What I look like

I was sitting in my office yesterday morning, and I noticed my old employee badge. I had it taken about 18 months ago because I had been wearing a beard for more than a year and figured my badge should look like me. I stopped in the middle of the day and got it done. I remember being in a pretty good mood

Anyway, I looked at the photo on the badge yesterday morning and what I saw was puffy, baggy eyed, and very stressed. It appeared that my face had been a little distorted and the effect was that I was quite misaligned. This photo would have been taken at my nadir (I believe that's the word for low point. If it's not, my apologies.).

I will scan that badge in as soon as I get my printer hooked up. With 8 inches of fresh powder on the ground, this chore may wait until next week. The best thing about feeling better is awareness. I love being more of a factor. I'm reading more - much more , thinking more, asking more questions and generally being more of a participant in my life.

Now that I work in a National Service capacity, all of this happy gratitude has me thinking about ways we can serve each other, and others. My kids have agreed to go volunteer on Martin Luther King day, so we'll go help out a local museum that needs cleaning up. These young AmeriCorps hooligans are always volunteering someplace and I'm definitely a slacker by comparison. More importantly, what our almost-president is asking us to do is to step up and let our bodies and our efforts reflect our values. I believe in the idea that we should all do something to improve our community because we live here. How often I actually do something that reflects this belief is a little embarrassing. I used to tell myself that because I was grossly underpaid and worked 50 hours per week working to get low income folks access to quality mental health care, my martyrdom excused me from participating.

On reflection, the martyrdom thing is over-rated. If one is martyred because one stands up for principle, then I'm all for one. However, the feeling of martyrdom, kissing cousin of self-pity, is just an excuse, license to allow one's self all sorts of negative liberties. And some damned fine martinis. With garlic olives. Jumbo. Mmmm.

But I digress.

Today good friends are coming south to join us as we play in a lot of very good snow. It's light and powdery and there is an abundance of it. We have about 7 inches of the new stuff on a base that's about 5 inches deep. It was bitterly cold. Here: a picture of a frozen sparrow!

I used to dislike sparrows. As a boy I was a bird watcher and liked the interesting birds. Sparrows are mundane and scrappy. I'm reading a book about China and in it is a story of how Mao decided that sparrows were undesirable. He required the workers and peasants to go stand near where sparrows roosted and yell and bang pots and pans all night. This exhausted the sparrows and after a week of this they died. Later during the Great Famine there was no one to eat the bugs.

Imagine being so powerful you could decree the doom of an entire species. We feed sparrows and starlings and in exchange we accept visits from mourning doves, juncos, cardinals and a spunky little downy woodpecker who always climbs up the pole as though it were a tree and helps himself to suet. The sparrows have a subtlety and an inevitability that I find reassuring. I used to think of myself as a flashier bird, but I am more sparrow like than I used to think.

My good friend Kevin, who knows me all too well, has always commented that I was born middle aged and am trying to get younger. Swinton used to comment on my "boyish enthusiasm" but I often settled, too fearful of chance to risk the big risks.

I am filled with joy this day and I don't care who knows. I invite you, whenever you read this, to do something good. Lay down a little positive karma in an arbitrary and capricious manner. Let your eyes scan the world about you and linger on the beauty you see. Kick a little snow on the dog shit and put a good picture in your head. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!

I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.

--Bob Dylan

Dispatch

This is what we do for each other.  We are bound together, in part, out of survival and we survive because the fit care for the halt and the lame.

These photos are from early  morning at the Amana Lily Pond.

Mom has been, all of a sudden, getting very confused and panicky.  She calls and sometimes I can calm her, but she's  convinced she is supposed to be going somewhere, to "get closer to you," she says, and that she's lost.  The metaphysical implications of these statements are staggering, but who has time?  

Her cats are shitting all over the place.  I had them to the vet and they are fine.  It think it's the cat box -- I tried to convert them to a covered one -- and the bathroom door -- it closes.  I put up a sign by Mom's phone:  a letter in my handwriting (only neater) explaining the situation.  Also, as sign on the bathroom door.

We don't think Mom's sudden decline is probably Alzheimer's.  Alzheimer's is the context, but it does not explain any sudden loss of faculties.  That's probably an infection or med side effect, something to be chased down by my lovely and talented nurse practitioner Julie Shaw (APRN), who is the best neurologist I have ever met, and who gives hugs to my Mom.

I think it started when we all got the flu.  Robyn had one bout of back spasming in the Spring, but went to physical therapy and seemed to get past it.  She was having another bout and just getting over it, but also feeling sad to have a bad back again, when Caitlin got the puking flu.  It was a very energetic flu and the puking took on Olympic proportions.  After 36 hours it was gone, leaving us tired.  Robyn's puking stage neatly coincided with back spasms and nearly landed her in the hospital.  She never recovered.

Robyn herniated the same disc as last time.  It has probably been coming apart since this Spring.  The herniation is worse this time and she is nauseous, weak, has tingling and numbness and lots of referred pain.  She's on so much medication she is totally unreliable and the whole thing is so depressing I have a Prozac air pistol and I just sort of shoot her randomly with a medicated dart whenever she gets morose.

Surgery is today at 2, but will probably be moved up a little.  She'll spend the night in the hospital, thankfully.  The first 24 hours post op are really nasty.  This will keep her there and pain managed by pros and give us all a better night's sleep.

Did I mention Caitlin's urinary tract infection?  No, because I'm so busy that Caitlin took herself to the doctor and got her own goddamn chicken soup!  What a great kid!  She's missed a lot of school lately and is going to need to bear down.  Not her best thing.  Caitlin is really smart, but she was really a lonely person for a while and now she has wonderful friends.  As long as she's happy, it's really hard for me to insist that she be more academic.  She seems to have a great boyfriend and really solid pals.  She works and does well, and has lots of interests and good values.  I think she's going to be just fine, and will bear down and study when she catches fire.  She has so many interests that I just feel sure something will, so I don't worry about it.

Mom hasn't called me in a panic since I put the sign up and we got the cats back.  Robyn will feel better in 48 hours.  Caitlin has really butch antibiotic on board.

I haven't talked about Walker because it would not be thematic.  Or maybe it would be, in that the men in this family are doing very well. 

Walker just finished his last cross country meet running his personal best for the year on a hilly course.  He just loves running and it's infectious.  His main preoccupation is getting to the mall to purchase clothing.  Hey, don't knock it!  It's finite and achievable.

I have been running a little, with Tye.  We eke out two miles on a good day.  Tye has a limp when we run too hard or encounter too much gravel.  Some days I have to walk a little; I cramp or have a cold.  It's great for guilt and low self-esteem though.  Put yourself through about 1/2 hour of panting and huffing and get 6 hours of residual runner's high and the feeling that you've taken care of a little business, hedging against entropy, enabling bowls of ice cream with fruit on top and other decadent things.

I feel great.  I haven't felt this good since long before Dad died.  I realize now that I was carrying around a great sadness that was chewing me up from the inside.  For reasons I cannot understand, I have let go of much of this, and although I am reassuringly inconsistent in my mission, I feel more in balance than I have, probably, ever.

I do understand a few things, learned from my friends and my family.  This things are:

Appreciating beauty as frequently and lingeringly as possible.  Being as creative as time allows.  Caring for others.  Showing up.  Taking the time to do the things we love and to be with those we love.  Thinking carefully about when to be present and when to be absent.  Applying various anaethesias more sparingly in light of said.   Taste.  Smell.  Feel.  Touch.  Consume it all, but not too much.  Love, dammit, and don't quit!

Couldn't post this right after the Marie Memorial.

This beauty flew right past my head as I was mowing the lawn this morning. She was easily 5 inches long and I think this means she is a female.  She looked at me and then turned away, dismissively, to hunt

I think this girl was just about the queen predator in my neighbor's yard.

This morning I took Walker down to the Lily Pond in the Amana Colonies, and I stayed to take some shots of this fine misty morning.  It was good to be alive.

Marie Paulina sneaked off Thursday night while no one was looking.  Kevin says she and Shorty and Diana all passed away while attention was diverted.  Not wanting to make a show, he suggested.  Life had long sense become a burden she endured, I think.  She lived to mourn her oldest daughter and bury her husband.  She was, in her time, sharp as a tack, and generous.  She is also where her daugher Diana got her dogged determination, I think.

I thought about Marie and stood by the Lily Pond and was glad she is free, and glad I am, too.

Now here is why a fella buys a couple of kayaks!  Walker and I took a paddle on the Wapsipnicon River this morning, from Olin to Hale.  This led to a number of puns, but since Robyn helped me drop the car off, Walker was able to call to her "I'll see you in Hale!"

Kind of makes your day.

This is a nice little stretch of river, 6.7 miles long, with a nice current and clearing water.  The sandbars are nicely scoured by last week's high water, and Walker was totally pleased with our adventure.  He doesn't fancy lakes much.  There is no current and it's boring.  You paddle around and there's no suspense.  But a river, now, that's something different!  There's always something new around the bend.

We stopped on this sandbar and I got the camera out, of course.  I had it in the big kayak's dry compartment.  Good thing, too, because I almost ditched the little boat getting into it.  235 pounds in a 12 foot kayak takes some doing.  Once I'm in I'm almost sprightly!  Walker and I dumped the water out of my boat on the first of many sandbars and we carried on.  The sun was shining, the water was burbling, and the birds were singing.

What one sees here are heron tracks.   I should have put my toe in the picture so you could appreciate that they are 5 inches long.  Herons have big dogs.

I was telling Walker that when I was a boy, I used to go down to the Arkansas River and hang out on a sandbar.  The Arkansas (pronounced Ar-KAN-sas in Kansas and normally everywhere else) is a bendy river that meanders across Kansas from sandbar to sandbar.  It provided me with a place to go when I needed to be by myself.  There was a grassy bank up 20 feet from the sand, overhung with young elm trees, and I used to sit there and watch the water go by, and not think any more than I could help.

I have always loved to walk along the water's edge and see what the river left.  I like the texture of it.  The river leaves behind gradated lines of matter of various particular weights.  There's an order to it.  I think this one will make a great desktop wallpaper.

Of course, there were flowers, and I photographed them.   I am nothing if not consistent in this.  Robyn rolls her eyes.  I feast mine.

Time on the river calms my soul.  Walker and I spent time and didn't argue.  We needed some of that time together.  

Fourteen year old boys make better sense if you get them alone and give them a space to romp in.  Romping helps a young man channel his testosterone back into nature, vigor, joy, and motion.

Yep, this is why we buy kayaks.

 And cameras. 

Down by the river I used to find refuge from problems I did not make and could not control, from the decay and disappointment that seemed to follow our family like a stray dog.  

I was able to sit on the bank and wash away 7th grade gym, unrequited love that isn't love yet, but longing.

The water will tell you, if you listen, how you will make it through, another day, another week, the rest of your life.  

You will keep going, and if you look around. . . .

There are flowers.

Dog

Tye's in the living room lying on the sofa thinking I don't know it.  I'll go roust him in a little while.  He's a good dog and his crimes, such as they are, are minor.  Occasionally some good snack will disappear from the counter if left within inches of the edge.  He's a crotch sniffer, no denying that.  Yipes.  And he sits on the overstuffed furniture in the living room, even though he knows he's not supposed to.

He's such a good guy to have around, we don't really complain much about his foibles.  He is an agreeable creature, prone to making the rounds, collecting scratches behind ears and various rubs from each available human.  He will fetch until the earth opens up to swallow him, and can locate amazingly small items thrown into high grass, in the dark.  Tye is a pretty good frisbee catcher unless there's something more interesting, like another dog, or a tennis ball around.

Tye loses his mind over tennis balls.  We tried to catch frisbees at Kevin's one time, but as soon as he saw all the tennis balls lying around it was frisbees be damned.  The slimier the better, there is nothing quite like a well seasoned tennis ball.

Every once in a while, Tye gets a little uppity and has to be told to find a place and lie down.  He expresses his resentment through pointed, long groans.  Tye could do Streetcar Named Desire in dog speak.

Just what we need in our house: more drama.

Iowa from a bus

I did a lot of driving today, back and forth between Vinton and Cedar Rapids, ferrying our new corps members to our site from the airport.  It was funny to see my home through the eyes of a bunch of 18-24 year olds from all over the U.S.

I think this is what they saw.  Corn.  Farms.  I told them the corn was not high enough, that it should be six feet tall by now.  I told them pithy things about local lore.  Corn.  That's what they heard, as though Charlie Brown's teacher (wah, wah, wah, wah!) finally said just one intelligible word:  Corn.  Jesus, look at all that corn!  Shit.

They seem to be a great bunch of young people, full of juice and ready for a new adventure serving their country and facing challenges.  I remember when I felt like that, all full of human potential and bulletproof.  Now it's more about ducking metaphorical bullets and staying flexible.  I don't mess much with my potential.  

When I was eighteen, I secretly thought I would probably end up famous.  Now I think I'm about as famous as I'm going to be.

So I tried to explain that we were driving along the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway, once a rutted dirt road, barely graded, that brave adventurers negotiated with spindly wheeled Fords.  At the end of each day's ride, there was a roadhouse, with gas, food, and little cabins out back, some with indoor plumbing.  As we turned at the Youngville Cafe, said roadhouse, and went north on 218, I heard a kid say "Damn.  Look at all that corn."

One of the Team Leaders said "This is where we saw the tornado last week!"

That got their attention.

where am I?

Those of you who are used to checking in here once in a while to see what is leaking out of my head should know that I am sharing a space with some good friends, over at a spot we call "Lessons."  I will blog here, too, but if you're wondering what we've been doing since May 24th, v visit here:

http://nancyturtle2.blogspot.com/

I think I will continue writing my more perverse stuff here, so stay tuned. s.