RIDING THE DOG

RIDING THE DOG

The Greyhound bus station in downtown Baton Rouge—capital of the state of Louisiana—needs some work— the restrooms remind me of family car trips to Rock City or Pensacola in the 60s and 70s when you had to stop at gas stations and use the toilets that the mechanics used. Nothing against the mechanics, but my mom and I dreaded those bathrooms—it seemed like they were never cleaned—grimed with car grease on every surface. They smelled bad. The industrial toilet paper holders at the bus station have lost their covers, so you have to hold your hand over the rolls to keep them from falling out. The toilet seats are wonky, the tile floor slicked with a sticky grey film.  The one I used did flush—from the odor I’m guessing not all of them did; none of the soap dispensers work or they’re empty; as was the hand sanitizer thingy which has a thick brown residue under the spout that I could not identify.

The waiting room has an overwhelming odor of used fryer grease that originates in a small kitchen at the back of the gift shop/convenience store that sells snack food, drinks and a few Louisiana items like Zatarain’s spice mixture, Tabasco sauce, and key rings in the shape of the state. The young man at the cash register—I bought some peanuts—was sweet and talkative. He’d moved to the state recently from out of the country and was greeting each customer with a warm smile and friendly banter. Most people in line didn’t look at him, so I made conversation and he seemed to appreciate it.

Communication from the drivers, who are usually pretty friendly and helpful, was poor. They told us to get off the bus and wait, that we would be boarding the same bus again for Lafayette and Houston in 30 minutes. One of drivers stomped his foot and shooed us inside, like we were naughty puppies—we weren’t allowed to wait outside—so we had to go back into the greasy lobby.

A nice man who spoke no English asked me to help him figure out what to do. He tried to mime the questions: Do I get my luggage off the bus? Do I wait inside or outside?  Do we get on a different bus or the same one?  How long do we wait? Ashamed of my lack of Spanish, I called my daughter-in-law who is from Ecuador and had her talk to him.

While I was trying to set up the call, a woman came inside through the back door frantically calling for help. She was short and stout and wearing a gray housedress and slip-on bedroom slippers with fur at the toes. Her grey hair was done in tiny braids against her head, and she had a righteous, you know what I mean, expression.

“That mangy dog out there chased me ‘cross the street. You got to do something about that dog.” She started shuffling in front of the ticket counter to get their attention, panting and barking like a dog. “He got the mange. Bald spots all over his back. It looks like the rabies.” The people who worked there eyed each other to see who was going to do something. They acted like this happened every day. Finally, one of them sat her down and went out to look in the back, presumably for the misbehaving dog.

Meanwhile, our driver came inside and in a frustrated, school-teacher voice commanded us all to get our luggage off the bus, we had to change buses. My daughter-in-law had just finished telling my Latino friend that we were going to get back on the same bus, and now I had to figure out how to explain what was happening. I wasn’t really sure myself since the information was vague.  Google translate is not as easy to use as I thought, and no one in the room spoke Spanish. After a few tries, he and I figured it out, laughing together at the dog-lady.

The busload of passengers was crammed into the small lobby, and people were a little miffed. The group was a good representation of the American melting pot. We were black, white, brown—more than one Asian and Latino group were represented—all ages from teen to elderly. Some people wore vacation-type clothes, others appeared to be backpacking, and others looked like they’d just gotten off a construction site. Some were tattooed, pierced and braided, some old and square like me.  I would guess there was no one in there you could call wealthy, but you never know. People were feeling put out partly because there was no explanation or apology for the inconvenience, and they had treated us like little kids in detention.

But after a while, the complaints turned into story swapping, comparing different bus stations—how when you leave the station in New Orleans, you have to be careful not to end up on the wrong street at the wrong time; how in Atlanta they warn you not to go outside the doors unless you want to be mugged; somebody started teasing that he heard we’d have to go all the way back to New Orleans to get another bus headed towards Houston. Before long everybody was talking and laughing and teasing each other. Even the non-English speakers looked like they picked up on the lift in the room.

Our bus came and we boarded, the laughing and teasing kept on. The dog-lady climbed on and announced—punctuated with much laughter: “It’s me. I’m on the bus. My name is, what y’all want my name to be today? Y’all can call me whatever you want. That young boy at the cash register, he said, where you going? I said I’m going to your house.” She laughed. “I told him I was going to his house. It’s not his business where I’m going.” (The nice kid at the cash register, trying to make conversation.)

She yelled up to the driver, “What’s your name, honey? You married? He say he’s got four wives. How many kids you got with four wives? Hunh, imagine, four wives.”

I’ll admit that I got emotional about the whole experience, probably inflating it, but it renewed my hope for the country, for humanity in general, for the possibility that love, and compassion, and humor will in the end lift us back into neighborliness and good-will, and that in the next dire situation we find ourselves, a mad virus or civil strife, we will rise to the occasion, like this group did in the greasy Greyhound bus station in Baton Rouge.  

The Dance of Being: Returning Home Again

This move has nearly outdone me. If you want the opportunity to experience being thrown into a canyon, freefalling with no bottom in sight, move 1200 miles across the country, in your late sixties.

I had assumed that the hard part would be the move itself, packing and getting rid of things, selling a house, leaving stable, familiar places and people, the arduous physicality of the move. But the hard part came after we got here.

People say, ‘but you went back home, right? To your home state, where you grew up, where you have friends and family? To a familiar climate? A familiar culture?’ Yes and no.

Yes, there are beloved friends and family not too far away. And the climate is welcome and familiar. The scenery, the food, the atmosphere, all welcoming and loving. But in day to day existence, many of the things that gave me a sense of being grounded have either disappeared or feel difficult or impossible here.

Of course, it’s me. It’s the psychic challenge of starting everything over again without the familiar daily routine of place, smells, people, seasons. Without knowing where things are, how to find them, how to get there and then back home again. Even as there are many wonderful and familiar and nostalgic things here, there are equal numbers of them that are new and different and challenging.

With the onset of a quiet and lonely holiday season, I found myself flailing around clinging to whatever I could for stability. I started a new meditation app; revisited Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now; picked up books by St. Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart, medieval Christian mystics; read daily Christian and Buddhist messages; sought out Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way, and Mirabai Starr, a modern Jewish mystic; studied Maria Popova of the Marginalian making sure to follow all links lest I miss the perfect quote from Rilke or O’Donahue that would be the perfect answer to my angst; listened to podcasts, On Being with Krista Tippett and old radio talks of Alan Watts.

One morning in the middle of all this while trying to observe my consciousness, or separate from it, or have a vision of the Trinity, or feel the flow, I had a meltdown. All this and I still can’t figure it out!  What is God? Who am I? What am I doing here? What matters and what doesn’t? I was driving myself crazy. Maybe it’s like being a hoarder, or addicted to social media, or to food or anything really. My brain was overloaded.

What I was searching for is here now, with me all the time, like the breath as some say, whatever it is, however you want to name it. It is not in all the books and philosophies and spiritual practices of others; it has to be mine. I thought of my mother, still teaching me from the beyond. I stopped reading and started doing things. I went into the sunny laundry room and ironed my pillowcases reveling in the smell of the hot iron, the hiss of the steam, the miracle of my hands and the warmth of the sun on my back. There is no reason for ironing pillowcases; they function just the same whether you iron them or not. As there is no reason for doing much of anything, except to do it. My cousin says that watching my mother move around our house taught her the joy of housework. It can be the joy of anything, or the pain of anything, it is simply the act of Being in the midst of all the other Being around us.

Alan Watts says each thing or creature has a game; I call it the Being game. There is the tree game, the ant game (fire ants here), the rock game, the Sharon game. I might choose a word other than game, maybe the Tree show or the Tree dance. Dance is good, it suggests something playful.

Mary Oliver also puts it well and I’ll end with this quote from her famous Wild Geese poem:

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves…Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

The camelias also help. The yard is filled with them, overflowing bushes of color and texture. An amazing December surprise.

The transformation of memories

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist. - Guy de Maupassant

I would add that it gives life back not only to the beings who have left this world, but to times and places that, as they say in New Orleans, ain’t there no more.

Being immersed once again in the air of the Deep South has awakened memories. The smell of the sweet olive warming in the sun, the mockingbird’s endless operatic warbling, the feel of the humidity on my skin and the arching canopies of live oak trees- all of it is creating a time machine effect. I’ve been thrown down the rabbit hole and as I fall, things from childhood appear. The descent is slow. The images are blurred at first. They remain blurred around the edges, none of them achieve full clarity.

I would like to believe that we never lose a memory, but that they transform over the course of our lives. Instead of mourning their loss, I’ve decided to embrace the idea that they are responsible in part for those vague, unexplainable moments in life, some lovely and awe filled, others not so much. They pass quickly, you have to be ready, like the servant waiting for the master who could come home at any minute, otherwise you can miss them. A wave of sensation like the scent of the sweet olive from some undiscovered location wafting into my backyard.

I suspect I miss many of them, caught in the day’s little trials and busyness. A couple of them so far have been crystal clear. Around my new neighborhood in Lafayette, I smell the playground of my kindergarten, Mac Donough 35 on St. Roch Avenue in New Orleans. (ain't there no more), and the memory of my little friend Jane Ranson showing me her baby toe. It must be a specific combination of flora and fauna that I come across that does the trick like Proust’s madeleine. It sends me right back there.

I believe that most of these moments of nostalgic sensation are the reservoirs of our memories that have been re shaped and re imagined over the course of our lives, transformed but not lost. I’m trying to stay awake for them, God’s little messages, nudging me on.

July 24, 2022

We left the hospital in the van from hell. I could not believe that the vehicle used by institutions created to heal and care for, in this case, the frail, sick and elderly, could be so entirely pieces of junk. My 100 year old mother, who had suffered a fractured femur repaired three days earlier with several screws, sat in her usual upright posture, strapped to a wheelchair that was held to the floor by four thick cords. None of this reinforcement seemed to keep her, and myself on the seat in front of her, from being jostled around like a blow up yard decoration in the wind. I wondered about patients with internal injuries, and if their transport would be handled any differently. Her poor leg, propped up on the foot holder of the wheelchair, jostled with every bump and hole of the parish roads leading to the rural town of Lacombe, north of New Orleans, the town where her parents had once had a home, passed down to her sister and her children who my mother had taken in over the years at various times of transition; where my brothers used to catch fish at the fish hatchery in the 50s. She had come full circle back to the land of her roots to heal.

During her three days at hospital, she had developed the idea that she was dying and that all this fuss was really not necessary. She had come up with several ideas to speed up the process. Can you just hit me over the head? How about one of those pills that just makes you go to sleep except you don’t wake up? Or how about just some whiskey? How much of this was the effect of the anesthetic and pain meds, I’ll never know. But in the van ride, it continued.

This must be strange for you. How many daughters get to go with their mothers like this to be buried? That’s where we’re going, isn’t it? To the cemetery?

When I tried to explain that she had broken her leg and was going someplace where we could get help to heal from it, she insisted that the leg didn’t hurt, that at this point in her life, why bother with all this, she was not going to be around long enough for any of this to matter. This was all said with a calm and serene, often flippant manner. No complaining or frustration, more of a commentary on the absurdity of it all.

As I consider this now, all the physical, occupational and speech therapy. The switch to pureed food, the leg braces, the exercises, I wonder: what if we had just brought her home, put her in a recliner next to a nice window, a potty chair nearby, let her eat and drink whatever she wanted and die there without all the institutional hassle.

Of course, you never know. How long will it be? Will she walk again? Will she aspirate her food and die of pneumonia? What should I be doing now? What’s the best solution for everyone?

I had her here close to me for three blessed months during the most glorious autumn I can remember. That’s what I know. The rest is past.

October 20, 2022

The night mama died, I leaned over the kitchen table to clear it for dinner. A powerful feeling of dread came over me. I had experienced this feeling, a kind of cold gripping in the heart area, only once before, the night I learned that my father had suffered a heart attack and gone into a coma. That was 34 years ago. Both times I knew what the feeling meant, and both times I dismissed it, let it pass by me. As I had done with her the previous three months, I would listen to professional warnings and observations, but not really take them in.

This time was somewhat different because I am now 65 years old instead of 30. It’s different because she was 100 years old, daddy only 71. Because after spending hours with her that day as she slept, holding her hand as I said a rosary, stroking her forehead, I felt that she was ready. Of course, I would never be, and she knew that. One day when she mentioned her own death, I must have made a face because she said, you don’t like to hear me talk about that, do you?

So that night, although the strong wave of dread had passed, a less intense version of it lingered. I did not go back to see her that night. I regretted it later, but now I believe it was best. Death seems a private thing to me, especially one that is timely and considered a path to a new realm, and especially for someone as private as she. I had called my brothers that afternoon to tell them the warning of the nurse that it would likely be only days. We were all thinking of her, wondering what to do next. One woke early the next day, the other texted me late that night. We were all together in the ether when she chose to leave. As my son said, I had her for 65 years, but it would never be enough.

The Divine Message of Clouds

The Divine Message of Clouds

This is the summer of clouds.

As a child in New Orleans, I spent many hours lying in the backyard with my dog, Babs, (named after my brother’s current squeeze) staring up at the clouds. I didn’t have many friends nearby. My dog was not allowed to come inside the house, and that made me so sad that I spent hours alone with her outside.

These days, I walk with my dog, Summer (named for the season, I suppose, she came so named), every day in the neighborhood. Behind the school buildings down the block is a large open field for play and sports surrounded in the distance by forest and a few houses and low buildings. I have an unobstructed view of the dome of sky. On most humid days in summer, it is filled with enormous mountains of cloud. Late in the evening sometimes it is layered with low, dirty ones closer to the horizon followed by layers that increase in brightness tinged with gold and ultimately clear to an evening gray blue.

What I’ve thought of this summer, is how the clouds push against each other, either in an adagio motion on a hot still day, or faster together when a breeze is present. Once the motion begins, the shapes shift and change into the various animals and faces we guessed at as children. What the shapes will become once the motion begins, is out of the clouds’ control; they will be what they will become, without any outside influence other than humidity and air currents, and all the other things I know very little about but leave to those who study the weather.

Each living and non-living thing on earth, which includes each of us, our families and friends, our pets, the mosquitoes and the heat, the wind and the passing cars, exerts a force, psychic and physical. Once the force manifests, its energy becomes what it will become in the universe, and its effects often are never known.

Which is why I hope and desire and practice that the force of my psychic and physical energy, thoughts, words, actions, are connected to a divine force that works beyond my capacity to create. If my force is aligning with what is beautiful and good (even those things that I may perceive as not so) then perhaps I will have a positive effect on my little world. It is not my job or the clouds’ job to predict an outcome, or to judge an event, but only to align with something outside my small self that Sees the bigger picture, which I in my undeveloped human state, cannot pretend to See.

A Mother's Prayer

A Mother's Prayer

for Katie

Forms change form yet light remains.

In the vast dome of robin's blue

Above my somber head,

In that abundant ocean of light,

vibrant clouds that float like fresh milk

I will see you. There. 

When darkness enfolds 

After shadows dissolve 

Sparks of gold appear.

In that shimmering presence, 

year after decade after century,

I will see you. There.

In the countless prickly needles of our lanky pines,

In the infinite white shells of Pontchartrain,

In the tender blades of grass that daddy tends

and the precious creatures that crawl 

beneath my feet or sing in dark forests,

I will see you. There. 

Forms change form yet light remains. 

You, Divine Light, have joined the sky and stars,

the sea and wood,

the swirl of endless life and love

that was,

In the beginning, 

is now,

and ever shall be.

Amen. 

I see you. There. 

Piano Recital

It is at the end of the year, listening to my students play on recital, that I renew my commitment to my calling as a teacher, to this part of my spiritual path, as my friend says, yet another access to the divine.

Listening to my students at the recital is a nerve-wracking thrill.  I play along with many of them, my heart rate faster, my mood elevated. I listen to the songs they have worked so hard on for weeks, and hope to hear the details: that crescendo, that bit of pedal, the slow quiet of an ending phrase. But it’s not just the music I hear. I listen and remember. One phrase might remind me of the fact that this boy, with his quiet, calm demeanor, did not smile for the first three weeks. Now he bows with a smile as wide as the keyboard. The next one up and I remember that this one would bang the keys for every mistake, slap her forehead and groan. At recital, she wades through mistakes like a pro, faking it when necessary. This year, I’ve learned a lot about teaching, even after having finished over 35 years of it. One main thing is to let go, not force. To talk about playing from the heart, not the head. To make jokes and laugh more. And to listen.

It's about a whole lot more than the piano. There’s the girl who came in crying after a hard day at school, feeling misunderstood by teachers, forced into a ‘stop and think’ room. Or the boy who can’t sit still one day, who had lost both recess times to an unfinished math test in third grade. The girl who watched her cat die in her living room and wrote a song for him. The one whose uncle passed away and who wants to play the same song his uncle played when he was in high school. The one whose brother’s truck rolled over in a ditch. It’s about listening.

Music is about feelings after all. There are moments when a child truly feels the phrase for the first time, not just shaping it because I say music has shape but feeling the shape and mimicking it with her body. Or maintaining extraordinary focus on a one-minute song, creating startling intensity to convey the sense of aT - Rex or a shark, or drifting clouds or shimmering stars, or whatever the composer intends in her song. The moments when their hearts and fingers are in sync and the feelings come out. For me the experience is profound whether the source is a 5-year-old beginner or an advanced high school student.

Then there is the arc of years. The experience of sharing a life from age 7 to 15 years, through middle C to Clair de Lune, through giggling to disdain to mutual appreciation.

I imagine college level piano students might consider a lifelong of teaching kids to play their instrument torturous, perhaps beneath them, boring and uneventful, humorless. Not all of them will have the opportunity to experience it. Many of them hope they never have to. But in the world of piano teachers, our little secret is that above all the tedium of thousands of middle C’s, we are lucky to be able to do what we do. Boring, sometimes, humorless, never. Meaningful, always.

I have weeks when my skin is crawling, and I don’t know how I’ll face another child at the piano. But those weeks are rare. And at the recital, listening to each studied crescendo and ritardando, I feel a love unlike any other of the loves in my life, for these children. I love their vulnerability, their pride, their work, their goofiness, and the music that comes out of their grubby fingernails. There is something about it that elevates me, deepens me.

 I guess I’ll be one of those eighty-year-old piano teachers, with gray hair, smelling of lavender, whose five cats take turns at the piano bench next to a student whenever they get a chance. I hope so, anyway.   

The Multiple Silence of Trees

The woods surrounding my home are filled with popple trees. Popple is a colloquial word that has been in use for more than a century in the upper Midwest to denote several species of whitish-greenish barked trees. It includes some aspens and some poplars and birches. In winter they line up sentry-like, hundreds of them, dancing in the ever-increasing midwestern winds. I love the way they sway in unison; I love the color variations of the bark and how “far the stems rise, rise until ribs of shelter open” to quote Denise Levertov.

I adopted the image of these trees in meditation to remind me and bring me back to my center, to my deepest self “which for convenience I call God,” to quote Ettie Hillesum. It was not until after I began to use this image that I was amazed to learn how trees communicate, through root systems, sending messages to each other, warnings of insect invasions, forest destruction, coming storms. The image of these trees, the mass groupings of them, so close together, came to represent for me a place of peace and harmony, of connection to the universe, a breathing union with life itself. “To hear the multiple silence of trees. The rainy forest depths of their listening.” Levertov, again.

Listening. Perhaps the most important thing humans do on this earth. This credited to Ettie.

Then I learned that there is a forest of aspens that makes up the largest organism on Earth. This forest and its endangered status are discussed by Forbes and PBS among many others. Pando is the scientific name for this organism, ‘the one-tree aspen forest in Utah made up of over 47,000 trunks, and millions of leaves, connected through one root system.’ (https://pandopopulus.com/pando-the-tree/)

It is described as a quaking aspen clone of 47,000 stems, as perhaps the world’s oldest, heaviest thing, estimated to be 80,000 years old.

Again, from pandopopulus:

Above ground, Pando appears to be a grove of individual trees, like any other grove. It was overlooked, for years. But underground everything is connected by a single and vast root system. It is one tree. A one-tree-forest.

Pando is a fitting symbol of our common and threatened life together, and our ability to endure.

Former First Lady of California Maria Shriver puts it this way: “Pando means I belong to you, you belong to me, we belong to each other.”

I am choosing not to focus on the possible threat that exists to Pando, or to all of us on the planet, but to hold the ecstatic possibility of such an organism along with the constant dangers of human forgetfulness, in both hands together, both parts of our evolution from here to there.  

Commonplace Books

Children love to collect things. In Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald, she describes her subject at age four collecting and making little piles of rose petals, naming and burying them. She also collected any number of things from the garden of their small cottage in the English countryside, bringing them inside, sorting and counting. My children did the same thing: feathers, shells, rocks, sticks, flowers and leaves stuffed into their pockets and brought inside to sort and arrange like living collages.

I collected all sorts of things as a child. From the back seat of the station wagon in 1960’s New Orleans, I copied phone numbers and names of businesses off buildings and vehicles. These were written on slips of paper, whatever I could find, and stuffed inside an old oblong wallet, white leather with black stitching, that my mother had thrown out and given to me. My many collections filled my bedroom. Blown glass animals, ceramic horses, tiny boxes, paper, stationery, erasers, Barbie clothes, books and more books. Mardi Gras night we all came home, counted and sorted or beads and trinkets, traded and collected them year to year.

Collecting is an expression of self, a creative extension of personality. When I collect things now I feel a direct connection with that child, much the same as when I play with a dog or climb a tree. I have snail-mail pen pals all over the world who announce in their profiles all the things they collect, from hotel stationery to view cards with butterflies to paper napkins. It’s extraordinary.

Hermione Lee’s biography of Fitzgerald also brought me to the existence of the ‘Commonplace Book’. These books have been around since the time of Marcus Aurelius. Many famous writers and artists are known to have kept them during their lifetimes. At Oxford, Fitzgerald encouraged her cronies to use one, and the concept was actually part of the curriculum.

The commonplace book is an answer to my life-long struggle of collecting thoughts, ideas, poems, quotes, books, movies, inspirations, conversations. I have notebooks, slips of paper, calendars, index cards stuck all over the place. Every now and then something amazing happens where several of these things from different sources connect and form a magic circle of inspiration. The synchronicities are called forth from the universe or who knows where, and start to appear in these little baubles that I record over a period of time. With a commonplace book, all these things are in one place, a notebook, a catalogue, a set of index cards, or files on an IPad. The connections can be seen and experienced and saved to be revisited as often as needed. Several of these have happened to me lately, one involving Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Hirsch, the other with TC McLuhan, Carl Jung and Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the latter connected to a letter from my 88 year old pen pal in Wales.

It is a way to simplify the overabundance of stimulation that bombards my poor brain  in this modern age. When I write down a poem from the New Yorker, or something funny or profound from a conversation with my husband, or a six year old student’s wise comment, I add it to my collection. Over time the collection becomes an expression of a life, perhaps not anything anyone else will make sense of or even be interested in, but the process of doing it refines my sense of self. It connects me with my child-self, brings me closer to the Source, to what is real and true.

So I encourage you to collect something, preferably something small, not old cars or airplanes, and when you tend your collection, reconnect with who you were in your gladdest moments as a child. Also, try the Commonplace Book, it may be the best idea I’ve come across in decades.

Conversation Exchange

She talks to me in front of a blank white wall.

It is all I know of her house

perhaps all I will ever know.

Yet I glimpse things

imagine them:

an alcove

dark bricks with vines

plum trees

an ancient stone gate

two sets of steps

also stone.

Through a window a metal

bench in a dreary mist

near a small pond with reeds,

lilies, and white-barked trees.

This is all in my head of course.

She is thousands of miles across an ocean

thinking in a different language as

she tries to learn mine.

We laugh together

and are sad together.

We have never met.

We may never meet.

A friendship borne of Covid

and my love of French.

The images play against her wall

like my dream.

Trumpeter Swan

The Sidewaks iced and rigid

Shoeprints pressed like fossils in rocks

She navigates with care and for no reason

begins to run.

I have to hold back not to slip.

She noticed first the pink-edged feathers at the snowy curb.

The body lay beyond with its red open wound.

Black leather feet

ungainly awkward protrude up.

I was glad not to see the eyes

Blank and waiting.

Another solitary trumpeter swan flew over.

The trumpet sound lonely and sad.

Canada geese mate for life

I don’t know about trumpeters.

I hurried ahead and took the long way home

Not wanting to cross the dead bird again.

At the river a family of trumpeters:

Bright-white parents

Soft-grey young

Floating in the ice floes

Calling to one another

with that singular note

they often choose.

Ringel Ringel Reihe

The opening of my new story, hopefully to be published soon:

Marie waits for Dietrich, as she has every day for two years, on a crumbling stone bench facing the Burgplatz in Essen. It is warm for November, and she wears only a light wool coat and beret. Behind her sits the ruined cathedral of Saints Cosmos and Damian whose bells have been silent all this time. Since the war, the charred stone arches are open to the grey-white sky, the symmetry of stone and stained glass shattered by bombings, and the structure is a heap of rubble overgrown with weeds and vines. Marie waits for Dietrich, but she is not convinced that he will come, or even that he is still alive. At her apartment on a table by the door, sits a collection of letters that she has written, to Dietrich’s family home, all returned to her, marked unable to deliver.

Near Marie’s bench a group of children begins a circle game, singing a chant, Ringel, Ringel, Reihe, Ring around the Rosy. Marie’s eyes close and the scene around her is gone. In her head is the opera Wozzeck whose last scene includes a circle of children singing that very song. The haunting tune in the horns and strings opens the scene, and the children’s chant begins after an eerie harp glissando. In the opera the children clasp hands while a little boy circles them riding on his toy horse, his meager ethereal voice echoing: hop-hop, hop-hop, hop-hop. He continues his shrill song even after they tell him his mother is dead, murdered, of course, by his father, since all opera is overwhelmingly tragic.

No ordinary summer

In my dream the little league was playing down the street from my house as they do every summer. In this small Midwestern town, it’s like Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury’s memoir of a childhood summer in early 20th century (white) America. Barefoot kids ride their bikes with fishing poles attached to their backs; cheers erupt at all hours from the high school stadium; the marching band practices every morning, doing their maneuvers in and out of the school parking lots.

Not this summer.

But in my dream the little league played to a noisy crowd, little kids were running around, parents talking, some yelling. One of my former students, Reed, now a grown young woman, slid into third base. A dispute began over whether she was safe or not. (Why Reed? I don’t know, I often dream of my favorite students.)

I saw it all through a grainy lens and underneath it was a sense that something was terribly wrong. A man stood near me talking, and I found myself staring at his mouth and the spittle coming out of it with every word. Then I remembered and stepped back from him. I had forgotten, as I do sometimes for a few minutes when fully awake, that this was no ordinary summer. I’d left my mask at home.

As I stepped back a loud, rusty Ford diesel pick-up drove by blaring the famous song DILLIGAF (look it up, it’s not pretty), flying US and blue striped flags, with TRUMP in block letters on the back windshield. Bradbury’s idyllic American summer turned nightmare.

From "Marjorie" : Hanging Clothes

The sun warmed her bare legs as its rays just began to touch the water of the bayou. The porch was very high, twenty or thirty feet, or was it fifty? It made her dizzy to look down, but the railing felt solid at her waist. Sometimes there were ducks, or little fish that made the water shimmer and vibrate across the surface of the bayou. Little waves lapped at the sides of the fishing boat.

The warmth climbed up her body and the sky began to take on the deep blue color of summer. A sudden urge began deep inside her body. It hadn’t started with a thought as in normal urges where your mind decides something and your body follows. Instead, it was the other way around. The body trying to get the mind to remember. She lifted both arms above her head reaching high, stretching and swaying a little. The stretch felt good. So did the sun on her arms and chest.

‘Mama?’ Her son’s worried voice. ‘What are you doing?’

She had to make an effort with the interruption to stay there in that place. To keep going back as though something had been lost, a key in the dirt, and you walk over the spot slowly, slowly searching every inch.

‘Mom,’ he said. ‘Did you sleep okay? It’s early.’

She lowered her arms. ‘I’m enjoying the sun.’ Her mind finally caught up with her body’s memory and she saw the lines against the blue, felt the grass tickling her feet, smelled the china ball trees and the dark humidity of New Orleans. The sheets taut, swaying in the wind, the clothespins lined up straight like toy soldiers.

He said, ‘I made some eggs. I’ll bring them out here.’

She sat down a white rocker near the railing where she was still in the sun. ‘Oh, thank you. You treat me like a queen.’

The urge remained in her belly like a child waiting to burst out of the door to run to their daddy. That joy. She had loved hanging clothes.

From "Marjorie, stories from my mother"

She poured out her coffee in two cups, and filled both of them with hot milk from the stove making sure two, three times that the burner was off. She brought one cup at a time to the table and set them on the plastic-coated Christmas placemat. It was uneven from all the little bits of paper she stored underneath it. She moved the cups and fumbled with the papers, smoothing them out before putting her cups back on Santa’s beard. She pressed the remote carefully, sometimes she turned everything off and had to call for her son to turn it back on.

That video was on again. They kept showing it over and over again of the man dying with another man’s knee on his neck. It was not a TV show, it was real. She didn’t understand it. Policemen? And everyone watching it, filming it, unable to stop it?

She pressed a button and another show came on with two policemen pushing a man up against a car. She pressed the button again and again until a well-dressed and made-up woman was trying to sell fake pearls. “This silicon-based compound has the sheen and polish of real cultured pearls. Look at this setting. Only 19.99.”

She put down the remote and pulled out a piece of paper from under the placemat. She called this table her desk and these were her important papers.

The paper had been torn off the end of an envelope. It read, 2020-1922 = 98. 98? 1922 was right. That was the year she was born. Was it 2020? But she was 88, wasn’t she? Not 98? That’s almost a hundred? She looked at the paper again. She erased the 98 and wrote in 88. That was it. She’d subtracted wrong the first time.

Eckhart Tolle, my mother Marjorie, (98 years old) and a different lethal virus

My mother is safe at home with my brother in Mississippi, I am safe at home in Wisconsin. I had to cancel my last trip to go see her in March because of the virus. It was to be a little family reunion.

A couple of days ago I asked her some questions about her siblings, ten of whom have died, she has one living brother. She said to me, Thank God you’re still here.

At first I was taken aback, then we both laughed. I said, Yeah, I’m glad I’m still here, too.

Of course I am glad that I’m still here, for her sake and my own. I’m glad she’s still here as well for both our sakes. I started to think about how when she was a girl, sickness, epidemics, illness and death were part of everyday life. Her young brother in law died from inhaling cotton dust at the mill where he worked. She had a sister with spinal meningitis, a brother with polio, and a little sister, Elizabeth, who died before age two of whooping cough, another horrible disease that attacks the lungs and depletes the victim of oxygen. My mother is not a woman who cries often, but one time I do remember when recounting Elizabeth’s death, she said, crying, That baby died alone. They wouldn’t let us go see her.

Maybe there was a quarantine situation with whooping cough, or maybe because they were poor and had no voice, Charity Hospital in New Orleans would not let the family be with the dying baby girl. My grandmother, who had given birth to her ninth child only days or weeks earlier, would not enter the room where they laid out the tiny coffin, preferring to remember Elizabeth alive and well.

In a recent video, Eckhart Tolle said that we are all infected with a lethal virus: TIME. It will kill us eventually if nothing else does first. He said that in other times and cultures DEATH was and is a constant companion, but we in the modern world tend to be afraid to even say the word, especially in reference to ourselves.

So when my mother reminds me that I am still here, it makes me pause and consider. I am grateful that I was given this time here, by whatever creative power in the universe. I hope to embrace it not as something I was entitled to, but as a gift I humbly accept and celebrate until my time runs out.

The cardinal sings because it must

The cardinal sings because it must  

The cardinal sings because it must

April, after all,

Despite wild winds and

As snow smothers what green the earth had begun to reveal  

The cardinal sings

It is his job and duty

To secure a place in the ritual

To enliven this time and place when we have lost track  

The cardinal sings

For love and life

For a partner to share and do what

Spring instructs while the world weeps and moans for its dead  

The cardinal sings

From the highest branch the earth allows

Sings us back to our selves

Helps us carry our hearts, day to day, in weary and chapped hands

The Rites of Spring

It’s Spring in Wisconsin, but today we had 20 mph winds and a 25 degree wind chill with snow showers. A day like today fits the mood: unpredictable, biting and indiscriminate. Two days ago the sun shone and the temperature reached the high 60’s. It was sparkly, crystal-clear, warm.

Our street is noisy on most mornings of the school year with the chatter of children waiting for the school bus to take them to the schools half a block away from my front door. Even on the coldest days they are out climbing snow banks, dancing to keep warm. I watch them from my writing desk, they and the stream of yellow buses going by, shadows of kids in all the windows, keep me company.

Now, the street is silent. Schools are closed, the sign outside the high school reads: Warriors, we hope to see you soon! The streets in town, as everywhere, are very quiet but for an occasional walker, bicycle, or passing car.

Yet one creature that seems immune to the pall of dread over everything is the certain breed of young man they grow here in the upper Midwest who, on those summery days like the one earlier this week, try to make as much noise as possible. They have abandoned their snowmobiles and roar by at odd moments, breaking the silence, in their ATV’s or souped-up testosterone-detailed diesel pick-ups. The guttural explosions of these vehicles replace the more familiar groan of the school buses and chatter of the children.

These boys remind me of the male pigeons who can also be seen this time of year strutting their stuff, both obscene and silly at once, for the females. What comes to mind for me when one of these vehicles blasts down the otherwise empty street, one of the many empty streets of town, by empty stores and restaurants and schools, is a weird vision: an abandoned state fairgrounds or amusement park on a sunny summer day, no visitors, no one running the rides or making cotton candy, no smells of hundreds of hand-held food items. Or maybe there would be one ride going, the tilt-a-whirl, let’s say, without any passengers. Then out of nowhere comes a twenty-something in a T-shirt, barreling through Food Avenue in his truck with an air of reckless pride and showmanship. No one to notice him.

It’s not that I begrudge them their fun, although the noise they make grates on me. It’s that their Spring ritual is playing out in what feels like the movie set for a ghastly horror film. Jack Gilbert says that we are meant to go on with life even with all the suffering around us all the time. That it is disrespectful of the sufferer for us not to engage with the world. I tended to agree with him before this, but now, I’m finding the suffering almost too much to bear.

My mother, Marjorie, 98, enjoying an orange, blissfully unaware of the fear

When I called my mother yesterday, she was eating an orange.

Last time you called I think I was eating an orange, too, wasn’ t I? I love oranges, you don’t love oranges?

She loves to asks questions in the negative. Then she always asks about the weather. Hers is always great, no complaints.

I talk about the virus, about New York.

I don’t peel them, either, she says. Do you peel them? A lot of people peel them, but I don’t. I love to suck out all the juice.

I’ve watched my mother eat oranges all my life. She cuts them into wedges and settles in with her teeth and lips, slurping quietly, working the teeth into the flesh.

I mention that I cannot teach anymore, because of the virus, I’m teaching over the computer. She doesn’t understand the word online.

She says, But you’re not in New York. Why can’t you teach anymore?

Then I realize that another shift has occurred in her ability to engage with the world, the world as I know it, anyway. Once an avid follower of TV news, I believe she is no longer able to hear it well enough, or follow it well enough, or perhaps, she is wise enough to choose not to do either of those things.

She has remained for me a steady and constant companion in life, if from a distance, never failing to ask about each of my children, about the weather, my job, my husband. She continues to ask, but this time, when I answer, she is reluctant to follow up, to add to the train of the conversation.

i, meanwhile, have a son in New York City, who, the hospital has more or less admitted without administering the test, has contracted the virus. My daughter lives in San Francisco. My stepson and his friends here have mild to severe cases. I am worried. I am scared.

I hear a slight slurping sound, Mmmmm. Do you peel them? I don’t peel them.

I realize that she is blissfully unaware of this threat, the magnitude, the scope of it. Or again, that she has chosen not to let it in, not to worry, at this point, who was one to worry and pray much and often, especially over us, her children, her grandchildren.

Do you eat the white stuff? I like to scrape the white part off with my teeth. I like it. I don’t know if it’s good for you or not. Do you think it’s bad?

When I eat my orange later in the day, I am more grateful for it than ever before, its bright color, its surface, both smooth and bumpy, the shock of citrus on my tongue. I allow myself the gift of this moment, to feel and taste and smell and see it in all its beauty and complexity. One moment among the many frightening ones.

And I thank Marjorie for that.