Sprung

Over the next four days, we'll be experiencing quite a harmonic convergence, as it were. Tomorrow is the first day of Spring, followed by Benito Juarez's birthday and then Mothering Sunday (UK). Many years ago, in fact the day the war in Iraq started, we were in England and got to honor Robyn on Mothering Day. Many years ago, the year we started the Iraq war, we were in England for Mothering Day. We honored Robyn for her mothering. British Mother's day is understated, compared with ours. More a smile and an approving nod. I think we ought to celebrate this fine combination of holidays. Benito loved a party. Wasn't he the father of Mexican something?

Walker and I are ready to kayak. I've started to run (stumble, gasp) again. Jeff's going to tune up my bike. We sense the faintest stirrings of something. It's brown as far as you can see, but in the squishy cold muck underfoot roots stretch and grubs stir. Inside my head the chill fog clears. I stop counting cost and smell the air.

I'm going to go rouse Robyn. Go look out the window!

An heroic exit!

I always said that I want to die rescuing a child from a burning bus. This is no longer true.

In my youth, Verne Gagne was a famous pro wrestler ("rassler"), the master of the "sleeper hold." He was one of the original pro wrestlers who made it big with the advent of black and white televisions all over blue collar suburban America. The sweaty burly drama fit well on a flickering black and white screen, and featured black and white morality plays perfect for the concrete understanding of 10 year old boys.

Vern has Alzheimer's disease and like my Mom, lives in the present, and in a memory care unit somewhere. Somewhere new, now, poor fella. It seems at the last place he was staying, he took it into his head to pick up a 97 year old companion and body slam him.

The un-named 97 year old gentleman suffered a broken hip and did not survive the shock of the injury. He would have died faster had Vern remembered the sleeper hold, but Vern hasn't wrestled professionally in some time and was probably somewhat rusty.

If I am 97 years old, living in a memory care unit someplace, I beg you: Please send a demented pro wrestler to body slam me into the Great Beyond. If the body slam does not do the trick and I am still kicking, please apply the sleeper hold and the iron claw. Please have him climb the ropes and teeter, sweaty and intent, soaking in the jeers and yells of the other residents and staff, before dropping on my ribcage in a perfect pike position.

No tag team allowed. Drop kick me, Jesus!

now

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

-- e. e. cummings

e e cummings is probably my favorite poet. My Dad's best friend Woody was a poet and he would introduce me to poets -- e e cummings (who never capitalized), Richard Brautigan -- numerous others whose names I don't remember.

I remember the attention he gave me and the fun we had with words, and I remember that I love the beat and the rhythm of language. That's probably why I write lyrics and sing them, that and a craving for immediate gratification. But I digress.

I struggle, these bleak days, with being in the present. Distracted from the now, I find myself gnawing old bones, polishing the cold stones of my resentments, rehearsing my responses to anticipated conflicts.

What I love about this poem is how entirely present it is.

Last night Caitlin wanted to be with her boyfriend and we forbade her to travel on the icy roads and so the intrepid young man drove to her in his jeep and we tried to leave them alone. I read and fell asleep early, to some television show linking secret symbols on the dollar bill to the "new world order" and probably the trilateral commission or something. I don't know because I fell asleep. I'm probably dead meat, trilateral commission-wise.

In any event, I awoke especially early this morning, at about 5 a.m. I've been reading the new Atlantic and drinking good strong coffee. Soon Tye will give in to his bladder and climb off Caitlin's warm bed. Robyn and the kids will be up in a while.

I'm going to try, this weekend, to pay less attention to the syntax. Keeping score is for suckers, right?

And stay away from T. S. Eliot. He's really gloomy.

Poop

Anyone who has raised a boy knows that this is what we are about. This and penises. Our humor, our symbolism (practically 2/3 of Freud), and our points of view revolve around scatology.

In the beginning we struggle for mastery over our poop, or over others' dominion over it. As we get older, and hair falls from the popular places, only to colonize in far less popular places, our thoughts return again to the lowly sphincter, center of our Universe. Nothing like a good poop. Shouldn't have have that second helping of meringue pie at Bishop's.

Small wonder that colonoscopy becomes our rite of passage. It's a simple procedure and relatively noninvasive, medically speaking and a very good idea to do. If I've got polyps, I certainly want them removed before they consider morphing. My rational mind is settled.

Unfortunately, there's the rest of me, which occupies what Monty Python called "the Pied Piper of my attention squad." This has been, thus far, a messy business. I certainly hope my insides are clean enough because I'd be pretty annoyed if I had to "do over." Then there's the little matter of having my channel inspected: yikes. Dr. Qiao is going to snake a cable up there and see what he can see. Thank God he is administering the good medication, the stuff that helps you forget indignity. (I only hope I don't blather on. What do you suppose the chance of that is!) My women friends will have long since gone off on tangents about cold speculums (speculae), mammograms and childbirth, shaming me into perspective, and missing the point.

As insignificant as my loss of dignity may be, as minor as the inconvenience is to my marginally violated sphincter, the fact remains that I am a man. Even now the good doctor is readying the anal probe. Forgive my lack of personal perspective.

Happy travels, Dr. Qiao.

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.