Intentionally Breaking Mirrors

Today was the first time in weeks my head let me go to the gym. It doesn’t like me to have a cocktail and it doesn’t like to go to the gym. It also doesn’t like me to chew or lie down or think or sleep or even hardly smile and raise my eyebrows.

But I took a blue pill last night and after awhile it seemed like I could see better, my eyes were more in synch, and I got some paperwork done and though I could not sleep for a long time my head did not force me to get up with its usual antics of hissing and popping and fizzy pressure and pain and dragging down lizard tail in the belly making me feel queasy.

So when I got up today I had clocked in many hours of lying supine, a thing my head had not allowed much of this past week.

And last night when I was able to think a bit more clearly I got a big infusion of hope because I thought what if we have all been wrong all along and the severe head pain is just a symptom of the other disease and maybe I am closer to a diagnosis than ever before.

And I had also read about an occipital nerve block and got very excited that maybe I could get something like that.

And I decided to return to the local doc to tell her that maybe we had missed something. Let’s start over. Let’s pretend I am a new patient with a blank page. That for many years I had been having severe periods and then three years ago head pains which seemed like classic menstrual migraines began and that they were so bad they would wake me up in the middle of the night. Then in Fall 2007 I am in sudden acute back right shoulder pain and it is so severe that after days of pain and night sweats and delirium I end up at ER where my BP which has always been low and normal, has shot up skyhigh. They do x-rays and give me injections in my legs to treat the pain. But the severe pain lasts for months, for over a year. Then in Fall 2008 I tried bp pills to try to reduce menstrual migraines and severe periods but three weeks in some spiking head pain and upper right ab pain lands me in the ER, with again, sky high bp. The upper ab pain never really goes away though after a few months it reduces. But since Fall 2008 I have rarely been without a headache and/or signs of aura. Then in Fall 2010 I develop a bizarre right sided head pain which leaves me dizzy and blacking out, unable to eat, think, drive, anything. It is the most disabled I have ever been in my whole life.

So what is this?

I think I am on some spectrum between scleroderma and porphyria.
Is there a disease in which the tendons or ligaments rip off from their attachment sites? Because that almost feels like it would explain my right sided back, shoulder, ab, neck, skull pain.

I will show her my MRI results and see what she thinks and ask her to review the Lost Cameo in the CT scan.

I begin to believe that maybe progress can be made. I have not given up hope. It had just gone dormant. The hope had just been sucker-punched by the pain.

I was on the stair-climber at the gym today and my heart rate was hitting 170 and I turned to my mate and smiled and said “If I die, just tell everyone I was happy. It’s true. I lived happy and I died happy.”

And of course I did not die at the gym. I had a great and hopeful work-out.

I am now wearing a Curious George band-aid~ but that is the next part of the story.

We came home, driving past the gorgeous flocks of greater scaup and the large gathering of swans who were floating and wading on the Navesink River, and while I was preparing our lunch of hard boiled eggs and blueberry blintzes, I caught Kaboodle.

And also Kit her sister who is sadly being held hostage to keep her company and also warm as they snuggle in this dog crate in the garage.

But don’t think success was a happy occasion. I was afraid Kaboodle the Fox was going to break her teeth trying to get out as she bit the metal bars as hard as she could. As soon as I got door closed she went crazy feral ballistic and threw herself against all sides and the ceiling and then tried to chew her way out. We spent some hours gently pushing her back and shushing her.

I caught her at 2:30 today, Sunday. Now at 6 pm she has quieted and has eaten some of the tuna I have pushed through the bars. We are warming the garage and will move Kit and Kaboodle in there and at some point I will try to open the door enough to give them proper dinner and water and a litter pan.

Right after catching her I called the vet and he answered and I asked to be put on a waiting list in case any times open up before Wednesday and he said that he might be able to get her in Tuesday and he will call if that is possible.

Meanwhile during all those antics, Shaka the mother who is filled with more kittens, sat wary on the fence eyeing the whole production. And then Beezle the winter kitten appeared, ran up on to the deck and pressed his face to the glass crying at the top of his lungs. He is a loud hungry beggar and he is a primary reason I don’t like God or Nature. It is unkind to make a baby animal in the heart of winter. Though he was blessed with extra toes and a very thick coat and a weird plumped out body.

I opened a can of wet food and put it out on the deck. He ran at me screaming and began eating. I petted him. This has only happened once before, when he was this hungry and I got my hands on him in his hunger. This is the kitten who was forty feet up a tree in our yard in November, and whose Mom climbed it to nurse him and try to get him down, and he wouldn’t come down. He began crying all day and night, and I finally on Day 5 I found a tree company to get him down. I held him in this same crate in the garage for two days and he was a crazy, mad, sad, terrified, aggressive little bobcat, and when I couldn’t find anyone in the world to take him, and his Mom sat in the yard on the fence all day crying for him, I hosted a reunion. They ran to each other and ran off like wild little horses reunited.

So Shaka came up on deck but didn’t get a bite before Beezle sort of chased her off and hogged all the food. So I opened a second can for her to get some. And when I came back inside, there was blood everywhere. I had not felt a thing. And I always tell everyone be so careful those lids are like razors. And indeed, I sliced myself good.

Meanwhile, our cat Blue hangs around the front looking like a green eyed goblin and Tiger moves around wondering why he hasn’t had any food and where did his two sisters go? We see him later stalking a squirrel. Tonight I will grab him and bring him in garage and feed him with his sisters.

My mate and I had a cathartic and satisfying time yesterday cleaning out the garage. We disposed of a large broken mirror the last owners had left here, and also the remains of the furnace pipe that had exploded and sounded like a car hitting the side of the house. This was after several repair people had told us that furnaces don’t explode. And then it did.

So now I am proposing we rename Shaka Zulu, the Queen of all these Cats. When we returned from Kwazulu Natal in Africa in the Fall of 2008, she had moved into our yard. I thought she seemed such a fierce warrior. But I think now it is time to name her after a nun of chastity. Enough is enough. We are trying to hang a sign on the backdoor that says, “Closed for business.” We want to board up under the playhouse where she brings the kittens but right now we are concerned the possums are hibernating under there and we don’t want to trap them.

So how does one wean a kitten piñata? A cat who is always pregnant? Like creating world peace, it may be impossible. But we endeavor to try. Spring will bring baby rabbits and mice and birds and we hope she can go back to her wild way of eating. We hope that someone will invent a cat birth control and that we can dart her.

As for the best case scenario with Kaboodle, we hope she won’t escape, that she will not break her teeth trying to get out, that she will not test positive for diseases, that she will survive surgery, and recover without any problems.

Well, so then we went and took the dog to the ocean and picked up a ricotta, tomato, and basil pizza and now I write to you.

I do give great thanks for the god and nature who makes the miracle that I can hold the flesh of my finger together and someday soon it will re-knit. It has I imagine, already begun.

Disappointed

I want to sing “Disappointment, my old friend…” as if I were feeling all Simon and Garfunkel rainy-day sad but I am not that mellow.

How do you handle disappointment?

An appointment with the dis.

Today I was supposed to go the Thai Temple in Pennsylvania for a remembrance ceremony for my mate’s Mom and for two friends who died in January. And then we were going to spend our afternoon wandering about the town of New Hope where early on in our love affair we spent one of our first days together, drinking in the sunshine and the sights, the planter boxes above the bridge overflowing with pansies, the grackles eating at our feet as we sat sipping iced tea and diet coke and chatting over lunch. New Hope flies rainbow flags everywhere. It’s a wonderful little place.

But my head would not let me go today. Yesterday I had to cancel the appointment with the new chiropractor I was going to try because my head hurt too badly to go. The past two nights my head has been nonstop pain and suffering. It doesn’t want me to lie down. It throbs and screams. I sit up, toss and turn, get up and haunt the house. Finally at daybreak sometimes I pass out for a few hours, this morning with the heating pad on my skull.

Yesterday the very kind nurse Tricia from the ENT doc in Bellingham called me back to say that they don’t think what I have is an infection so instead of more antibiotics they want me to come in for another CT scan.

I want this. I want it right now. But I may be too exhausted to fly west right now. And my attempts at getting medical care in NJ (or getting practically anything done in NJ, have been quite surreal. To be fair we have a terrific vet and pharmacist, the visit at the Motor Vehicle Dept went great, I love our electrician and the man who painted the house, the mailman is a joy, but the doctors, the neurologist and one of the hospitals have been sort of bizarre, and getting anything like a gas oven or furnace fixed has been doomed.) So I told Tricia I was just mailing the CT scan from the hospital visit and an updated letter of my symptoms from the past couple of weeks, and she said they would review those and call me later next week. I am relieved by this. She was so helpful. A kind person right there with me in the present moment.

I cannot even plan a day ahead, cannot plan March. I am stuck here on a tiny lily pad in the croc infested water of late February.

My mate got up and went. He helps me handle my disappointment by not giving in to his.

We both do all we can to stay positive and to wake up each day with this year’s mantra of “Another Beautiful Day.”

2009 was Yes We Can
2010 was Enjoy Each Day
2011 is Another Beautiful Day

We want to feel this.

We are really ready for some new hope.

Feeding Baba Yaga

I have two best girlfriends who are in a very similar predicament to my own. We are in our forties and we all have health problems dating back to our twenties and the years in between have been endurance challenges. We have each also spent those decades taking care of our families of origin, especially our fathers.

And we are all spent.

So I was trying to think of what we need, of how we could rekindle ourselves. Last year I proposed that we sort of report to each other once a week on what we had done that week that was feminine and creative, something that was for ourselves, and not for others.

This year I am thinking that the task is to find ways to refuel ourselves and to get our fire re-lit. I turned to Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book “Women Who Run with the Wolves” and randomly opened a page. (I had gotten a new bookshelf thinking this would solve some of my worldly problems but alas it made some of my problems only become clearer. I have too many books. Also, too many cats. Also, two many headaches.) I say too many because the books, cats, and headpains make me feel overwhelmed instead of blessed with abundance.

It’s the same with people. If there were only half the people here in suburbia I might love them all. But as many as there are, I don’t like any of them. At least not the ones driving at me in their Yukons and Escalades while talking on their cell phones.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes:

“A wise woman keeps her psychic environ uncluttered.”

“To cook for Baba Yaga, we ask literally, how does one feed the Baba Yaga of the psyche, what does one feed so wild a Goddess?

“To cook for the Yaga one must arrange that one's creative life has a consistent fire under it.”

“Women’s cycles according to Vasalisa’s tasks are these: to cleanse one’s thinking, renewing one’s values, on a regular basis. To clear one’s psyche of trivia, sweep one’s self, clean up one’s thinking and feeling states on a regular basis. To build an enduring fire beneath the creative life, and cook up ideas on a systematic basis, means especially to cook, and with originality, a lot of unprecedented life in order to feed the relationship between oneself and the wildish nature.”

How might we all do this?

The kid’s book was making me snow-blind. I could not see it anymore. It is back in a drawer. But I will think how I can better do my creative work.

The medicine I have loved most, the medicine of walking, has been lost to me in the past year as my head had begun to hurt worse when I walk. To lose that is partly to lose my life. I love walking. Walking is me, my rhythm and dance. My left leg has also struggled like my head has, but how can so much be wrong with me? How did my flesh and bone so dis-integrate? How did I get so hobbled? I may need to borrow someone’s magic chicken legs.

But I have a car again.
And it’s a parade float with music.
I can move along singing through the world.

The last car was a sea horse. This car is a land horse.

A Percheron, on the outside anyway.
On the inside it’s a manatee.

And I must say also, I feel the wheel pull hard to the west.

But will I have to leave Hades underground?
Can he come with me?

I bought daffodils. And they are cupping all available sunshine, capturing all the light they can.

Isn’t sunshine a kind of fire?

The Veterinarian

I am literally crying with relief. Seriously, tears of joy and grief all at once.
My vet will spay Kaboodle.

Seriously, I am crying. You must think I weep every day. I don’t, but maybe I need to.

It was suddenly like there was an ally.

It’s awful. I don’t want to abort three week old kitten fetuses. It is sickening to even think about and makes me feel like the devil. But I wake up to cats on the deck and cats coming over the fence and cats on the doormat. And I want control over our lives and yard again.
I want to be able to give good attention to the animals we have committed to. And I want the birds to have some peace.

For two years I have made so many phone calls to so many agencies and rescue places and vet's offices, always finding no one who can help. Many people mean well but they are so overwhelmed also.

And the tragedy of cats is that they breed so well. And the world doesn’t need them.

My favorite rescue place The Popcorn Zoo flat out euthanizes all ferals. Even my local SPCA will only take them if they are socialized and can be touched, because they already have 300 to 400 cats they can’t place. They give them away two for one. Every pet shop and cat rescue place for miles is overwhelmed. I have called everywhere and talked to many people and can’t find anyone to foster a pregnant cat. Nor could I find anyone in the Fall to take the Beezle.

I am so tired.

And I can’t fault my neighbors because I see they have all adopted cats and now in a neighborhood where three to four years ago there were zero cats, there is now a cat peeking out every window and door.

And I think that our local neighborhood rescue person who has a heart of gold and who loaned us the have-a-heart trap, made things much worse. She took in loads of kittens from shelters in the South (I think Maryland and North Carolina) who were all about to be euthanized even though they were healthy and sweet, and she found homes for them with our neighbors. So now our local no-kill shelters are almost having to become kill shelters.

Every kitten that arrives displaces a cat who is already here and potentially dooms it to euthanasia just by their innocent act of being born.

Can no one invent a cat birth control? Really?

The neighboring town Sea Bright which has always had dreadful, sad, mangy, infected- eye cats who threaten the nesting plovers in the dunes, has just begun a TNR=trap, neuter, return program. I think that is the best that can be done. But you know what, we need tax money and not tea partiers or the local mayor if such things are going to happen here.

In two years I have already spent almost two thousand dollars on these cats, and only 3 of them have gotten full medical care.

Do you know what it was like to hear the receptionist ask my vet what his policy would be on spaying a pregnant feral cat and to hear his calm kind voice say, “I don’t have a problem with it.”

This is the vet who cares for our dog and for our own cat who was once a feral. Our vet Dr. H is one of the kindest most professional humans I have ever met. My mate and I have both lamented that when we move he will be the one professional person we really miss. (Along with our pharmacist Ross.) As I have been so sick since 2008 I have often wished that Dr. H were my own doctor.

A few months ago he left his job at the big animal hospital in Red Bank and opened his own small practice in a house in our neighborhood where he lives with his wife and children. He bought the place from a man who used to be a doctor and had his medical office at home, (just as my great grandfather practiced medicine from his farm in Virginia, and just as most doctors used to, since they were needed 24/7.)

Just to hear my veterinarian’s voice in the background, “I don’t have a problem with it,” was like hearing the voice of God.

I felt like in this suburban wilderness where I so often feel so desperately alone and without kindreds, that I had just found an adult.

I want that kind of God. Loving, measured, scientific, calm, competent, compassionate, available, willing to help. An ally.

I want a God who lets females of all species control their fertility.

We didn’t create the problem. We are just doing the best we can with a tough situation, looking for solutions.

Kaboodle will get the best medical care. She will be kept overnight and given antibiotics and pain meds. She will be vaccinated. I will nurse her through her post operative week and then she can join her siblings and enjoy the coming green grass of Spring.

She will be in the best hands the world has to offer.

The Lost Cameo

I don’t mean when a movie star makes an unexpected appearance in a scene.
I mean one of those old fashioned brooches, often with a person’s silhouette, carved out of a gemstone or a pinkish seashell.

I have been reviewing the CT scan of my head from September 2010. It is all very Halloween and of course I have no idea how to interpret it. Still, I flash through the slide show trying to see if there is any sign as to what is troubling the right side of my head and brain and skull so badly.

And then I think I see it! A cameo brooch! Why that is the problem, someone left their cameo in my head.

The author Diane Ackerman writes of her husband Paul’s world after he has a stroke:

Paul would tell me later that he felt different from before, newly embedded in himself, as if trapped in statuary. His room seemed to be full of Hopi dancers and dazzling as Mardi Gras. He felt his teeth blink. Something pagan was going on, with a mad ring to it, like a disturbed vibraphone. People were speaking a foreign language. And they didn’t seem aware of the pandemonium and cacophony he was enduring. Alice-In-Wonderland sensory warping is common after a stroke, as the damaged brain struggles to make sense of its surroundings.


I stare harder at the CT scan.

It’s like reading tea leaves.

Brux

Brux

I wake up at 4:30 am and think I have bits of broken tooth in my mouth from grinding my teeth so hard. There is light coming in from under the bedroom door. My mate’s recent performance review at work did not go well and now he is up every night between 3 and 4 am.

I am claustrophobic in my body. Shut in. I have clenched my jaws so hard I cannot roar.
I cannot even sound my barbaric yawp.

When he leaves for work at 7 am I open my bleary eyes and muster a strange little baby- handed wave, like I am preverbal and speak only the sign language of toddlers.

My grandmother always wore a night guard. She was crushing her own teeth after her second husband died too young.

She wore a plastic guard she kept on the nightstand. I felt sorry for her. I still do.
I began grinding my teeth when I lived in Seattle about eight years ago. I loved my life but I was sick then too. I didn’t know I was still grinding my teeth.

Bruxism. It is almost what it sounds like, feels like.

The gnashing of the teeth.

Do you grind your teeth too?

At 4:30 I could feel the pressure in my skull, could feel it changed shape, that it was an egg under pressure, my soft palate was being flexed beyond capacity

Do you remember when The Giant at the top of the beanstalk says,
“I’ll grind his bones to make me bread.”

Am I trying to cannibalize myself?
Am I so chomping at the bit?

Why yes, yes I am.

Fee Fi Fo Fum.

I feel so locked into my self.

Today in the mirror even my teeth look stressed beyond belief.

So today I have gone to the drug store and bought a nightguard. Made an appt with a TMJ specialist. Scheduled to see a chiropractor. And called the ENT doc. Surely someone somewhere can help me?

In the meantime I will drink more water. I will put hot packs on my head. I just took some liquid benadryl to see if that would relieve the pressure in the side of my head.

But why does it seem that for each good moment, there comes the next moment which takes it away? I meet helpful and nice people at the store but on the drive back a mini cooper and a deer have collided. I see this sort of thing each time I leave the house. Something that hurts me. Something that is hurt.

Why does leaving the house have to be so tragic? Why do the deer and the mini cooper have to collide? Why does the beautiful now damaged deer have to limp and fall, its back leg hitched up to the hip, and then it tries to get back up, succeeds, but has nowhere to go. And why do all the people honk and honk and honk and honk?

This my friends is why I need the gun.

Spring will come soon. I will feel better then.

Kaboodle

The news on Kaboodle the Fox cat has not been good. I could not catch her. And don’t think I did not try. I had cleared an area in the garage for her and set up the space heater. I had gone online and ordered a special sort of heating pad and it had arrived just in time. I had cans of tuna and batches of potent catnip. I spent nine hours lying in wait like Wile E. Coyote waiting for Roadrunner, and like Roadrunner, she got away.

It wasn’t that she didn’t go into the dog crate that I was using as a trap. She did. But Goodness went in there with her, or another kitten was blocking the door so I couldn’t close it.

Kaboodle was hungry and immensely interested in the whole production. She spent a lot of that day lying down in front of the crate door, and even stuck her head in the kitchen as if to ask me what I was up to.

All day long it was like trying to catch a small wild bird.

Then as darkness fell I was about to give up hope. Then, she went in!

I closed the door but before I could get it latched she smashed against it. I leaned down to say “it’s ok” and try to latch it and she smashed out. My angle was awkward and she was a bolt of pure feline lightning. Am I really that weak? She is her mother’s daughter. They look alike and they both lunge and throw themselves at a door when it is closed. The other two kittens I was able to catch as their instinct was to cower, not to charge.

So now she is 2 or 3 weeks pregnant and no one wants to spay her. I have been looking for a foster home for a pregnant cat. No one can take her. Her gestation would last another four or five weeks and then the kittens would need to be nursed for two months.

This madness has got to end. We need our lives back.

I feel that if we could solve the problem of the feral kittens, we could solve all our problems.

If we were Egyptian royalty with vast granaries we would give thanks. We would be rich with cats. Shaka Zulu, the mother of all these kittens, makes beautiful, healthy, smart, bright, sweet, interesting kittens who are good hunters.

But I cannot solve this problem of cat overpopulation, hard as I try, so what am I to do?

Is the only answer to introduce coyotes?

for whom the blog tolls

I have been enjoying writing the blog. I relaxed all rules. I let go of grammar and punctuation, of caring what people might think, of believing that I needed to post on any consistent topic or theme, or that what I had to say had to be in any way good or important, or that I had to post only once a day. And so I have just been enjoying myself.

I gave up being concerned that what I felt like writing about was pedestrian, quotidian, that it seemed so self-centered or insular.

Pain locks you in a small room.

The blog is like getting out.

The blog is also like entering a fresh space and not having to do any housekeeping there.

The blank page is an empty uncluttered room.

The blog leaves the body behind.

I figured out who the blog is really for~

It’s for me, January 2012. I want to be around to look back and see what I was doing, to see that I survived, to know perhaps there was progress.

And then to look forward again.

The gun

I am concerned that since the idea of a gun has been introduced to the blog that it might become potent or portent, as if it is some foreshadowing that later I will procure the gun and use it, and someone will say, ‘Oh we might have seen that coming.’

But it’s not like that. I am not going to use it.

But my desire does have to do with the feeling that if I have a gun I can take better care of myself.

When my mate has to be out of town, I sleep with his cocked gun under the bed. It is true. I have been doing this for over a year. I am weaker than I used to be so I don’t trust myself to cock it quickly and efficiently enough should I need it, and I am only using it if someone comes into the house who shouldn’t.

I am not going to storm down to borough hall and wave it around because I am furious at their deforestation. As for last years decimation of the local woodlands, the update is that a couple of months ago they did indeed come and plant some baby trees. Many baby trees that are a little taller than myself. But it is still hard for me to go there without feeling the grief of losing our old growth friends. What I want to say to the shade tree commission members who had all the big trees taken down is that I still really wish I could just take away all of their beloved grandparents and great grandparents and elders, and say~ “but don’t be sad, I am going to instead give you a roomful of babies. Have fun!”

So you see, I also know that shooting my full of himself pro lifer Republican mayor won’t do a thing so I won’t. He is lowering taxes by outsourcing our local police and garbage men. He is making his own enemies.

And I won’t use the gun on myself either. I am fighting too hard to recover a life, not lose it. And I did hear a woodpecker today.

But a lot of people have guns. Sometimes my neighbors go into their yards and shoot themselves in the chest. I would not do this. But being amongst people who have guns makes me want my own. One I can cock and aim easily by myself.

Had I stayed in Virginia, where as a child of six I was just learning to shoot shotguns, I would have had a gun. So this is perhaps part of my sense of achieving a certain independence.

My desire for gun ownership also comes from traveling to many places where people had guns or machetes but we didn’t, and we felt utterly primally naked. Like we had forgotten to put on pants.

I have also done lots of domestic violence and sexual assault advocacy and heard too many detailed firsthand accounts of home invasions and seen the consequences.

And perhaps I have just become more wild west, more Annie Oakley.

And I do have to say that overall, I just feel more alone, that we are all on our own, it is best to be as prepared as possible for all situations.

A gun will just make me feel better. And of course the plan is to never ever use it. The security comes in having handy something you will not use, unless your life depends upon it.

A gun is a tool, or an instrument. It can make music, it can sit in beautiful silence.

What kind should I get?

Do you want one too?

The paper airplane brain

The origami brain

I figured out what my head feels like sometimes. It’s like when someone takes an 8 ½ by 11 inch piece of paper and then crumples it in frustration. Then crushes it harder and harder so the whole thing is a small crinkly ball, unrecognizable as a piece of paper.

Sometimes my face twitches, my inner ear feels crumpled and folded up. Whatever this is tries to pinch my right eye closed. My right eye is like one of those squishy balls someone presses in their palm to relieve their own tension.

Sometimes I think I somehow fractured my skull.

Tell me the truth. Did I get kicked in the head by a zebra and no one will tell me that my circus trick went horribly wrong?

I hear a little music, vaguely remember a dancing poodle on horseback.
There were sequins right? And bright lights?

Paper and snow. This is the day.


(Egyptian sculpture, 1386-1349 BC, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Front row seat to crazy

Six months after he’s died and I am beginning to think my father was just schizophrenic.

(I mean before he was also epileptic and had liver disease and then got cancer.) As if someone is just schizophrenic. Like a word contains anything. What I really wonder is what would it have been like to have had a diagnosis for him for all those years when I was a child. (And it’s not that my grandmother and my mother did not try to get help for him.) No one ever disputed he was crazy. Crazy. With a capital C. And finally when more modern medical help came he was diagnosed with manic depression, with perhaps schizoaffective tendencies.

I just thought of myself as the mad man’s daughter.
And when the band the Who sang “ No one knows what it’s like to be the sad man, behind blue eyes’, I thought they knew my father.

He was severe bipolar and had medicated with alcohol, or tried to, off and on since his teens. He had suffered. He had caused suffering in others. He had not responded well to lithium or antipsychotics. Finally in his late 50’s (when I became his guardian) another brain trauma seemed to knock some of the crazy out of him. He had started having grand mal seizures and either the force of the electrical storms or the benefit of the anti epileptic medications, helped manage his condition. When he did go crazy, it was usually in the deliriums following these seizures and he was helped by newer drugs, neuroleptics that only became available in the 1990’s.

But what if, over the course of our lives, we had been able to say, “Our father suffers from schizophrenia.” Would that have helped any of us? Was that in any way less dehumanizing than just knowing someone was “crazy?”

Would it have helped to just have always known he had schizophrenia, an organic disease of the mind? To think, there is science, there is medicine, take cover but have pity.

But it’s not like you stop to read the guidebook on genetic illnesses of dinosaurs when the T-Rex is chasing you down the hill.

It was just that his crazy looked so much crazier than a lot of people’s crazy.

But maybe that is always how crazy looks when you have front row seats.

His sane times were so lucid and bright, his mind clear and quick and witty and kind even. He was handsome and his eyes twinkled with life. It was during one of these windows my mother met him.

But the beauty of his sanity made his crazy seem crazier.

Jekyll and Hyde, only brighter and faster and more out of control.

I believe he went to Mexico to save us all. I think the sunshine helped. And a certain kindness and tolerance in the Latino people. Being able to live cheaply helped. Being far away from home with its expectations and responsibilities must have helped.

Now I am understanding my attraction to these books. Maybe their stories will better help me tell mine.

But I just spent ten years taking care of my father, trying to protect my family and the world from him. I am tired. It might be too soon.

And Ack, what if that crackling in my head is a radio station trying to tune in? The first sign of impending madness? I don’t really think it is, and yet it gives me some idea of the powerlessness a “crazy” person must feel.

Home alone

My mate has gone to Baltimore for work and in preparation for his departure I have made myself a list of cheering things to do while he is away. It’s not just that I miss him when he is gone but that so many of the projects I work on seem to have a macabre or sorrowful element that I don’t like to work on them when I am alone nights.

In recent months I have been accidentally reading books about children with mentally ill parents. In these two books, “Swallow The Ocean” by Laura M. Flynn and “Rescuing Patty Hearst” by Virginia Holman, both stories are told by the compassionate daughters of schizophrenic mothers. The daughters are essentially my peers, and they so vividly bring to life the era of our childhoods, especially Virginia Holman who grew up in that coastal Virginia area which was so like the Virginia and Maryland of many of my formative years.

Is it comforting or voyeuristic, is it helpful or is it like pouring salt in a wound or picking a scab to read these books? Is one part of me doing research for telling my own story while another part of me balks at beginning the writing of it?

As for these books, it was I who chose them, and yet it is as if I am still reading them by accident.

I have also been reading about adventurous lives and tragic deaths in Africa and in Texas desert settings. I am attracted to tv programs like Dateline and 20/20 or to survival shows like "I Shouldn’t Be Alive".

The kid’s book I am writing on has some very frightening supernatural scenes. Meanwhile I have been transcribing WWII documents.

So these projects will be put on the backburner for a few days and I will focus on other tasks. I have picked out two easy on the heart and mind books from the library: Nora Ephron’s "I Remember Nothing" and Gretchen Rubin’s "The Happiness Project."

And I intend to work on household projects and the feral cat project.

Out with winter and in with Spring. Out with Fall actually. I found a beautiful basket of red and gold leaves and acorns on the counter so I will take them back to the outdoors.

Winter and I could be best friends if it would just leave after two weeks.

But it’s been a nice weekend. We went and heard some Schumann, Chopin, Schubert. I particularly recommend listening to Chopin’s Ballade No. 4 in f minor, op. 52.
You know the one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br1HnIqflt0


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqihZwPkkGo

My mate walks in from the grocery store and tells me he wanted to bring me a present from the store and couldn’t find anything so he made a donation to fight Muscular Dystrophy in my name. I tell him thank you. One of my best girlfriends in high school had MD, and one of my favorite adult friends also has it. Both are individuals with incredibly admirable unstoppable spirits. You must know folks like this too.

Today my mate and I are off to look at birds on the Navesink. A flock of something has landed on the water and we shall go investigate. (They turned out to be incredible flocks of greater scaup, with some ruddy ducks and brants thrown in, and also many swans.)

I want to see an art house movie and I wish one of you, my girlfriends, was here to see it with me. My man likes action movies. I already subjected him to "Blue Valentine" and "The Girl Who Played with Fire" recently. This will be two hours in pastoral England I think. Care for a cup of tea? Want to come over? If you can’t make it I understand.

But I will be thinking of you and wishing you were here.

Caramel coloring

When the news came out this week that caramel coloring was possibly carcinogenic, I was depressed by it in a way that I manage to usually ward off when I hear food news. I am never shocked when a coloring or a chemical is determined to be cancer causing. We are supposed to be eating living food not lab food.

But Coke-a -cola? That is a not a manmade product. I have always thought of that as a gift from the gods. Since childhood my only drinks have been iced tea, water, and co-cola. I always thought that miraculous blend of sugar, caffeine, fizz and secret natural flavors was the way the gods let us know they loved us.

And now that it finally dawns on me that I have some bizarre neurological illness, I wonder if even back then coca-a-cola was providing me medicinal benefits. Like leeching the calcium out of me since it looks like maybe my calcium levels get too high and push out all my magnesium. Or just the way caffeine helps lessen the severity of migraines.

I am not one of those people who drinks soda every day. It’s cyclical, some weeks none. Some weeks a bottle a day for four or five days in a row.

Apparently there are five kinds of synthetic caramel coloring, (no one really makes it by burning sugar anymore), and three out of five have been determined to be bad for us, so Europe will ban then, and the US won’t.

I will still drink a Coke. But now some of the shine is off. I look at it and think, deflated, ‘Oh, humans made that. Darn.’

But maybe the Coke in other countries is still made by the gods?
Maybe I will have to travel more in search of the cure.

Coke adds life. The spark.

La chispa de la vida.

Not Disneyland

Some people want to gather up their families and take them to Disneyland. I want to gather mine up and take them to the Undiagnosed Disease Program at the National Institutes of Health which opened in Washington DC in 2008.

Mother, sister, at least one brother, maybe both, and the maternal grandmother if she were alive. I can’t tell, maybe the aunt and uncle need to come too. Maybe the paternal grandmother and the father. I don’t know. The levels of suffering in my family are so high, that I don’t just have my own suffering I also have the pain of having watched the suffering of others.

Sometimes now when I notice how I move or how my face frowns with gravity, how I sit with the heating pad pressed into me, I think “Oh my god I am my mother’ (sorry Mumsy) and I love my mother, but she had been living in severe and chronic pain for so long, with spiking blood pressure nothing can resolve, and I am afraid for her, and afraid of being her. I want her to be her happy joyous creative talented enthusiastic self of younger years. By which I mean her 40’s. She has spent her 50’s in chronic pain and in and out of hospitals and doctor’s offices. Her diagnosis, only, ‘uncontrolled hypertension’.

Somehow the bomb went off in me a decade earlier.

But my twenties were no piece of cake either. And my sister also suffered her entire twenties with severe pains and distress and no answers. And now my baby brother who is in his twenties has high blood pressure and high cholesterol, even though like all of us he has eaten fairly well and stayed fairly lean and remained very active. There is some possibility that we all have some sort of adrenaline secreting tumor which has not been located but I don’t know. We have all been subjected to so many tests and nothing is ever found. And we are not all exactly the same. Those three have low thyroid and I do not. My sister does not have high bp though the other three of us do. (Well, mine is only high when my pain levels rise, or is it that it spikes spontaneously and then so do pain levels? No one knows.)

At this Institute people sometimes learn horrible news. But the weird thing is that the patients who were interviewed were still so grateful and happy for the help, even when they were given news of a death sentence. It seems contradictory, who wants bad news? But there is something empowering about knowing. Like you can know, and then you can move on. You can make decisions, you can do what is next, you can prepare the best you can.

My life is constantly struck by lightning. There are grass fires. The zebras run off. I feel like a person not who has some horrible disease for which even modern medicine cannot come up with a cure, but like a person who has some horrible disease which modern medicine cannot even identify yet, much less cure.

Without a diagnosis, there is no real prognosis.
There is just hope, and sometimes the lack of hope.

Diagnosis

Let’s revisit recent diagnoses. October 2010 the ER thinks it’s a complex migraine plus a virus. They give me pain meds (which I don’t really need and don’t take, though I do take their anti dizzy pill which is what enables me to check out the same night) and they refer me to the neurologist.

The neurologist thinks its all in my head. He wants me to start high dose steroids and then a daily dose of a new medication and to see his wife who is a psychologist. He says that I may have some underlying stress I don’t even know about. I am nearly heartbroken by this visit because he is missing the point that I am too sick to just start more meds without knowing what the problem is, and while I love counseling and counselors, I am looking for medicine, science, some biology. Something is very wrong in the physical world of my skull. I already have plenty of stresses I know about, I don’t need anymore!

Doctor Hayward thinks I have had an adverse reaction to the bp medication/beta blocker she has just tried me on and puts it on my allergy list.
Her colleague tells me to drink more water.

Doctor Hopper thinks its migraine plus maybe Meniere’s disease but doesn’t know.
Doctor Steinburg thinks its migraine plus maybe trigeminal neuralgia but he hopes not. And he does not rule out the possibility of stroke like events.

Doctor Stackhouse thinks I have a lot going on in my head and he doesn’t know what it is but says let’s start with antibiotics and see if we can work on the sinus disease which shows up on the CT scans. 2-4-6 weeks of antibiotics and then another CT scan and then maybe more antibiotics and then maybe surgery. But this confuses me because I can breathe through my nose and face. Can he do surgery on the side of my head?

Do I need a second opinion on the MRI?
I have asked if I need another MRI with contrast to look better at my veins and arteries and for now they say no. I want it to be no. But I also want to be better.

Everyone agrees it is inflammation. But no one knows how or why or quite how to control it.

Two docs say go to see a dentist to rule out TMJ.

Two docs say, “I don’t know what it is exactly but I don’t think it is life threatening.” But there is an emphasis on the word think and the sound goes down ‘plunk’ when they say it like it is a stepping stone that is under water. A step down into a puddle.

They are not dismissing me. They just don’t know. They both want me to come back soon. As soon as I have seen Stackhouse the ENT. They will defer to him they say.

So three weeks of antibiotics later and I am the same.

I never saw him again

At “I never saw him again.” I begin crying.
My grandfather’s friend is sent into combat on Christmas Day. That was the last they saw of each other.

As for my grandfather Chit, I never saw him at all.
Except in photographs, and perhaps reflected in the eyes of my father and other family members.

I have finished transcribing this letter.

There is a second letter.
It is from a woman, Emily Sapp, whose husband Walter witnessed the moment on the battlefield when my grandfather met his death.

I am proud of all the people who fight for good every day, on the battlefield and off.

William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

I recall a story now; it wafts in from the corners of my memory. That the woman who worked for my grandfather’s parents, when the news finally came that Chit had died, she said that she knew. She said Chit had come through and visited that night. She had seen him. He was no longer on the battlefields of the war far away but had come back home for a moment.

Why did my grandmother never share these two letters with me? Too much grief? Conversations she did not want to have? But we did try to talk about certain things and we visited historic WWII sites and attended local Veteran’s ceremonies.

Was it complicated that her second husband, who was also my grandfather’s cousin, was of Germanic ancestry, and that they would visit Germany to visit his family, and would have a fountain built for their kindreds?
How do we all reconcile these things?

My grandmother and I watched ‘Saving Private Ryan’ together and it broke both our hearts. Later that day she told me that Chit had told her he was afraid that was what would get him, that there was some new technology, some red laser sighting system or something. That night when the wind shook pecans down on the tin roof I jolted awake, certain that I was in the war.

Bright spots on the brain

I want to believe that they are like stars
Or like a jeweled hairnet

They were what was visible on the MRI when the doctor called the day before Christmas to tell me that the results were thus far fairly decent but that they could see I was having severe migraines.

A week later in his office I ask, “Well is it that there are these bright spots and so they are causing the migraine, or are the migraines causing the bright spots?” He was clear, the migraines come first. So what then does that mean? I could see him choose his words carefully.

He did not use the words brain damage, but I feel that is essentially what he was saying, that the migraines were causing changes in my brain, that maybe these were areas experiencing less circulation, areas that were denied circulation at some point.

He did not say them but the words ‘brain damage’ were in the air. I already knew.

I had been experiencing cyclical cognitive defects since Nov 2008 but I am so much better now than I was then, that I try not to fret about it. I believe the brain can heal, that neurons can regenerate. Memories have come back, words have come back. Except during the most severe of migraines I am relatively normal in my brain right now, though it gets stressed and exhausted more easily and shuts down faster, almost like I am post concussion or something. Sometimes it hurts horribly to try to think. Sometimes I test myself by just looking around the room and trying to name all the nouns, and when I can I feel hopeful.

I ask another doctor about the results of the MRI. Does he think that these are evidence of small strokes I might have had? I ask because in late 2004 or early 2005 I experienced what I think might have been a small stroke. Three events seemed to happen simultaneously.

1. My stepfather has a heart attack and when I get the news I feel a hatchet in the left side of my chest and double over. This is bizarre to me because sure I love my stepfather but I don’t think we are that close.

2. And then my diabetic mate, with whom I am separating though we are still sharing a bed, is having massive blood sugar swings so bad that sometimes I am having to wake him up in his near coma and feed him sugar. Well one night I am awakened from a dead sleep by a bloodcurdling scream from him, right next to me, and I literally feel myself have a heart attack, and then my brain momentarily shuts down. I recover quickly and rush to help him but for months afterwards my excellent sense of direction is diminished, I have a hard time recalling things, someone tells me something and I immediately repeat my question or act as if I have not heard or retained the info, and I can tell something in my brain is just not right at all. I feel lost. I cannot make new maps.

3. Then this soon to be ex fiancé and I are almost killed when a drunk driver comes down 1-5 the wrong way, going south in the northbound lane~ as we are headed north. A miracle and my soon to be ex’s swerve save our lives, but it was so close I had already put my feet on the dashboard and curled into the fetal position. Not that this is the right thing to do, but our lives were over. Since that time I have wondered if we died and we are now in the afterlife. We were shaken to the core, but ok. There was no metal on metal. It was a miracle. But two days later my eye began to bleed, to fill up with blood. I went to the doctor who believed it was a hemorrhage that had clotted up quickly during the “accident.” It made me wonder what else happened as a result of our cars passing through each other like metal ghost ships.

So I had had some traumas. And it is right after these events I start experiencing extreme blacking out dizziness when eating.

So the doctor says with my cholesterol level (presumed to be genetic, high for decades) and the off the charts spiking blood pressure that happen when I am in pain, then it could be possible that yes, I had been having something like strokes. He doesn’t know.

So how do I get the pain under control? It roared up again last night (2-17-11). The pain would not let me lie down, it wakes me and shakes me the way people will say a shark shook them like a rag doll. The pain blasts through me and turns me to red mush.

For a few hours last night I was back at the beginning of the saga, back in Nov 2008 when it seems this began, or rather, exploded. The various kindlings seemed to be there already. Then I was started on female hormones to try to curb the severe cyclical pain and then instead of a healing my pain tops out and blows my body apart like a bomb. I recall on the way to the ER in the middle of the night we are driving by the ocean and I think that even if I could rush into the cold wintry waves with a gun and shoot myself in the head, I don’t know if this will trump the pain in my head. I have never known anything like it. And it is just the beginning. It will go on weeks and months. Morphine will not touch it.

Every day this week of Feb 2011 I was having head pain and pressure and floating bits in my eyes. A few days ago I start also having twinges and pains in my upper right abdomen. An anxiety begins to build, a foreboding. Then one night all of a sudden I have the bad head pain and am acutely sick to my guts. Hours later a knife stab pain in my upper right abdomen doubles me over. I spend the night with a heating pad and ginger tea. And I feel afraid. The voodoo is back.

So exhausting. Pain and pressure and fear.

Today I pop a blue pill. It takes my edge off. It is no cure but it makes me feel less like a time bomb. I had pain and pressure in my head all day, all month really, all the time since October. The sounds have changed but still, having sounds in one head could make one go psychiatric. Mainly its pressure and a strange sizzling liquid sound, almost like fizzing.

It’s akin to Chinese water torture to not be able to escape this.

I noticed last week I was thinking of cocktails. I didn’t drink any but I kept thinking maybe that would reduce my dizziness (but actually my dizziness is much improved since the New Year) and maybe it would make the noise more like background noise I don’t notice so much.

Never before the past few months have I thought alcohol would cure anything.
But there is something about this that wants a drink.
The noise and the pain make me anxious.
The part of me that cannot find a cure or be comforted wants a good stiff drink.
Maybe some intuitive part of me thinks I need an old fashioned blood thinner.

There is this terrible truth that I who can somewhat advocate for myself and who have health insurance and who is determined and who believes in medicine and who has sought help from scores of medical professionals in the past 28 months and who has done every test and tried many of the medicines, still has no diagnosis or comfort or cure, and this leaves me feeling very sad for myself like none of them care enough to really help me, and also so very sad for all the people who do not even have insurance or access to these doctors and hospitals or money for medicine or the doggedness of my personality type.

I would have had to declare medical bankruptcy were in not for money left to me by my grandfather and grandmother. So thank heavens for that, but what a sad way to spend an inheritance that could have helped other people or sent me on a trip around the world.

How many nights I have been up alone at 2 or 3 am, in serious pain, afraid, trying to decide what to do, which ER to head towards, feeling my bp spiked up and it making my head and heart gurgly, and it’s a vicious cycle of pain making bp go up and bp being up probably making head pain worse and round and round and round.


May the circle be broken.

Today I end with his words

I have fallen in love with the man who wrote the letter I am transcribing. How grateful I am he was my grandfather’s friend and he wrote this detailed story of their days.

His letter is addressed to Mrs. Peirce, not me of course but my grandmother, and no wonder she kept this letter hidden for 60 years. When he writes of how he learned about her, it is so direct and sincere, it grips one’s soul and pulls one completely out of one’s day, out of the here and now, and brings one into 1944 war time France, into a large brick building on the front, where men are waiting to go to die.

My grandmother Mrs. Peirce did not know this man but he knew intimate details about her and her life. He writes:

"Our main pastime around the school however, was sitting around in our little rooms swapping tales and talk of home. From the time we left England to late November we got no mail so we did a lot of wishful thinking. We showed one another our pictures and read snatches of old letters. I learned about you and the little house across from the courthouse, about the inlaws, the characters of the county, the job in the courthouse, the interesting cases that had come up there, and all such homey little items and replied from my own nostalgic memories.”

In February 2011 New Jersey, I uncovered some bulbs trying to rise up beneath mushy leaves. But I am also with the American soldiers in France. It is time for Thanksgiving.

Today I end with his words:

“All this time our company was being reduced in size by the constant flow of men to the front. Every day 3, 5, or 15 perhaps would leave for a combat unit from our company, and in most cases when we said good-bye we knew our paths would never cross again. Our little group seemed to be charmed however and at Thanksgiving we were still together. We had an excellent Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, and for a change we ate in the theater with no standing in line. Our numbers were sufficiently reduced by this time to make this possible.”

Random happiness

You know what I like about having a car? When I come back from walking into town and I see the car in the driveway, it looks like I am already home.

Today the mourning doves were singing.

Some children were climbing in the receding snow and I overheard them say that they were playing that they were at the North Pole and that they were “still trying to get to Santa’s house.”

I am ahead with the blog, behind on the kid’s book, and right on time with the WWII letter. I am filled with so many ideas. It’s like learning to put ones toys away.

Things need places.
Ideas need places.

I am still learning what goes where. Options are my paper journal, a letter, the blog, a facebook status, an email, the kid’s book, a new poem, a work of fiction, memoir, or nowhere. Much of what I come up with ends up on scraps of paper that end up in the recycling bin or floating about the desks and bookshelves like ghosts. This is the habit I am trying to break. I am trying to learn to put all my toys back where they belong.

In my mind I write a letter to my friend Kyle who has been working in dangerous regions of the Middle East. We have been friends a long time. “Dear Kyle, you are my gun and god go-to guy. This year I would like more of both in my life. When will I see you again?”

Holy Smokes. Every time I turn around it’s later in the day. Time to make apple crisp. The one from the Fannie Farmer cookbook. My sister’s favorite. Double the topping she says.

My lover calls from the road and for one minute and twenty seconds we share the beautiful sound of church bells.

Page Ten

I am thinking of my grandfather eating some of the last fresh fruits and raw vegetables of his life as he rides a train late October, through France to the frontlines.

It makes me suddenly stop typing, put my hands in my lap, and whisper, “oh god.”

I look out the window at the trees and sky which seem to go on forever.
My heart sucks in its breath.

I am on page ten. Nine more pages to go.

The paper smells faintly of mold and an old perfume which is more like cologne, a deeper more serious amber sort of fragrance wafts up from time to time.

Kaboodle and Goodness

Kaboodle and Goodness are napping under the cherry tree.
It’s like cat Romeo and Juliet. So sweet and I feel a foreboding.
I know the outcome. I know what is next.

Tomorrow I try to trap Kaboodle and take her to the Feline Medical Center to be spayed. She is the third of the three feral kittens from last summer, the one who could not be caught. Tiger (Leo) was neutered and vaccinated and Kit (Cleo) was spayed and vaccinated. And Kaboodle (the Fox) stayed just out of reach.

From how far away can a tomcat smell a kitten in her first heat?

Or did the roaming of the toms induce her first heat?
Who smelled who?

Or is that whom?

When we returned from December holidays in WA, this enormous green eyed tom cat was living in our yard in NJ. He had the best manners and came and sat politely at our front door and back door, as if praying.

At first I thought he just wanted food as the blizzards were raging.

But then I began to think he was asking for Kaboodle’s paw in marriage.

I am not kidding.

He sat looking at me with his deep green pools of eyes and it was as if he wanted to convey to me that he was the prince from a neighboring land and he was strong and a gentleman and would take good care of Kaboodle and their kittens.

For two weeks this Goodness and a pure black cat, nearly his shadow twin in size, beat the life out of each other in the snow. It was like two primal bears fighting for territory. No one would give in. I thought they might kill each other. There was a third tom also. (He is striped and was here last February when I tried to drive him off but I think finally he drove off that previous year’s kitten whom we called Copycat, and then I think this year he fathered the kitten whom I call The Beezle.) But this year this slinky striped Tom was driven off by these two enormous males who yowled and fought all day and night.

Goodness would show up with ears beaten up and scratches on his face and a very stiff gait. His fur hung off in tufts. He lost about five pounds overnight and has not regained it. He wobbles a little and moves more slowly.

Now he mainly wants to nap in the garden with his prize.

So I was feeling so guilty I almost considered canceling the appointment. The problem is, we don’t want more kittens. And we want any kittens born to have good lives. And I don’t even know if I can catch Kaboodle, though I am going to give it my best shot. She is a very sweet thing and while she lives on the cusp of two worlds, I think she could find a home in the world of humans, just as I think Kit and Tiger can be domesticated and would prefer that.

This is not true of cats like the Beezle, who is right now in his youth as feral as a beast can be. This is not true of the Toms, and I am not sure it is true of Shaka the mother of all cats. My own Blue was a trick and challenge to domesticate and he is still an aloof and independent creature, though a loving kindred soul to my mate and I and a good brother to the dog.

So my idea is just to feed Goodness all that I can. To give him something, now that I feel I will be taking so much away.

I hate interfering.
But I do love the birds and rabbits and mice.

Why my dog is not in the dog house

“Good puppy! Good boy.”

I heard him come down the stairs joyfully carrying something he was not supposed to have. He only sounds this happy when he has contraband. I could tell by the rustling sound it wasn’t ‘nothing’, like something he had snagged from the recycling bag under my desk. Indeed, he appeared with a scrolled up watercolor my niece had painted last year at the age of three and which is giving me some inspiration for the kid’s book I am working on.

“Ohhh, no. No.” I gently chided him, not wanting him to startle and close his drooling jaws any tighter. He listened and laid it down. I leapt up and grabbed the painting, and found a croissant in the kitchen for him. He accepted the swap. Good Boy.

The puppy is growing up. He is going to be five in May but as a golden he will stay a puppy until he becomes an old man, with not much time in between, a day maybe, a week? So as soon as I celebrate this level of maturity, I may begin mourning a decline.

He was only able to get to this treasure because two weeks ago, when I again tripped over the barricade blocking my office door and nearly broke three toes, I was like “enough is enough!” I had imagined that after a few months of puppyhood the dog would settle and he would lie at my feet and dream of chasing rabbits while I typed.

But that would not be this dog. He spent his whole time trying to get his 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, and then 90 pounds into my lap. So I barricaded him out and myself in and the baskets were low enough the Blue cat could clear them and come and go as he pleased. So now the cat lies near me dreaming of chasing rabbits and the dog seems content on his bed in the hall.

But the puppy is growing up. Yesterday when I was sitting on the sofa I looked over at him where he had dragged his bed over near me in the sun and lay snoozing peacefully. My contraband fuzzy slipper socks from upstairs were tucked next to him, and as he raised his sleepy head to see if I needed something, I felt for the first time ever that he was babysitting me.

Thank you Puppy Dog.

And now he has finished his croissant and is sniffing my coffee cup and wagging his tail.
He looks like he might try to leap in my lap.
Good Boy!?

Church bells

The early evening moonlight is shining on the snow. I have the laundry in the dryer, the Captain’s chicken simmering on the stove, and here I am typing to you.

My beloved just called from his commute so I could hear the church bells through the phone. He was pulled over on the side of the road in central New Jersey with his cell phone out the window.

I had told him how much I had been enjoying church bells here in our neighborhood the past few months, that just since last Fall, often when I am outside with the kittens, I hear bells.

He says he was driving through a small town about a half hour west and as he passed through the clock read 6 pm and he heard bells strike once, and then again, and so then he quickly turned around and drove back to play them for me.

Each morning my beloved gets up before me and every morning of my life he leaves me a message on my cell phone to welcome me to the day.

And every night I am up later than he is and I leave him a note on the kitchen counter to wish him good morning and welcome him to the day.

The lark and the owl.

Church bells and music boxes.

The sound of his voice, the sound of his silence.

This is the music I love.

From somewhere else

“No matter where you live, you will always be from somewhere else.”

I hear myself say this to myself as I walk the halls of the local borough.

“This is what happens when you leave home at the age of seven.”

These Boro Halls of Fair Haven, New Jersey are not decorated so very differently from the Court House walls of my Lancaster County, Virginia childhood. Antiquated images of people, yellowed documents, steamboats.

At this late date, no matter where I go, I will be from somewhere else.

This has its blessedness and its cursedness.

My fights are pretty much the same regardless of geography, wanting to see an end to racism and poverty and to child and animal abuse, to see women’s rights upheld, to see the land and water respected and protected.

Tonight the news upsets me that the town to the north wants to raid the savings account of the library to pay the policemen. (Which is not to say I don’t want policemen to get paid but just that it’s not ok to break into your sister’s room and take her piggybank because you her brother spent all your allowance.)

But the fight that riles me more is that the Catholic Church in Red Bank has just applied for a permit to march to Planned Parenthood to protest abortion, and it does surprise me that they don’t have anything better to do with their resources, (for instance, rooting out and bringing to court the child abusers in their own organization and helping the victims rebuild their lives.) But what was particularly appalling to me was that the mayor of Fair Haven weighed in on the forum and said he for one believes life begins at conception.

And you know what, that is not the issue. Believe what you will and want. But leave women alone to make the medical choices they determine are best for them. I just cannot believe it is 2011 and this is a discussion we are having. Thankfully some ally out there of mine said he would be perfectly willing to uphold the mayor’s right to not have an abortion.

Hallelujah.




(painting by Clarence Holbrook Carter, hanging in the museum at Rutgers)

The Fossil Egg

I am in two places at once. I am in suburban New Jersey, February 2011, and I am in wartime France, October 1944, with my grandfather and his fellow soldiers. They have just spent the night in a pup-tent near Omaha Beach when a rainstorm sends them outside to stand in the darkness next to fires, trying to warm up and dry off in the company of men who have been wounded in combat but are headed back to the front lines.

I cannot change the past.
But it feels so important to remember it.

How much are you in this world and how much are you in another?

You know the stories of women who walked around with calcified fetuses in their wombs, laboring daily as if they were carrying a large rock inside of them, which they essentially were? My new theory is that my head has turned to stone.

That what in my head should be made of space and balsa wood, so that I could fly my skull like a kite, has instead calcified and filled in, like a marble egg.

My head~the fossil egg.

I think this would explain some things. Why when I walk it’s like there is no cushion in my head, and each step I take jars things up above. Why there is fluid sloshing around in encapsulated areas, like underground streams in deep caves.

Some of those women miraculously went on to carry other fetuses to full term and to give birth to healthy babies.

Quiddity Cupidity

Happy Valentine’s Day.

I wish you all love.

The weather gave me the most tremendous present. Warmth! I still wore two pairs of wool socks and heavy boots out into the day but I left my heaviest jacket hanging in the closet and put on something lighter. I wanted to feel the day, not bundle in my fleece and faux fur cocoon. I wanted to come out and play.

The branches of trees and bushes are trying to rise up and regain their shape as their burden of snow is lifting.

The osprey soars over the thawing waters.

Are the fish waking up from a dream?


Puddles of pure joy

I sat on the bench at the pond with the warm wind blowing across me and I felt such serenity. I wish you serenity.

The tom cats have ceased fighting, the winner Goodness declared,
(though I would not be surprised if kittens in all shapes and colors came out of the female cat), but today the Canada geese are standing tall and waling on each other with their wings and biting each other’s necks. Why must nature beat the pulp out of itself?


The oak trees are shedding their leaves in preparation for what is to come.

I heard a bird sing some warm weather notes.

Oh, and my Beloved got me a snow leopard. I imagine it out there in the wilds, feeling the wind across its face and the snow beneath its paws.

The Hollow Ear

Oh I can hear you. Yes I can. I can hear you and everything else in the landscape too.

But what is all this deafening pressure in the right side of my head?
And if not Osama Bin Laden eating pop-rocks, and if not the Morton Salt Girl stomping around in my attic, and if not an African parasite eating my brain like it's potato chips, what is this?

This, whatever it is, started in September 2010, and an ER visit and a CT scan and an MRI have not given many answers. My internet searches have yielded so many clues and questions and so few answers. Since September I have seen three separate general practice doctors, one ER doc, one neurologist, one naturopath, and one ENT specialist and these many visits have yielded no diagnosis. And here I am.

Today makes three weeks on the antibiotics and this is as far as I can go with those for now. I am not sure that they have had any effect at all. Perhaps that information will be useful to the doctor. I have applied heat as he has recommended also. It comforts but it does not cure.

What would cause this immense pressure in the right side of head? Coupled with the sound and feeling of something sloshing about? And the extreme sense that the whole side of my head needs to pop, not just my ear? And the dizziness which makes me eat goldfish crackers and drink coca cola or hot ginger tea to combat the ensuing queasiness?
And what fluids could there be in there moving around so much? What is there? Blood? Salt water? Cerebrospinal fluid?

The noise and pressure and dizziness make it seem like there is a shipwreck in my head.

The sailors are manning the lifeboats. They paddle forward. They paddle backwards. There is no way out.

Maybe I need to eat a lot of pepper, re enact some scene from Jonah and the whale. Or was that Pinocchio in the whale?

Do I need a massive dose of horseradish?

Trepanation?

And I am not deaf though my ear feels utterly deafened. Instead I am almost hyper acute to sounds, but they are not pure, they are somewhat distorted, and sometimes horrifically amplified.

In December my doctor taught me that there was a word for at least this one symptom.
Hyperacusis.

And maybe that is why for the past few years when the leafblowers have been circling my neighborhood I have almost been driven to murder-suicide. I have always experienced having a keen sense of hearing.
What has changed now, since September, is that my echolocation is totally broken. I can hear so many sounds but they are not in right proportion, and I cannot tell where they are coming from.

It’s almost like having blind ears.

the sound of slush

A day of double rejections!

I had promised myself I would share some writing with the world and so at the end of 2010 I sent an essay to the Sun and some poems to a small press and yesterday I received two rejections! That was fast! One came in the mail and one came via email.

Maybe I should have submitted three things so that I could then find a rejection skywritten above the house!

Do I care? Do I not care? I never feel like sharing or submitting anything I write but at the end of last year with pages and projects piling up I decided I had best start sending things out, so I did, and they did not find homes, and all it really makes me feel like is not wasting paper and postage to send anything else out…even though I know one is supposed to collect rejection slips to pave their pathways to success.

Oh I do want Spring.

Real flowers and real stones.

This past week the curb was littered with abandoned Xmas trees who lay there in the snow looking so forlorn. I wanted to stand them up and hug them, dance with them, arrange them upright in snowbanks in a circle as if they were having a meeting.

Then the rain came and melted all the snowman heads.

And then yesterday, I saw the ground in places! And I heard the trickling sound of water as ice was chased away by sunshine. As the cold has receded, the pond has gone from white ice to clear ice, and now the sound of slush is music to my ears.

special gloves for the mind

Special gloves for the mind

And the heart

This may be what I need for one of my current projects, for the handling of a WWII letter which details how my grandfather died on the battlefield. This letter is pure grief. I did not know it existed until after my grandmother died in 2006 and I have been intending to document and transcribe it since I discovered it in her bureau drawer, but it has taken time to get to the right time for this task.

You cannot read this letter without weeping.

And what I say daily to myself is ‘If Not Now, Then Never.’

It has been six months since my father died.
This letter contains part of his father’s story.
It is the story of his father’s life ending.

I go outside and find Ping walking along the glass surface of the pond.
It is like he is walking on the impossible.

He cheerfully accepts the corn I throw his way.

Happy Year of the Rabbit!

Happy Lunar New Year!
Happy Year of the Rabbit!

Crocus blooms are rising up like hot air balloons!

In the kitchen, at least.

At night I have been listening to the enormous tom cats yowl like banshees and then pummel each other in the snow. Meat on meat. Muzzle to muzzle. They seem to think February is Spring. I remember throwing snowballs at them in the middle of the night, this same time last year when they came here and fought like grizzly bears.

Today for the first time in almost a week I saw the miracle who is Ping. He was hanging out with some Canada geese at the far end of the pond. Which is frozen over of course. Nature outdoes itself, goes for the gold, breaks all its own records again.

I see a blank page and I want to bound across it like a dog across a field of fresh snow. But I have reined myself in on the blog for it doesn’t seem to right to ask people to read a bunch of thoughtless muddy tracks.

I took to heart the idea, “if not now, when?” and that one possible answer, “If not Now, then Never”, and so I am back at work on the kid’s book. I last worked on it in earnest in April 2010 when I wrote 7, 235 new words and felt miserable each step of the way. The problem is that I have a tiny pea brain and like simple things, and the story wants to be complicated like an orchid or a fish or a mammal.

But I try again.
Imagining I might someday live on a little farm helps me.
I would ask the chickens for writing advice.