this room isn't looking too wild. anyone can navigate from door to chair to computer to desk to bathroom to bedroom without having to step over boxes or bundles of old magazines or old dinners or dead bodies. still...you wouldn't want to call it a tidy place. it's tidy maybe once or twice a year.

i'm not a tidy person, but there is a place for every thing. i'm not one to force things into their places. i prefer they find it on their own. and they do. amazingly. once or twice a year.

just now there was this dead fly....

actually, the fly has been dead for quite some time... a little still life, legs up inside the picture window frame for months, one of winter's dead. but because i almost never raise the blinds, i almost never see it. then just now i plucked it up in a wad of toilet paper and i ran that paper over the ledge there and it came up black and gritty. i'm not much of a cleaner-upper, but that ledge looked better for the wipe. i'll let it rest for now.

but the blinds are up and the window's open to celebrate these little bursts of spring inside and out. and i'm listening to old tunes by tricky (maxinquaye). we like a steady beat under the random bits.... and then it all becomes a beat. let the mess become itself.

which brings me back to this room and all this paper. i don't mean student writing, which is all carefully contained in that one stack of manila folders. i mean these vague clusters of odd bits: gutted envelopes, old credit card statements (paid), amnesty international (annual renewal), carmelite news (mostly bad), square blue post-its, graduate program come-ons, software deals too good to toss, community meeting minutes. all of this just to my left. over on the shelf to the right there's another, older pile of illinois map poorly folded and cards for titus brandsma and valentine's day and easter. down below on the floor, a stack of catalogues i'll never use because i really just don't need that crap (however much i might want it).

it would not be accurate to say i never dust. i have one of those large fuzzy dusters. i rearrange the bookshelf dust with it every now and then. i interact with the dust. i don't remove it. can't be done.

that desk with the manila folder pile is not looking too bad, but there's this one pile on the left side by the window. that pile never goes away. sometimes i use things from it, throw them out or set them somewhere else, but the pile itself never goes away. never. ever.

and then there is the mind. my mind. i suppose this room with its mild mess is an adequate representation of some inner condition. there are corners into which i do not care to venture.

lately i've been taken by the idea of an index. no, i'm not making another one. i'm supervising it in the ap class. they are indexing tim o'brien's the things they carried. today in class i showed them this book called indexing books, which i am reading cover to cover right now because i can't get beyond this bloody rage for order (said who?). there is a deeper mystery in all of this sorting and sifting. is it just to help us remember? lord knows i need that help. but it's something else. "oh do not ask what is it..."

it's the friday night of my perfect-enough mother's 82nd birthday.

they say that one of the joys of parenthood is the gift of watching your children grow, change, become, go up, go down, swing all around. and i'm sure they're right. but this is also the child's joy, to see the parent shift and bend and grow and become (in the best of cases...in mom's case) utterly beautiful with use.

happy birthday, mom.

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.

Jane Jacobs