Beginning September First three people I have loved died and I am so reluctant to also write, I had to kill my cat, Soot. He was seventeen, suffering kidney failure and suffering. I don't pander with people saying "I put my pet down" Down the fuck where? Or with peope, "He made the Great Crossing. Pal, He died. These poetic terms don't make me feel better, they aren't particularly the truth and they don't change the the way I feel inside, so I've decided to just say it like it is. I was too young in the sixties, but now I understand.
First on the list was my first husband the schizophrenic and the father of my first son. I loved him, I worked with his mental illness, we did well until his also schizophrenic brother showed up with a baggie of cocaine. This is a person I wouldn't mind killing. He offers nothing to society and no, I don't feel sorry for him. He chooses to make it worse with self-medication. My husband and I lived in the country, ate vegetarian or the occasional deer given to us by neighbors who I suspect were fearful of our starvation. We lived on $350 a month and I could do this. I grew up poor and I considered myself an expert at it. This was the mid-seventies. We smoked a large-ish ounce of pot a month and had two small jelly jars of cheap red wine an evening. This seemed to stay the demons. I had a secret stash of phenobarbatol the doctor gave me with instructions on how to use it. He rarely needed it. We share a doctor in this small town and the other day the doc said, "You know when you were pregnant out there in the woods, he was not schizophrenic." I was so proud. My methods had worked.He had worked on himself to the ability he could. But the cocaine changed it all and I had to take child and run for my life. He had tried to kill me several times. He moved to town after burning his cabin down around him and almost not making it out. This is what hard drugs do the mentally ill. I cried the first year I was gone, shivered with fear, reconstructed my life around our child's who inherited the genius , but not the mental illness. The night he died he was found outside on the highway naked and acting "strangely" , (police report). They took him to the hospital. There were two mental health workers on the floor. One of them said, "It's clear this man needs to be hospitalized." The other said,"He's fine , take him back to his motel. " He did not wake up the morning. It was days before anyone realized something was wrong. As next of kin, my son had to go into that room, ID and retrieve effects. I hope the mental health worker has a grown child who experiences this sometimes. I hope the parent left is willing to pay for some crisis therapy. Yes, I'm angry. That death didn't need to happen. Yes, he needed to stop using weird drugs (he had in high school been on his way to studying himself into a degree for ethno-botony I was told). He had been drinking copious amounts of alcohol but at the time of his death he had stopped drinking any thing but the occasional glass of wine or beer.He needed to get on a maintenance program, but he should not have been marked a 'useless part of society " and kicked down into the gutter again.
By the time I felt I could handle this and keep my son from grief-anger overdose, I got a phone from my cousin that the father of her daughter had a massive heart attack and died. We speak on the phone as often as I can afford it which is not much, but I email her often. Thanks to the dear friend who loaned me a fabulous laptop. She feels like she can never marry or date again.
There is some distance there. I hadn't seen my cousin since the eighties and she and her daughter reconnected last summer because the daughter felt she wanted to be a poet. And wanted my advice. I came through that safely when one morning, the phone rings and its the daughter of my best male friend. He's a painter; I'm a poet and I had just shown him, at his request how to tweak his poems into real poems. They were damn fine poems when he was done with minimum work. Her voice was off, I have to ask her what is wrong and there is gasping and fast light breathing before I realize I already know what she's going to say and I scream "NO" and the quieter, "when. She says, "This morning." I really cannot bear this. I have to sit down. Then I find myself back in bed, all my clothes on under the covers, the walk-around phone with me, listening to her tell me things I can't bear hearing.
Growing up I had read in books, Autumn is the month of death and I always took that to be a melancholy thing. More poetic than real. But I understand people die from the cold, or poor diets which make for germs to creep in. I have had to put this aside and let my emotions stew, mull around, I've had to let the sharp intake of breath hurt less and now, months later, I'm able to write. I always thought I would be the one to die first. I expect with my heart condition to die early and yet I'm fifty-four. A miracle.
I go outside and stare into the blackness. I always go outside when my emotions get too big for my chest. Slowly, my vision stops looking inside myself. I stop thinking of myself. Stars begin emerging. I give them names. Now, my dead are not lost. On the clear nights I will be able to see them, talk to them and the nights full of white, covered with fog, I'll reach out my voice like a hand and wrap it around a star of someone in particular and pull it into my heart. I'll let the star beat for my heart instead of my pacemaker. I'll let the star become my little/gigantic machine of love.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Water is for Drinking & Washing Babies' Faces
Tonight I participated in a poetry reading which was delightfully unusual. Our County is pretty dedicated to being Green, and our Poet Laurete for the next two years thought up this beautiful way to celebrate our watersheds. There were six poets, all women, because women represent water in so many ways. (Don't worry, the men get their glory) The poet laurete asked the County map-maker for a map of all the watersheds and she framed in with UV glass and its the only one framed that way which is so important. All the other maps are fading or faded already. Then she found six poets she felt dedicated some of their writing to the importance of water and she asked us if she could use a line or two from a particular poem. Then she made the same map as the map-maker did but on transparency plastic with the watersheds inked on it, and then, with the computer, she transferred those poetry lines to fit on the transparent map. As if a miracle, she found an old piece of packing box probably from the 1800s which had stamped on it our County name. It was probably a ship's cargo box which made it even more perfect for the project. She made little clips and then clipped the transparency right to the board. It's funky, it's beautiful, it's information.
We all sat in a semi-circle with the maps behind us and held black notebooks with fifteen pages of the names of the watersheds typed in a column, though sometimes part of a second column.
We had arranged which sections poets would read and some sections we made for each poet to read three creek names and then the next poet, three creek names, every ten creeks or gulches, we read in chorus. We each read several watersheds all by ourselves. It was beautiful.
We drove thirty miles from our small town to the county seat where it took place and when I got
into the old, but renovated building, I set my notebook down to get a glass of water. Someone accidently put some object over it and I didn't find it until after the show. I had to read with my neighbor, who graciously pointed out my names to read in advance. Oh, but the names were beautiful or silly or someone's true name who had lived there back in the 1800s. So many mysterious-by-now reasons why a river or creek got its name.
We gave this reading to a full house in order to remind people that to name something is to give it power. Water is so valuable. I don't mean money, despite the fact that people are selling their
water which is not their right. I mean as an entity which nourishes us and keeps us alive, we require water.
Two of the poets made food that was truly art. We will probably do it again in a studio because the rustle of papers was distracting. We do a watershed event every year and each year try to be different.
We all sat in a semi-circle with the maps behind us and held black notebooks with fifteen pages of the names of the watersheds typed in a column, though sometimes part of a second column.
We had arranged which sections poets would read and some sections we made for each poet to read three creek names and then the next poet, three creek names, every ten creeks or gulches, we read in chorus. We each read several watersheds all by ourselves. It was beautiful.
We drove thirty miles from our small town to the county seat where it took place and when I got
into the old, but renovated building, I set my notebook down to get a glass of water. Someone accidently put some object over it and I didn't find it until after the show. I had to read with my neighbor, who graciously pointed out my names to read in advance. Oh, but the names were beautiful or silly or someone's true name who had lived there back in the 1800s. So many mysterious-by-now reasons why a river or creek got its name.
We gave this reading to a full house in order to remind people that to name something is to give it power. Water is so valuable. I don't mean money, despite the fact that people are selling their
water which is not their right. I mean as an entity which nourishes us and keeps us alive, we require water.
Two of the poets made food that was truly art. We will probably do it again in a studio because the rustle of papers was distracting. We do a watershed event every year and each year try to be different.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Diaries of Light, Diaries of Dark
1.
Sun out for a little bit today. I feel like it was a parade. I've had a migraine all day, so besides a monthly doctor check up, I have done nothing today, but sleep, pet the cat, and lie with an ice pack on my forehead, ala nineteenth century femme and finally give in to one helluva cup of coffee which has knocked me upside the head, messed with my gut, and made my headache go away. I'm tender and fragile the way a migraine leaves me. My skin shivers at thought of being touched. My eyelids twitch with the uneven light of autumn leaves gently banging on the window as the wind goes in and out of the arbor. Sometimes i am protected by a whole branch of rattling leaves, and then the wind blows the branch aft and my eyes are inflamed by the weak sun on the maple limb that lost its leaves first. It's such an ordeal to go through, listening to artillery all day and it's only the distant whirr of cars two blocks away where the transcontinental highway roars through town.
Any kind of big noise makes me try to get away from it, fast-walking, since I was a little kid, but migraines, double the effect. Now I can't run away from the noise, so I stick my whole head under the covers and let the dark ease the pain from my psyche. It's a relief to be over it. It's a chocolate kiss dripping down my throat as I gently suck on its triangular form of sweetness.
2.
Several years ago I was commissioned to make a crown for someone to give to a relative of theirs who had won two Grammies for script-writing day-time soaps. It sits under a bell jar with a Grammy on each side of it on her mantelpiece. wow! The guy who made the initial base for me made several, so I'm working on another crown and having so much fun going through boxes of stuff looking for rhinestones. "All that glitters..."
3.
My studio is absolutely immaculate with cigar boxes labeled with this and that: it's a little too much like lining my dolls and animals up at the foot of the bed before I go to sleep which I still do, but I can FIND stuff when I need it. That's a relief. The Magpie is getting bad posture walking down the street looking for...TREASURE. I need more shiny stuff. The nice thing about ANY project is glue and paint takes awhile to dry, so I'm making a second crown with small iridescent turkey feathers and paper dolls from Italy glued to the tines that rise up from the base. I'm not sure what else I want to cover the metal with. Obviously jewels, but not white diamond-y gems like with the first one. The turkey feather one has white rabbit fur sewed to the white velvet I glued to the metal. I wanted light brown velvet and that nut brown rabbit fur that feels so soft on the bunny, so eastern wind without a vicious nip. These are on the inside of the metal, so it sits on the head gently. Oh it's an enchantment. Not sure I can sell this. But I say that all the time.
4.
There's only one book I've made I should not have sold called "Transfusion". I dream about that book sometimes: it's beauty and of personal importance. I made it after I had two units of blood. (infected pacemaker and finally a signal that I had something wrong and it turned out to be as simple as celiac's syndrome, which is self-curing. (is that a word?!)So, as far as I can figure from what the techie told me, units of blood are made up of the plasma of twelve donors, so I had the blood of 24 people in me as far as I tell. It took all night to drip drip drip into me and then they sent me home at the unholy hour of 7 am. The nurses who were not doing anything major wanted to trundle my butt out the door at 4am, but my doctor (yeah! wave flag!) yelled at them to let me lie there and rest awhile.
For the next two weeks I dreamt those other people's dreams. I know that sounds bazaar, but it's true. I never held forth at night with my unconscious like that before. So I wrote those stories down in first person and found pictures and stuff to make collages and sewed the whole thing together and put it in old paste boards held together by a strip of black velvet. The cover itself was a magpie heaven. Oh, it is a piece of beauty. I showed in Palo Alto and these women of, let's say, means, started taking this little book's picture with a digital camera until I told them to stop. They wanted my ideas, but didn't want to pay. I sure liked the shine of their diamond ear-bobs!! The magpie came out with a flutter! Very frustrating to have my unique ideas stolen. I had never thought of something as ephemeral as an idea being something that could be stolen. It's called Intellectual property. But I had sold it an hour earlier to a woman who truly appreciated the whole conceptual masterpiece. She was nice enough to let it stay on display until the end of the show. She even said I could come to her house in Sacramento and photograph it. (At that point, I didn't have a camera, but this woman bought all four books, so I bought a camera the next week.)
5.
I took this year off. I desperately needed a sabbatical. I made no art, I only wrote poetry and essays. And now, it feels so good to be back making things, collecting things. Women from my church bring me little baggies full of junk jewelry. I think that's one of my most favorite things to do, is to go through those baggies. Every woman saves the earring of the pair she lost one of. Every woman saves old-fashioned jewelry Aunt Agatha left her, but isn't her style. I love to inherit those things. I love yard sales and church rummage sales for the same reason. There is always jewelry only someone like me knows how to look at with a different eye. It's not one earring from a set. It's its own shining little planet of sparkle. And that necklace drippy with rhinestones, but missing one or two, is a cascade of icicles to me. Suddenly I am making a crown for Hans Christen Andersen's Snow Queen, in my imagination. And maybe I will someday. But right now, I am waiting for the glue to dry on the crown that will be worn by the Woodland Gypsy Girl on the First Day of Winter.
"Darling,"says my husband as he peeks into my studio, "There's glitter all over yr brow..."
Sun out for a little bit today. I feel like it was a parade. I've had a migraine all day, so besides a monthly doctor check up, I have done nothing today, but sleep, pet the cat, and lie with an ice pack on my forehead, ala nineteenth century femme and finally give in to one helluva cup of coffee which has knocked me upside the head, messed with my gut, and made my headache go away. I'm tender and fragile the way a migraine leaves me. My skin shivers at thought of being touched. My eyelids twitch with the uneven light of autumn leaves gently banging on the window as the wind goes in and out of the arbor. Sometimes i am protected by a whole branch of rattling leaves, and then the wind blows the branch aft and my eyes are inflamed by the weak sun on the maple limb that lost its leaves first. It's such an ordeal to go through, listening to artillery all day and it's only the distant whirr of cars two blocks away where the transcontinental highway roars through town.
Any kind of big noise makes me try to get away from it, fast-walking, since I was a little kid, but migraines, double the effect. Now I can't run away from the noise, so I stick my whole head under the covers and let the dark ease the pain from my psyche. It's a relief to be over it. It's a chocolate kiss dripping down my throat as I gently suck on its triangular form of sweetness.
2.
Several years ago I was commissioned to make a crown for someone to give to a relative of theirs who had won two Grammies for script-writing day-time soaps. It sits under a bell jar with a Grammy on each side of it on her mantelpiece. wow! The guy who made the initial base for me made several, so I'm working on another crown and having so much fun going through boxes of stuff looking for rhinestones. "All that glitters..."
3.
My studio is absolutely immaculate with cigar boxes labeled with this and that: it's a little too much like lining my dolls and animals up at the foot of the bed before I go to sleep which I still do, but I can FIND stuff when I need it. That's a relief. The Magpie is getting bad posture walking down the street looking for...TREASURE. I need more shiny stuff. The nice thing about ANY project is glue and paint takes awhile to dry, so I'm making a second crown with small iridescent turkey feathers and paper dolls from Italy glued to the tines that rise up from the base. I'm not sure what else I want to cover the metal with. Obviously jewels, but not white diamond-y gems like with the first one. The turkey feather one has white rabbit fur sewed to the white velvet I glued to the metal. I wanted light brown velvet and that nut brown rabbit fur that feels so soft on the bunny, so eastern wind without a vicious nip. These are on the inside of the metal, so it sits on the head gently. Oh it's an enchantment. Not sure I can sell this. But I say that all the time.
4.
There's only one book I've made I should not have sold called "Transfusion". I dream about that book sometimes: it's beauty and of personal importance. I made it after I had two units of blood. (infected pacemaker and finally a signal that I had something wrong and it turned out to be as simple as celiac's syndrome, which is self-curing. (is that a word?!)So, as far as I can figure from what the techie told me, units of blood are made up of the plasma of twelve donors, so I had the blood of 24 people in me as far as I tell. It took all night to drip drip drip into me and then they sent me home at the unholy hour of 7 am. The nurses who were not doing anything major wanted to trundle my butt out the door at 4am, but my doctor (yeah! wave flag!) yelled at them to let me lie there and rest awhile.
For the next two weeks I dreamt those other people's dreams. I know that sounds bazaar, but it's true. I never held forth at night with my unconscious like that before. So I wrote those stories down in first person and found pictures and stuff to make collages and sewed the whole thing together and put it in old paste boards held together by a strip of black velvet. The cover itself was a magpie heaven. Oh, it is a piece of beauty. I showed in Palo Alto and these women of, let's say, means, started taking this little book's picture with a digital camera until I told them to stop. They wanted my ideas, but didn't want to pay. I sure liked the shine of their diamond ear-bobs!! The magpie came out with a flutter! Very frustrating to have my unique ideas stolen. I had never thought of something as ephemeral as an idea being something that could be stolen. It's called Intellectual property. But I had sold it an hour earlier to a woman who truly appreciated the whole conceptual masterpiece. She was nice enough to let it stay on display until the end of the show. She even said I could come to her house in Sacramento and photograph it. (At that point, I didn't have a camera, but this woman bought all four books, so I bought a camera the next week.)
5.
I took this year off. I desperately needed a sabbatical. I made no art, I only wrote poetry and essays. And now, it feels so good to be back making things, collecting things. Women from my church bring me little baggies full of junk jewelry. I think that's one of my most favorite things to do, is to go through those baggies. Every woman saves the earring of the pair she lost one of. Every woman saves old-fashioned jewelry Aunt Agatha left her, but isn't her style. I love to inherit those things. I love yard sales and church rummage sales for the same reason. There is always jewelry only someone like me knows how to look at with a different eye. It's not one earring from a set. It's its own shining little planet of sparkle. And that necklace drippy with rhinestones, but missing one or two, is a cascade of icicles to me. Suddenly I am making a crown for Hans Christen Andersen's Snow Queen, in my imagination. And maybe I will someday. But right now, I am waiting for the glue to dry on the crown that will be worn by the Woodland Gypsy Girl on the First Day of Winter.
"Darling,"says my husband as he peeks into my studio, "There's glitter all over yr brow..."
Monday, October 5, 2009
There's a 'Possum Under the Porch, Daddy
In an earlier diary entry I write about hating opossums and it's true , I find them ugly and prehistoric: what do they DO for the planet? Walking home early evening, I see a young opossum lurking under the porch and then, like the wind, gone, underneath the caboose, not even a shadow remaining.
Something shifted in my heart. I held my breath between my teeth like a small puff of smoke. I remembered that in the animal kingdom, when a young animal can feed itself, run and hide, the mother moves on to make another nest and another set of young in the months to come. This opossum looked like he's just been left to himself. The two sides of myself were at war. Did I get the hose and shoo him away from under the caboose, or did I set out a little bit of dry cat food in an old pie tin? The war didn't last long. I capitulated almost before I found the little puff of smoke had disappeared from the edge of my incisors and the rattle of cat food on tin became music, the way the beating of an irregular heart can be. I remembered that four years ago I had folded an old holey towel into a square and knotted it inside a plastic Chinatown shopping bag to keep the dampness from creeping into the cloth. I had hidden it under the veranda for a semi-feral cat Frenchie , who I suspect has died by now. He wasn't young, I had nursed him through so many problems and got very little thanks for my work, though once he was so sick, after I had forced antibiotics and ear mite meds into him, I had swaddled him tight in a towel so he wouldn't scratch me to hell and back, I sang lousy in French to him my deep and abiding love. He would disappear for months and then show up, either fit as a fiddle or barely alive and the circle of health would start over again. It's been over a year since I've seen him this time and I don't think he's capable of being taken in by a family or a person even, he was that wild, so I am fearing he is dead. I gave him the last eight years of his life, fine quality, from meds to chopped chicken livers, so I have no guilt, I just miss him, even though he was so brutal to me with his claws on my forearms. I had put the towel out for him when we first made aquaintance. It wasn't until the heavy rains began that I made a bed on the porch itself under a bit of roof, so he could stay warm and dry and he would sleep in there, or on those days when it rained all day every day for weeks, he would live in there, coming out to eat and drink some water, rush out under a tree and perform his ablutions, then run back into the warmth where I would dry him off and leave him be. I promise you, I have no intention of doing all of that for the opossum. I will feed him occasionally and leave the folded towel under the porch. There seemed to be a small indentation in the middle of the square. I said to myself, I'll bet that lil' ol' opposum is sleeping there these cold nights.
I'm still afraid to look at them up close, those sharp teeth, those almost red eyes, the small powder puff of pink nose that if you blink seems to fade into the night, but I have found the compassion that the Samaritan had for his stranger on the roadside and I am sneaking catfood out when I can.
My continued relationship with wild animals is probably the only secret I have from my husband, because he remembers when we first moved out here to the caboose and in the abandoned house before us were at least twelve cats and or kittens of various injuries, deformities and stages of starvation. We had a little bit of harvest money left and I went to the feedstore and bought a big ol' bag of dry catfood and a couple of tins of wet food, because I noticed there were two females, both knocked up past the time to do anything about it. If we were going to have kittens we were going to have healthy kittens. There was a nasty ol' junk pile in the back of the house where those mother cats lived in order to be protected from the raccoons and opossums. I noticed, sure enough when the kittens were born and old enough to tumble out from under old car parts, undefinable pieces of metal and scrap lumber, that if they didn't get back under the pile with their mamas, by nightfall, who by the way nursed each other kittens, the raccoons were libel to get them and the next day I would see just a tiny kitten paw or two on the ground and I would just stand there and sob. So I was no friend to the larger feral animal. I think he assumes I am done, since there are no more feral cats. He hasn't yet realized that I have grown braver and taken on the larger feral animals, just not getting close, not yearning to cuddle and sing to them.
It took me seven years to get rid of all the cats, catins and kittens, but finally there was one left, who we believe lived here with the previous tenants and was left for one reason or another. I named him Capt'in because he was captain of his own fate and made us take him into our hearts and incidently, our kitchen.
So what's this got to do with one youth of a opossum? That simple word: vulnerability. My heart is vulnerable to any animals or human who is in need. My husband, like Dorothy Day, cooks at the local Catholic church for the homeless or the poor and the hungry, and because I'm disabled, I'm left to care for the animal kingdom, which is a far easier job. But the benefits are better I think. After awhile, my creatures allow me to pick them up and croon to them, and the most Daniel receives is a handshake and a "Thanky Sir", which isn't enough, because Dan is a real hugger. But he respects the need for space from the mentally ill, the disenfranchised, the lost and lonely and puts his whole heart into that single handshake. We both have our tasks in the world of entropy and we do it with all our hearts.
Something shifted in my heart. I held my breath between my teeth like a small puff of smoke. I remembered that in the animal kingdom, when a young animal can feed itself, run and hide, the mother moves on to make another nest and another set of young in the months to come. This opossum looked like he's just been left to himself. The two sides of myself were at war. Did I get the hose and shoo him away from under the caboose, or did I set out a little bit of dry cat food in an old pie tin? The war didn't last long. I capitulated almost before I found the little puff of smoke had disappeared from the edge of my incisors and the rattle of cat food on tin became music, the way the beating of an irregular heart can be. I remembered that four years ago I had folded an old holey towel into a square and knotted it inside a plastic Chinatown shopping bag to keep the dampness from creeping into the cloth. I had hidden it under the veranda for a semi-feral cat Frenchie , who I suspect has died by now. He wasn't young, I had nursed him through so many problems and got very little thanks for my work, though once he was so sick, after I had forced antibiotics and ear mite meds into him, I had swaddled him tight in a towel so he wouldn't scratch me to hell and back, I sang lousy in French to him my deep and abiding love. He would disappear for months and then show up, either fit as a fiddle or barely alive and the circle of health would start over again. It's been over a year since I've seen him this time and I don't think he's capable of being taken in by a family or a person even, he was that wild, so I am fearing he is dead. I gave him the last eight years of his life, fine quality, from meds to chopped chicken livers, so I have no guilt, I just miss him, even though he was so brutal to me with his claws on my forearms. I had put the towel out for him when we first made aquaintance. It wasn't until the heavy rains began that I made a bed on the porch itself under a bit of roof, so he could stay warm and dry and he would sleep in there, or on those days when it rained all day every day for weeks, he would live in there, coming out to eat and drink some water, rush out under a tree and perform his ablutions, then run back into the warmth where I would dry him off and leave him be. I promise you, I have no intention of doing all of that for the opossum. I will feed him occasionally and leave the folded towel under the porch. There seemed to be a small indentation in the middle of the square. I said to myself, I'll bet that lil' ol' opposum is sleeping there these cold nights.
I'm still afraid to look at them up close, those sharp teeth, those almost red eyes, the small powder puff of pink nose that if you blink seems to fade into the night, but I have found the compassion that the Samaritan had for his stranger on the roadside and I am sneaking catfood out when I can.
My continued relationship with wild animals is probably the only secret I have from my husband, because he remembers when we first moved out here to the caboose and in the abandoned house before us were at least twelve cats and or kittens of various injuries, deformities and stages of starvation. We had a little bit of harvest money left and I went to the feedstore and bought a big ol' bag of dry catfood and a couple of tins of wet food, because I noticed there were two females, both knocked up past the time to do anything about it. If we were going to have kittens we were going to have healthy kittens. There was a nasty ol' junk pile in the back of the house where those mother cats lived in order to be protected from the raccoons and opossums. I noticed, sure enough when the kittens were born and old enough to tumble out from under old car parts, undefinable pieces of metal and scrap lumber, that if they didn't get back under the pile with their mamas, by nightfall, who by the way nursed each other kittens, the raccoons were libel to get them and the next day I would see just a tiny kitten paw or two on the ground and I would just stand there and sob. So I was no friend to the larger feral animal. I think he assumes I am done, since there are no more feral cats. He hasn't yet realized that I have grown braver and taken on the larger feral animals, just not getting close, not yearning to cuddle and sing to them.
It took me seven years to get rid of all the cats, catins and kittens, but finally there was one left, who we believe lived here with the previous tenants and was left for one reason or another. I named him Capt'in because he was captain of his own fate and made us take him into our hearts and incidently, our kitchen.
So what's this got to do with one youth of a opossum? That simple word: vulnerability. My heart is vulnerable to any animals or human who is in need. My husband, like Dorothy Day, cooks at the local Catholic church for the homeless or the poor and the hungry, and because I'm disabled, I'm left to care for the animal kingdom, which is a far easier job. But the benefits are better I think. After awhile, my creatures allow me to pick them up and croon to them, and the most Daniel receives is a handshake and a "Thanky Sir", which isn't enough, because Dan is a real hugger. But he respects the need for space from the mentally ill, the disenfranchised, the lost and lonely and puts his whole heart into that single handshake. We both have our tasks in the world of entropy and we do it with all our hearts.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Reflections in the Morning Cave
In a mid-morning coffee break, (which I shouldn't drink), I sneak into the shadowy writing shanty and just sit in the dark and reflect. Part of my family has been shaky for a month. My oldest son, which makes him the oldest, "kid", at thirty-two, got married the last day of last year, and buying a house in the redwoods for himself and his Bride and as of the first of the month has been dealing with the news that his schizophrenic father died on the first. Death is always a harsh rattle in the back of the throat, but this carries more baggage than the usual, I think. Oh, who am I kidding, all families feel, they're the only ones carrying the greatest load of grief and sorrow. Though every family thinks that, and rightfully so, this is more than a prolonged illness we had time to "get ready for". John contracted teen schizophrenia in the mid-sixties (the third generation to do so; there are two children in his family that suffer and two 'normals' with big hearts) and has been , except for a short period, miserable ever since. The police said he was acting 'strangely' and took him to the E.R. Our state apparently doesn't have enough mental health ducats, because one mental health person said, "This man needs to be hospitalized and the other one , wanting to save money, said he didn't. The police took him home and he died, apparently in his sleep. I am waiting for the toxicology report. We know that the mental ill self-medicate because they hurt inside so damn bad, but I want to know what... When we married, me, the "child-bride" with no concept of mental illness and he, a twenty-eight year old genius whose ideas he shared with people in their field (ethno-botony) like Terrance McKenna, author of "Invisible Landscape", which were a lot of John's ideas, also deciphered into modern day reality, the works of the Mage Levi, actually drawing out the crystal wand. John played a part in a film by George Csiecery based on myths and the wondrous powers of archetypal beings (helluva time memorizing lines), and a film in which George interviewed him on 16 mm for the sheer weird and wacky magical conversation that coherent schizophrenics are so capable of sharing. I clicked an old brownie as much as we could afford film for in the early seventies when our baby was tiny and even a toddler and I hope I can find the all the negatives to make a Cd and prints to share with old friends. We were so poor that year, I had to send the spent rolls to my mother for developing; but she was smart, she was guaranteed pictoral copies of her first grandchild.
Life and Death are a circle. Anyone with any ability to let go of their fear will understand that Death holds as much wonder as life does, we just don't know what it looks like yet. (except for those boring people who think when you die its just the beginning of "The Worm Song" and nothing more. (The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle in yr snout..."). We know that's what happens to the corporeal body, but the giant mystery of the spirit and the soul just shouts for thighbone trumpets, and forearm piccolos to sing joyful the D.N.A. song of the transcendental heart.
My son is busy being his own genius right now. And receiving recognition for his endeavors; he really doesn't need to take time out to go to residential motels and clean out stuff he might not know what is valuable intellectual property and what isn't. I'm hoping there is enough stuff there to ghost-write the rest of a book he had been working on since we married and if it sells even as popularly as "Invisible Landscape", it would give my son a big chunk to pay on his beautiful house in the redwoods. Parents always want to hand birthday cake out, well, good parents do.
Well, I've had my thunk, and I see the butterfly bush is in need of a severe pruning to guarantee a good show of blossom next year and I need to seed the greens bed again to fill out the chocolate cake earth. We eat alot of greens in the winter, especially when ya need more iron. I have Celiacs and so have to pay attention to iron, calcium and vitamin D which my body won't store. Twenty minutes of face lifted to the sun is a lovely mediation in the winter's weak sun and we are still operating on the batteries of Autumn's intense afternoon heat and seemingly freezing early early mornings. (As in, whining, "it's cold, it's cold every 3 am when the cat wants out and then again at 5:30 am when he wants back in. There's a reason I named him Capt'in and only part of it is based on Walt Whitman's poem.)
It's time to get up and stretch , walk the lines and pretend they outline "my" ownership. And of course, admire my beds of food and flowers. I have to give myself joy. My son's father is finally at peace and we like to think here at the caboose, that peace is contagious. Have you had yr peace shot today! Pass it on.
Life and Death are a circle. Anyone with any ability to let go of their fear will understand that Death holds as much wonder as life does, we just don't know what it looks like yet. (except for those boring people who think when you die its just the beginning of "The Worm Song" and nothing more. (The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle in yr snout..."). We know that's what happens to the corporeal body, but the giant mystery of the spirit and the soul just shouts for thighbone trumpets, and forearm piccolos to sing joyful the D.N.A. song of the transcendental heart.
My son is busy being his own genius right now. And receiving recognition for his endeavors; he really doesn't need to take time out to go to residential motels and clean out stuff he might not know what is valuable intellectual property and what isn't. I'm hoping there is enough stuff there to ghost-write the rest of a book he had been working on since we married and if it sells even as popularly as "Invisible Landscape", it would give my son a big chunk to pay on his beautiful house in the redwoods. Parents always want to hand birthday cake out, well, good parents do.
Well, I've had my thunk, and I see the butterfly bush is in need of a severe pruning to guarantee a good show of blossom next year and I need to seed the greens bed again to fill out the chocolate cake earth. We eat alot of greens in the winter, especially when ya need more iron. I have Celiacs and so have to pay attention to iron, calcium and vitamin D which my body won't store. Twenty minutes of face lifted to the sun is a lovely mediation in the winter's weak sun and we are still operating on the batteries of Autumn's intense afternoon heat and seemingly freezing early early mornings. (As in, whining, "it's cold, it's cold every 3 am when the cat wants out and then again at 5:30 am when he wants back in. There's a reason I named him Capt'in and only part of it is based on Walt Whitman's poem.)
It's time to get up and stretch , walk the lines and pretend they outline "my" ownership. And of course, admire my beds of food and flowers. I have to give myself joy. My son's father is finally at peace and we like to think here at the caboose, that peace is contagious. Have you had yr peace shot today! Pass it on.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
In the Early Morning of Summer
Earlier this summer, I stood in the garden behind the caboose, filling a pail with water. I glanced upward and noticed the grapes on the arbor were bigger and very hard green. Soon they will turn purple and burst with the musky odor of wine. When this happens, I pick them and pasteurize juice into bottles. Many clusters of the grapes are wasted
each season, trampled underfoot. The fallen ones will ferment in the heat of summer afternoons. It will smell like wine. The arbor is the only cool spot and people will gather to sit there under the table
and do chores. The air will be rich with the sweat of human work.
An older woman will shell peas while a young girl embroiders raggedy tea towels, sewing daisy chains around the various holes and making a blanket stitch around the edges to keep them from fraying anymore than they are. Nothing is wasted here. A boom box plays fado in the garden
across a small fence which keeps dogs from digging to China by way of the artichokes.Young mothers are weeding and discussing the upcoming concert at Black Oak Ranch, while their fat babies dig in the rich earth with old teaspoons.
This is a small compound of six living places. Everyone has a purpose and a commitment. It took several years of people moving in and around to discover the right combination of personalities. We have children, we have cats, two dogs, a hot tub on wheels that visits different farms throughout our community (you supply the wood), we have elders, well, one now, Virginia at eighty-three is waiting to join Stan at 92 who left us last September. We have a single father and a boy and his dog. Mark cooks every weekend , come eat with us, we are all us and Virginia is teaching women how to make fudge the old way. Our newly weds are smiling. On Friday evenings we stand with candles in front of the hospital with others from our small town and witness for peace. It's time to heal the land before the winter curtain comes down until Spring.
The earth is a thick rich chocolate cake here, where we have worked the soil for years with goat manure or sheepshit. We are growing babies in rows and mounds of earth. It's a happy time for all of us in a place where to compost means to enrich, to grow, to fatten instead of to rot,
instead of to war one against the other. We cling to our ideas with strong hands and thick arms, with breasts full of milk. We are bringing summer into jars and braids of garlic and apples hidden in straw, so that on cold winter days, we can open the plum jam and honey bees will lighten the room with their golden song.
each season, trampled underfoot. The fallen ones will ferment in the heat of summer afternoons. It will smell like wine. The arbor is the only cool spot and people will gather to sit there under the table
and do chores. The air will be rich with the sweat of human work.
An older woman will shell peas while a young girl embroiders raggedy tea towels, sewing daisy chains around the various holes and making a blanket stitch around the edges to keep them from fraying anymore than they are. Nothing is wasted here. A boom box plays fado in the garden
across a small fence which keeps dogs from digging to China by way of the artichokes.Young mothers are weeding and discussing the upcoming concert at Black Oak Ranch, while their fat babies dig in the rich earth with old teaspoons.
This is a small compound of six living places. Everyone has a purpose and a commitment. It took several years of people moving in and around to discover the right combination of personalities. We have children, we have cats, two dogs, a hot tub on wheels that visits different farms throughout our community (you supply the wood), we have elders, well, one now, Virginia at eighty-three is waiting to join Stan at 92 who left us last September. We have a single father and a boy and his dog. Mark cooks every weekend , come eat with us, we are all us and Virginia is teaching women how to make fudge the old way. Our newly weds are smiling. On Friday evenings we stand with candles in front of the hospital with others from our small town and witness for peace. It's time to heal the land before the winter curtain comes down until Spring.
The earth is a thick rich chocolate cake here, where we have worked the soil for years with goat manure or sheepshit. We are growing babies in rows and mounds of earth. It's a happy time for all of us in a place where to compost means to enrich, to grow, to fatten instead of to rot,
instead of to war one against the other. We cling to our ideas with strong hands and thick arms, with breasts full of milk. We are bringing summer into jars and braids of garlic and apples hidden in straw, so that on cold winter days, we can open the plum jam and honey bees will lighten the room with their golden song.
When Night Turns to Autumn
Autumn has finally reached her hands into the walnut tree and given it a good shake. The knocking on the old shanty's roof is a rat-ta-tat and then the high hat. When the wind gets up a real wrap around the branches,the beat is Gene Krupa and then dies down, til I'm busy with my books and cleaning out fountain pens when BAM! the wind scares up another drum solo smooth and fast. It's scary for the first month 'til I get used to it. Then the storms do the same thing and I'm jumping out of my skirts.
Tonight when I locked up, there leaning up against the front door, sucking up the heat that was pushing it's way out of the thin crack along the bottom was a baby possum. I love animals, but I can't stand those little guys. Most animals, any animal is cute when it's a baby, except possums. I don't know if it's that linty color, or the seemingly hairless tail, or the snout with that nasty shade of pink flesh at the end...they just seem a bad job of it. I feel bad that I don't like 'em, but there it is. Mister Ugly. The cat's been wanting to go out , but with the possum there, I don't dare, so I'm picking my Capt'in up and walking to the back, which is how I end up in the writing shanty and I need more warm clothes. So, I dump the cat and come back inside. Hopefully the little gray ghost will go somewhere else.
This is early for me and i want to keep it that way. I need my rest after not sleeping the last two nights. Good night cat, goodnight gray ghost.
Tonight when I locked up, there leaning up against the front door, sucking up the heat that was pushing it's way out of the thin crack along the bottom was a baby possum. I love animals, but I can't stand those little guys. Most animals, any animal is cute when it's a baby, except possums. I don't know if it's that linty color, or the seemingly hairless tail, or the snout with that nasty shade of pink flesh at the end...they just seem a bad job of it. I feel bad that I don't like 'em, but there it is. Mister Ugly. The cat's been wanting to go out , but with the possum there, I don't dare, so I'm picking my Capt'in up and walking to the back, which is how I end up in the writing shanty and I need more warm clothes. So, I dump the cat and come back inside. Hopefully the little gray ghost will go somewhere else.
This is early for me and i want to keep it that way. I need my rest after not sleeping the last two nights. Good night cat, goodnight gray ghost.
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