get home. Breakfast was on the way.

The moon rose higher, illuminating the show in the backyard. Three mice in an hour, a good haul. Food in the belly quieted the owlets in the maple. The adults flew off into the night. I’m not sure how much longer they’ll be in our yard.

Soon, the babies will be off in the world, hunting in the backyards of other streets, finding mates of their own, and these will be monogamous and long-term relationships. Owen, too. I try to remind myself that he IS doing it right. He’ll learn best by trying, by possibly failing, by sometimes succeeding. His flight is about to be out of his parents’ hands.

I wonder if the owl adults have an impending sense that their work of the season will soon be over. If, after dawn, when they’ve been up all night hunting, they wonder whether their efforts will build self-sustaining offspring who are smart enough to avoid death by hawks, by cars, by razed habitats. If they fret that their teachings, even now, are falling away and growing smaller in the rearview mirror.

image: http://thebirdsandthebeads-sue.blogspot.com/p/yard-birds.html

Categories: family, nature, outdoors, parenting, Uncategorized | Tags: family, nature, outdoors, parenting | 2 Comments

depth perception

Posted on April 29, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

Deep and sincere thanks to Matthew Limpede and the staff at Carve Magazine, who said yes to including the story “Depth Perception” in their Spring 2014 Premium Edition. I’m in great company in these pages and ever grateful for the chance to be there.

2014_1 spring.png

Categories: fiction, gardening, outdoors, publishing, short story, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: fiction, outdoors, publishing, short story, small towns, writing | 2 Comments

McDermott, Chainsaw Artist

Posted on March 23, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

http://imgur.com/gallery/mvo3o

I recently read a craft article by Ben Percy on creating and managing conflict in stories. Trying to figure out the allure in Stieg Larsson’s uber-popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Percy decided to color code the conflicts in the novel’s hefty pages, working to understand the way Larsson had complicated, layered and ratcheted up the various perils facing Lisbeth and Mikael. According to Percy, the best stories create characters who juggle several problems at one time – these are the “flaming chainsaws” of good fiction, simultaneous crises that increase in threat and rotation. Necessary tools, because believable, palpable peril is the engine under the hoods of novels.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I read it, aligning his notion alongside of my own stories, which frequently fail in early drafts to be on fire in effective measure.

This week I considered chainsaws in Alice McDermott’s quiet book Someone, the story of Marie Commeford. In 2012, I read one of the book’s chapters excerpted in The New Yorker, though at the time I didn’t realize it was part of something longer because it works so beautifully as a short story. Two sentences into this section of the novel, my first experience reading came back to me viscerally in full bloom: Marie’s first sexual experience with the usurious Walter Hartnett, a boy with a gimpy leg; Marie’s abandonment when Walter found a better offer, a girl with money and a name. McDermott’s stories, searing and quiet, structurally complex, worth puzzling over, are the sort that stay with you.

In the novel, throughout her life, Marie invokes Walter’s name several times, an iteration that McDermott deftly employs to illustrate the power and lasting watermark of sexual memory. A girl plagued with poor eyesight, Marie tells her own story, looks back over a life beginning in a 1930s Brooklyn neighborhood. Her lack of sight, the various surgeries she has to correct it, the scenes a reader is privy to through Marie’s hazy vision or which we experience from beneath gauze, become an important trope in the book, which is largely about the way we see the world slant, caught up as we are in dreams and our varied versions of reality.

When it was released in 2013, many critical reviews examined how nothing much happened in Someone’s pages. Even the book flap reads: “…this resonant story of an unremarkable woman’s unforgettable life.” Not the best words to recommend a reader sit down right now and give it a go.

McDermott herself, when interviewed by The New Yorker about the novel, said, “novels about unremarkable women, especially those written by unremarkable women, seem a thing of the past. But that’s what the novel wanted to be. . . . It’s the contrarian in me, I’m afraid.”

There’s the undeniable beauty of McDermott’s writing, spare and unassuming, a fitting match for the characters, who soldier on without the kind of histrionics present in louder stories. And McDermott’s fictive world is certainly universal– the novel depicts a world we might recognize in our own neighborhoods, sensorially rich but compressed, too, in the way stories about others often come to us. Constant in every page is the aching gap between the intimate knowledge about ourselves we accept or refuse or dress up as something else, and the way we never really know the heart of another.

And yet I found McDermott’s unremarkable story surprisingly compelling, and though it’s not the stuff of Stieg Larsson’s edgy-sexual-action-adventure-murder-mystery-thriller, it IS full of the sorts of chainsaws one recognizes.

Inspired by Percy, I started making a list of McDermott’s chainsaws, struggles essential to the becoming of Marie. There are Marie’s internal issues– the effect of her father’s sickness and early death; her trouble with her sight and later, the fear of blindness and the surgeries to avert it; her sexual awakening with Walter Hartnett; her desire to understand and to help her brother Gabe, which is largely a useless desire, until the end.

Orbiting all around Marie is another set of struggles, all within spitting distance of her Brooklyn stoop. There are the neighborhood deaths that dot the landscape of these pages — her neighbor, Peegen Chehab, who dies falling down a flight of stairs, and whose name, like Walter Hartnett’s, is invoked again and again throughout the novel; young Mrs. Hanson, her best friend Gerty’s mother, who dies in childbirth, echoed later in Marie’s own medical scare with her first child; blind Bill Corrigan, the arbiter of street baseball, who commits suicide. And later, once young Marie broadens her world view, there is the parade of death she must help assuage the pain of at Fagin’s funeral home where she works. There’s spiritual crisis, abandonment, widowhood, urban blight, complications of Marie’s own child birth, the question of whether and how one can save others from themselves.

The list is much longer than this, but I’m surprised at the way this quiet story is so fraught with struggle. McDermott’s Marie is not being chased by madmen or facing the end times, but her chainsaws have heft and urgency enough to give Marie the kind of agency readers seek.

And while I never fully understood why McDermott didn’t choose to let fully rise to the surface what’s really wrong with Gabe, I did find it interesting how she uses the unknown surrounding her brother to pull us along through the narrative. The issue of Gabe rises above another rotating danger – bearing and raising children, which, as Marie shows us time and again can be treacherous and heartbreaking. It is all around Marie in those she knows. It is also her own treachery–bearing a second child after almost losing her life to the first is a defiance she justifies out of desire, courage, stubbornness. But this danger is muted by our early understanding that Marie is looking back, that she’s successfully had children.

Flaming chainsaws at work in a story reach a place where they are dangerously aflame. The “constant, rotating threat of them,” as Percy says, must be extinguished.

Gabe’s breakdown and time in an institution, the way Tom and Marie bring him home like a child (though, even to the end, Gabe remains the zen-master about the world and the human heart), are a surprising inevitability. Ultimately, Marie believes she “saves” Gabe from himself by pocketing his pills, saves him from “falling down” like poor Peegen Chehab. I’m not sure it works, this choice, but I take McDermott’s point.

It’s not a movie, after all, it’s a life. Full of all that cannot be seen or known, of falling and failing, and the celebration of triumphs, both real and imagined.

http://jockmackenzie.wordpress.com. maybe the best part of this hard-to-find image is the fact that this guy is a teacher and juggled flaming chainsaws for his students...

http://jockmackenzie.wordpress.com.
Maybe the best part of this understandably hard-to-find image is the fact that this guy is a teacher and juggled flaming chainsaws for his students…

Categories: book review, fiction, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: book review, fiction, writing | 2 Comments

bragging post

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

birdweb.org

In the foothills I saw my first meadowlark this week. It was the perfectly orchestrated sighting. That gorgeous canary yellow breast, embellished with a black chevron, heaving with song from a perch on a stem of sagebrush. Backlit by the blaze of rising sun, it was crooning its heart out. There could’ve easily been music, something by Bach or Handel, or maybe Beethoven.

It was pretty thrilling to finally spot one and feel the song was aimed at me, for I was thrilled, too, at witnessing the paling sky surrendering to the bold lines of day. The half moon was just disappearing across the valley. I stopped to soak in the privilege of being present at that moment in that place and hoped it wouldn’t startle and fly away. What with the tilting sky on the threshold between night and day, the full-bodied song, the solitude of the place, I understood the impulse to yawp over the rooftops of the world.

Later I learned male meadowlarks like to squat on “bragging posts” to tell the world all about their fabulous selves, much like roosters, and this certainly seemed to be the case that morning. The lark was busy with the job of wooing, to be sure, but also, it would seem, saying to any fellas within range, Robert de Niro-style, “You wanna piece of me?”

His serenade must’ve trumped the undersong of pugnacity. Along came two females – these fellows travel in the world with two mates—and off they flew together.

allaboutbirds.org

Categories: nature, outdoors, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: nature, outdoors | 4 Comments

how can i keep from singing?

Posted on February 11, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

More like an older sister than an aunt, Susie taught me to swim. I was nine the summer she came to visit, and though I splashed around easily enough in the shallow end, nothing I did resembled a stroke. Over the course of a week, Susie worked with me at our little community pool, teaching me to do the freestyle and be brave in water. On day four I made the discovery that submerging my head wouldn’t mean sudden death. After that I was golden.

Since that summer I’ve been a swimmer. Not a competitive one, but a dabbler in the unstructured water play of paddling across lakes and rivers, jumping off rocks, bodysurfing, rafting.

In addition to last year’s big life changes I’ve probably written about too much here, in the fall I added swimming laps, a new skill that still feels humbling. I was looking for another activity that might deliver the kind of focused non-focus of running, one I’ll be able to do for many years, long after my running knees give out.

That I was very bad at surviving laps in the beginning is an understatement. But it was thrilling to engage in something at which I was terrible. I had to learn to sustain swimming and breathing at the same time without panicking and stopping in the middle of the pool to gasp for air. To put on a swim cap. To wear goggles so they were tight enough to work but not so tight they nearly sucked my eyes out of my sockets. To swim in a straight line and share a lane with another swimmer. To “deal” with the wall every twenty-five yards.

At first, swimming four laps in a row left me completely without breath. For the first month I could only swim ten slow, tortuous laps before peeling off, exhausted, to simmer in the Jacuzzi. In the second month I tasked myself with braving the wall via flip turn, and the day I figured out how to plan for and execute a series of turns I was high on life the rest of the day. The day swimming laps gave me a glimmer of the kind of meditation I feel while trail running was even more affirming.

Given the choice, I’d rather swim in a lake or bay over a pool, but I imagine no matter the space, I’ll be a swimmer as long as I can still walk. I’m grateful about that.

It’s 2014, time to renew my vow to learn something new.

On a whim a few weeks ago, Riley and I tagged along with some friends to their choir practice. Though we met at a church because that’s a space large enough for the group, the choir is secular and intergenerational. I’ve never really sung before, unless I count the shower or those musical performances from grade school. In high school I was both too shy and too busy playing sports to spend any time in the arts and theatre wing, a fact which I regret a now. Despite a year or so of piano in middle school, I can’t read music, and I don’t have a great voice. I’m on friendly terms with the voice I do have. Singing in public terrifies me.

In a packed sanctuary hall the night of our first practice, we met and were wrangled by three local, professional musicians, our leaders, who believe so strongly in the power of the collective voice they’ve volunteered their time in this way. A white-haired woman with a walker sporting orange tennis balls staked out a place at the back of the sanctuary. With our friends, we squeezed four bodies onto two chairs next to her. Kids of all ages wiggled and danced beneath the stage as we sang ten or so tunes, many we knew and some we didn’t. Reading lyrics projected on a huge screen at the back of the stage, we practiced singing in harmony. We sang in round. Folk, pop, blues, tunes from around the world.

I spent much of the evening sweating, working to manage anxiety about whether and how my voice belonged. But there are three hundred of us, and we sound good together. I can see that each week my fears will be allayed by my own efforts and being buoyed by the group. Our sessions together will be about the community building of raising our voices in song, and also about preparing for a culminating performance in the spring.

Pete Seeger had just passed away a few days before our first choir meeting. Even though he’d had a good run, dying quietly at 94, I’d been melancholy about his presence gone from the world. At home I’d been playing over and over Springsteen’s The Seeger Sessions and thinking back to 2002, when John, Owen and I went to the Great Hudson River Revival, an annual folk festival Pete and his wife Toshi began in 1966 to raise awareness about keeping the Hudson River and surrounding wetlands healthy.

That June weekend in New York was a rainy, hot muddy mess of a festival. Food vendors and magicians, hacky-sackers and jugglers, artists and storytellers filled the grounds. The afternoon Pete took the stage toward the end of the weekend, it was still raining steadily. John and I sat in our chairs, a blanket over Owen who slept across our laps, finally worn out, and for an hour we sang along with Pete and other musicians who joined him. Songs we’d known since we could walk and sing. This Land is Your Land. If I Had a Hammer. Turn, Turn, Turn. We Shall Overcome.

Then, I was aware as I scanned the soggy crowd that we were in the presence of a kind of greatness. Everyone sang, most eyes on Pete and his banjo, his enthusiasm and gathering spirit infectious. There was nothing pretentious about him, none of that rock star stuff he might have deserved after decades of fame. As I recall he wore faded jeans, a t-shirt, his signature cap. Through a gap in the trees, the sloop Clearwater sailed by along the Hudson, loaded with passengers availing themselves of learning how to save the river. I’m so grateful now we made that trip.

Owen navigating the rope bridge at the Clearwater Festival.

At choir practice, toward the end of the night, a photo of Pete filled the screen, and these words -“Participation! It’s what all my work has been about.” Singing next to Riley whose voice is bold and clear and lovely, I was a little sad she’ll never get to sing along with Pete. We stood up and grooved to a song Pete sang with Woody Guthrie, a fun kids’ tune about all working together with a “wiggle and a giggle.” Kids twirled and fell on the ground and helped each other up. This full-bodied interaction with music was exactly what Pete had in mind, for it’s not too far a jump to go from singing together to working together in all ways that matter most.

That night the spirit of Pete was all around us, it seemed, filling up our lungs and hearts. We began “How Can I Keep from Singing?”, a song many seem to take credit for though I think it’s a hymn from the 19^th century. This song always makes me a little weepy, and I was struck that night by the gorgeous impermanence of the music we were making and the universal truth in some of those words. Our individual and collective voices were vanishing into thin air, and yet long after the notes could no longer be heard, the people who’d gathered would remember the singularity of the effort.

I couldn’t really hear my own voice, though I knew it was a piece of the whole. Still a little sweaty, emboldened by my plucky daughter who wasn’t nervous in the slightest, I tried to sing with bravery and intention, thinking of Pete, and of the way participating with hundreds of other voices could -was already- rendering a similar kind of grace I sought in breathing life into stories, in trail running at dawn, in gliding through water.

Categories: community, parenting, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: bucket list, community, memoir, parenting, writing | 4 Comments

surviving february

Posted on February 4, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

Over dinner our family sometimes plays the tattoo game. It goes something like this: If you had to get a tattoo, which animal (or fruit or motorized vehicle…) would you choose and where on your body would you put it? The answers are sometimes surprising. Riley always tries to choose a bird no matter the category. John once chose a unicycle for his “motorized” vehicle, and that led to a half hour discussion on locomotion. But anyway, the kids like our strange amusement. It’s a pastime that saves us on days we’d otherwise easily fall into lamenting the ways the world feels terribly broken.

How the world is broken seems more evident in February, when the slant of light has changed, but not enough to signal spring. When it feels like it’s been winter long enough, and yet the storms keep on coming. What’s wanting is diversion enough to distract from another several weeks of slate skies and long underwear.

The other day I found the perfect thing on River Teeth‘s website. You can sign up to get a daily email from them — “28 days of Beautiful Things.” Each day you will receive an excerpt from Michelle Webster-Hein’s essay “Beautiful Things,” originally published in River Teeth in 2013. I was hooked after reading the idea for the project, but what really got me was the gorgeous photo of a beet, a vegetable I uniformly detested in youth but which now I cannot eat enough of.

Golden, Chioggia, Detroit Dark Red. Roasted, pickled, slawed. Nothing beats (ha) growing them. Feeling them release from the soil when they are ready to be harvested. Knowing that under the tough exterior awaits brilliant color, sweet earthy flavor. Fresh beets means eating the greens, too, steamed or sauteed in sesame oil or hidden inside chili or lasagna (don’t tell the kids).

I’m not usually very clever about where I’d put a tattoo — I almost always choose my arm, because it seems like if I’d gone through the journey of permanently inking myself, I’d want to be able to admire the art without having to use a mirror. The kids tell me that’s not the point. Tattoos are meant to be seen by others.

My obsession with body art doesn’t get much past our dinner game. When we play vegetable tattoo, a beet in any of its iterations is always my answer. It’s also the lone answer to another game we play — If you were marooned on a deserted island and could only have one food, what would it be? The beet. Of course. Though I would have trouble deciding which variety.

The miracle of a beet is the topic of “28 Days of Beautiful Things” first beautiful thing.

Today’s excerpt from Webster-Hein is an ode to dust — oddly dear to her, its silty presence on her belongings means she’s spent time doing what she loves instead of housekeeping.

Amen to that.

From River Teeth's website. How could anyone not love this gorgeous vegetable?

From River Teeth’s website. So gorgeous every time…

Categories: gardening, kids, outdoors, Uncategorized, writing | Tags: family, gardening, reading, writing | 2 Comments

boomerang

Posted on January 10, 2014 by Laura M Gibson

At the trailhead Zora always lingers too long, inhaling the scent of other dogs who’ve peed on the boulder by the kiosk, ferreting out who’s squatted in the sage, heavy with flowering stems.

“Hurry up,” I say. “Spending too much time here is like reading a dime store romance. The story’s way better up ahead, I promise.”

And it is. Off the leash, she frolics, radiating wider and wider until she finds some deer and is gone for twenty minutes. Too long. I worry about her driving the chase into a street over the ridge. I worry whether she’ll be able to find me when she’s finished running that story down, creating and telling it all at once.

Over the ridge I can hear her syncopated deer song, high and yearning, joyful.

She always comes back, tongue out, sides heaving, sharing her adventures through that Sherlock of a nose she bumps against my thigh and those eyes, wild and dark.

I pretend to be mad. I put her on the leash and ask her if it’s worth it to lose her freedom by going so far away.

But I know the answer already. Next to storytelling about others, running to find me with her nose to the ground is her quest.

If she could talk, she’d say she can’t invite me along to chase deer, because then there’d be no me to come back to.

Categories: dogs, outdoors | Tags: dogs, outdoors | 4 Comments

cyclopean eye

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

For the better part of a year, I’ve been agitated about selfies, trying to articulate what feels so Orwellian about pictures replacing words. I know too many adults who have given themselves over to the selfie revolution. A growing, navel-gazing army of teens is at the front lines of this surge. You know the posture – one arm outstretched so the self-directed cyclopean eye of a cell phone tastes an experience in order to broadcast it.

It’s hard to be in the world these days without witnessing a selfie in the making.

At our house most technology is considered poor company for sitting down to eat, engaging in conversations, reading, doing homework. Cell phones, computers and tablets are not invited to join us at these times, and this rule is largely true when the kids have friends over. We’re mean parents and expect our kids and their friends to actually hang out together, use real words from their mouths, and also maybe some eye contact. Our kids are pretty accomplished at live conversation.

Still, I know when they leave the house the story is different. Owen’s received a few alarming selfies of girls scantily clad. One poor girl repeatedly photographed and texted “I Love You” spelled out with a variety of objects — chocolates, candy canes, Goldfish crackers. I know about these photos because I check. A lot of parents don’t. I’m heartsick that for these girls, no one seems to be discussing self-respect and appropriate use of technology, and probably all sorts of other things too.

More to the point, though, too many teens are free to use their devices without boundaries or guidance. The result, it seems to me, is the crafting of a whole culture of self-consumed, image-obsessed, instant-gratification-seeking citizens. Immediacy of everything is king. Waiting of any kind is bad. I worry about the fate of the good, hard work of face-to-face social interaction and conversation. What about companionable silence? What about the art of doing one thing at one time? What will happen to these important skills?

It’s hard to say.

Now is the time of year for retrospection. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word selfie has been so important to us culturally it’s 2013’s word of the year. This sort of thing makes me feel I was born in the wrong time, and also feeds my sometimes unease that perhaps I’m just not seeing the world clearly. I mean, if everybody’s doing it, maybe it has some merit. Maybe if I did IT, I would like IT. Growth and change mean moving out of one’s comfort zone, after all.

Back in October, I decided I’d do a whole day of selfies, dawn-to-dusk. First, I had to figure out my platform. I wasn’t willing to have an Instagram or Snapchat account just for the sake of research, which probably means this wasn’t a valid experiment from the start. But I was willing to text, so I enlisted my friend Heather. We agreed to text each other all day to see if we could crack the code of what made selfing so attractive.

The next morning, my alarm rang at o’dark-thirty. I used my phone alarm, so I could take a picture of myself still in bed, in the dark. I picked it up and realized two things: I had no idea how to use the camera directed the wrong way –where was that button anyway?– and also that I’d never taken a picture of myself. Ever. I HATE having my picture taken, which is plainly obvious in any picture with me in it.

John rolled over and pushed me to get out of his sleeping space. “I know what you’re doing,” he said. “It’s stupid. Just don’t involve me.”

“But don’t you think it’ll be an interesting sociological experiment? It might help us understand Owen better.”

“Get out of bed now, please.”

In the pre-dawn light, it occurred to me John was right. What I’d signed us up to do was, frankly, kind of lame. While I fumbled with the phone, thinking about calling it off, Heather texted a picture of herself waking up, so I went to the bathroom and took a bunch of pictures of brushing teeth.

Because we couldn’t help ourselves, we also used lots of words, mostly about how foolish it felt to snap pictures of things like our ablutions. Well, not all of them, just the ones involving teeth.

So the day began.

Heather’s two hours ahead of me. One photo of brushing teeth is plenty. Here’s one of her feeding the birds. Look how excited she was to be involved in this research. We were crushing it.

There was get-the-paper selfie. Drink-some-coffee selfie. Start-some-laundry selfie. Take-the-kids-to-school selfie.

Another trawl through the interwebs informed the heap of options I’d already decided against taking pictures of: my hair (a helfie), my backside (a belfie), my workout (a welfie, also called a gym selfie), my drunken stupor (a drelfie), and a funeral (a felfie?).

I opted for a kiss-a-beer selfie (my carrot later in the evening for doing this stupid experiment).

Running-with-the-dog selfie. Maybe this qualifies as a welfie, except with no abs or mirrors –the rules about this one seem shifty.

The dog-swimming-with-my-face-in-one-corner selfie.

Each time I snapped a photo, I texted it right away. Waiting for any kind of reply was excruciating. Sometimes Heather took a whole twenty minutes to respond. What the hell was she doing anyway, that she couldn’t make a quicker response? Our experiment was serious business, social science. Part of the deal was immediacy, because waiting is stupid. I worried whether she’d aborted the mission, whether her heart was in it, whether she was offended by my zeal or thought my pictures were stupid. Later, in our debrief of the experiment, we discovered we’d been doing the same thing — snapping many pictures but not sending them all, worried that the barrage of photos would be annoying, anxious that we were overdoing it, ill at ease with completely embracing the selfie way of shouting PLEASE RESPOND TO ME. I guess we’re not very good scientists.

By eleven that morning, I was running out of ideas. I tried a duckface-gangster selfie, except mostly I looked deranged. I mean, what grown woman pretends to be a gangster?

I sat down to get some work done and took some pictures of that. (Don’t zoom in and read the words; I had to murder those darlings.)

Then I tried to concentrate, but it was hard work because right next to me, the phone was silent. What was she doing anyway? An hour later I took another picture of myself working, texted it again, and tried to concentrate some more.

Heather sent a picture of herself doing the same thing, and also, because she was running out of ideas, some words about why teenagers do stupid things in photos. It seemed clear that when you’ve got your finger on the trigger all the time, OF COURSE you run out of material.

On a break from work, I googled selfie again and found an article by Alexandra Siferlin in TIME, “Why Selfies Matter.” Siferlin suggests parents who are gripped about selfies need to unhinge themselves. (Oh dear). Selfies are just part of growing up in the digital age (shit). What counts is to teach kids what KINDS of selfies are acceptable. And then the article tacks south and basically says that selfies can be dangerous because:

A: Kids don’t understand what’s an acceptable thing to take pictures of, even when you tell them (but hello, neither do plenty of adults. I’m talking about you, Anthony Weiner).

B: Selfies often make kids feel jealous and lonely when they see their friends doing what LOOKS like fun, and they are not. This leads to risk-taking, potentially of the naughty kind.

And so, the jury’s out, maybe, still, on how all this digital stuff is shaping the next generations.

Back to the experiment, more hours passed. All my pictures of working looked the same, so I stopped taking them until I left the house and had an experience worth documenting.

Later that day there were more driving-in-the-car selfies while I picked kids up from school. A man in the car next to us at the stoplight caught us being idiots. He shook his head and scowled. When the light turned green, he sped up and cut me off.

Heather sent a driving-in-the-car selfie also.

Back at home, Riley and I perfected the blowfish selfie.

Then we did some yoga and took pictures of ourselves doing downward dog. I can’t show those photos here because, in addition to our faces, the photo captures everything down the front of my gaping shirt. Sharing them would violate our household acceptable use policy about privacy. Our drumbeat of advice for the kids goes something like this: Remember that there’s no privacy anymore. Your technological presence is a PERMANENT DIGITAL RECORD. Let us be the voices in your head when you’re out in the world. Also, while we’re on the subject of out in the world, remember that GENITAL HERPES can ruin your lives. Please keep your pants on.

But. I digress.

Like so many I see around me, I went through my whole day without letting the phone out of my sight. Just in case there was a message responding to my message. By dinnertime, I was weary of the mission, sick of myself and horrified by how much getting an instant response from one person had come to mean over the course of twelve hours. What would happen if I expanded my recipient list? Would I begin to move through my days, starting every sentence with I and forgetting to ask people questions about themselves? If I practiced this kind of relentless self-focus, would my frontal lobe leave my body, pinging around like a pleasure-seeking UFO that couldn’t find the mothership?

While dinner cooked, I flipped through a smutty magazine and enjoyed that carrot beer. John came home and caught me snapping pictures of myself engaged in these two activities.

“Jesus. You’re not really doing that are you?”

“What? It’s research. Come over by the fire and we’ll selfie together. Although maybe if we’re both in it, we would dualie…”

“Oh great. Now it’s a verb.”

Once John was home, I couldn’t experiment with the same verve. It felt dirty somehow. We ate dinner, and I left the phone in the other room, though I confess I did flirt with hiding it under the table in my lap. Afterward, when I checked my texts, Heather had sent along a half-asleep-on-the-couch-and-goodnight selfie.

I took a last picture and sent it, quickly, while John announced from the kitchen that he was turning his phone OFF for the night and suggested I do the same.

Honestly, I needed someone to be the heavy and make some rules. I was exhausted.

Categories: community, family, girls, kids, parenting, writing | Tags: family, friendship, parenting, writing | 4 Comments

winter’s fist

Posted on December 11, 2013 by Laura M Gibson

It’s been in the single digits for days now. Minnesota cold, John keeps saying.

On the phone with family and friends, I try to describe the frigidity. Waking up to temperatures below zero and the way it stings your face, lungs, and teeth. Sheets of ice crystals on the original windows of our old house. Remembering youth, when this sort of cold required us to coddle our car batteries, keep them warm enough to start the next morning. Though we’ve seen some cars in the neighborhood plugged into heaters, our cars get no such attention. They’re starting right up but registering their complaint through intermittent dash display lights asking to be serviced.

We finally stacked a pile of firewood, a job we did quickly, a race against too numb fingers. It’s the best sort of riches, the delicious possibility of all those fires. Even better, coming inside from this kind of cold to sit next to that warmth.

Since the weather turned, I’ve carried in my head a poem by Joe Green, one he and Marquita sent to us as a holiday card, hot off their own printing press, a few years ago.

The Longest Night

Ice on the sidewalk. The first dusting

of snow lasting a week on your deck.

Perhaps tonight you’ve even left

the faucet dripping in your kitchen sink

to keep the pipes from seizing.

Think of this weather as winter’s fist

adjusting its grip around the hours.

Then go outside and try to collect all the lost

particles of light around your sleeping house.