I Will Anchor Myself More Firmly To My Bones

 I Will Anchor Myself To My Bones More Firmly

There is a charming Yiddish word for a man who gets by with one hustle after another: luftmensch, which means literally “air man” - a man with, as the legal term puts it, no visible means of support.

There have been times in my life when I felt that kind of disconnection with life, not because I didn’t work but because I was disconnected in my mind from the world. From my body, in fact: I would often feel as though my body were just a vehicle that the “real me” was riding around in, sitting comfortably inside my skull. At the time, I felt it was a mark of superior perception. Only much later did I see that it was actually a sign of disassociative personality disorder, the result of childhood trauma: my body was a source of pain, so I had withdrawn from it.

I was quite a mess psychologically. Not that I’m all that well-put-together now, but I’m much better than I was. It took the biggest crisis of my life, when I was on the verge of divorcing my wife, that I finally went into therapy. My counselor was brilliant, and walked me gradually toward a reintegration with myself. The effect was truly amazing: everyone could see an improvement in my voice, my posture, my relationship with the world.

One day, on my way home from a session, I noticed it in a way that was especially concrete (no pun intended): as I walked that I could literally feel the pavement beneath my feet more than I could before, exactly as though I’d been floating along up until then.

I walked, feeling how my body stood differently, amazed by how much I could feel it. I climbed the steps of my home, took hold of the doorknob, feeling it in my hand. I walked in to see my wife sitting in the kitchen, and my little son on the couch, holding his teddy bear on his knee. I felt as though I could see them better than I had before.

I knelt beside my wife to kiss her. That contact, which I hadn’t thought could be more emphatic, was. As I exchanged greetings with her, I heard my little boy say  in his chirpy little voice: “Air hadh ox’hin and . . . udder duff we don’ need….”

I was startled. He had deduced a part of the lesson I hadn’t included. He was teaching it better than I had taught him, just as I was teaching myself basic lessons in being an adult than I had even known I needed.

To A Baby, Everything Is A New Thing

 To A Baby, Everything Is A New Thing

I accepted the delicate object into my hands, cradling it as I had done before with others of its kind. This, though, was nothing like anything else.

He looked up at me. The world was a great confusion to his eyes, which at most had seen a red void before, but I knew he could recognize faces, for the same reason that adults “recognize” faces in wall sockets and cracks in the ceiling.

“Hello. Your name is Walden Kelley Burt. I love you.”

We’d known he was going to be a boy for a couple of months now. I’d sent out an e-mail announcing, “It’s a boy. Well, it’s a fetus, but it’s a boy fetus (The Adventures of Walden Kelley Burt, Boy Fetus).”

“God, look at him,” my wife said at my shoulder.”

“How can I look at anything else?”

“Look at the look on his face. He’s fascinated.”

“Everything has changed for him.”

“I remember when Jake was born, he cried, but he stopped when I said, ‘It’s okay, baby, I’m still here’. He quieted down as soon as he heard my voice.”

“Waldy won’t get that. He didn’t hear Maureen’s voice. He may never hear it again.”

“He’s had a very different trip, being anesthetized along with Maureen for the C-section, and then waking up in a strange place without even her voice to orient him.”

“We’ll have to make his landing as easy as we can.”

I brushed his forehead lightly with my fingertips, and put my finger where his hand could grasp. His tiny fingers closed around it.

“God….”

I held him out for Kathe to take.

“I remember being this helpless. Not much, but I especially remember being laid on a cold pan scale to weigh me. It could have been from my birth, or from a well-baby visit when I was a few months old, but I was definitely very small.”

“Justin said he remembered before he was born, a time when ‘I could see only red, and I was slimy, but I didn’t mind’.”

I laughed.

“You told me about that one. I wonder what Waldy will remember?”

“We’ll have to ask him.”

Kathe handed him back to the impatient nurse, who carried him out of the room.

 

 

https://poems.com/poem/your-new-world/

The Past Is Not Dead

 The Past Is Not Dead

As the sound of the pipes rolled out of the laptop, I said, “You never got to hear your Grandpa George play his bagpipes. I wish you had. He loved his pipes, and loved playing them, and I loved hearing them.”

“Did he sound like this?” my youngest child said.

“More or less. He loved to play this tune, especially. ‘Land of my high endeavor, Scotland the Brave’” I sang along for a moment.

“Was he Scottish?”

“Not really. In fact, he said he wished he could identify a Scottish ancestor so he could feel justified in wearing a real clan tartan. Every clan has its own pattern. My mother has a Scottish ancestor, a MacFarlane, but she’s a long way back, like maybe your great-times-seven-grandmother.”

“My what?”

“Like, not your grandmother like Grandma Dorothy, and not your great-grandmother like my Grandma Zoe, but your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother,” I said, counting off the “greats” on my fingers. “Your grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother.”

“How long ago was that? A hundred years?”

“More like two hundred. Long enough ago that Miss MacFarlane, before she came to America, probably saw men wearing kilts for everyday wear, instead of pants.”

“It’s kind of weird that I’m connected to someone that far back.”

“We’re all connected that far back. And one of your other ancestors was a nobleman who could trace his ancestry back to one of the soldiers who helped William the Conqueror, um, conquer, a thousand years ago.”

“Whoa! Like, a knight in shining armor?”

“Not the kind of armor you’re thinking of. It hadn’t been invented yet.”

He shook his head.

“I feel like I’m floating, thinking about going back that far.”

“Well, that knight who fought for William probably didn’t know who his ancestors were, but you know that he had ancestors going back a thousand years more, to when Jesus was alive. Everybody does, or they wouldn’t be here now, would they?”

“And that ancestor had ancestors who were, what, like cavemen a thousand years before that.”

“You have caveman ancestors, of course, but they were’nt a thousand years before, more like fifty thousand.”

“How many ‘greats’ would that be?”

“I don’t even know. But even before the cavemen, you had ancestors who weren’t human yet. And the planet Earth and the Sun are our ancestors, because we came from them.”

“Uhhh….”

“And the Sun had an ancestor. We know it’s part of the second generation of stars, that are made up of matter that formed in earlier stars, or it would be only made up of hydrogen and helium, and so would its planets, and life could not have arisen on them.”

“So how far does the Sun’s ancestry go?”

“About fifteen billion years. That’s fifteen thousand thousand thousand.”

“What was there before that?”

“Nobody knows. That’s just when the Big Bang happened, and nobody can figure out what came before. Maybe the Universe had a Mom Universe, and a Grandma Universe, but nobody actually knows.”

“And we’re related to the whole Universe,” he said.

“Yep.”

The video ended, and he said, “Okay, now I’m going to pick a song. Type in ‘Five Nights At Freddy’s, Join Us For A Bite’.”

 

https://www.magzter.com/article/News/The-Atlantic/What-to-Do-About-William-Faulkner

Promised Walks Never Taken

 Promised Walks Never Taken

In the face of an overwhelming loss like the death of a life partner of many years, grief can turn every small regret into a burden difficult to bear. You regret every missed opportunity and every occasion when you took your beloved for granted.

A photograph accidentally tucked into a box of bills can derail a search for a document with a long period of just sitting and looking at a picture of a place you didn’t actually enjoy visiting.

Coming across a garment that missed its date with the donation box, you may clutch it to you as something precious - before you put it into a bag for the next trip to the thrift shop.

A reference to a place or a time of year can squeeze your heart time after time, until you feel like you’re the recurring character in Abbott and Costello films who would fly into a rage at the mention of “Niagara Falls”.

A breeze across your face can take you back to a windy afternoon which was entirely ordinary, except for whom you were with.

“Our song” can turn out to be the entire catalog of a musician or even an entire genre of music.

Even the sight of the door can arouse sorrow for promised walks never taken.

You can’t stop remembering, though, and you wouldn’t want to.

In the end, all you can do is appreciate the memory of what you once had, and try to take solace from it, and hope that you can build a life after bereavement that is something more than a compendium of regrets and backward glances. 

https://africa.si.edu/2014/05/when-great-trees-fall%E2%80%A8%E2%80%A8-by-maya-angelou/

One of the members of my group said that she'd heard this poem read four times in different places in honor of Justice Ginsburg, but it made me think, inescapably, of my own personal loss.

Kathe, I love you. I will never stop loving you.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "The only way to avoid the pain of loss is never to have had anything to lose."

 I Thought The Earth Remembered Me

I’d come out to the property my parents had owned to conduct some business, which actually had nothing to do with that former ownership, or with my having lived there as a child. There was a strange sense of dislocation, to be there again after so many years, to see what had changed and what hadn’t.

I arrived, and found the new owner wasn’t there. I called her, and she asked if I could wait there for about twenty minutes. I walked out into the pasture where my parents had kept a succession of steers and goats. They had grazed there, the steers to be raised until they were ready to slaughter, the goats to generate milk for a few years and then also to be slaughtered. I remembered the taste of that milk, cream floating on its surface, and the meat of the goats also, gamier than the beef. I remembered someone claiming that goat’s milk had a “billygoat stink”, and my replying that if goat milk smelled of billygoat, they were milking the wrong goat.

I recalled Summer afternoons when I had lain on the grass, too hot to move, feeling as though I could hear the heat as well as feel it. I lay down again, willing myself to feel that same sensation, even though the day was actually quite mild. I felt the ground beneath me, and felt…not especially connected to it.

I lay there for a minute or so, trying to feel something more than I would lying anywhere else. The ground felt good under me, in spite of its irregularity and the sharpness of the grass, but that was all I felt, the same as if I had been anywhere else.

I got up and walked back to the house, sat on the front step, pulled out my phone and checked my messages.

https://www.ikedacenter.org/thinkers-themes/thinkers/poems/oliver

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Just because you remember doesn't mean they will. Same for a place as with a person."

I'd Like To Make You Smile

 I’d Like To Make You Smile

I’d like to make you smile, but I know that a smile can’t always happen when you want it, in yourself or in someone else. Even so, it hurts me to see you so unhappy.

I can’t deny that you are entitled to be unhappy. Life is difficult right now, for you and for so many people. My life isn’t easy right now, either. I’m not sure when’s the last time I smiled myself.

I’ve heard people say that if you smile when you aren’t feeling like it, it can improve your mood.Stanislavsky psychology - no, wait, it’s the other way around, isn’t it? Stanislavsky said to invoke the right emotion in yourself or you couldn’t convey it to the audience.

That’s why I’m afraid to say anything, and I’m just walking beside you without saying anything - I’m afraid to say the wrong thing. Not afraid to make myself seem stupid, but afraid to hurt you worse when you’re already feeling so poorly.

But every time I look over at you, I see how sorrowful you look and it makes me feel so bad for you. Gee, am I making your well-being a higher priority than my own? Why, that just might mean that I love you. Here we are, living together and about to be married, and there’s a definite possibility that I love you. Who’d have thought?

If only I knew how to articulate that thought. Shouldn’t be that hard.

“If I had a choice, I think I’d make you smile, rather than me.

“Hey, did I just make you smile?”

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "A smile is a good thing."

A Darker and More Curious Matter

 A Darker And More Curious Matter

The viewing room couldn’t have seemed less like a viewing room. It looked more like a tax accountant’s office than anything else. I understood that we weren’t going to see the inside of the particle accelerator where all the action was taking place (though I still visualized it as looking like some Disney animation from 1960 or so, all streaking particles in bright colors and explosions of bright light), and we weren’t in the control room (which I’d actually seen, and which was indistinguishable to my eye from the control room of a nuclear reactor or a mechanized bakery), but…a desk, a computer console and a whiteboard…? Lorina woke the computer and showed me the display which represented the control room and the accelerator, explained what various cryptic notations meant. As she did, she grew more animated than I’d ever seen her - and more attractive to me. She was clearly in her element here. “We got dark matter in the VISION last year,” she said modestly (it was Lorina who had worked out the process which had created the first specimen of dark matter in captivity). “Right now, there’s a knot of it in there about to be bombarded with Curious traffets. If I’m right about the anatomy of strange matter, the specimen should absorb them and increase in darkness,” I understood enough of particle physics to at least understand that there were so many forces at work down at that level that they had to be given arbitrary names all over the map. Protons were made up of quarks in three “colors”, Up Down and Strange. Quarks were made of traffets which were composed of Curiosity and Boredom. Dark matter didn’t seem to have either quarks or traffets in it, or anything else that was known in normal matter, and was formed from the interaction of Darkness, Antidarkness, Bright and Antibright. Even knowing all this, the wording had an odd effect on me, as I imagined the bombardment resulting in a darker and more curious matter.

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Keep seeking after knowledge."

Catch Somewhere, My Soul

 Catch Somewhere, My Soul

Paging through digital images, I fall upon one I took of a wall in the old house. Strange, cryptic figures my son drew when he was six or so, too charming to wash off, so instead I cut a frame for it from construction paper. It was on the wall in the stairwell for all those years. I actually wanted to take the drawing, but that would have required gouging a hole in the drywall, and I didn’t want to leave a mess like that for the buyer to patch. Instead, I took this photo.

The buyer was so enthusiastic about the house. He loved it. He was looking forward to continuing the years of careful work we had put into it. He had an “in” with the city planning division, so he’d have more flexibility than we had.

The city double-crossed him, though, and forced him to demolish it. More than a century old, and with decades of careful work put into it, and it’s gone now. And so is the majestic cedar tree we loved so much, that the neighbors loved so much, often stopping under it to use its hanging branches as a frame for their photos of one another.

Can’t hang onto that grief, though. Or that grievance. We sold the house, so let it go. The house is gone, so let it go. It’s not wise to be so connected to an object, especially one you don’t own, even one as large and splendid as a Victorian house. Anyway, home is where Kathe is.

Oh, right. Kathe is dead, too. No doubt that’s part of the issue with the house: displacement of a much greater loss. Well, then, home will have to be where I am.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have been able to survive this. I was such a mess when I first met Kathe. I was incomplete. Immature. I should take heart, knowing that I did survive all of this, losses which would have destroyed me if they’d happened earlier. At least I’ve learned how to be self-sufficient enough to be able to carry on - even if I don’t always keep calm.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Keep calm and carry on."

The Answer Is Hidden And Folded Over

 The Answer Is Hidden And Folded Over

I walked around the room, pacing like a tiger. What was I going to do? As I walked between the shelf of preserved food which I had stored up as “treats” for when I was sufficiently tired of the chlorella and yeast and the door which I could only open in a truly dire situation, and only when properly suited, I recalled hearing that tigers, when confined in a very small space, pace in a very methodical way, making the same number of steps across the same distance, turning at the same spot. I was pretty sure my pacing wasn’t actually anything like as well-done as a tiger’s.

That wasn’t a helpful thought. What I needed was to deal with my situation in more constructive ways, not improve my pacing skills.

I pulled down my bed and sat on it, pulling up my feet. I thought about my former life, what I did with my days back then. There were all of those things I couldn’t do now. There were a handful of things I still could do. 

Whisper Secrets Only Your People Know

 Whisper Secrets Only Your People Know

“Oh, for cryin’ out sake!”

Laurie laughed.

“What did you just say?”

“Something we say in my family. One of my brothers said it when he was very small, abd our parents started saying it, and now we all tend to say it when we’re exasperated.”

“Heh. We all have our family jargon and conventions.”

“I noticed that at the end of the day you have a way of saying,’Ah’m tahrred. Ah’m tahrred an’ Ah’m hongreh’ in a very thick accent of some kind.”

“Oh, my, that’s a really good example. I picked that up from my father, who got it from his father, who was making fun of what one of his neighbors would say to his wife when he came in out of the fields. And considering how long my father and his father lived, that neighbor must have been wearing himself out in the fields before World War Two, at least.”

“I wonder how long some mannerisms get passed down through families. I heard Erin say ‘After you, Alphonse’ to Nessa the other day.”

“Making reference to a comic strip which ended its run almost a hundred years ago. Which means that it must have been passed down to Erin from her…great-grandmother or great-grandfather, at least.”

“It doesn’t just stay within the family, either. The other day on the radio, I heard the announcer talking about how something was happening ‘all around the world’ in a particular tone of voice, and I finally recognized it as the tone FDR used in his Four Freedoms speech. I doubt the announcer noticed what he was doing.”

Its Light Was A Thing Of Wonder

 Its Light Was A Thing Of Wonder

 I woke up an hour before dawn, an hour and a half before my alarm was to go off. I thought about trying to go back to sleep, but the predawn light coming in the window drew me out of bed.

I pulled on my longies from where I’d left them on the floor and opened the door to the outside.

It was cool, rather than cold, which I supposed meant the day would be very hot. The sky was just paling, the Sun only a brighter patch of sky at the moment. It looked a lot like the sky as I’d seen it many times when I was working nights, when the approach of Sunrise meant the end of another work shift, and it would soon be time to head home.

I missed my old job. It wasn’t what I’d set out to do for a living, but it was rewarding work, satisfying work. I worked night shifts by preference, because I liked the quiet and the slower pace. For most of a typical shift, it was just me and the residents.

The residents were good people, and I enjoyed being with them, helping them. Sometimes the work was demanding, but I took comfort and drew strength from the thought that I was doing a job that absolutely had to be done, 24 hours a day, weekends and holidays included. There was a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that was true.

There were only a few stars visible, and the Moon had already set. The brightest light was Venus, so brilliant and bright. I loved that spark in the sky, always felt happier when it was visible in the gloaming.

I called my wife “my Brightly Shining”, without really knowing what it meant. It just sounded right, for this woman who was the best part of my life. Only years later did I realize that the phrase, “the Brightly Shining” was associated in my mind, for some reason, with Venus. That was only appropriate, since she was my Venus, my ideal woman. It was also appropriate, since the Morning Star was so often my companion as I rode home.

I’d ride home under the brilliant point source, sometimes stopping to admire it for a moment, and slide gratefully into bed next to my wife. She’d hold me so lovingly, kiss me, tell me she was glad to have me home, and we’d fall asleep together for an hour or so before she had to get up.

I looked up at that brightly shining spot in the sky and felt my wife’s presence with me.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "She was the Brightly Shining".

Something About What You Carry Or Have Carried

 Something About What You Carry Or Have Carried

“My brain hurts.”

“Aww, sweetie. Did you take your pills?”

“The usual ones: the blue one and the two aspirin. And I took the allegedly prophylactic

pills at six, as prescribed.”

“Well, come here. Yes, really. Come rest your head on my shoulder. I’ll stroke your hair.

Mmm, it’s getting so long, like it was when we were first together. Have some more water.”

“Headache shall be always with us. With me, anyway. Sometimes it’s like a thing of its

own, dropping in to visit. Or maybe it’s always there, riding on my shoulder, maybe, and only

brings itself to my attention from time to time.”

“Like a little guy with stubble on his chin whacking you with a hammer?”

“Heh. There’s the secret of our success again: I’m not old enough to have seen those ads for

whatever that medication was, but I know about them anyway. I’ve seen him in old magazines,

and parodied in Mad magazine reprint books. So I’m honorary old.

“Hold on a sec, let me get my water bottle. Yeah, now go back to stroking my hair. Feels so

good.”

“Are you feeling better?”

“Starting to. Wow, it’s amazing how different I feel while you’re touching me. It hurts so

much less.

“But I do wonder if there’s something else I could do about these headaches. Or this

headache. The headache.”

“The great granddaddy of all headaches. I’m so sorry. I know it’s a burden on you. Mmm, I

do like your hair like this.”

“It’s not all that much trouble. I could keep it this way if you want.

“I do like it when you stroke my head like that. Well, when you did stroke it. I sure do miss

you. Everything reminds me of you, even my headache. It knew you, too.”

Sharon Olds Late Poem To My Father

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2005%252F11%252F17.htm

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Take care of yourself."

Thoughts On Moving House

15 April The movers came today, and they were here much longer than I expected, and got a lot more done than I excpected them to, which was good, but also pushed back everything else in our day.

The house looks...very different, with wso much of its contents removed.

Let Him Live, Lord

 [An older Creative Coven composition]

"You like the idea of being able to dismiss him as just garbage,

unworthy of life, don't you?"

"I'm just being realistic. You're the one romanticizing him as

some kind of wonderful guy who was deprived of the opportunity

to make the world such a better place, when he was just another

thug."

"He was nineteen years old and neither you nor I have any idea

what he might have done with his life. You're just trying to

make excuses for the fact that you don't want to stick a crowbar

in your heart and care that a human being was killed without any

good reason. How can you care so little that a human life was

snuffed out so carelessly by the people who are supposed to

prevent that sort of thing?"

"How can you care so much? What is this guy to you? You never

met him, he's not your damn cousin or something."

"Yeah, I think that's what's really at the root of this whole

disagreement between you and me. You just don't care about

people outside of a narrow circle, and you think I'm either

pretending to care or actually crazy when I look further."

"That's not true. I care about people. I volunteer. I donate.

But you do get kind of weird over people sometimes, and I don't

get it."

"That pretty much describes how I see you. When you talk about a

human being like he's a bug to be stepped on, that strikes me as

weird, and I don't get you."

"So what would you want for this guy?"

"I'd want for him and everybody who meets a cop in an ordinary

encounter to live, just to live. Is that asking so much?

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Evidently."

There Are No Creatures You Cannot Love

 There Are No Creatures You Cannot Love

 

“Aaaaah! A spider!”

“Oh,” I said calmly. “Be careful not to hurt her.”

“I hate spiders! I wish every spider in the world were destroyed!”

I remembered saying almost exactly the same thing when I’d been about his age. My father had said, “Think of how many flies there’d be if there were no spiders.” It was an especially pointed thought just now, because the shed was teeming with flies.

I said, “Calm down, hon. If there were no spiders, we’d have to eat all of these flies ourselves.”

That got his attention. Ru gave a start, then laughed.

“Okay, you’re right. I know I have arachnophobia.”

That was typical of all of my kids. I talked to them as though they were adults, and they used adult vocabulary. It wasn’t even especially noteworthy for a five-year-old to use a six-syllable word that way.

“You do know that there are only three or four kinds of spider in the whole world that can even bite humans, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I remember Vicky told me that when I got that sliver in my hand.”

Poor guy. He’d been so afraid of a spider running over his arm while he was pulling a toy out of a crevice in the wall that he’d yanked it back abruptly, catching a long splinter and also barking his elbow.

I lifted a heavy piece of electronics we were saving to give to Harai when she visited next and found the source of the smell, which was also the source of the flies.

“You might find this interesting, Ru.”

“Wow, what is it?”

“It’s a possum that died back here. It’s all rotted away except for the bones and the skin. We could probably save the skull, and maybe the skin, for a craft project. I’ll get a dustpan for it, and we can take it into the kitchen and see. The rest can go in the compost.”

As I was scooping it up, Ru asked, “What happened to the rest of the possum?”

“Probably the flies ate it. When they were baby maggots, that is. Ate all the meat and left the skin and bones. And the stink.”

He laughed.

“I guess even flies are helpful, aren’t they?”

“They’ve all got a place in the world. It’s not like they were put here by an evil spirit to annoy us.”

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Beelzebub, 'Lord of the Flies', was a typo. He was actually Beelzebul, 'Lord of the Temple'."