Wild Heart

"To thine own self be true . . . " Sure, Polonius, I'll give it a shot . . .

In an age where there is much talk about "being yourself," I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. ~ Thomas Merton

The day is growing steadily darker with cloud, and a stiff breeze kicks up. Birds are making a racket at the feeder. My bare feet feel cold, windows still open to let in fresh air. When the temps got hot last week, I considered taking the comforter off of my bed, and then remembered that it's May, a month that opened with snow this year, and it's not summer yet. Memorial Day here is often chilly, and that's yet to come.

(Rumble of thunder; birds twitter louder.)

When I was a kid, I was told I was "moody," and of course that didn't stop when I was in my teens. Sometimes I think I'm still moody, but I don't really know what that means. I started taking an antidepressant when menopause tried to kill me 20 years ago. The medication didn't stop me from having "moods"; I can still drop into weepiness from out of nowhere, can still feel like life is crappy, even though mine isn't. I was much moodier when I still listened to NPR driving to work or watched the evening news, though "moody" doesn't really describe the anger bordering on rage I could feel. I still get angry, but not as often, and much less often over things I can't control, like the weather.

(Rain. Not heavy, just light rain pattering on the sidewalk.)

The other day as I was coming out of the grocery store, the sun was shining and rain was falling. That happens here sometimes: sunshine and rain. Just now rain is falling out of a darkly cloudy sky and the stiff breeze has stopped. I like the unexpected. I like big thunderstorms and big dark sky and the whoosh of a sudden wind and the flapping of the patio umbrella threatening to take off.

Maybe I'm not moody at all. Maybe I'm just a self of many moods, keeping myself entertained. You know how when you're about to try something new and you're scared and someone says, "Just be yourself"? What does that mean?

(Sun breaking through dark clouds and lighting up the wet trees. No birds. No wind.)

Some Days Are Just Like That

Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts. ~ Leo Rosten

First day I've needed AC and it worked fine for 10 minutes and then sounded like the kid next door was drilling a hole through the wall. Good thing it has a 10-year warranty. Repair people will be here in the morning. And I'm not kidding about thinking it was the kid next door. I do expect one day to see him come crashing through the wall with a chain saw and a floor sander. Mr. Fixit.

Got out a fan and it was so covered with dust I thought I'd take it apart and clean it. I'm a smart woman. I looked it over, flipped it on its back, turned it upside down, could see no way to dismantle it. I looked through my bin of warranties to see if I could find directions for cleaning. I have user booklets for a bunch of stuff I no longer own, but nothing for the fan.

So I went online and searched "how to clean Honeywell room fan." I got the directions all right, but when I looked at them and then looked at the fan, I said out loud, "You have got to be kidding me." Nope. They want me to turn it on its face and remove 6 tiny little screws. Right.

Did I ever mention that I used to be a technical writer? Did I ever tell you tech writers often do user testing? Do you see where this is going? Here's the logic: Honeywell has a good reputation for making quality products that last and last. So I have a fan that will last and last, and that being the case, what is the one thing I am going to have to do with this fan to keep it running smoothly? That's right: clean the dust off of the blades and the motor. But first I have to remove 6 tiny little screws. I didn't know they made screwdrivers with a head that small.

AAARRRGGGHHHHH!!

So I have a dandy little room fan that works like a champ and will become my lifetime companion except that if I don't clean it, it will eventually become so clogged it won't work and if I turn it on with all that dust in there, I'll die. Or maybe just sneeze and cough a lot.

So then I Googled Honeywell customer service, saw the Contact Us link, clicked on it, and here's what I got:

Does Honeywell really want me to contact them? What would you do? I had a similar usability hissy fit a few years ago when I bought an over-the-stove microwave oven that needed to have a light bulb replaced. Don't get me started. You can, however, read about it here. I just did and laughed so hard I honked. Sometimes I crack myself up.

Mother's Day: Take Two

Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at the very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive.
~ Mel Brooks

My sister Carolyn died on Mother's Day, 2006, about six weeks short of her 59th birthday. I had just seen her in Indiana two weeks before where all but one of the siblings - and a lot of their kids - met at Dad's to celebrate his 80th birthday. When my brother called to tell me that she had died in her sleep after being prescribed an overdose of pain medication, I pounded the walls and screamed. It took me a long time to accept that she was gone, but I finally came to a really calm place where every time I thought of her, I laughed. She was so darned funny!

That was the trip to Indiana when she did an imitation of my brothers and father and all the male in-laws standing around a car with the hood up. She adjusted her "jewels" with the back of one hand, spat on the ground, and said "Yep" a lot. She was so deadpan about it, even as we were laughing so hard we had coughing fits and had to be pounded on the back.

I think every one of us is funny. Dad was funny in the same goofy way Caro was. Mother had a sly sense of humor. Butch can imitate anyone, much as Caro could. But Caro could do it and keep a straight face. When she went into labor with her twin sons, she called me. Mona, my best friend who lived next door, was at my kitchen table drinking Coke, and for the next few hours we talked and laughed on the phone with Caro. She'd yell, "Wait! Wait! Here comes another one!" and we didn't know if she meant labor pain or joke. I'd hand the phone to Mona and  make PB&J for our kids. Then I'd talk to Caro while Mona ran home to take her curlers out before her husband got home. Finally, Caro's pains were so close she had to go the hospital. I like to think that Mona and I were midwives in a funny way.

In her younger days, Caro could hit the depths as well as the heights. She was raising twin boys alone, abandoned by their father. She loved those boys through every single bit of raising them alone, and it wasn't easy. But she laughed, too. One day she called to tell me about taking the boys to K-Mart. She put them both in the shopping basket and headed down an aisle. Son C. reached out and grabbed a box off a shelf. She veered the other direction, and son S. grabbed a bottle. She tried to stay in the middle of the aisle and found that her sons' arms were longer than the aisle was wide. She had to run from the store before they destroyed everything within their reach.

But the best story of all is this one, and I don't know if her boys have heard her tell it or me imitate her telling it, but it has become a family classic. She was still married at the time, so the boys were still babies. She put them down for a nap and as soon as they were quiet, she lay down on the sofa. When she got up an hour later, all was still quiet, so she peeked into their room to check on them: Both boys were sitting in the middle of the room completely naked. The walls were covered with baby poop and crayon scribbles. They had dropped crayons down the heating vent, took their cribs apart - let me repeat that: two infant boys took their cribs apart - and they were playing with the curtains they had removed from the window. Then Caro broke down and cried: "Their dad will be home from work any minute, dinner isn't ready, and Verna - I can't find the curtain rod!"

I miss my sister every day. Her sons miss their mom. Mother's Day is a reminder of what was and what is no more. It's also a day when I get to think about my sister and how funny she was and I get to be grateful that we had become very close in the last decade or so before she died. Grief and joy are very closely related. When she died, I felt robbed of all the years we would have had to grow old together, to say to each other, "Remember that time when . . ."  I think of her every day, especially on Mother's Day, and I remember "that time when" and then I laugh.

Mother's Day

I don't think kids set out to be mean to their parents. I know that I didn't plot to make my mother's life miserable, but I think I did a pretty good job of it, anyway. When I was in my teens, I thought I was smarter than my mother. I suppose most teenagers think that. And of course, as I got older and had my own kids, I started to see how little I really knew, and gradually I came to understand that my mother knew a whole lot more than I ever gave her credit for.

The problem, of course, is that by the time I figured this out, Mother had died. I'm not sure we ever would have been close. We tried to be friends - and failed - and kept trying often enough to despair of ever really knowing each other. Now as I approach the age she was when she died, I have greater understanding of her as a parent and as a woman. Here are a few things about her life that I'd like to share:

• She got married when she was 18 and  had me just before her 19th birthday.
• In the next three years she had two more kids, my sister Caro and my brother Butch.
• My dad moved us all from her home and her family to live with his parents in San Francisco.
• We had very little money, but Mother was a master grocery shopper and a cook who knew how to stretch a pot of soup.
• By the time Mother was 29, she had six kids.
• Between the ages of 29 and 33, Mother had four miscarriages followed by the birth of my youngest sister.
• We never went hungry.

It would be redundant to say that Mother had a hard life, but for many years I was too busy feeling sorry for myself for having to be a caretaker of younger siblings to see what her life was really like. Of course she wasn't perfect; no one is. And I was much less perfect than I thought I was, that's for sure. And I'm not saying that we could have been closer if I had only _________ [fill in the blank].

I wish we could have known each other better, but we weren't the two people who could make that happen. I believe she was closer to my brothers and maybe she felt closer to my sisters. I hope that is so. She's been gone now for 14 years, and I do think of her on Mother's Day. If there is, indeed, a heaven as she believed it to exist, then she knows I am thinking of her and appreciating her for all that she offered to all us kids. She worked hard to make a home for us and to feed us and clothe us. I know she loved us. It took me years to get there, but I finally came to respect her. I hope she knows that, too.

Update after weeks of not posting

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination. ~ John Lennon

It snowed here on May 1. Today the tulips vie with clematis for room to bloom, and the honey locust tells me every day to be patient. It is always the last to come into leaf. It is always the one I am most willing to be patient with.

Today rain falls out of a blue sky, just as it did yesterday when I was coming out of the grocery store, thinking I should start using sun block again, and I put on my sunglasses and they were immediately sparkled with rain.

My oldest grandson called and we talked about his pending back surgery. He was in a car accident about 5 years ago and has been living in pain, with no hope of ever getting the help he needs - until now. We talk a couple of times a week, just as we used to do when he first started talking and would call me from Southern California and tell me all about going to "Didneylan." When he stopped talking like Elmer Fudd, I mourned.

I've started meditating again, something I periodically do when I remember how good it feels to do it. I learned Transcendental Meditation in the early 70s when I had two little kids at home and needed all the help I could get. I got a mantra. I got time alone for 20 minutes twice a day. My sister Carolyn went with me to meditation training. She needed it even more than I did - she had twin sons who were two years old.

I hang out with a friend who, when she calls, always sounds so happy that I answered the phone. How cool is that? Then she bubbles over with ideas she wants to share or conundrums she wants to discuss or the next big thing for us to do together. If you're old enough, you may remember a time when you were a kid and your doorbell would ring and when you opened the door, a neighbor kid was standing there who said, "Can you come out and play?" That's how it is when Blaze calls me. She has the best toys!

In the last year, I've lost three people I love: my cousin to suicide when Huntington's Disease overwhelmed him; his wife, who found out just weeks after his death that she had pancreatic cancer; a friend who finally succumbed to bladder cancer. It's been a hard year, and in the midst of all the cancer and dying and death are so many reasons to keep getting up in the morning, keep loving and saying aloud, "I love you," keep noticing that rain can fall out of blue sky and friends can still ask me to come out and play.

Life's not over until it's over. I'd like to remember that.

 

Letting Go

Once you remove the absurdity from human existence, there isn't much left.
~ Alexis A. Gilliland

I was talking on the phone with my youngest daughter yesterday about the weather - among other things - and we were laughing. I was sitting on the bottom step leading to the front porch of a friend's house. Her partner had just died, and I had been present with them to witness this final passage after a very long illness and many surgeries. Cancer does not take prisoners. The day was sunny and mild, almost warm. Inside the house, tears mixed with laughter, friends arrived and left, hospice nurses packed away the many, many items that become part of a household where cancer is claiming another life.

By dark a spring storm had moved in, starting with rain and wind so fierce it bent trees sideways and let them back up again only long enough to take the next blow. By the time I went to bed last night, snow was falling, heavy and wet, and the temperature had dropped 50 degrees.

So many people rushed out yesterday to stock up for the storm that, as my daughter noted on her Facebook page, news folks were giving us live footage of empty shelves at local grocery stores. A big selling item was butter. Butter? And you know what? It's still snowing, but the streets are clear and not even icy around here. And anyway, the snow will stop by tonight, so I didn't go out and stock up on anything, although I seriously considered running to Albertson's for chocolate. You know, just in case . . .

I know that every day my friend will be aware of how long it's been since her partner took her last breath. And I know from my own experience how difficult the first year can be. I've shed many tears over the cancer diagnosis and the physical and emotional pain I witnessed. I have raised my fist at god for taking a woman so young and so full of life. And still the snow falls in one last push (maybe the last, who knows) before the lilac blooms. My friend whose partner died will laugh again, too, not today but maybe tomorrow. And people will watch what passes for news these days and rush out to buy butter before The Big Storm (that didn't happen) keeps us out of the grocery store for 24 hours.

We're here for such a short time, really. I'll be 68 this summer, and I sometimes feel I've already been around too long. But I mark the days that are as full of love as yesterday was, and I note my own need to laugh when I can, and to share that laughter with those I love - because I think that's all there is. Love.

And absurdity.

 

Happy National Poetry Month!

Here's a fun one for you - that strikes close to home if you've ever tried to teach poetry:

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Leaving Vashon

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.
~ Mark Twain

I don’t want to go.

No, really. I really don’t want to leave Vashon.  I don’t want to say good-bye to the married geese couple who flutter over here every day to dine on whatever has emerged from the soil beneath the grass. I want to stay here and watch the girl next door carry a wide surf board to the water, step carefully onto it with one oar, watch Duke, her Jack Russell terrier, step on the board behind her and stand very still while she poles out of the little cove here and into deeper water. Most of all, I want to keep writing every day and meeting up with Nancy and JoAnne every afternoon and talking about writing and books every evening.

It’s been a fantasy week, this time here. Of course I don’t want it to end. I suppose most of us feel like that at the end of a really good vacation. Nothing wrong with home or the life I’m going back to, but couldn’t I stay here another week, maybe?

I can hardly distinguish one day from the next except, of course, that there is night in between. What I mean is that each moment lasts forever and each moment is gone before I can even register the word “moment.” No, that’s not what I mean. Here’s what I mean: time is like those gulls out there riding the wind, wing feathers making minor adjustments in a slow curve or a long dive, the ride being the thing, not the curve or dive or swoop but the sum of all the parts. That’s how time passes here, and before I can finish writing this post I am already packing my bags, am already on the ferry for Seattle or in the air over Utah. I’m home in Colorado remembering the way the wind rocks the empty rocking chair on the deck of this cottage and turns the boats that are anchored in the shallow water.

Do you ever get the feeling that when you’re gone from a place, that place doesn’t exist anymore? Well, it doesn't, not when we turn our backs on it. Vashon won’t exist for me when I leave this island on the 3:00 ferry, will cease to exist when I turn my back on it, except in memory and journal entries, just as “home” is a place I made up, an imaginary comfort zone to return to after an adventure. So today I’m leaving this place that exists to return to a place that doesn’t exist - until I get there - and then that place exists and this one doesn’t.

Right?

Right.

Out of Town, Out of Body

On Sunday in the pre-dawn dark, my pal Blaze and I drove along icy snow-crusted roads to DIA where we had a 9:00 AM flight to Seattle. I was bundled in my heavy winter coat, a scarf around my neck and my hands wrapped in my scarf. I hadn't slept well the night before, and I was in for a long day.

I'm not a happy traveler. I love a good road trip; I don't like going anywhere by air. But some occasions call for a retreat from old prejudices, and this was one of those times.

I'm in a lovely house on Vashon Island (Puget Sound) for a writing retreat with my BFF Blaze and our writing coach. I've never been on a writing retreat. I've never been to Seattle and certainly not to an island in the Sound. On the one hand, I feel like I've stepped into someone else's life. On the other, this is so much my life that I'm surprised I haven't done this before.

On my third day here I'm wondering how much I have limited my own life by having fixed ideas of what is or isn't possible for me. This opportunity dropped into my lap, and I grabbed it up and hugged it to me with a great big YES!! Nancy got us on a flight out of Denver and into Seattle - and then fear set in and I wished I had said no, what was I thinking, I hate flying, I hate airports, what if I get sick, what if I'm not able to write when I get there, what if what if what if.

So I'm adjusting my attitude, settling into an altered mind/body that looks just like the old mind/body - only different. In this brief space of time, I'm already plotting more trips, more time alone to write, more time with other writers. I may be required to fly somewhere, to challenge my body to navigate strange airports and haul my luggage from place to place. I may have to - gasp! - ask for help.

The payoff this time is beyond anything I could have imagined when the invitation came out of the blue. That view of the dock in the photo above was taken from the deck of the cottage I'm sleeping in every night. My days are dedicated to writing and reading. At dinner timeI meet with Blaze and our coach at the dining room table where we eat, talk about writing, talk about books, laugh, and then we read to each other from something we've written.

I'm making slow progress on a novel, meaning that I am doing all of that peripheral work to identify the theme and plot and subplot that - surprise! - isn't peripheral at all. Before I came here, I thought of this time as an opportunity to come face-to-face with myself, and that is exactly what this week is about, observing the narrative arc of my own life and not looking away, inviting myself to move closer, examine detail, accept it all as mine.

I want to carry home with me the ability to see beyond the obvious, a skill that is built in to traveling somewhere new. The stories are always there - I just have to learn how to see them.

Happy New Year!

Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before. ~ Steven Wright

I don't make resolutions on the first of the year - or the last day of the year - at all - ever - not anymore. It's too embarrassing to see them listed in an old journal and repeated in other old journals, all those intentions that led to lots of grief and no new behaviors or deep growth. I wonder how to strike the balance between accepting who I am and challenging myself to learn something new and maybe wonderful.

Why do you stay in prison / when the door is so wide open? / Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. / Live in silence. ~ Rumi

It's more about moments than about long-term. More about spontaneity than resolution. I do have some habits that came about because I wanted to focus on what I love about my life instead of berating myself over what I don't have. So every night I list what I'm grateful for from that day. I make myself list five things (people) and usually stop counting after 10. Being grateful has become a new age cliche, but you know what? It works. It helps me fall asleep and it brings me home to myself.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me. ~ Anna Quindlen

As this new year opens, I'm making lists of people I love and things I love and activities and food and books and whatever pops into my head. With each list, I get excited, and one item on a list engenders a whole new tumbling river of where to go and what to do.

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. ~ A.A. Milne

 So I'm starting this year with curiosity. Less thinking and more wondering. That's a resolution worth considering.

The more you think about things, the weirder they seem. Take milk for example. Why do we drink COW milk? Who was the guy who first looked at a cow and said, "I think I'll drink whatever comes out of these things when I squeeze 'em." ~ Bill Watterson, from Calvin and Hobbes