Anything Can Happen*

Anything Can Happen

After Horace, Odes, I, 34

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky.. It shook the earth
and the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
the winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleading on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle lid.
Capstones shift. Nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

Seamus Heaney
1939-2013








*Thank you, Yvonne W.

Incantation

Oliver, my darling number three

... isn't that the conceit of mothers -- that we conceal our youth and exist only for our children? It is the province of mothers to preserve the myth that we are unburdened with our own problems. Placed in a circle of immunity, we carry only the crises of those we love. We mask our needs as the needs of others. If ever there was a story without a shadow, it would be this: that we as women exist in direct sunlight only.

When women were birds, we knew otherwise. We knew our greatest freedom was in taking flight at night, when we could steal the heavenly darkness for ourselves, navigating through the intelligence of stars and the constellations of our own making in the delight and terror of our uncertainty. 

What my mother wanted to do and what she was able to do remains her secret.

We all have our secrets. I hold mine. To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.

from Terry Tempest Williams' When Women Were Birds

I go back, over and over, to verses of poems and passages in novels and memoir that speak to me in the timeless way of touchstones. I've posted the above passage before, but it came back to me this morning when the border between yesterday and now was still blurry. When Sophie seizes, we say, over and over, It's okay. It's okay. It's okay. I say it as incantation, waiting for the seizure to stop, and then I gather her up in my arms and sit with her curled in my lap much as she might have lain when inside me more than twenty years ago. My softness envelops her but doesn't suffocate. I imagine it holds everything. Just like all paradox that we learn to hold as mothers of these children, inherent in that simple phrase it's okay, it's okay, it's okay is  holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. Acceptance and anger. Despair and peace. Wonder and disbelief. A long time ago my father gave me a check to put toward some treatment or another for Sophie that I've long since forgotten. He wrapped the check in a small piece of paper that I've kept folded in a little bag in my purse that holds other tokens and charms -- a sort of nest that I've woven and sit in, come back to, over and over. There's a New York City subway token, a small rock that Henry picked up on a nature trail overlooking Malibu and proudly gave to me, a cheap, beaded bracelet that Oliver made in preschool and the silver clip and pale pink ribbon that held Sophie's first and only pacifier, the one she spit out soon after steroids were injected into her body, her screams began and then were silenced, forever. She's never had words. The piece of paper that my father wrapped his money in and gave to me is smudged and soft and creased, the fine script barely discernible, words faded. It says, This is going to work. It's okay. His words. It's okay, it's okay, it's okay. The recent spat with the developer over felled trees, the admonition to be silent, to be less angry, less righteous, less expressive. Their words. To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is power. And yes, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. And it's okay, it's okay, it's okay.

 

 

 

Sunning with Smiles

Casting a long, thin shadow
Rooftop, ArcLight Cinemas, Los Angeles

I was called out by Anonymous yesterday who observed that I'm often angry (mea culpa) and that my particular anger isn't the right kind. He said, I'm frequently angry, righteously angry, smarter than you angry and superior angry. He did compliment my writing, though, so there's that. I'm going to take this comment to heart and work on being -- well -- rarely angry, unrighteously angry, stupider than you angry and inferior to you angry. But angry, all the same.

Here are three poems:

A Poison Tree

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine.
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree. 

William Blake

When Ecstasy is Inconvenient

Feign a great calm;
all gay transport soon ends.
Chant: who knows --
flight's end or flight's beginning
for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.
Say there is money but it rusted;
say the time of moon is not right for escape.
It's the color in the lower sky
too broadly suffused,
or even the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands
and keeps it.

Lorine Neidecker


Spellbound

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.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

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

Emily Bronte

How to Avoid Everything, Part 2

1. Continue to go back and forth with The McMansion Developer in countless emails, listening to him mansplaining and condescending to you before finally realizing that he's not accustomed to a vocal female because of his religious persuasion. When he tells you that world hunger and war are more important things to feel sad about than trees and a peaceful home, thank him for the reminder and then add my daughter's refractory seizures and caregiving to his list. Then read how sorry he is to hear this, how he will pray to God for my children and that I will have the strength to take care of them so just say Bless his heart in your tiny, little mother mind™ and avoid everything.

2. Appease your mounting anxieties about how many books there are to be read by downloading a ridiculous number of them on your Kindle and staring down the hardbacks you have yet to crack on your bedside table, the floor, the shelves -- and then avoid everything.

3. Pull the blinds down in your own room to shield your view of the McMansion workers on the second story of their construction.

4. Read a bunch of poems about nature, love and sex, again, by Jack Gilbert.

5. Stay in bed sipping coffee and feel grateful that you have such good and funny friends.

6. Hang a pretty scarf over the boys' window despite their protestations instead of ordering the new blinds for them since the old ones broke five years ago.

7. Count on the universe to come through.

8. Pray to God that world hunger and war will stop, that epilepsy will as well and that you will continue to be a kick-ass caregiver. Then go demo a house, cut down some old trees, build an enormous mansion, sell it for $3 million and praise His Name. If it's His will, that is.

9. Get the whole bullshit exchange with the developer out of your system by writing incessantly about it and him and Him but realize that you are, in the end, an ineffectual woman with a big mouth who is no match for capitalism, progress and -- well -- God.

10. Accept this, humbly.

11. Accept this humbly, but get your sons to emerge from their room, attach speakers to their various devices and blast the Soviet Republic's national anthem toward the McMansion during an open house. Bribe them with a promise that you will order those new blinds ASAP.



(thank you, my friend who's actually an immigrant from a former Soviet Republic who posted this on my Facebook page)

Speaking of Russians (see yesterday's post)

This morning, Oliver screamed for me to come and look because the workers who have been constructing a McMansion directly behind our home were cutting down the old trees that lined our property. These trees are on their side of the property line, so they are certainly free to do whatever they'd like, but several months ago, when I'd objected to them cutting down those that line OUR property. the developer assured me that he would let me know when any more tree-cutting would happen.

I wrote him an email that expressed my dismay and called him out on his lack of communication and disregard for our community. He replied with his own email, calling me nasty and antagonistic.

Okay.

Like the proverbial fly to shit, I replied and disagreed that I'd been nasty and antagonistic, that I'd only expressed my dismay that he'd neglected to inform me when he was going to cut down the old trees and that I was concerned about the lack of privacy that would result.

The developer -- let's call him Mr. Potter, shall we -- then had a mini-tirade and, in a nutshell, called me a communist seeking to dictate what sort of changes he should make to his property. Because, you know -- communists do love trees.

Buzz, buzz, buzz. 

I told Mr. Potter that if discussion with members of one's community about radical changes to one's neighborhood constituted communism, then I was a proud member. I signed the email:

товарищ Элизабет

I really did.*

Then I said, Mr. Potter, you're nothing but a scurvy little spider. **

Not really.

Then I riffled through my Barbie closet for this little green communist cap with the red star that one of my roomates in college brought back from Communist China for me many years ago. I thought it'd be fun to parade around in my backyard naked with only the cap and perhaps scare the workers from continuing their work on the second story of the McMansion. I'll come up with a system to do the same when the McMansion goes up for sale. Mr. Potter will have to come up with some kind of disclosure to the future owners of the $3 million dollar heap (yes, that's how much these houses cost and are TRIPLE the size of ours) that a Naked Communist Woman lives directly behind them, and she's closer in form to a Russian gulag operator than Madame Butterfly.






That lonely outpost on the Arctic Circle is looking ever more attractive. I hope Slava will welcome my children and goofy dog as well.















* That's Russian for Comrade Elizabeth


** I'm referring to George Bailey calling Mr. Potter that in It's a Wonderful Life

I Wonder if Slava is Looking for a Room-mate

Photographer: Evgenia Arbugaeva

Slava Korotki is described as the most cut-off man in the universe. Except for the  problem (for me) of the extreme northern position of his home on the edge of Russia and the Arctic, and those frightfully short winter days, I've a hankering to join him. I thought about it even as I dragged myself to Trader Joe's today and joined the literal throngs of people waiting in line to buy stuff. I imagine I could make a pretty decent matchstick house or two, maybe a castle or one of those lonely wooden towers that Van Morrison crooned of in Purple Heather. You can't go anywhere in Los Angeles, and I mean anywhere, without seeing some of the most destitute people living on the streets, under bridges, in shopping cart villages. The other day, as I pulled out of a gas station and waited at a light, I found myself staring at a man trying to light a match to the contents of a tin can. It was the first chilly morning in forever, my car sat idling. At home, a house rich in the accoutrements of 2015, the buzz of workers creating a drought-tolerant landscape, a saint who helps to tend Sophie yet is desperate for more work.  I closed my eyes and imagined myself stopping the car, stepping out, closing the door behind me and oblivious to the honks and shouts of the others, walking toward him, abiding there. City of Angels. Slava is a weatherman, and according to the woman who wrote the article, he  doesn’t have a sense of self the way most people do. It’s as if he were the wind, or the weather itself.

Making the Vague Bearable

I got up on that little stage and expressed my motherhood and then sat down and listened while other women expressed theirs, and then I and a few of my friends who had come went out for a drink and chatter and laughter. I had an elderflower gimlet and a few calamari and some french fries and lots of laughs. It was a good night.

I had some really good news today about a job -- a really good job that will help to -- well, not help, but rather -- sustain me. Negotiating is still in the works, so I'm not going to say much more, but it's a flexible job that will enable me to be here for my kids and particularly Sophie. I am beyond grateful, sort of hushed by the whole possibility. I guess I'll slip in here that I'm going through a big transition right now, a divorce, to be blunt. Is a blog really the place to say this? Perhaps not. Despite what you think you know of me, you must know that it's not all, and there are certain things about my life that I'm just not going to write about -- ever.

I will include a poem, though, because poetry makes the vague bearable.




Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven

Break My Leg

I'll be reading/performing this Saturday in Los Angeles for Expressing Motherhood, along with ten other women. We had a rehearsal on Monday, and I'm just honored to be in this group of talented, engaging, moving and hilarious women.

The show is sold out, but you can evidently watch it on Babble's Periscope, streaming live at 7:30, Holy Pacific Ocean Time. I'm actually first up (holy shit) and can't promise that I won't have a double chin, but I will promise to have a good time. Word is that the music I walk up on stage to is Motley Crue. Who knew? Oliver just screamed when I told him that I would dance up to the stage.

Lindsay Kavet, the creator of Expressing Motherhood, is a rockstar and either produces or helps to produce shows all over the country. Check out their website for announcements on submissions. She's also beautiful, has three adorable children and has supported me for years. This is my fourth time doing the show, and I can't over-state how great an experience it is --

Here's a link to the live-stream thing:

Expressing Motherhood on Periscope @babble

Leaving Irony Behind

I feel like I left the tyranny of irony behind me at Tomales Bay. I can only be vague here, but I think most would agree that I am adept at irony, maybe even a mistress of it. The picture above is of an old, abandoned building at the Marconi Conference Center. We walked by this beautiful building several times a day, from the hours just after dawn when northern California mists floated in and around it, to the blackest hours after the sun had set when bats swooped, invisible but heard. In the middle of the day, you could walk up to the many windows, cup your hands at the side of your eyes like blinders and make out the sun-glistened ocean of the harbor, glinting through the windows on the opposite side. Nearly everyone I walked with or spoke to expressed their dislike of this building. 

Creepy. Horrible. Scary. Like a mental institution. 

I thought otherwise, wished I could climb through the broken windows and wander the rooms, dance slowly and silently in the grand room I could barely make out when I squinted. It looked out on the ocean. I liked it especially at dusk when it seemed most haunted, when I could imagine its inhabitants a combination of old world formalism and the rugged frontier that was California in the nineteenth century. The woods and unruly plants and flowers grew up and around it, sometimes if I cocked my head, it appeared slanted, its peaks barely reaching, more earth than sky. I have no idea how old this building was nor what it was used for, and I had no desire to learn.

I left my irony there, a visitor grown pale, wispy, cold and of no use. What remains is vulnerability, something raw and lusty, no blinders, blinding not blinded.

Recalling a Lullaby

My sons, 2003

The History of Mothers and Sons

All sons sleep next to mothers, then alone, then with others

Eventually, all our sons bare molars, incisors

Meanwhile, mothers are wingless things in a room of stairs

A gymnasium of bars and ropes, small arms hauling self over self

Mothers hum nonsense, driving here

and there (Here! There!) in hollow steeds, mothers reflecting

how faint reflections shiver over the road

All the deafening musts along the way

Mothers favor the moon—hook-hung and mirroring the sun—

there, in a berry bramble, calm as a stone

This is enough to wrench our hand out of his

and simply devour him, though he exceeds even the tallest grass

Every mother recalls a lullaby, and the elegy blowing through it

Lisa Furmanski

You can listen to it here.

Conversations with Special Ed Bus Drivers

The weather has turned here in Los Angeles to crisper temperatures (meaning around 55 at night and 65 in the day), and we've even had a few drops of rain here and there, probably nature's easing us into what promises to be a brutal El Nino rainy season with apocalyptic flooding and slides. Oy. The light right now is indescribable -- although shortly after I moved to Los Angeles eighteen years ago, I read an article about it in The New Yorker that did perfect justice to its luminescence.  Interestingly, I had only lived in Los Angeles for a few months, was pregnant with Henry and already noticed the light. The last truly huge El Nino winter storms happened that winter as well -- so much rain and craziness that I remember wondering what everyone talked about when they said it never rained in southern California! Unfortunately, the article is available only to subscribers, but here's a brief excerpt from Lawrence Weschler's L.A. Glows in the February, 1998 issue.

I was recalling McWilliams' comments one morning while breakfasting with the architect Coy Howard, a true student of the light, and he concurred. "It's an incredibly loaded subject -- this diaphanous soup we live in," he said, "It feels primeval -- there's a sense of the undifferentiated, the non-hierarchical. It's not exactly a dramatic light. In fact, 'dramatic' is exactly what it's not. If anything, it's meditative. And there's something really peculiar about it. In places where you get a crisp, sharp light with deep, clean shadows -- which we do get here sometimes -- you get confronted with a strong contrasting duality: illumination and opacity. But when you have the kind of veiled light we get here more regularly you become aware of a sort of multiplicity -- not illumination so much as luminosity. Southern California glows, and the opacity melts away into translucency and even transparency."

I wasn't quite getting it, so Howard tried again.

"Things in the light here have a kind of threeness instead of the usual twoness. There's the thing -- the object -- and its shadow, but then a sense of reflection as well. You know how you can be walking along the beach, let's say, and you'll see a seagull walking along ahead of you, and the wave comes in, splashing its feet. At that moment, you'll see the bird, its shadow and its reflection. Well, there's something about the environment here -- the air, the atmosphere, the light -- that makes everything shimmer like that. There's a kind of glowing thickness to the world -- diaphanous soup I was talking about -- which, in turn, grounds a magic - meditative presence." 

This afternoon, while busy working I heard the familiar screech of Sophie's bus come round the corner, and when I emerged from my writing cave, I blinked in the sun and shivered -- both from the chill in the air and the warm sun on my skin. The bus driver got busy letting down the wheelchair ramp, turning to me afterward with a huge smile on his face.

Isn't it beautiful, today? he said, The day, the light reminds me of when I was five years old, running through the fields of my country, El Salvador. Free.

Reader, I don't know why that brought tears to my eyes, but I felt them prick there and could only tell him what a wonderful memory that was and thank you for telling me. Then we both turned to Sophie, busying ourselves with the straps and levers that assured her safety as she descended.

This place I live sustains me.

Morning Devotional

Barnside, Marin County, CA 2015

Jack Gilbert's poetry

The blue sky after a bit of rain

A friend's dream of me being pregnant, two times

Not being pregnant in any way but the metaphorical


Suddenly Adult

The train's stopping wakes me.
Weeds in the gully are white
with the the year's first snow.
A lighted train goes
slowly past absolutely empty.
Also going to Fukuoka.
I feel around in myself
to see if I mind. Maybe
I am lonely. It is hard
to know. It could be
hidden in familiarity.

Jack Gilbert

To Be Human Is NOT To Be Powerful

Yesterday's post Things People Say  provoked a bit of discussion in the comments and particularly over on Facebook that I thought we should hash out a bit more. Since I've been feeling as sere and uninspired of late as the California landscape, I thank you for helping to kick me in the fanny and feel a bit of pep in my step.

I am writing a book right now and have been for the last decade or more about the last eighteen years of my life. The book is, of course, about Sophie, about disability, about identity, about what it means to be human, about how we do it, how I do it and about how all these things sort of intersect. I can't attest to the quality of the book-in-progress, but one of the things I do as a writer, one of the things that I find necessary to my survival (a bit of hyperbole, but maybe not) is to write down my observations, even as they happen and to wrest some sort of meaning from my experiences through words. Words equal blood, to tell you the truth. Drip. I strive to be non-judgmental in the telling, sometimes, using words to convey emotion. Sometimes I succeeed, I think, and other times I don't. I'm not sure what happened with the post yesterday, but I do know that it struck a chord and that some people were offended for the woman I called out and others were offended by the woman I called out.

Here's the thing. Things People Say is a "thing" I use throughout my book to convey everyday experiences raising a child with severe disabilities. I try not to write about my own responses to these things but rather to tell them like they are and leave the interpretation up to the reader. That being said, I don't always do a good job, and yesterday's post was probably a good example of my being half-assed and not just coming right out and explaining things.

Beyond my hatred of the use of the word "retarded," I was struck yesterday by the irony of a physically disabled woman putting down a cognitively disabled woman. Sophie, as you remember was standing right with me. Let me say that this is not unusual. The disabled as a population are not some sort of tribe, always recognizing their kin or even backing one another up. Did you know that there are great rifts, even, between those who are disabled themselves and those who parent the disabled? I'd venture to say -- with a pretty certain authority -- that the cognitively disabled are at the bottom of the caste system, if we can stand to be non-politically correct, and while I don't want to assign rankings to discriminated peoples (all the isms), I feel pretty strongly that with few exceptions, to be "retarded" or cognitively disabled is a fate worse than death for many in our culture. And contrary to the increased visibility that others on the fringe of society are earning (not without enormous and grotesque struggle), the cognitively disabled are lagging behind. I'd venture to say that they have no voice -- quite literally -- other than mine. Ours.

I wince when I hear those in wheelchairs object to people condescending to them, not because they are in a wheelchair but because they are taken to be "retarded." The retarded are, in effect, even less than the physically disabled, relegated to an inferior position.

We live in a culture that looks on disability -- both physical and cognitive -- as something "less than." Those of us who walk are "grateful" to not be in a wheelchair.  The formerly abled who through accident become disabled often go through great trauma, feel suicidal, would rather die than lose their "abilities." Pregnant women use invasive medical procedures to determine whether their unborn children are "healthy," and when they discover any abnormality, may decide to abort on the basis of "the difficult life ahead for the child."

This is the way it is. I am passing no judgement, am a firm believer in a woman's right to choose abortion, no matter the reason.

I wonder, though, if disability is more a social construct than otherwise.

We live in a culture that defines people -- their worth and sometimes their very existence -- by their intelligence.

I'm not talking about being inspired by those with disabilities or by those of us who care for individuals with disabilities.

I could never do what you do. I don't know how you do it. 

I'm talking about truly living in concert, without pity or judgement, with those who are different than us -- beyond color, gender or sexuality and "ability."

There is a lack of synchronicity between our society and people with disabilities. A society that honours only the powerful, the clever, and the winners necessarily belittles the weak. It is as if to say: to be human is to be powerful.

 Those who see the heart only as a place of weakness will be fearful of their own hearts. For them, the heart is a place of pain and anguish, of chaos and of transitory emotions. So they reject those who live essentially by their hearts, who cannot develop the same intellectual and rational capacities as others.

Jean Vanier, Becoming Human 

Things People Say

After driving through the carwash with a mesmerized Sophie, our outing of late that relieves my guilt at not providing enough stimulation, I pulled into a local small restaurant to pick up some food for the workers who are turning my yard into a drought-tolerant paradise. I intended to leave Sophie in the car while I ordered at the outside counter, within eye-shot, in a handicapped space. The spot was filled, though, with a large, red SUV so I pulled into another spot around the corner and took Sophie out. We made our way awkwardly up to the counter (Sophie isn't walking very well these days which I'm attributing to drug withdrawals, but who the hell knows?), and because the handicapped spot is right next to the counter, I saw that there was no indication a handicapped person was in fact using it. In other words, there was no license plate or placard hanging from the rear-view mirror. I waited in a long line, keeping Sophie from sitting on the pavement, one eye on the spot, in hopes that I might call out the person who was using it without a placard. I could see inside the small restaurant, how every table was full but that there were no visible indications of disability. This doesn't mean anything. When I finally got to the window to order, I told the cashier that someone was parked in the handicapped spot without a placard, that I had a handicapped daughter and had to park a distance away, that I hoped he could find the person who had parked there and perhaps let them know. He smiled incomprehensibly at me and told me that he'd let his manager know. I ordered. He did not make any attempt to let his manager know and continued to take orders.

I girded my loins.

Excuse me, I asked a couple dipping curly fries into a white cup of ketchup, is that your red Honda in the handicapped spot?

I asked another couple with two small children the same thing.

I asked a family identically clothed in USC red and gold tee-shirts as well. I tried not to let their choice of college sport regalia affect me, pulled my loincloth a bit tighter.

Excuse me, is that your red Honda in the handicapped spot?

The man rose up and said, Yes, that's mine, and he turned to his wife, and she said, Oh! We forgot to put our placard up! 

And I said, Oh, thank you because I was going to be so upset if it was just someone using the spot! 

And she said, I always forget! I'm physically handicapped, but sometimes I'm retarded, too!















This is, of course, an equal opportunity post.