My upbeat got beat up

Boy, I sure am ready for a New Month. I love new beginnings and here we go! One coming up! Groundhog Day, Lunar New Year, Valentine’s Day, a slew of birthdays, and maybe something green poking up from the earth somewhere. Ok, probably not.

Today I was taking a platter of chopped up pears, apples, bananas, and grapes out to the birds when I tripped and took an impressive fall into the snow. There were those moments when none of me was touching the ground at all.

The confetti of fruit flew and dotted the landscape like rainbow sprinkles. It was beautiful.

But I was not sure I was not hurt. I still popped right back up, adrenaline style, and tried to figure out what had happened. A misstep? We try to learn so we don’t repeat our mistakes but I am not sure this applies to falling down.

There was the sharp end of a holly branch sticking out and I was relieved that I had not impaled myself. That branch is something I dragged home weeks ago when it lay curbside covered in bright red berries, a victim of a storm or someone’s chainsaw.

Except for some scraped wrists and a very heavy feeling, I was not hurt.

I just felt so dense. It was like I got the gravity knocked into me.

I hit the earth like a giant water laden snowman.

Foompf.

I must have tripped on a stone at the edge of the buried garden. I don’t know. In recent months I have taken to falling sometimes. Clumsy? Brain damaged? Just getting back in touch with the earth?

It is true that I was feeling irritable, distracted by a rude message from a woman at the boro hall regarding pet licensing.

“Walking with anger?” Eva asked me.

And yes, that is what I was doing. Walking with anger. Danger. Danger. Not in a rage but just distracted perhaps, some part of my mind on that topic of the rude woman.

I realize part of the function of this blog was just to help me cope with suburbia. I have loved cities and I have loved countryside and I have loved villages, but suburbia poses a lot of troubles and challenges for me.

I am not the calm, kind, non-judgemental, loving person I am when I live other places. Suburbia brings out anger in me.

And it is a strangely isolating place.

While now I love my privacy with all my heart, it used to feel we lived amongst ghosts, or that we had become ghosts ourselves.

I have a letter to deliver to my neighbors who share our fence and therefore the feral cats, and here it is five years since we arrived in January 2006, and I do not know their names.

And they do not know mine.

And you may recall that even my favorite neighbor, the lady on the corner, scared me this summer when her appearance changed so drastically I suddenly did not recognize her at all, as if my neighbor had suddenly been replaced and was being played by a different actress.

When people go get their faces botoxed all I can think is, ‘People, there are starving children in Africa!’

And Trenton and Camden and Newark.

So the blog was partly to help me cope and navigate, to help channel rage and judgement, to keep me off the streets where my chances of interactions going awry are increased exponentially.

The blog was to keep me out of jail.

So far, so good…

Tune in next time...

Come take a bath in my bathos

Ok, a new month begins soon and I think of it as a chance to do better, to do more. Hopefully not more of this dreadful blogging at you about uninteresting topics, like myself. Forgive me!

Didn’t it seem like all I could talk about was me and my head? Forgive me.

I shall try to do better.

I have been feeling about as organized as an icicle.

Will that help?

Today I can hear the snow yelling, “Help me, I’m melting!” in its best wicked witch voice.

But we are in for more of what they call “wintry mix.”

Time too is like an icicle.

The icicle of time.

I knew we could not get through January without death visiting. It always does. As Eva so astutely put it, January is the 3 am in hospitals.

In remembrance we held Ima and Carol close in our hearts.
And now this week a friend of my mate’s was just found deceased in his apartment in NYC, and my sister’s dog Grobbin has left us too.
This is also my first January without my biological father.
Rest in Peace, Dear Ones.

So now, I have nearly caught up with my absurd Jan posts, let’s see what Feb can bring. I believe it will bring good things.

There are many ideas orbiting me.

I really shall try to do better.

More frozen rivers and fish shaped clouds. Less my head.

I endeavor to resurrect what is better.

I turn toward Spring.

Come join me!

hope for the world

I am at the grocery store in Little Silver and I see the lady unpacking yogurts. There is a stack of small empty cardboard boxes and since it is true that I have moved so many times in my life that every time I see an empty box I think I need it, I ask the lady if I might please have one.

She smiles and says “Yes,” and “Please help yourself. They will just be crushed.”

So then I say “Well if they are headed for oblivion might I take two?”

“Please do.”

“Thank you. I am making some Valentine’s Day packages.”

And she says, “Oh Good, you might inspire me.”

There is a small traffic jam of carts in the dairy section and a few minutes later she comes up to me and says, “Thank you for being so polite and asking so nicely. I know that you are raising your children the same way and that gives me hope for the world.”

I smile and say, “I am afraid we have only cats and dogs.”

And she says, “And I bet they are very well-behaved.”

And I reply, “I wish that I could say that was true.”

But what I think is that in people like this kind lady, there is hope for the world.

And I also found hope in two other encounters today:

We heard a musician named Dan Wilensky speak on his life and new book entitled Musician. Imagine Tom Hanks meets Jon Stewart with an eye patch and a saxophone.

Dan is a very winning human being, with a pleasing combination of sweetness and charisma. He started off in a musical family but was considered the least talented one, or a late bloomer anyway, and then in his late teens he went on tour playing with Ray Charles. He loves all music, and is such a heart-filled person, believing every child and every person should have an opportunity to learn a musical instrument. Without sounding at all cliché he managed to talk about how important it is to do what you love in life.

He alerted us that out of the 18th wealthiest nations on the planet, the US comes in last for supporting the arts, especially music. We all agree that this is shameful and our culture is poorer for it.

Do you all play a musical instrument? If not, he truly believes it is never too late to begin.

I am a strings person and not so much sax and flute, his specialties, but if you want to hear him play here is a link where there is a listen button:
http://danwilensky.com/bio.php


I envied not only his impressive talent but also his eye patch. Maybe that would help my migraine. If I wore that over my right eye… I coveted that eye patch.

I also heard him mention being half blind. That idea has stuck with me. Half blind.


More hope was to be found in the lady at the Lion’s Den, the café at the library, who made for me a lovely steamed milk cocoa and from whom I also purchased a cider donut and a vanilla wafer cupcake. She was so calm and gentle and we had such a pleasant conversation. Then I tipped her and then she gave me a complimentary donut.

Now, how many children should I adopt?

Or should I just try to get the feral kittens more interested in music?

a room of one's own

A room of one’s own

I wanted to walk into a room where I did not have a headache.

Wanted to go somewhere where my headache forgot itself.

One week on the antibiotics and no improvements. But I am determined to finish a two week course and though I have many side effects I have been so relieved to not break out in hives or have anaphylaxis that I think I can make it through the next week.

Ok, you can see that with my current long windedness I am not best suited to the form of the blog but better to some lengthier breezier enterprise. Perhaps a novel. Perhaps loose pages I write on and then burn.

Now that I wish to spend my time primarily with solitude, with animals and birds, with trees and flowers, with books, I may to appear to have developed a latent form of autism.
It is rather like my childhood in the woods actually.

But the modern world is so noisy to me. And I treasure the animals because humans seem so preoccupied with things I don’t understand, like getting new and bigger plastic gadgets as often as possible.

And even though Goodness, (the giant cat who appeared here this month and hangs out politely on our doorstep), this week punched both my mate and I in the hand with his big hooked paw, and made us each bleed (Two years of messing about with feral cats with not a bite or scratch, and this week is the first time either of us has shed blood) I can forgive Goodness for that just being his nature. Whereas it is harder for me to understand the “nature” of humans. They seem so much more destructive. (We forgive Goodness though we now sometimes also call him “Jerk Face” and “Mohammed Ow-ee” or “the Boxer.”)

People, you are not that interesting. (I am not talking about you my friends. I am talking about all these people on their cell phones in public. The ones dominating the air space and eating up the silence, the ones holding up the check-out line, the people who are so rude to the hardworking people serving them, the ones driving at me in their Escalades with their ears pressed to their plastic phones.)

What if for one day everyone’s cell phones turned into toys? Like the plastic phones of our childhood playrooms. Actually, some of those were even made of wood! What if for a day everyone’s phones turned to wood! The opposite of Pinocchio becoming a real boy!

I quote to you from my beloved e e cummings. “you and I are not snobs.”



“you and I are not snobs. We can never be born enough. We are human beings;for whom birth is a supremely welcome mystery,the mystery of growing:which happens only and whenever we are faithful to ourselves. You and I wear the dangerous looseness of doom and find it becoming. Life,for eternal us,is now,and now is much too busy being a little more than everything to seem anything,catastrophic included.

Life,for mostpeople,simply isn't. Take the socalled standardofliving. What do mostpeople mean by "living"? They don't mean living. They mean the latest and closest plural approximation to singular prenatal passivity which science,in its finite but unbounded wisdom,has succeeded in selling their wives. If science could fail,a mountain's a mammal. Mostpeople's wives could spot a genuine delusion of embryonic omnipotence immediately and will accept no substitutes.

…
Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn,a human being
…
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question”

Porphyria

You know how you will recognize my skull when I am dead and gone? By my tea-stained teeth!

How I love my tea.

At least I am no longer feeling like I need an autopsy.

Not that the doctors have figured out what is wrong with me. But I am still here.

Sometimes I think I have porphyria.

And here is why. I was in the beautiful Dominican Republic in December of 2009 when the land of pain visited me and tried to subsume and conquer me in the Dominican Republic the way Columbus had tormented the indigenous people.

So while my mate slept blissfully I was locked in a hotel bathroom, the window open enough to let in the night noises but not swarms of mosquitoes, and I was doubled up in gut pain and head pain, lying on a towel on a strange floor.

And praying.

And wondering. What on earth could this be? And why? And how could there be so much suffering. I was certain this was the reason my sister and I had decided to not birth children, to ensure that no one else ever experienced this.

And here I was on Day 1 of the first out of the country trip I had taken since I was in the ER 3 times in Nov 2008 and subsequently ill for months, for all year, and I had to wonder, would I need to find a taxi and get to a hospital in another part of the island?
For all its beauty, the DR has challenges with poor sanitation, water that is unsafe to drink, and some contaminated blood in its hospitals, and so I had to consider would I try to get a taxi to take me the long length of the island to a resort with westerners who probably had better medical help?

Or should I just get back to the airport and try to get a flight out? The day before a suicide bomber had tried to blow up that plane going into Detroit and had scorched his lap and scared America deeply and so the airport was in a state of very heightened alert.

I survived the night, and the next day, though it was not easy and in the heat I was always seeking a magical coca-cola to try to fight the migraine.

But what was also on my mind was porphyria. That night locked in the bathroom and so alone I read from the NY Times magazine I had carried on the plane and there was a medical mystery column and the woman had bizarre and complicated symptoms which seemed to affect every system and yet did not show up on tests.

And what did she end up having, but porphyria.

Since I was fifteen doctors have been testing me for lupus. I have been living in the kingdom of illness for that long.

But there are respites when I live on other islands.
The illness backs off, moves away, and as strangely as it comes on, it leaves, for no real rhyme or reason I can determine.

(Though the past three years hormonal fluctuations are the source of much of my misery And this reminds me, I think plane travel is also a trigger for my migraines. Not that day, but the day after. )

So anyway, when this past December the doctor was very concerned I might have multiple sclerosis, maybe I didn’t think it was that because even though some of my symptoms overlap with those of sufferers of MS, I have been sick for so long. More than twenty five years now.

What I have is an intruder, someone or something breaks in and lays waste, wrecks the place. (Which I typo-ed as the palace.)

Home invasion.

It happens to me every month.

Every month for the past 3 years.

Longer if you count my seizures which wracked me for twenty years. But sometimes I think these migraines are just the seizures in disguise, the seizures after a costume change. Because what happened was that I finally got the seizures under control and went back to my life and finished college etc and when I got down to only a couple of seizures a year, and then basically none, these migraines popped up.

First, I just had them about two days a month and I thought they were an anomaly. They were so bad they would wake me up at night and I would think it was just a nightmare.

But finally by December of 2007 they had gotten so bad they were lasting three consecutive days and would not let me eat or sleep and I recall driving two hours to the airport with what I was still calling “The Worst Head Ache of My Life”, even though I had now had “The Worst Headache of My Life” many many times in the months before, and after I got back, I popped a handful of something like Tylenol (I don’t mean handful, I mean 3 probably, but that was after taking aspirin or advil for days) and I lay down on the bed in the darkness in all my clothes and passed out for about twenty hours.

When I awoke, the headache was gone.

Until the next month.

Because there was a gut element and because I kept taking things like advil and alleve which probably made my guts worse, I was thinking I was getting monthly food poisoning and that was making me really depressed about the food supply in America. And that wasn’t helped by the fact that every week either spinach or hamburger or peanut butter or alfalfa sprouts or tomatoes or eggs or chicken potpies or catfood being recalled due to toxicity and deaths.

So, too much sharing! I hope you don’t read this post. It is too icky. It is why I shall either abandon the blog again soon or really rail myself in so I stop with the too much sharing! I suppose I am just trying to figure things out by talking out loud.

Must shut up!

a migraine in my heart

Unbelievable pain.

It’s not religious.

It’s my head.

It is so bad that the only relief I can really imagine is taking the wooden handled oyster knife of my Chesapeake Bay childhood and prying open the right side of my skull just above my ear. It would pop open like a hinged shell, and then I would see what needed to be done, like a mechanic under the hood.

Only this is an unreachable spot.

Would I find that that part of the brain has essentially turned to brain coral? Does it need to be chiseled out like an eroded flagstone in a garden pathway? Does something just need to be washed free of grit? Does the brain just need airing out? Is the hinge faulty?

All I know is that the pain in my head is so bad it hurts my whole body.

In denial that it could be another migraine, I spent a lot of yesterday with a hot pack on my head. That is a symptom of my migraine also, a sort of shock and awe and denial. An inability to really make a good assessment of how I feel, like a person who puts on way too much lipstick looking in a mirror in a darkened room and goes out looking like a clown.

Cheerful. But weird.

Which is not to say I was cheerful.

I had the floating bits in my eyes yesterday. The snow had holes in and so did the sky. I had stiffness in my neck and a feeling of impending doom and anxiety which seemed unwarranted for my life.

But because my cognitive function was pretty decent and I wasn’t passing-out dizzy, I kept wondering what this right side agony was, but then last night I counted the days in my cycle and indeed it is that time ago to go into the Agonies.

So today will be a Fiorcet day. (This is the medicine the neurologist gave me two years ago because it is what helps my sister and my mother. Yes, they too are migraine sufferers. As was my father. As is my mate.)

So I gratefully take the blue pill because the pain is so extreme it has made me nauseous and has made my whole body hurt. I can feel how it has spiked up my blood pressure. My heart begins to hurt.

I can always tell it has gotten really bad when my heart begins to hurt.

It’s like the whole body becomes a dying fish.

But I have survived these cycles for three years now. So I believe I will survive again.

And maybe my brain can somehow make a pearl out of the pain.

Well maybe not my brain, but maybe my life can make a pearl out of it.

Maybe I can make a pearl out of the pain. Last year though this was the reason ultimately that I left the blog. Each time I would come here all I could write about was migraines. It was the elephant in the room. The elephant standing on my head.

Pain is a weird phantom. And so the fact that now the migraines seem to always begin and storm out from the right side of my head, when the old migraines (prior to Sept 2010) were always global and if anything seemed to shoot out from my brain stem and pull me under from behind, adds more confusion to my muddled mind.

This pain is so Physical. It has an address.
The old migraines were also physical but they were so large and encompassing and I would just reel from them. These new migraines feel like an ice pick in the right side of my skull.

Trigeminal neuralgia? Acoustic neuroma? Three doctors have pondered these same possibilities. But no one knows. Maybe these are just some very weird migraines.

Having a migraine adds a real suck element to my day.

The Hush

My dog is the world’s worst dance partner, but maybe it’s me and not him. We just hear different music, and he pulls hard the opposite direction.

Tonight the world is so delicate and well appointed.
I walked him the best I could in the ice and slush, dodging danger. He pulls towards cars, it is so awful. Does he think they can nuzzle each other?
Finally walking the dog was too hard as we were competing with slipping and sliding cars. So I brought him home, let him eat the cat food,

And then I went back out. To soak up as much of the hush as I could.

I turned down the sycamore lined road where there were no cars.

The beautiful sublime hush.

I cannot get enough of it.

As I walked, all snow and trees and a few gas lampposts, next to a silver white pond stilled to silence, it is like walking in some other time in the past hundred years.

Something about my gait makes me feel like a peaceful dinosaur.
Like I am delighted and stunned to be so upright, and my tiny pea brain is making a movie as I pass through the landscape.

There is this sense that I am moving forward into beautiful and time and space with each step.

The snow falls on my head, but it’s soft like butterflies.

In praise of canned soup

Since September when I suffered a new symptom, reeling vertigo and disequilibrium that left me feeling like I had been kicked in the head by a horse (actually a zebra), canned soup and ginger tea have saved me.

I am hardly dizzy most days now (whew) but still find so much comfort in this can of gumbo I am eating on a snowy day. Chicken, sausage, okra, rice, and yes too much salt but that was the least of my worries recently. I am so blessed. The cabinet is overflowing with soups.

It is like out there some mother spirit has made all these cans. (Oh I know about factories and exploitation and genetically modified food and synthetic ingredients and the dangers of the plastic with which the cans are lined and the perils of not eating locally grown food, and pesticides and food riddled not with caterpillars but with guilt, but I also know the heartening happiness of being alive, being warm, being fed, being in this gratitude filled moment and wanting to spread that wealth.) I want to thank her for her recipes and her single serving size cans which make two servings for me.

Soup is my lunch time friend this season. What kind do you like?
I love making homemade soup and stews and have recently made Hawaiian ginger chicken stew and the beef stew of my childhood and chorizo and kale and white bean soup but for lunch time it is a miracle to grab a can of split pea with ham and settle in.

Oh these luxuries.
Meanwhile a family displaced by floods in Pakistan is lucky to eat one meal a day now.
The people in Australia and Brazil have watched their lives swept away by water.
The earthquake and cholera in Haiti have left an island of humanity almost abandoned.
The riots in Tunisia spread to Egypt and today history is in the making in the streets of Cairo where military tanks and tear gas and protestors for democratic freedoms are all negotiating space.

History is in the making.

What can we do?

Meanwhile I have mini world peace. It’s in my can of soup.
It is also in the bowl.
It is also in me.

The Paper Mines

A little shivering possum was here eating tonight.

I am glad to be able to feed it. It is small and a little clumsy in the snow. I wish you could hear the adorable noise it makes when chewing.

So, the joy of unemployment is the unhurried snow shoveling, catering to the feral cat colony, making snow angels with the dog, feeding the birds and possums and raccoons, taking a walk with corn and crackers in the pocket for the ducks.

But the agony of unemployment is the bills arriving today, some from the ER visit in October, the MRI in December…

It reminds one to be clear what one is living for.

I always wanted to be a grandmother and now that I am Aunty to two small children (and to two lovely older nieces also) I find that that is the fulfillment of that same desire.

But I have two lives now. On opposite coasts.
My bi-coastal personality disorder in full swing.

(And what happens when we add the triangulating power of Virginia?)

I have twin lives. My life is its own twin.

And both lives are beautiful.

(I had tried other lives but they wouldn’t have me.)

But while here in the East, I am missing the growingness of the babies in the west.
And so I try to make the most sensible use of this time and right now this means to write and write as much as I can in the hopes I can someday achieve another dream I have of writing a particular children’s book which I have started but abandoned. More than once.

But what if I cannot write that book and meanwhile the niece and nephew grow tall as beanstalks? What if while I toil in the Paper Mines the children grow up and go off to school and then college and then have families of their own and grow old and die and I am still here toiling?

It is a book I want to write for them. And for my childhood self. And for all the children.
And while I am on the topic, what was your favorite childhood book?

Did you ever see The Double Life of Veronique? I first saw that movie in my very early twenties and it perfectly captured the feeling I had had my entire life~that I had two lives and one was going on simultaneously elsewhere.

Do you think I will be able to write my way out of this?

The Snow was Blue

It snowed so much it snew.

It has snowed and snowed and snowed, and then it has snowed again.
We have shoveled and shoveled and shoveled, and then shoveled again.

A snowman has been born in every yard.
I love the old fashioned carrot noses and the eloquent sticks for arms.

And the maybe nineteen inches of snow we got yesterday and today was magic and blue, like a present from the glacial North Pole.

So the joy of my morning was the unhurried shoveling of blue snow beneath the blue sky.
Also, the failed attempt at sculpting a rhino out of the white stuff.
And then, more shoveling.

A sweet smiling Latino man, shovel over shoulder, called out to me,
“Miss? Help You?”
And I smiled back and said “No Thanks,” though I am so grateful for his presence here.

And he helps remind me of more of my goals for this year, now that I am really entering 2011.

Practice some Spanish.
Go to a dentist.
Catch and spay the feral kitten we call Kaboodle/Fox.
Get a car.
Come see you!

What is it that you will do?

Snow for Breakfast

The possums are hibernating and now a very pointy faced young raccoon has shown up. Shaka gets out of its way. It has a face like a wedge of cheese.

Sometimes I hear the raccoon talking at night outside and it sounds loony tunes, ancient, like it is uttering incantations in some old scary language.

I hope to stay on its good side.


I have been out shoveling snow. I love shoveling snow.
I was sad when I ran out of snow.

Of course there is real time and there is blog time and I am writing this from January 26th even though I may not get to post it until February.

Why do I so love shoveling snow? I don’t know-but I do.
It seems to work the right parts of my body and mind. All those muscles coordinating.

When I shovel snow I am also in Vermont and Colorado and Washington and all the other places I have shoveled snow. My mind goes back to shoveling, to places I have shoveled.

I love throwing snowballs for the dog.
Love the chatter of the blue jay above me.

I love eating the snow.

Snow for breakfast!

Do you know the Billy Collins poem, “Shoveling Snow with Buddha”? (Do you want to go now and read it, here while you are online? I think you will enjoy it.)


All this snow has inspired me to write a small poem:

I have shoveled the driveway,
If you want to come home.

I have shoveled the road too.

Organizing the Interior

Ah, the blank page.

Dangerous beauty.
It’s like snow, which is currently blanketing the world as far as I can see.

Snowy nonsense.

My plans to play cards with the ladies and to eat Hawaiian chicken stew and twenty kinds of cookies have been snowed out so I resort to feeding cats and admiring falling snow, and trying to get my writing in order.

It could be said I have written too much.

So much that sometimes I am not certain which projects I need to work on.
And my love for the blank page has ironically led me to soil way too many of them with words, with ink, with weird magical virtual computer ink which really doesn’t exist, even though I see black type appear here on a white field.

And because of my love for trees and books, the house is overflowing with books. I end up at library book sales, as if a mysterious sixth sense leads me there.

So between collecting books and writing as much as I possibly can, it may be that I am not seeing real snow but am just blinded by this paper storm inside the house.

I looked around two weeks ago and thought ‘Goodness gracious, I will go blind!’ I really had to avert my eyes when entering the office. So I decided instead of focusing on the outside, I would begin within.

I would think very hard on what I was trying to accomplish, and organize accordingly.

It is working.

I am actually feeling that my writing is more organized than it has ever been. Silly things like file folders have names. Anything I touch gets a “2011” notation on it, like a psychic thumbprint so I lay claim to it again. The projects I most want to work on from 2010 have been pulled forward both in my mind and in a new plastic filing tub.

And when organizing I found this note to myself. It was written in November 2007 in a Personal History writing class I was teaching (and where I met my dear friend Sally, who then introduced me to another card shark, my dear friend Mary) when I asked the students to write on the topic of “How I would like to be remembered."
If I recall correctly we wrote right then and there and here is what I said to myself:

“I would like to be remembered as a Happy Person~ though sometimes it is not true. I have been far too complex to be happy all the time. But my moments of joy and ecstasy have sent me skyward and in full immersion of the earth, like a dog rolling in the grass and flowers.

I want to be remembered as someone who planted flowers for the bees,
And trees for the children and birds
And who tried to preserve the places where nature could be itself.”


Outside the robins are fluttering by the window between snowflakes.

Begin within.

The Politics of the Pond

It was so warm today (at 28 degrees) that I could almost believe in Spring.

And I saw a very reassuring thing.

Ping!

Ping the duck, the last of the seven white Pekins, who just lost his last duck buddy in the blizzards of January, was swimming around in a tiny open hole of water, surrounded by five mallards.

Maybe he can make new friends.

He survived last night when our breath turned to ice and the world was all white.

In the late Spring and early Summer, he is often on my shit list (I am so sorry but how else can I say it? Pardon my not-French!) because the white ducks terrorize the mallards and chase the young mallard mothers and their tiny babies, such between them and the snapping turtles and the ospreys no baby mallards survive, but maybe this year…

My heart also goes out to Ping. He is sweet with a sweet duck soul.
I take him corn and crackers.

I never think of orange sauce when I see him. Or even of crispy fried duck.

And I have seen him bullied to near death by a Canada goose who rode his back and repeatedly plunged him underwater violently, wringing the near life out of him.

The politics of the pond.

Now that it is warmer for a moment, I think I can hear the murmurs of crocuses.
They are dreaming. Like me, they are dreaming Spring.

The dream is just beginning.

Facebook is the Tattoo

Facebook is the tattoo I never got.

I know that at least half on you are on fb and I wonder if your thoughts and feelings have changed about it during the time you have had an account.

Facebook is my first social networking experience. While I had enjoyed peeking in on my younger siblings MySpace accounts for a few years, I had always thought I was too old to get a MySpace account. (Perhaps too old to even be on the internet!)

But I joined fb two Januarys ago at a time when I was so ill I was basically an invalid. I was in serious pain in snowy New Jersey and my ever constructive sister said, “Come play Scrabble with me on Facebook.”

“Do I have to set up an account?”

“Yes, but it’s worth it.”

And she was right.

I threw caution to the wind and opened an account using my own name, something I rarely use in any sort of public forum. But I was dead anyway. So using my real name didn’t see risky.

Who would use my name after I was dead? I had better use it now.

And I had just snatched a starving feral kitten from the yard two months before and he seemed like a blue wizard, my familiar, and so I posted his photo.

I had been so sick, living in a land of agony, lacking any diagnosis, three emergency room visits and a long list of procedures later and I seemed to look good on paper, but really I was just a paper doll. A paper voodoo doll.

I was so alone I didn’t even understand why people had furniture.

And then Scrabble sort of saved me.

Facebook seemed like the afterlife. Immediately a couple of old college friends drifted by and said Hi, like we were at a reunion, all with cocktails in hand, and then they drifted off.

Then I began the love-hate relationship with feeling exposed. For all the blabbing I do, and all my openness and extroversion, and the fact that I invited my lady friends to the blog, I am a deeply private person who cherishes solitude.

And of course I need the solitude to write.

And to play Scrabble!


These thoughts come to mind since I just hung up the phone with my stepfather. He works in a place I call “Mattress Land” which is much like Sartre’s play No Exit. I teased him, “You sure suck at facebook!” and he said it was true and he was afraid to post anything because a future employer might see it and that might affect his eligibility for a job.

And I recall way back when, in my adolescence and early twenties, that that fear was the reason I did not get a tattoo. I wanted to stay blank so that I could fit better into any circles of the world I might seek entrance.

It wasn’t my personal prejudice. I loved tattoos. (I particularly wanted to cover myself with glow –in-the-dark stars and maps of the world, mermaids and dragons and lions and trees, a zebra running on my shoulder…) But being from rural Virginia there was definitely a stigma that basically tattoos were for people in the military, and bikers, and an exception could be made for Japanese gangsters and Maori warriors.

(Having a Southern accent back then was also something to lose, or at least soften, if you wanted a career in the wider world.)

Five minutes later the whole world would rush to the tattoo parlor and ladies and teenagers and punks and baristas would suddenly all sport colorful camouflage and my sister would start adding to her collection and everyone would pierce any piece of their flesh that they could.

But I was right there in the last few minutes of the old world, the one where tattoos were permanent and we must have believed we were going to live awhile.

(Remember, back when books were made of paper and you saved your money to go to an actual bookstore and choose one carefully?)

What I know now~ there is An Exit.

And the house is overrun with books. Beautiful papery semi permanent books.
And maybe this year I will get another fabulous temporary tattoo at the fair!

Temporary is permanent enough.

Car and gun

A car and a gun.

How much is a car wrapped up with your own identity?

It’s like as long as I don’t have a car here in suburbia, I don’t really live here.
I am invisible.

And my days are rich~I stay home. I walk. I plan around the absence of car.

But this year, soon, I know I will need the wider world, to look for work, to visit friends and family, to not be such a bum who has to borrow my mate’s car in inclement weather or for large shopping trips or to haul the ninety pound tornado we call our dog.

I have loved all my cars like they were people or horses.

I do not take entering into car ownership again lightly. It’s not just the love and loyalty and the loss, and it isn’t just the harrowing moments in recent years, like when the brakes failed going down a hill in rural Maryland. Or when the car lost all power and started on fire and had to be put out by three firemen on a busy road near Freehold, New Jersey. (Rest In Peace Green Seahorse Honda.) Or when a rock smashed out my side window as I was driving 60 miles an hour on 1-5 in Seattle on the way to the funeral home.

It’s that driving here is risky business.
Driving puts me back in the food chain of New Jersey.

So I call the insurance company for a quote and Jack says to me, “Don’t be shocked. NJ has the second highest rates in the country. We just gave up first place to DC.”

“Yes.” I say, “It is a cultural difference, the way people drive here. There is that issue of no left turns. And I have so often been honked at to take that right turn on red where it is so clearly posted not to.”

“Yes,” Jack says, “a cultural difference that everyone expects you to go along with! Here everyone is in a big hurry to go nowhere fast.”

We laugh and banter. And when I put down the phone I really question if this is the route I want to go. Do I really want to leave the house? Do I want to go nowhere fast?

I can hear the sound of buoys or foghorns in the water. I love this. It makes me want to walk to the river.

Last week I saw three swans silently swimming there in the silver waters of the Navesink.

The Lowly Worm

I have invited some ladies to join me here and to my delight they have popped by. Hello Ladies! Welcome! It is nice to know you might visit this virtual parlor and I shall try to keep it interesting enough that you may want to return from time to time.

What is on your mind today?

I am not supremely keen on this turn of events called January.

There is snow and I hear a bird screaming. I suspect plunder by cat, even though I have not seen a kill in ages and even though I feed and fatten the ferals in the hopes that they will think predation is boring. On the other hand I want the cats to survive when we leave and they need to rely on their hunting skills. It is in their nature. It wasn’t my idea.

It is so hard loving both the birds and the cats. One almost understands how people make up horrible stories to exploit others. The mind seems to want to take sides, or by choosing one, it somehow necessitates excluding the other.

So what can the mind do? Sometimes I run interference, like a bird-cat referee. Sometimes I make up stories, like ‘this life isn’t so great. The cats are helping the birds get to a place that is so much more magnificent, so lush, so filled with seeds and fruit- and absolutely no cats.’

The Sudanese poet David Aoloch Bion has a poem entitled, “Death is the Last Orgasm of Life.” He suggests:

The best sorrowful way to mourn
For your beloved one is to laugh
Melodically for one minute and
Compose epitaph.


I will always be on the cat/bird see-saw, loving them both, horrified by them both.

For I also love the little worm.

The Morton salt girl stomps around upstairs

I am amazed by how people in New Jersey treat each other.
How rude! Bump, honk, block, yell, gesture, frown.

And that is just in the grocery store! It is shocking.

A woman seems to think I am the safe one to approach so she comes over to me and asks,

“Do you know where the escarole is?”

Escarole.

My mind draws the blank card. I scroll through images like I am slowly flipping pages of a book in my mind: fennel, watercress, arugula, mesclun, radicchio.

I say, “I am so sorry. Escarole. I cannot think of what it looks like but I will be happy to help you look.”

The part of my mind that once knew escarole is missing.

I scan the rows of vegetables.

“Does it look like that?” I point at the red frilled edges of the radicchio. I cannot recall if escarole is red or green.

“I think it is green”, she says. “Yes, maybe so” I agree.

I have had to get used to being wrong all the time.

There is often a squishy sloshy feeling in my head, like someone is in there walking around in rain boots.

Pray tell, is it the Morton salt girl splashing about in the puddles in my attic?

It’s like someone is trying to make soup in my head.

Do I hear someone singing Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head?

(By the way, did you know that it was Mr. Joy Morton who founded Morton’s Salt, and it was his father Mr. J Sterling Morton who was the founder of Arbor Day? Small world! Every day is a good day to celebrate Trees!)

As for me, I have not even caught up to the New Year yet.

Escarole!

Chicken Little's Big Sister

I have been so afraid.

The task was simple~ to take some antibiotics in the hopes it would reduce inflammation in my skull. The past few years have made me acutely conscious of my head. It is always shrieking or crackling or aching and I am often found walking around as if I were the model for the Scream.

I used to hold my head for more existential reasons. Or when contemplating issues of social and environmental justice.

As a favorite poet Rosmarie Waldrop writes:

“You made a ceremony out of holding your head in your hands
because, you said, it could not be contained in itself.”

Mine has always been the kind of mind that was looking around trying to find the edges of reality. Trying to look beyond, beneath, behind. It sort of always seemed like this life was a theater set and that people were moving the props somewhat randomly.

It is good that I like being alone now so that no one has to see me looking like an Edvard Munch painting. (The Scream with a Migraine.) So the latest task in an effort to rein in my head sounds so simple. The doctor prescribes antibiotics. Says take them for 2-4-6 weeks. Then another CT scan.

I believe in antibiotics. But I have not taken any in the past six years, and for the past three years any time I try a medicine I have had about a 50-50 chance of landing in the ER

And so The Fear.

You know how I think of the head now? A rock filled with intelligent jello.
And not much more.

It is amazing we ascribe so much meaning to it.

One thing though, I don’t take mine for granted anymore. It is not a silent thing perched there. It gives me constant feedback. Like a drunken parrot.
Still, overall it is working fairly well.
And for that I am grateful.

An antibiotic is a living thing killing another living thing. It’s warfare. The mold eats the bacteria. The bacteria takes the other bacteria out into a back alley. Only one returns.

I was worried because I have suffered so much vertigo, and a side effect of the antibiotic is dizziness, but I talked to myself like a character in a gangster movie and so I started the pills. Down the hatch.

Not sure yet if the sky is falling.
It seems not to be.

Then again, I have always thought the sky reached right down to the ground and we were already walking around in it.

Measuring and Treasuring the Old Year

There are so many places to begin. Begin now, with this breath, with this moment. Begin with this gift that you woke up today and you are breathing. Something may make you smile. May make you think, may make you feel, may make you remember.

I have been in between goals for awhile. Now I steady myself to make more decisions and commitments, to commence with planning. But I am still somewhat basking in the revelry of the old year, of the year 2010 whose last few months were filled with pain and terror and strange symptoms in the head, with the death of the father and then an undiagnosable crackling in the brain, like fat being burned off on a hot griddle.

But the funeral in Virginia was beautiful, the earth and its inhabitants at their finest. And then there was Texas, the desert’s infinite beauty and we met the creatures there: its cactus and its bear.
Its bobcat, its grey fox, its Carmen deer, its Mexican ravens and blue jays, its cactus wrens, its roadrunner and javelina.

The tracks of the mountain lion. The dinosaur footprints, not just fossils but fresh prints beside the river.

And then there was what I wished for and it came true, to spend the winter holidays with the family and the niece and nephew who are just four and just two and for whom Xmas is New. And so they make it new again for us all.

I have not fully finished measuring and treasuring the old year.

The old year fuels the new year. The New Year is here.

Outside the window I watch the rain and snow compete. Many feet of the cold white snow are being splashed about by a silver rain. There must be a name for this. Yet it seems rare and I don’t recall seeing it before, so much warm rain falling on so much deep cold snow.

The driveway is a rectangular swimming pool, hemmed in by ice. The drips from the power lines make swirling circles on the surface, as if fish are coming up to bite.

This year the blog may find its subject. Last year I left it when the migraines so overwhelmed me that the blog was about to become a migraine blog. This week I have had head pain for three consecutive days but my dreams and hopes and I are not yet backburnered. Still, I am not sure I am out of the woods. Yet.

Perhaps this blog will just be what it will be.

Hello to you. Hello to me.

Claustrosnowbia

The iced-over windchime
the pink sunrise
sugar and cream in the coffee
thoughts of mortality
thoughts of immortality
a dream of claustrophobia

can you say anything more political than "sugar and cream in the coffee"?

Three cats puffed up in the snow like marshmallow caterpillars

the red bird
the white teacup
the lover drives off on his long commute
no horses

horses
snow

I am not yet used to writing 2011.

Happy New Year! It is 2011!

It is tempting to come back here. To find myself here, to find you here. There is so much snow. It is as if the world is a specially prepared cake all covered with an insanely thick creamy cold vanilla frosting. The colorful lights twinkle in the windows, hang in arches between pillars, it looks like this is the home of a happy witch, a happy warlock. The endless cat tracks in the snow might also give something away. The familiars come and go. At last count we were up to nine cats. There is a dog too and today we tried to protect the red crested cardinal in the tree whom we also love. We love every single player in the foodchain. Even God. Even the dirt. Even the red-winged bird and the moon faced cat.
We are, alas, down to our last duck. Ping shivers under the picnic table next to the iced over pond and we take him corn and bread. We lean down and look into his pale blue eye. Winter is so fierce.
May we all make it through the best we can. May we help all whom we can. Winter is so very harsh, even to itself.