Merry Christmas Eve

Oliver got a tattoo.

It's Sophie's birthdate in Roman numerals. As he said, "Now we each have a tattoo for Sophie."

I have a mermaid, Henry has a bit of Sophie's brainwaves from an EEG and now Oliver has her birthday.

Merry Christmas Eve!

Sunday Night

Homeless Encampment, La Brea Blvd., just south of Olympic
Los Angeles, 2016

Sophie's not doing too well, again. I'm not sure what's going on or when it's going to turn or even if it's going to turn. It's not so much seizures (although they're persistent) but more her overall well-being. This feeling I get when I spoon food in her mouth and she's working so hard to chew it. Or maybe she's not working at all. The way her juice comes out the corners of her mouth and drips down her arm. I imagine the sensors in her mouth dulled, struck by lightning, over and over. Some food falls out of her mouth and down the bib and I look away. I have been watching the suffering for a long time. She has been suffering for a long time. I'm not sure whether she actually is suffering or whether I am suffering doing the watching. The lines between us are blurred. I realize that's fucked up. Mea culpa. I forget to abide. I'm not sure when those questions when will it get better? will I figure it out? is it this? is it that? will she know? what should I do? will he know? stopped rising out of my brain. Perhaps I stopped feeding them the yeast of discontent and doggedness. The line between resignation and acceptance is thin and bloody. My tears are still clear. It's all pretty mighty and terrible. Terrible in the Biblical sense. Like awesome. Everything unleavened.

The only thing is to Be Here Now.


Today, my friend Melissa stopped by with her husband Marc. I haven't seen them in ages or even talked to her in while. I had been sitting in Sophie's room, reading a book while she slept fitfully, loaded up with rectal Valium. I'd been crying. A lot. Melissa texted me from outside, so I went out there and gave her a hug. She gave me a tiny silver medallion with a mermaid on it. She had no idea I'd had such a morning, that Sophie had had such a morning. Yet she was there with a mermaid charm. Everything lifted. Poof.

I read this somewhere:

You are my compass
I'm perpetually lost




I love this:

Mermaids and Flying Panthers

My friend Allison Ray Benevides and her husband Rob own this amazing tattoo place in San Diego called Flying Panther. I drove down on Saturday afternoon and into a world that I really have never experienced.

So much beautiful art on the walls and on the bodies of those working. Here's Sue:

Do you feel a little shaky? Do you have a presentiment?

Art by Rob Benevides

Do you remember what I was going to do by my 50th birthday?

That's me and Allison. I can assure you that I had already downed not one but two shots of straight vodka and thus look a bit bleary, but in real life, I swear my head isn't that big nor hers that small.

Why the vodka?

Whose arm is Sue gripping?

Take a break, Sue says, it hurts the most when you're close to the artery.

So, yes. I finally got my mermaid tattoo. That smile is a gritty one because it hurt a bit, but I did a whole lot of deep breathing, reminded myself of three childbirths and that time in ninth grade when I had a whole lot of packing in my nose after surgery and had to have it pulled out, and then -- to tell you the truth -- the pain felt sort of exhilarating.  I understand that there's a rushy kind of feeling while being tattooed and afterward, and it's distinct from the buzz of alcohol. I felt it.

Lest you think I've gone completely mad given the circumstances, I'll remind you that I'm 52 years old and have wanted to do this well before I was firmly middle-aged. So, I'm only partly a cliche. Still, it's a radical departure from the me that is me. Next thing you know, I'll be running in the Los Angeles marathon, swearing off pastries, vaping weed and avidly reading those books about the different shades of grey.

Well, maybe all of it except the marathon.

An Incongruous Mermaid***

I started Early - Took my Dog -
And visited the Sea -
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me -

And Frigates - in the Upper floor
Extended Hempen Hands -
Presuming Me to be a Mouse -
Aground - upon the Sands

But no Man moved Me - till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe -
And past my Apron - and my Belt
And past my Bodice - too -

And made as He would eat me up -
As wholly as a Dew
Upon a Dandelion's Sleeve -
And then - I started - too -

And He - He followed - close behind -
I felt His Silver Heel
Upon my Ankle - Then my Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl -

Until We met the Solid Town -
No One He seemed to know -
And bowing - with a Mighty look -
At me - The Sea withdrew

Emily Dickinson, c. 1862




***I posted this years ago, and I just love it so I'm posting it again.

Saturday Night Mermaids

woodcut by Jose Luis Borges

I really don't have much to post tonight, but I needed to post the above piece of art that Angella sent me via email. She said that it evidently hangs in the International Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe. It looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't put my finger on it until I realized that J Borges, the artist, is Jose Francisco Borges, whose woodcuts illustrate this amazing book called Walking Words by Eduardo Galeano that I've owned for some years and periodically dipped into to marvel at and exclaim over. Here's a snippet:

Windows on the Sea

It's not fixed in one spot. The fate of mountains and trees lies in the
roots, but the sea, like us, is condemned to a wandering life.
   Sailors at heart: we men of the coast, are made of sea as well as
earth. And we know it well, even if we're unaware of it when we
navigate the waves of city streets from cafe to cafe, and travel through
the mist toward the port or shipwreck that awaits us tonight.


Here's another one:

Window on a Woman (III)

No one could kill that time, no one: not even ourselves. I mean: as
long as you are, wherever you are, or as long as I am.
   The calendar says that that time, that short time, no longer exists;
but tonight my naked body is oozing with you.

Swimming Across the Sea

I had nothing to write about today until now, when I opened the mail. I got a package from the United Kingdom, and nestled like a Matryoshka doll in ever smaller packaging and wrapping, I discovered this beautiful silver mermaid pin with a tiny pearl.

Where have you swum from, beautiful mermaid?

Thank you, lovely person from lands far away. This is a beautiful gift, a real treasure from the sea.

Thank you.

Mermaids, Emily Bronte, Winter Solstice, and Cannabidiol

via Mermaid Musings

Yesterday, Sophie and I visited a new doctor who will be guiding us as we continue to give Sophie the CBD. I haven't mentioned it, but last Sunday at a Realm of Caring - California informational meeting, the powers-that-be announced that the first twenty people on the waiting list would finally get Charlotte's Web. Sophie was one of them. I should put an exclamation point on the end of that sentence. Sophie is one of them! Maybe two or three. Sophie is one of them!! Since I wasn't at the meeting, I don't yet have the product in hand, but we're ready to go for sure, now, and the doctor we visited was fantastic (no Charles Dickens character like the one described here). The Charlotte's Web from the recent California harvest is a 51:1 proportion of CBD/THC, and we will be getting it this weekend. The doctor patiently went through the science of cannabis and cannabidiols and cannabidiol receptors in the brain, and while flickers of anger flared up in my primitive brain (why the hell isn't this a treatment BEFORE anti-epileptic drugs), and flickers of despair in my evolved one (what would have been the outcome if Sophie were given this nineteen years ago?), I was grateful to be sitting in that seat in that office in that city at that specific time, Sophie next to me, humming and making good eye contact with the doctor, perhaps holding shells to her ear in her mind, the ocean's vast whoosh, her tail's swish.

We're nearing the winter solstice, and even Los Angeles' days are shorter and darker. My mood has been low of late, but I shake it off, whoosh, swish.  As the great Emily B. said,  I will not, cannot go.

The night is darkening round me

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow;
The storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.

Emily Bronte

Writing and Gifts from Old Friends and Sisters

I started meeting once a week for a few hours with a group of writers. It's not a workshop group but, rather, a real writing group. We really write. At the beginning, we sit down and chit chat for a few minutes, catch each other up, briefly, on what's happening. Then one person tears up a few strips of paper and we each grab one or two. We write down phrases or words, anything that comes to mind and can be used as a prompt. Then someone picks up a piece of paper, opens it and reads it aloud. Then we write -- the first prompt is for five minutes, the second is for ten minutes, then it's fifteen and then back to five minutes. When the buzzer goes off, we stop typing or writing and read aloud what we've written. We don't comment, except to sigh or smile or laugh or draw our breaths in. Then we're on to the next. We follow in a specific order -- whoever opens the prompt and reads it aloud is the first to read aloud what she's written. Then we go counter-clockwise. It works. This is so good, you writers out there -- so good and so inspiring in the way that writers need to be inspired. You just start with something, anything, and then you write. I've always thought there's way too much discussion about writing in general -- about how difficult it is, about whether or not you're good enough, about the anxieties and insecurities of The Writer. Lately, I've noticed a whole lot of hullabaloo about writing for free on the internet, how resentful "writers" are when they're asked to write online and not get reimbursed. My opinion is that there haven't been too many writers in history that got paid enough money to support themselves and that if you're a writer, you'll just write, whenever and however you can. If you're getting paid and can support yourself, I envy you. If not, get a job, but don't stop writing.

Here are the prompts from a week or so ago:

1. My skeleton
2. Blood-shot eyes
3. A Sense of place
4. The Rain They Say is Coming

This week, I got a spark of a short story from the prompt It Goes Like This. Think a man, tattoos, a bald head, the goods, the threat of a cult, Jesus freaks and the slippery slope of desire -- that's what I wrote about for five minutes.

When I got home this afternoon from the usual driving around the city, I had a pile of mail, including two mysterious packages. One was for Sophie, and when I opened it up I saw that it was from one of my oldest and dearest friends with whom I backpacked through Europe in the Let's Go Europe! days. Do you remember those? This beautiful, brilliant woman sent that mermaid to Sophie, and I'm taking it as a token of luck. Sophie did really well today, too, but who's noticing? The other gift was from my funny sister Melissa. She sent me a Ryan Gosling coloring book. She knows me all too well. Henry and Oliver took one look at the gifts and rolled their eyes. Are you really going to color that? Henry asked. I told him that I imagine it will be enormously relaxing to sit and color in Ryan Gosling's lines. You'd think I was stoned, but I'm not. I'm CBD'd excited.

Poetry In Lieu

Hilton Head Island, 2010

A Recovered Memory of Water

Sometimes when the mermaid's daughter
is in the bathroom
cleaning her teeth with a thick brush
and baking soda
she has the sense the room is filling
with water.

It starts at her feet and ankles
and slides further and further up
over her thighs and hips and waist.
In no time
it's up to her oxters.
She bends down into it to pick up
handtowels and washcloths and all such things
as are sodden with it.
They all look like seaweed --
like those long strands of kelp that used to be called
'mermaid-hair' or 'foxtail'.
Just as suddenly the water recedes
and in no time
the room's completely dry again.

A terrible sense of stress
is part and parcel of these emotions.
At the end of the day she has nothing else
to compare it to.
She doesn't have the vocabulary for any of it.
At her weekly therapy session
she has more than enough to be going with
just to describe this strange phenomenon
and to express it properly
to the psychiatrist.

She doesn't have the terminology
or any of the points of reference
or any word at all that would give the slightest suggestion
as to what water might be.
'A transparent liquid,' she says, doing as best she can.
'Right,' says the therapist, 'keep going.'
He coaxes and cajoles her towards word-making.
She has another run at it.
'A thin flow,' she calls it,
casting about gingerly in the midst of words.
'A shiny film. Dripping stuff. Something wet.'

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, from The Fifty Minute Mermaid
translated by Paul Muldoon

Birthday Tattoo Call

My birthday is in a little over a week, and I plan on getting my first (and probably, last) tattoo. I think a small, simple mermaid on the inside of my left wrist is what I'd like, but I'm not sure if it should be black and white or colored or a bit of both. The sketch above is by an artist friend of mine who used it for a birthday card for Sophie a while back -- I like the simple lines and elegance (minus the flower, of course) and even the tiny bit of green and red. What do you think?

What about this one?

Ideas? Send me links!

Magical Realism

Sophie went back to school on Tuesday morning. I took her to the beach on Monday night as a sort of parting gift to summer. Sophie loves the beach, as you know, and when I let go of her hand, she walks straight for the water. I always think of mermaids and selkies when I see her pulled toward the ocean. I wonder if her discomfort on land, her life of struggle and seizures, is because she isn't where she's supposed to be. I like to think that Sophie breaks the rules of our "real" world. When I watch her awkward, labored gait, her tiny, inflexible feet, and her head tilted to the right, her eyes on the horizon as she makes a bee-line for the edge, I like to think that she might one day slip back into her natural sinuous self, greens and blues and grays, tendrils of hair, an effortless push off into ease and cool oblivion.

My Half Century Plan

via apartment therapy

So, in exactly one month, I'll be fifty years old. I love a birthday, mine included. I'm decidedly not the no gifts, please girl. So. This is what I want for my birthday:

1. Two weeks in the above little house on the Isle of Wight.
2. A trip to County Sligo, along the paths that Yeats walked 
3. A paddle board lesson in a slimming wet-suit with a cute surfer guy of any age
4. A tiny, perfect mermaid tattoo on my left inner wrist
5. A car tour through Badlands National Park, perhaps tripping on a tiny amount of an hallucinogenic

Reader, don't you wonder which of these I'll do?

How We Do It: Part XXIX in a series***

I'm lying next to Sophie in her room. The sun is going down, and we're watching the light dim through the palm fronds that hang outside her window. They need to come down, but they'll cling there, dry and brown, rustling, until some wind makes it too much. When they fall, they crash. Husks are not supple. Sophie's seizures are elemental like that. They come, errant, and they stop. Dry palms, then clammy, then dry again. A glass mermaid hangs from a paper mâché elephant trunk, and a line-up of Japanese dolls look on. Pillows and rolled up blankets and a thick carpet cushion the fall. Bill Callahan is singing about too many birds. If you could only, if you could only, if you could only stop. If you could only, if you could only, if you could only stop your. If you could only, if you could only, if you could only stop your heart. If you could only stop your heart beat, if you could only stop your heart beat, if you could only stop your heart beat for one heart. If you could only stop your heart beat for one heart beat. Sophie and I are lying here on the purple bedspread, our arms entwined. I'll remember this, the rustling palms, the dry, small palm of her hand, mermaids floating and too many birds.

One more bird, one last bird, and another.






**inspired by Bill Callahan's Too Many Birds which you can listen to by clicking on the title

Redolent of the Sea

A Tiny Clue

You could spend your entire life
eavesdropping on the mermaid
before you'd pickup the tiniest little clue
about where she was really from. One autumn day
    I happened upon
her and her child
while she was comforting it under her shawl,

'You are not the blue-green pup of the seal.
You are not the grey chick of the greater black-backed gull.
You are not that kit of the otter. Nor are you
the calf of the slender hornless cow.'

This was the lullaby she was singing
but she stopped short
immediately she realized
someone else was in the neighborhood.

I had the distinct sense she was embarrassed
I'd overheard her in the first place.
I also came away with the impression
the lullaby was, to put it mildly, redolent of the sea.

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, from The Fifty Minute Mermaid, translated by Paul Muldoon

Morning mermaid

Mermaids lie in sun slants when you sleep in Sophie's light-soaked bedroom. It's something you haven't ever noticed, tossing and turning, your own bed out of reach. May the long time sun shine upon you. All love surround you. And the pure light within you, guide your way on.

Team Sophie the Mermaid and the Epilepsy Run/Walk

After a year-long sabbatical where I wanted nothing to do with epilepsy and raising money to end epilepsy, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps (Republicans, love me!) and signed up to be Team Captain for this year's End Epilepsy Walk/Run. I'm forming my team now -- and some of you have already gotten notified and have generously donated -- but I'll provide links to it at a later date.

Today, I want to highlight one of my dearest blogger friends, artist Kim from Art in Red Wagons and Words On Paper Scraps. Kim has graciously created a special section in her etsy shop called Team Sophie and is donating a portion of her proceeds to our cause!

If you haven't visited Kim before and want to see some extraordinary drawing, painting and crafting, as well as beautiful writing and over-the-top gorgeous photography of the Pacific Northwest, you need to hop on over there. If you're so inclined, purchase one of those darling shells with the mermaids, keep it in your purse or pocket and help Sophie and all those like her.

Here's the link to the shop:  Etsy Team Sophie
Here's the link to join our team and/or make a donation:

Mermaid Sand Sculpture**

A Tiny Clue

You could spend your entire life
eavesdropping on the mermaid
before you'd pick up the tiniest little clue
about where she was really from. One autumn day
    I happened upon
her and her child
while she was comforting it under her shawl.

'You are not the blue-green pup of the seal.
You are not the grey chick of the greater black-backed gull.
You are not the kit of the otter. Nor are you
the calf of the slender hornless cow.'

This was the lullaby she was singing
but she stopped short
immediately she realized
someone else was in the neighborhood.

I had the distinct sense she was embarrassed
I'd overheard her in the first place
I also came away with the impression
the lullaby was, to put it mildly, redolent of the sea.

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, from The Fifty Minute Mermaid
translated from the Irish by Paul Muldoon

**Thank you to Karen Gerstenberger for thinking of Sophie and sending me the photo of the sand sculpted mermaid -- isn't it fantastic? For those of you who don't know about our fascination and love of mermaids and selkies, you can read this and this.