Palimpsest

You didn't think I'd just let things go, did you? Just as they always have, and do, they percolate, lay down in layers on top of one another, waiting to be urged into shape. Did you know that Rome is a city of layers, that about fifteen feet down are the remains of Late Antique Rome (between 1500 and 800 years old) and then another fifteen feet below that is another? And so on. That dermatologist with the Drumpf hair wanted a CAT scan of the skull, threw out diseases and words, mused, casual, and then he dismissed the giant hives as coincidence and prescribed the antihistamine with the green label with a shrug.  I nodded my head and asked intelligent questions, like I do, but he disappeared in a puff of dander in my mind. You didn't think I'd let it go, did you? I lay down on the bed for hours as the words lay down in layers, waiting to be urged into shape. I feel the urge. Otherwise I'd go mad, not be mad but go mad. Go.

I read a free article in Esquire today about an epileptic man, Henry, who was rendered an amnesiac in the 1950s, after an esteemed neurosurgeon basically fucked up the surgery. Stripped his memory with knife. I read this on my phone while sitting in the car at a Valvoline and a woman with dreads poked around in the car's netherparts. I'd call that a coincidence -- both the fact that of all the things on the internets that I'd click on to read was a story about an epileptic (named Henry) and that my car's netherparts were being explored -- but I'm not like the dermatologist or even the neurologist who prefers the empirical. I'm more inclined to believe that there are no accidents. Plus -- you know -- those layers. The author of the article was the grandson of the neurosurgeon. Henry's brain, though fucked up by the establishment, proved to be incredibly useful over the years, providing us with a wealth of information about the brain. Henry himself, the profound amnesiac, retained the memory of the surgeon who'd taken his memory, though, and whenever he'd get stubborn, let's say, about taking his medication, all They'd (it's always They) have to invoke was the doctor's name, his authority, and Henry would comply. Even after the surgeon was dead and Henry sat for hours doing crossword puzzles in a chair at the home where he'd lived ever since, the once upon a time.

I am as far from stripped of memory as Henry was stripped. Those layers.

Remember the layers. The latest ones laid over six days in the hospital. Lying for six hours the day after we returned home, waiting for words.

I am a reluctant ringleader in the circus, whipping my lariat around, one hand on my crop. There are the clowns in the car, spilling out, so many of them. A distraction. That beautiful woman on the rope above -- her balance and daring! -- is me as well, an alter-ego to be sure, her daring my dissociation. Even tigers are tamed in the ring, but they return to cages, crunch on bloody flesh. So it's all illusory -- the entertainment. Why always my urge to flee? Sophie, under my arm to some distant place. Something like the Chinese mountain scene I copied in watercolor for a high school art class. The drifting narrow clouds over peaks, the gentleness and peace of it. We're always digging holes to China.

Did you think I would rest here in some new-found wisdom borne of experience, that the razor isn't as sharp, my whip as precise? Some of us struggle and reconcile.  I struggle and resist. Sophie's eyes and everything in them. We are unwitting Bodhisattvas.

pal·imp·sest

ˈpaləm(p)ˌsest/

noun

1. a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

   • something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.

     
     

The Phoenix and the Ashes

Someone has recovered quite robustly from oral surgery, and it ain't me.

Still Here, My Dears

Withdrawal

That's a weird shot, isn't it? I was trying to get a picture of us together when Sophie suddenly head-butt me really hard. It brought tears to my eyes, but it didn't seem to bother her. I suppose she has a high pain threshold what with all the goings on in her brain. My entire scalp is always so sensitive which, Dr. Jin tells me, is too much heat, and now I have a sore spot. Other than that, though, Sophie's had a decent day with no seizures to speak of, fewer tremors and jerks that I believe are withdrawal symptoms. Sometimes I put my hand on her right arm and gently squeeze it, and I swear I can feel an electric pulse running down her arm and into her hand. I wonder if she feels agitated by that, if it drives her crazy, if butting someone's head is a pain that distracts from a greater one.

Happy Father's Day

I love you, Dad.

Sunday

I'll love you dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the

river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

W.H. Auden

Straight into my arms

I can't shake the feeling that Sophie is sad right now, her big dark eyes implore me to -- what? Do something? Be something? Stop something? Or is she me, me her, big dark eyes -- what? Do something? Be something? Stop something?

Listen:

You Crawled Out of the Sea

Sophie and I

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

Ray Bradbury 

Just a hairbeat away,

from breaking mine.

My Favorite Ridiculous Self-portrait
Palm Springs, 2011

Any idiot can face a crisis; it's day-to-day living

that wears you out.

Anton Chekov

What's given and what's handled

Is the ability to hold two opposing feelings and/or thoughts something that one is graced with or something that comes with time and experience and exposure? I don't know the answer, but I see it all the time in those who share the experience of caring for a child with disabilities or who have lost a child to illness. I can look at Sophie and grieve for the loss of "normalcy," but I can also exult in her being exactly the way she is. I can sorrow over the absurdity of changing a near-seventeen year old's diapers and marvel at the gift of intimacy that entails. My friend Jody's beautiful daughter Lueza suffered from severe cerebral palsy due to gross medical malpractice when she was born, and she died unexpectedly nearly a year ago at the age of sixteen, but Jody told me the other day that it was such an honor to have cared for her daughter so intimately for so many years. I'm not talking here about all that unconditional love blather, although trite expressions are trite for a reason. I'm heading toward an understanding of openness -- of what it means to be truly open to experience, to the relinquishment of false notions of power and control, to, dare I say it, Love. I wouldn't be able to live, one person might say, hearing of the death of someone's child.  I could never do what you do, another says, I just couldn't handle it. 

Contrary to what some might say, we're not given what we can handle. We're opening to handle what we're given.

Extreme Parenting and Teeth Brushing

Migrant Mother (Florence Owens), California
photographed by Dorothea Lange

After my shower this morning, and while I brushed my teeth, I started thinking about parenting. My father sent me and my sisters the article about how French parents are better parents, and I read it with a sigh and then deleted it. I saw it pop up on Facebook and then on blogs and now it's a book or something and everyone is talking about it and it's making a million dollars while legions of American parents, mainly mothers, are debating again whether they're doing it right or doing it wrong. I'm going out on a limb this morning to say that these debates bore me to no end, in the same way that I'm bored by the agonizing over breast-feeding or Tiger mother parenting or working mothers versus non-working mothers and all the rest of it. I'll admit to possessing one of the ultimate trump cards (parenting a disabled child which makes nearly every other kind of parenting sort of a walk in the park, as they say), but I'll also admit that my parenting Sophie is a walk in the park compared to the parenting of the Sophies of Bangladesh, perhaps, or the myriad children all over this country and the world that are far sicker or more involved, and while I know it's all relevant, in some ways it's not. There's perspective for one, and my belief that it's my responsibility to have some. Do I begrudge the writing of another blockbuster book about the parenting tribulations of the upper classes? Am I jealous? These are the things I thought about as I paid special attention to my back molars, dreading the visit to the dentist on Monday and the tut-tutting of the hygienist when she asks whether I've flossed since my last visit. I started thinking about the self-esteem wars -- important for our children to have it or not important? -- and that led to the giving out of trophies for nearly everything and how that sends some parents into a parenting tizzy. What are the repercussions of a child receiving a trophy when he's an abysmal athlete?  That thought segued into my own son Oliver's collection of trophies, half of which are not his, but which he acquired at a yard sale down the street when an unfortunate married couple went through a terrible divorce and divested themselves of nearly everything they owned. You can read about that here. I have one of those electric toothbrushes that buzzes and changes subtly every thirty seconds and while I usually only brush for 23 or so seconds, today with all this heavy thought, I got to the two minute mark and was awarded with an extended vibration and a smiley face on the panel. I thought about that, too, and how here in America, the U, S of A, we're given pats on the back for brushing our teeth for two minutes.

Self-portrait

Notes

Pablo Picasso: Woman with a Crow, 1904

-- the kind of day where you pull into the school parking lot after muesli and seizures and loud humming, irritated by the dog-sized crows on chicken feet slapping across the pavement, and a tired brown Christmas swag with a dirty red ribbon on the back windshield of a car. Why can't they take that off the car? you wonder, reaching in your mind for the slingshot that will knock that hopping bird from his arrogant path.

Thank You

for your kind and supportive comments on my last post.

Today was shaping up to be the day that I didn't post for the first time in more than a year. I just didn't feel like it. I felt dry. I felt old. I felt sick of myself.

But here I am, filled with gratitude.

And a dogged sense of humor.

Saturday

It began to rain in the early hours last night, and I woke abruptly at the drip, drip, drip from the metal awning over the steps that lie at my back door. I sat up, completely awake, got out of bed and grabbed the flashlight that I keep by the side of my bed in case there's an earthquake. I put on my clogs and opened the door, walked outside through the drips and to the timer for the sprinkler system. I shut it off, thinking about possums, whether they stay away when it's raining and where they stay if they do. I also thought about the water saved and the money saved by my vigilance in turning it off and then rolled my eyes at myself for thinking these thoughts at four am. When I went inside, I forgot to dash through the drip and was soaked so I pulled off my pajama top and put on another and got back into bed wondering how it was possible to wake so suddenly and think about so many trivial things. It sort of scared me and sort of disgusted me, too. So much for remembering convoluted dreams or feeling hazy and sexy and stretching contentedly. I wonder whether all the stress and thinking works to dull down the subconscious. I think of the days when I waited tables, and my nights were filled with weird and wonderful dreams of minutia -- tables filled with red wine glasses, only a tiny bit in each one, all needing to be cleared in that instant, fish that coiled up off of plates and into customers' laps, endless back and forths with undercooked steaks, yapping mouths and tiny plastic ketchup containers. Now when I wake it's wondering whether they'll play lacrosse in the rain (yes) and how much, exactly, is saved when the sprinklers don't come on.

Too Much Information

Virgo the Virgin

I'm generally not a blogger that reveals anything about sex (I'm a virgin), marriage (I've had two) or incontinence. Yesterday, though, in a torrent of words, if not creativity, I revealed that I had wet my pants -- a tiny bit -- two times in one day in the parking lot of the Grove, our large Disneyfied outdoor mall. I want to assure my more decorous readers that I've not jumped a line and will now start writing about my private parts with any regularity. But I wanted to clarify several things.

• I've had three cesarean sections (immaculate conception, since I'm a virgin, see above), so I can't blame my incontinence on that (in fact, given my virginity, things are -- well -- as tight as a drum)
• I have a tendency to idiotically not go to the bathroom when I need to go. There's that moment when you absolutely have to go, but if you can steel yourself and hold on (and you're still a virgin), that moment passes. The trouble with this technique is that it doesn't account for one hour of wandering around a large parking lot. The moment passed yesterday, and then it came again -- in other words.
• Given the above (the three cesareans, the fact that I'm a virgin and things are intact, and that sometimes I idiotically think myself a camel), I'd say that I don't really need the Poise pads. What I might consider, though, is wearing some Maximum Absorbency Garments (MAGS), a la astronaut style.

Consider that the only too much information post you'll get for quite some time. Now I'm back to my regular programming.

What my kids aren't too old to hear:

I see you when you're sleeping.
I know when you're awake.
I know when you've been bad or good
So be good, for goodness sake.

I've been honored

over at my friend Gretchen's blog Second Blooming. I'm a tad embarrassed, but not enough to not direct you over to Gretchen, because she's a terrific blogger and writer -- warm and funny and full of southern charm and awesome family stories. There are not too many people who will praise me and then call me to task on my more -- ahem -- colorful characteristics, but Gretchen has done it very well.

Now I'm off to sharpen my tongue.

Raindrops like Stars

I sat here this morning as the light fell in slanted and shadowed with a cup of coffee and silence. Everyone else was sleeping. I pulled a book off the shelf and started reading it -- a book that someone sent me long ago that I would say falls into the Christian literature genre -- maybe even Christian self-help. It's by Rob Bell and called Drops Like Stars. I had shelved the book when I got it, after a quick and cursory look-through, lots of pain and suffering, the man on the cross, the agony, etc. Lots of inspiration. But this morning, I opened it halfway through and started reading it, only a few words on a page.

So in the end of every major disaster, every tiny error,every wrong turning, every fragment of discarded clay, all the blood, sweat and tears -- everything has meaning. I give it meaning. I reuse, reshape, recast all that goes wrong so that in the end nothing is wasted and nothing is without significance and nothing ceases to be precious to me. (the character Harriet March, a sculptor in a novel by Susan Howatch)

My coffee steamed in my face as I read on, illuminated by chance.