Day One 2021

 

Good morning! The picture above is from last night when Carl, Henry, Oliver and I went to Santa Monica and watched the sun go down on 2020. Sophie was at her father's place, so the evening wasn't perfectly perfect, but it was pretty close to perfect being with three men that I love on the beach that I love. When the sun dipped below the horizon, everyone cheered. We drove home and built a little fire in the fire-pit in our backyard, roasted marshmallows and played a game on our phones called Psych or something like that. We drank champagne and whiskey and beer together and laughed and argued but mostly laughed, and it was about the most perfect New Year's Eve I could ever imagine during a pandemic or otherwise, to tell you the truth. I wrote down a few of my current fears and burned them in the fire, and when I went to bed my clothes smelled like smoke. When I woke this morning just before sunrise, my hair still smelled smoky and the moon shone in a band through the back door blinds. I stood there in my mind in the moonlight the year behind us with many ways forward, the rest of it, life, seen through the eyes of the heart.

Neowise

Yesterday, on an excursion to a place called Grassy Hollow where Carl and I headed for some much-needed nature, I read an article on the worldwide webs about the enormous hardship of our migrant workers, how they are bearing the brunt of the pandemic, even as they pick the food we eat, pluck the chickens we roast, slaughter and package the meat we barbecue. I won't regale you with the statistics, but it's gross. This country is foul.

How do we unhook from this culture?

This morning, I lay in bed thinking over-thinking wondering lamenting the usual morning fare. Professional basketball players are housed in what's being called the "Disney bubble," quarantined together with their families, at Disney hotels, kept safe and fed and tested constantly for the virus even as they are getting ready to finish the season of basketball that was so abruptly stopped and that fans so desperately await.

Do can will basketball players play without anyone watching? 

Does a tree make a sound when it falls if no one is there?

I'm reading an article in the newest New Yorker by Lawrence Wright titled "Crossroads." The subtitle is "A scholar of the plague thinks that pandemics wreak havoc -- and open minds." The scholar is Gianna Pomata, a retired professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine, at Johns Hopkins University who has returned to her hometown, the old city of Bologna, Italy. She compares Covid-19 to the bubonic plague of the 14th century -- "not in the number of dead people but in terms of shaking up the way people think." She says, "The Black Death really marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of something else." We know that something else was the Renaissance. Pomata also says, "Chroniclers of the plague describe the crumbling of the family. At the same time, human beings are creative. They react to this perceived moral decay by creating new institutions." She's less optimistic about what's going on in our country, a country that she loves, where she lived in and worked for over thirty years. "What I see right now in the United States is that the pandemic has not led to new creative thinking but, on the contrary, has strengthened all the worst, most stereotypical, and irrational ways of thinking. I'm very sorry for the state of your country, which seems to be in the grip of a horrible attack of unreason. I'm sorry because I love it, and have received so much from it."

I just can't help thinking about the migrant workers picking my fruit and the basketball giants in their bubble. I can't stop thinking about those who are both ignoring the necessary actions we need to take and those who want to "get back to normal" or "learn to live with it." I am aware of the absurdity and privilege of my own lamentation.

Again, how do we unhook from this culture? Maybe you don't want to. Tell me why?

After wandering around Grassy Hollow, Carl and I drove to La Cañada to try to see the comet in the northwestern sky. We parked on a street called Sleepy Hollow and walked up a dirt trail to a peak that looked out over the entire Los Angeles basin. We watched the sun go down in orange flame, a thin crescent moon rise, the lights of the downtown skyline appear out of a thin haze and then the Big Dipper. There, Carl said, just to the left of the ladle. I saw only a very faint smudge, my night blindness preventing any real recognition.  There was the comet, so aptly named Neowise, just barely visible to the naked eye, a cosmic snowball made of ice, rock and dust. I read that there are about 13 million Olympic swimming pools of water in Comet Neowise, that it's nearly 3 miles long and travels about 40 miles per second. When asked what she wanted to do when the pandemic was over, Gianna Pomata said that she longed to see her mother who lives in Sardinia. She wanted to swim there again. "Older people need exercise," she said. "I don't spend time at the beach gossiping with friends. I don't even take the sun. I just go immediately into the sea."

On Carl's super-camera, Neowise was a green blur with a fuzzy tail, 70 million miles away from the Earth where we stood.

I am grateful for my life. For life. I marvel and mark my own insignificance in this world. And I love the world and its people. But how do we unhook from this culture beyond going out into hollows and onto peaks to bask in and gaze at its mystery?


Here's a poem:

For the Sake of Strangers

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waiting patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another—a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them—
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

Dorianne Laux (1994)

Go On With Your Thinking

More and more I'm thinking of resilience and sorrow all mixed up together. Meaning, on waking, I want to sleep but not because I want to sleep because (but) I want to not be awake. This sounds depressed. Sorrow fills me up but doesn't define me in the same way that watching Sophie seize never gets easier. On June 14th, it was twenty-five years since she'd been diagnosed. Muscle memory. I could keep plumbing the depths of sorrow. Fathom the plumb unfathomable. It's down to words. Rage is just a cover for sorrow and everyone knows that.

Carl and I went out on the water yesterday on a whale-watching boat. Everyone was in masks except for a small group of over-dressed ladies who spent the entire time taking selfies. I steered clear of them and anyone else who came too close (oblivion) and found a quiet spot at the back of the boat. I sat in the sun with my face up, watched a couple of pelicans soar, at least a dozen terns torpedo into the water and a hundred or so dolphin dive and swim in the choppy water. It was cold. About halfway through the trip, a minke whale. At some point, mesmerized by all of this and the hum of the boat and the muffled shrieks of the people on the bottom deck, I wondered what it would be like to throw myself overboard, to slip in the water much like Hart Crane did after folding his overcoat over the railing. No one would see. Could one drown oneself? Could one keep gulping water or would the instinct to breathe, to thrash to stay alive kick in? This sounds depressed. The boat rocked me, though, and the late afternoon sun made the chop gold and glint, Carl was off in the distance, his lens raised and the sorrow rocked, too, back and forth, calm and soothing, making me who I am not quite all filled up.

Here's an excerpt from "Winnie," a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks:

Yet I know
that I am Poet!
I pass you my Poem.

A poem doesn’t do everything for you.
You are supposed to go on with your thinking.
You are supposed to enrich
the other person’s poem with your extensions,
your uniquely personal understandings,
thus making the poem serve you.

I pass you my Poem! — to tell you
we are all vulnerable —
the midget, the Mighty,
the richest, the poor.
Men, women, children, and trees.
I am vulnerable.
Hector Pieterson was vulnerable.

My Poem is life, and not finished.
It shall never be finished.
My Poem is life, and can grow.

Wherever life can grow, it will.
It will sprout out,
and do the best it can.
I give you what I have.
You don’t get all your questions answered in this world.
How many answers shall be found
in the developing world of my Poem?
I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem,
which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can.

I am not a tight-faced Poet.

I am tired of little tight-faced poets sitting down to
shape perfect unimportant pieces.
Poems that cough lightly — catch back a sneeze.
This is the time for Big Poems,
roaring up out of sleaze,
poems from ice, from vomit, and from tainted blood.
This is the time for stiff or viscous poems.
Big, and Big.

We Can Do Hard Things, Wednesday 3/18/20

Hey, Readers. How's it going? Are you keeping it sexy out there, social distancing?

Speaking of sexy, I read an article about a nun who's basically been social distancing for 29 years in a convent. She had three pieces of advice:

1. Establish structure.
2. Be intentional and love others.
3. Use the time for self-reflection and relaxation.

(I've formally renounced Catholicism in my very own creation: The Eighth Sacrament or Renunciation of the Catholic Church, but I've had a life-long love of nuns -- the good ones -- so I'm trying to take her advice).

In the morning when I open my eyes, I try not to think about what I've thought about for the last three-plus years (I'll leave it to your own imagination but it has something to do with November 9, 2016), and instead I put my hand over my heart and say metta for all of us:

May we be happy, healthy and peaceful.

May no harm come to us.

May no difficulties come to us.

May no problems come to us.

May we always meet with success.

May we also have patience, courage and understanding to meet and overcome inevitable difficulties, problems and failures in life.

Structure:

I get up and make my bed.

I take care of Sophie.

I begin my job teaching middle school and high school kids English literature and language arts.

I take care of Sophie.

I make breakfast and lunch and eat them. I feed Sophie.

I let Oliver take Sophie out for a walk.

I go out for a walk.

I take care of Sophie.

I take care of Sophie.

I catch up with all of you.

I make dinner.

I eat dinner and feed Sophie.

I prepare my lessons for tomorrow.

I sit with Carl and watch something on the teevee or just talk.

I take care of Sophie.

I go to bed and rest.

Being Intentional and Loving Others:

I check in with a lot of people every single day via text, phone and email. How lucky we are to have technology, right?

I tell Oliver and Carl how grateful I am that they are helping me and how much I love them for being who they are and being here with me and with Sophie.

I tell Sophie how much I love her and how difficult all of this is for everyone. Taking care of Sophie (see above) is a form of meditation. Honestly. It is.

I have cut out complaining as much as I can -- an intention most difficult for this old, crabby, sharp-tongued human

I bake bread and cookies and lovingly make food that is nourishing and looks good. Today I pulled something out of the freezer that looked like soup, but I believe it was gravy? Good thing I didn't feed it to Sophie? I am intentional in maintaining a sense of humor. I remember how goddamn fortunate we are to have purchased enough food to carry us through the next couple of weeks.

I paid my saintly childcare worker ahead of time and told her to stay home with her own family. I was able to do this because of the help I receive from my parents and from the glorious state of California.

I talked to my sisters, one of whom was feeling particularly agitated this morning. I reminded her that we should always acknowledge our fears, that bad things are happening and might happen to us. These are facts. I humbly say that it's been my experience that acknowledging things as they are or could be is very helpful in distilling fear and instilling acceptance and calm.

Use the time for self-reflection and relaxation:

See above for self-reflection. I have done hard things. We can do hard things.

I'm working on the relaxation but have been, so far, unsuccessful.

2020

This is my New Year's post.

On New Year's Day, Carl (aka The Bird Photographer) and I took Sophie to Solstice Canyon in Malibu because we read that it had an accessible path. It did have an accessible path, and the two of us took turns pushing Sophie up the steep grades, stopping every now and then to admire the yellow leaves, the bird calls and the grass-covered hills in the distance. I would have liked a view, but you had to do some serious, non-accessible climbing to see the Pacific, so Carl and I planned to come back another day. Afterward, we stopped at a fish shack restaurant on the PCH (that's Pacific Coast Highway for you non-Californians) and ate fried shrimp, grilled swordfish, grilled catfish, french fries, Cajun rice, coleslaw and salad. The restaurant was more "accessible" than accessible, so when we left, Carl had to make a path through the hordes of people waiting in line. He was helped by one guy who yelled out, "Watch your backs, folks! Coming through!" It must be the New Year kind of thing and all people filled with the resolutionary spirit because all the people parted, smiled, said encouraging things like No problem! How ya doing! Happy New Year! as we made our way through.

Here's the thing. It's been a hard year. It's been a hard decade. Hell, it's been a hard couple of decades.

But then there's now.

Who would have thought that on the first day of the year 2020 I would be divorced, walking a path with my daughter and a man with whom I've fallen deeply in love? Sophie's father -- my ex -- is devoted to Sophie, as she is to him, and I am grateful for that. I will say bluntly, though, that I had absolutely no expectation of finding happiness with anyone else. I had the usual post-fifty fears, both superficial and complex, but, frankly, the real concern was over who in their right mind would take up with someone whose life is a three-ring circus? There is baggage and then there's -- well -- baggage. I'm not saying Sophie is baggage, but the world of disability is not for the faint of heart. Sophie's made me who I am. Carl has a massive heart, and I am filled to bursting with gratitude.

Runes and Ruin

Sunset, Pacific Ocean
December 2019

Vikings had only an oral culture. Eventually they used runes, which were a sort of alphabet.
Here are some common ones that I lifted off the World Wide Web:

 Name:Hagalaz, “hail.” Phoneme: H. Meaning: destruction, chaos.

 Name: Naudhiz, “need.” Phoneme: N. Meaning: need, unfulfilled desire.

 Name: Uruz, “aurochs.” Phoneme: U (long and/or short). Meaning: strength of will.

 Name: Thurisaz, “Giant.” Phoneme: Th (both soft and hard). Meaning: danger, suffering.

 Name: Ansuz, “an Aesir god.” Phoneme: A (long and/or short). Meaning: prosperity, vitality.

All the free men in Viking World would gather together to make laws and settle disputes without resorting to blood and violence. They called this meeting The Thing. Ever since I read Sigrid Undset's books in my early twenties, I've been fascinated by that name. The Thing.

I'm going to call what's happening between my ex and me The Thing from now on. So when I disappear from this space you'll know it's The Thing, and that there's been no blood and violence.

Anyway.

I went out on the wine dark sea yesterday with Carl. We saw one gray whale, about fifty dolphins and some sea birds. It was really cold and really beautiful. The sunset was incredible. The photo I put up there is blurry, but there's no filter on it, and don't you think that oil tanker could be a Viking ship? You see where I'm going, right?

I didn't walk around the boat much because earlier I had wrenched my foot while cleaning up my porch. I was wearing clogs and stepped on an uneven spot and stepped off the clog. The clog, rather, bruised the side of my foot. I have a bum knee as well on my left leg, so now I have a bum knee and a bum foot, and I'm walking weird. I feel heavy but not rooted. On the boat, though, I sat and swayed and rode the waves like a whale myself.


Reader, what are you doing?

Portals

I took 24 hours and left with Carl on Sunday morning for Ventura and a boat that took us to Santa Rosa Island, one of the remote, uninhabited Channel Islands. We spent the morning looking at whales and dolphins and the wide-open Pacific, the water choppy and sky overhead gray and moody. It took over two hours to get to the island, but once we were there, the skies opened up blue and we wandered around the fields and explored the deserted buildings of the ranch that had once displaced the native Americans who made the island their home. It was very beautiful.

No one lives on the island anymore, but some people brave its isolation and camp, and there are volunteers who stay to lead tours. Carl and I avoided the few people who had gotten off the boat and made our way alone down to a beach that might as well have been in some tropical paradise, such was its wildness and solitude.

I lay in the sand and read and dozed and we ate a bit of the food that we'd brought -- turkey, crackers, cheese, grapes and plums.

I tried to let everything go, everything.

to be grateful for love and companionship
for whales
for the ocean
for the souls that were banished from this place
for the sand and the breeze that bends
the poppies
for the wide world that still holds us up

the deep world

Super Nose

Guess what's in the bag?

My ex-husband once told me that he thought I was a super-taster or had a super-nose (he's a chef), but my kids always mock me when I ask, what's that smell? They think I'm prone to exaggeration in addition to being, possibly, the most annoying human on the planet. I don't want to make this post one of those kid-basher ones, filled with the cliches of teenagers and the insufferable arrogance of young adults (I am perfectly aware of my own insufferable young adulthood but shhhhhhh, don't tell my parents). I don't want to badmouth The Brothers because they are divine in many respects, but damn if they haven't been helpful or even supportive in the rat saga of this past week. Neither agreed to handle any trapped rats (my feminism comes to a screeching halt when it comes to dead rats in traps) and last Saturday, after the traps were set and lined up behind the stove and the microwave stand in the kitchen, and we all heard the most horrific clatter and then silence, no one stepped up to check it out. Well, Henry did actually come out of his room with a bat and Carl did shine his phone light behind the stove, but the only thing we saw was one of what we thought were five (this is a crucial hint) traps a little skewed. No rats, though, and everyone carried on their days and nights as if nothing was the matter, as if roof rats, flying through trees and into the attic and jumping from vents onto pot racks over stoves and nibbling beautiful pears and cherries and making their way into the dining room to feast on the bits and pieces of food that fall from the wheelchair and then making their way back to their home or nests in the Christmas decorations and vintage toys and suitcases and skittering all about were NO BIG DEAL, were a problem that would magically take care of itself because that's the way things went in their home with their mother lying about all day.










The days went by.












I think I smelled something a couple of days ago but was met with the usual derision and mockery. I don't smell anything, they said and then rolled their eyes or did what boys do when my back is turned. I'm annoying -- it's annoying -- when I twitch my nose and sniff.  Today was the day that The Rat Man was coming back to seal all the holes in the house where the rats were coming in and out. I planned my day around this event because The Brothers were busy. I imagine the gears in their adorable heads clicking, clicking, pondering. What does she do all day, anyway? Does she even exist outside of my supreme sphere? The Rat Man arrived on time, bless him, and began his work. He is a peculiar guy in the way that certain occupations command peculiar, but Reader, I love him. When I told him about the clattering episode and asked him to shine his light behind the stove, he complied and then I swear I saw his nose twitch and he said, I smell rat. I practically shouted, I SMELL SOMETHING, TOO! and then thought about jumping up and down in excitement (not about the rat but because having someone actually confirm my suspicions which means affirm my skills, my extremely honed intuitive senses, my super-nose, my infallibility, etc. etc. is everything in these late middle-aged times) but instead said nervously, Do you see that fifth trap a bit at a distance from the other four? And he got down on his knees and claimed that the smell was urine and then he said, no, it's rat, and where's the sixth tra -- and before he got out the p and just as I said, SIX? I thought there were only FIVE? he said, I got him! Do you have a plastic bag? and I ran and got him a plastic garbage bag and reverently shook it out and handed it to him and left the room.

We have one rat bagged and every little hole in this hundred year old house screened up and against them. I texted The Brothers and Carl the good news and included a bit of my own exultation over smelling something funny. No one has acknowledged this, of course, but Henry did text me back:

Re-entry from Mexico

I swam with whale sharks.

Carl and I drove from Todos Santos to La Paz where we took a boat with five other people into this beautiful lagoon. Our guide jumped in the water and signaled for us, so that's what we did. we jumped in the water and swam alongside whale sharks. It was an amazing experience -- these enormous creatures of the sea are not aggressive, and we swam alongside them (no touching) and just - well -- communed. I can't explain how it felt other than thrilling. Free. A little later, dolphins gathered around our boat, so we jumped in and swam with them, too!

It was sort of a religious experience overall, even for the non-religious.

On the way back to the harbor, a young humpback whale joined the dolphins and literally frolicked in the water right in front of us. He didn't completely breach, but he did slap the water and roll around and around. We did not join him in the water but rather watched in delight. Carl took some amazing photos, but you'll have to follow him on Instagram to check those out as he puts them up. His instagram is @mo_better_birds and @cbjphoto.com

The night before we headed back to southern California, Carl and I walked down the beach (never a soul on it but us!) from where we were staying to see whether the turtle eggs had hatched and would be released. Because we are just about the luckiest couple on the planet, they were, so we got to join in the most magical sort of ceremony. The Olive Ridley turtles (Golfina in Spanish) were protected under this tent on a remote stretch of sand about a half mile or so from where we were staying. The tent served as a sort of incubator and protection from predators, after the females lay their eggs and went back to the ocean. When the turtle eggs hatch, the volunteers release the little guys into the ocean. About thirty people gathered to watch about twelve of the tiniest little creatures you've ever seen make a break for the Pacific, a slow crawl through the sand and into the water. I have experienced this once before in South Carolina when many more turtles made their way to the ocean from nests along the dunes, and that was fantastic, but there was something magical and profound about seeing them walk into the pounding surf of Mexico. A turtle would reach the water and disappear as the tide pulled him out, but more often the huge waves would crash into the beach and fling the turtle back. She'd right herself and start the journey again. We stood in a line and watched them in the orange light until they were all gone. No one spoke. We all knew that once they made it to the ocean, their chances of survival are slim. The whole thing is both terrible and awe-inspiring.

Now we're back in southern California, and I'm struggling with re-entry. I'm not looking for sympathy, though, as I know how fortunate I am to have had this vacation. My dear friend, the angel Heather McHugh, made it happen. I feel rested and restored and hope to hold on to that feeling, but to be honest, I'm overwhelmed also by the ongoingness of my life, those things that are constant struggles. That fatigue isn't ever lessened. I am infused with the soft air and bright colors of Mexico, the delicious food and sweet people, the simplicity of all of it. I long to make my own life simpler, to hope for peace and wellness for Sophie, especially, but also to weather the transition into my sons' adulthood. I am deeply grateful for the love of a beautiful man.

On re-entry, though, I feel more like those turtles, plodding by instinct toward the implacable sea and ferocious waves with only the most infinitesimal chance to make it at all.