A Letter From Kathe

 The other day, I received a call from the Reynolds Law Firm, which has handled our legal business in various matters over the years, telling me that they had a letter which they needed to either return to me or shred in order to protect my confidentiality. I was fairly certain that it wasn't anything with current relevance, but was still curious, so I went by and picked it up.

I was glad that I did. It was good to have a little reminder of Kathe's quietly fierce intellect in my hand for a moment. In the midst of our (valiant and energetic, though ultimately failed) effort to save our home from the hostile attentions of the City of Corvallis, Kathe gave a member of the city's bureaucracy a piece of her mind, and it was a pleasure to have it back.

Mr. W****:

Since we talked with you, I have continued to try to find a way to work on our decrepit outbuildings in a way that would satisfy the city. However, it doesn't seem that there is any such thing. I have continued to call and where possible interview people who might assist us with the work that (in my opinion) needs to be done. I was keeping a running account of my efforts but have decided to simply summarize them. At this time I have spoken with a small family business which will undertake to clear the debris from the yard and with a fencing contractor that I feel sure would do a good job. I have not yet found someone who would be willing to drop plans that would be acceptable to the city, but I have made some progress toward that end.

Over the past weekend, I looked at my notes and decided that since I had gotten no callbacks from any structural engineer, my next effort would be to call on them unannounced and see if anyone would talk to me. Yesterday, I spoke with Mr. David Flemings of Clair, who said he would look into the situation and see what advice he could give us. We happily accepted.

This morning, a couple of city representatives appeared on our porch and asked me to sign a paper that they mischaracterized as a vitally necessary permission for them to start hiring contractors to demolish our property on our behalf. They referred to the paper as permission to "abate or demolish" but as my husband pointed out to them, it really said "abate by demolition". They again referred to "your dangerous house" (I am so getting tired of that phrase). I signed, but I checked " Do Not (agree)" and they went away.

This is what we want:

First, agreement to our plan for remediation. We want to remove the part of the auxiliary structure that rests on decaying timbers, to retain the garage and later to put a foundation under the garage walls and to and to restore the back stairway and porch to a usable condition.

Second, permission to do some work ourselves now, or as soon as conditions permit. This would include clearance of some, if not all, of the debris in the yard. It would also include restoring the steps to the stairway (the one that is so very attractive to "small children"), rebuilding the porch, and replacing the door, if we can find one that will fit the space.

Third, to be allowed to enter the garage, both to clear debris and to work on the roof, and later, to use it to store yard equipment, tools, and materials, while the rest of the work proceeds.

Fourth, to be addressed as people with a problem (and one which arguably the city ought to have helped us with from the start), not people who are a problem. In short, we want the city's people to speak with us politely and honestly, and without bullying.

5th, if they know of contractors who would be willing to work with us, as opposed to contractors who are willing to work with the city, that they give us their names.

Kathleen and John Burt

If the city had dealt with us in a reasonable and decent fashion, that lovely old house would still be standing and I might well still be living in it. The house at the corner of 10^th and Jefferson could be a showpiece of the community instead of an empty socket in the city's jaw.

And couples would still be getting their pictures taken under the branches of the cedar tree arching over the sidewalk.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Look and see."

The Questions You Might Want To Ask

 

“Hello, Amy, can you hear me?”

“Um…yes?”

“That’s good. My name is George, and I’m here to help you. Are you comfortable right now? Is my voice too loud or too soft, for instance?”

“No, it’s fine. I’m . . . very comfortable. In fact, I feel better than I can ever remember being in my life.”

“That’s good. That’s always our intention, but we don’t always get it right on the first try.”

“’What you mean, “we”, white man?’ Sorry, I need to learn to stop making that joke. Fewer people get it every year, and some people take offense at it-especially people of color. Anyway, who is ‘we’, please? You don’t look like hospital staff.”

“I’m not, but I am here to help. I can show you how to make adjustments to be more comfortable, and try to answer the questions you might want to ask.

“Oh, and by the way, I did get the joke, and I didn’t take offense. Also: the King sits on gold. Who sits on silver?”

“The Lone Ranger, of course.”

“You have a nice laugh, Amy.”

“You have a nice smile, George. Oh, my, I’m flirting with you – I must be feeling better. But: please tell me exactly what is going on here. Is this a room for some new therapy I haven’t been getting before, or so I just not remember it?”

“From now on, you shouldn’t have any trouble with memory. For instance: what did you have to drink while you read the first chapter of Mission of Gravity?”

“Peppermint tea – it was the only tea left in the house. Wow, I was fourteen years old on June 5^th, 1967!”

“There, your memory is intact. Everything’s fine.”

“So I’m in Heaven?”

“We don’t use that name, because it comes with some associations that aren’t helpful. But it isn’t Hell, either, so don’t-“

“Grandma? Sorry to wake you, but I brought the kids, and we can only stay for a little while.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Meesha. I was having a nice dream, but it’s one I’ve had a couple of times already.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Oh, I feel fine, but they warned me about that. If I hadn’t read up on it, I wouldn’t know: when you get right to the end, you have a baseless feeling of well-being. A lot of people become convinced they’re getting better, which can be really hard on the people trying to help them at the end, when they start babbling about all the things they’re about to start doing.”

“Are you at the end, Gran Amy?”

“Yes, Hali, it’s almost over, but that’s okay. It’s the end for me, but I’ve lived longer than most, and I’ve had the good fortune and the good sense to enjoy more than most, and I have this lovely feeling of well-being to help me at the finish. Also, I get to see you. That’s good. You’re going to live long after I’m done.”

“Are you going to go to Heaven and meet the angels?”

“It’s a pretty thought. Probably not, but I’m okay with that.”

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46701/questions-about-angels

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Je m'en vais chercher un grand peut-être; tirez le rideau, la farce est jouée."

Which Is Why We Have Songs Of Praise

 

"Life isn’t easy and straightforward. It’s full of challenges and difficulties. Trouble will come to us uninvited and without warning. Man is prone to trouble as sparks are to fly upward, and under much the same circumstances: as the result of invisible forces surrounding us. But it is precisely because life is like that, that we should choose to embrace it and be grateful for it. It is because life is a damn pain that we should be glad to experience it.

“A prisoner of war once looked down in disgust at the bowl of slop and weevil-infested crust in front of him, and then noticed his cellmate saying grace over it. He said, ‘You’d say grace over a meal like that?’ His comrade looked startled and said, ‘Yeah – thank God for that!’

“It is in that spirit that we should each of us embrace the problems we face and be glad for the opportunity to work through them. We should not merely accept and endure our flawed lives, but rejoice in them. That is why we have songs of praise for our life in this fallen world.”

 

The Magic Eight-Ball Says, "Because screaming all the time makes your throat hurt."

https://pioneerproductions.blogspot.com/2017/10/and-bob-dylan-too-poem-by-mary-oliver.html

I Could Sleep In This Educated Earth

I used to have a great horror of the thought of death, of the end of my existence and the loss of my individual awareness. I yearned for some guarantee of immortality, spiritual or technological, which could guarantee my continued existence. I don’t have that same craving any longer. I’ve reconciled myself to the idea that the world doesn’t need to cater to my personal vanity that way.

I would like it, though, it would please me, if the Akashic Record really did exist: if there really were some level of the universe upon which every event which has happened, every word which has been spoken, even every thought which has crossed every mind, persists. And there’s reason to think, given what we know about quantum physics, that it might.

Given that, I could surrender my bones to join the rest of the dead, knowing that nothing was lost, that I was joining a well-educated Earth.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Everything changes, everything ends."

Man of Steel (2020 Revision)

 STREET SCENE: JOE and JERRY walk down an otherwise-empty urban sidewalk, the camera preceding them down the sidewalk, slightly higher than eye level, so that we look slightly down on them.

JOE I’M NOT SAYING THINGS AREN’T BETTER THAN THEY USED TO BE. I’M JUST SAYING THAT THE WORLD IS LESS MYSTERIOUS, LESS SURPRISING. THERE’S NO MORE MAGIC IN THE WORLD, NO MORE MIRACLES. NOTHING TO MAKE YOU STOP AND SAY --

JERRY has stopped. He puts out his left hand to stop JOE from moving forward, though JOE doesn’t notice at first.

JERRY LOOK . . . .

JERRY’s right hand slowly rises, index finger pointing towards something higher than our POV.

JERRY (In an awed half-whisper) UP IN THE SKY . . . .

Ted read over the scene again, grinning. It was good. It was very good, the perfect opening scene for Superman: City of Tomorrow. It established the theme of a world whose wonders could easily be missed, ignored or taken for granted. Superman would serve as a metaphor for the marvels all around, the everyday miracles of life, science and human creativity. At the end of the film, Joe would spot a rare bird and point it out to Jerry, who would express surprise at Joe’s noticing it. Joe would grin and say, “I spend more time looking up these days.”

Okay, so he had a beginning and an ending. Now he just had to fill in a hundred or so pages. That, and find a way to get some studio person to take a look at it, and he still had small idea of how that was done. It was all so complicated, and did sixty-year-old men ever actually break into scriptwriting? Not in big-budget franchise pictures, he knew that much. He probably shouldn’t even be working on his Superman movie – better to concentrate on learning how to write basic scripts for low-budget pictures, the kind he might possibly get a shot at – not that he knew much about how even those kinds of films got made.

But the Superman project was what he wanted to work on. It was what fired him up. He liked Superman.

He looked down at his T-shirt, at the red “S” centered on his chest like a target. So he was a grown man who liked Superman. Big deal. Some people drank.

He saved the file, “SCOT1”, and massaged his aching wrists while the computer shut down.

It will get easier, he told himself. As with all things, it came with practice. Facility, speed and confidence would all increase, the more of it he did.

He got up, flexing his fingers the way the physical therapist had shown him. The pain in his hands reminded him that sometimes doing a lot of something for a long time could also use up your capacity to do it. He’d had a good run as a massage therapist, almost twenty years, but he'd reached the point where he couldn't go on doing it. Joints and tendons wore out, that was all there was to it. And as much as he had enjoyed the work, there were simply too many LMTs in town for him to make a grown-up living.

He'd enrolled in nursing school, and enjoyed it immensely, but he had flunked out. He'd gone back the next year to take the second term over again, in spite of the expense, and failed a second time. When he was invited to attend the graduation of his former classmates, they'd all been glad to see him, and he'd been glad to see them, but he'd felt as though, having just recovered from a hysterectomy, he'd been invited to a baby shower.

He'd continued to work as a nurse's aide. It was simple work, poorly paid, but at least he was still in the healing profession.

It was a job that required strength. A lot of it. He recalled one client whom he'd gone to for two hours a day, six days a week, to get him get out of bed and dressed. It had taken a tremendous amount of strength and self-control to maintain a professional demeanor through all of the man's griping, nitpicking, rude questions and insults. One morning, the old man had for some reason pressed him for details about the kind of services he performed.

“Really, sir, I can’t say much about other clients. It’s a question of professional ethics.”

“Huh. I wouldn’t call someone who works for minimum wage a professional.”

A) "What the hell business of yours is it how much I make, you nosy bastard?"
B) "I’ll have you know I get the highest rate the agency pays."
C) "Go to Hell, why don't you?"
D) “Well, sir, to my way of thinking, even a convict on a work gang can act with professionalism. That depends on your own personal dignity.”

Choosing "D" to say out loud had taken plenty of strength. More than Ted had thought he possessed. So there you were.

Ted sighed and shook himself. He had tried to learn to leave garbage like that behind at the end of a shift, and here it was years later, years since the failing of his back had made it impossible for him to continue working as a CNA, so he'd been reduced to living on Social Security Disability Insurance. What was the point of letting that dickhead keep on riding his shoulders? Time to make supper, anyway.

He cleared a space on the dining table, one of the few pieces of furniture which had followed him and his wife from their house to the tiny apartment they had taken together. He remembered a time when he'd seen his son Jake doing homework with a girl he vaguely recognized.

“I’ll need some room to work. Could you spread out a little less?”

“Let’s just go now,” the girl had said, and they'd started packing up their papers.

“We’re gonna finish up at Carol’s place,” Jake explained. “I’ll probably stay for supper, too.”

Ted had nodded. If he were going to be alone for the evening, he’d probably just cook up a ramen. His wife had been at yet another board meeting for the group she was keeping afloat mainly by her own efforts. He was used to eating alone.

As the kids left, Jake stared at the “S” on Ted’s chest.

“What do you wear that thing for? You’re sure not Superman.”

Ted smiled.

“You’re wrong, Jake. I am Superman.”

Jake had looked at his father without saying anything, then turned and left with his friend.

Now, years later, with Jake a grown man with a wife and family of his own, and with his wife dead nearly a year, Ted remembered that night.

Before heading into the kitchenette to cook up yet another ramen, Ted looked at the mirror hung on the wall on the other side of the table. An old man, he supposed, but not an ugly one. His wife had found him attractive, as had other women. There was a woman a couple of time zones away, a former and possibly future girlfriend who might bring love back into his life eventually.

The man in the Superman shirt was nothing special to look at, it was true. But Ted smiled at him anyway, and when he did he saw in those soft brown eyes a glint of something that could never be broken.

Jake didn’t know. None of them knew. But that was all right. In fact, it was exactly as it should be. It was only appropriate that no-one should suspect that beneath that mild-mannered exterior was a man of steel.

[I wrote this story some years ago. I've revised it a couple of times to better reflect my own life, and I felt like redoing it once again. I feel the need of steel in my spine more than ever today.]

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Appearances can be deceiving."

We Never Belonged To You

Dear Mom and Dad:

Thank you for all the care and love you put into rearing us. We are all pretty well-adjusted and well-launched into life, and we have you to thank for a lot of that.

You need to know, though, that we are launched into life. We’re not your babies anymore. We need to decide things for ourselves now.

Last week at Thanksgiving, you both attacked Bettina for bringing Leslie to dinner, and belittled their relationship. We were all shocked at your behavior.

Leslie is the person Bettina is closest to, at least for now he is. The fact that they are not romantically involved is beside the point. Bettina isn’t looking for a romantic relationship, and like Leslie, she might very well be aromantic. Or, she might just be focussing on her career right now, and will be open to romance later on in life. That’s irrelevant. What matters is, it’s Bettina’s life, and you need to respect that.

 

https://genius.com/Margaret-atwood-the-moment-annotated

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Nope."

It Happened so Quickly

We’d gotten up early to drive to Portland. This was the culmination of years of effort, struggle, sacrifice, tedium, false starts, disappointments, embarrassment, humiliation.

Anyone who thinks adoption is easier than pregnancy and childbirth should come try it for themselves.

But now, we had finally come here, to this spot at PDX, the Portland International Airport. Standing together, the three of us, John and Kathe and Waldy, waiting for them to come.

We saw a pair of dark-skinned girls, but as they got closer we saw that they were not Hamitic, and older than the girls we expected, and there was no boy with them. We saw another girl, and looked for her sister and brother, and didn’t see them, and went back to waiting.

Finally, we saw what we were looking for: two girls and a little boy, all dressed in white linen Ethiopian formal wear, and wearing small backpacks. And they saw us as well. First one girl, then the other, then they called their brother’s attention to us.

They didn’t run. They’d surely been cautioned not to run, and they were good kids. But they picked up their pace a little bit, and it felt as though I was connected to them by an elastic bond that drew them toward us.

Then they were in our arms, my wife hugging one girl while I hugged the other, then the little boy, who had already hugged Waldy.

Touching them seemed to make them real. These were our kids. We were their parents.

It happened so quickly.

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Hurry up and wait".

 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."

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."

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.

I Have Her

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP5oylZW2uI
Depression is a cruel and painful disease. It has robbed us of many great talents besides Phil Ochs. As for whether "her" is literal or metaphorical, it doesn't really matter. People (not always heterosexual men) often personify some passion as a woman, a "demanding mistress". But also, plenty of people suffering from depression have destroyed relationships when they proved not to "cure" them, and blamed the lover. I am so fortunate that I have someone in my life who loved me enough to reach out after I had mistreated her so viciously, and ask me to try again. She hasn't made me whole, but no-one can -- if that's possible, I will have to do it myself. But she did show me that someone was capable of loving me that much. I was a glutton for love. It was not enough for me to have the love of a good woman -- I demanded the love of another, and then another, never satisfied. At my worst, I tried to have the love of three, any of whom would have been a good match for me, but trying to have everything more than just both ways made all of them miserable, hurt them terribly. I demanded that they prove themselves to me over and over, and was never satisfied. I am immensely fortunate that the true love of my life forgave me all of that, and invited me to walk away from self-indulgence onto a demanding path which led to the happiness I now enjoy. Depression is still an issue, but it's better now that I have found better footing. Ours is one of the great loves of history, even though no-one will know about it. Future generations will not speak of "John Burt and his Brightly Shining" as a metaphor for love, but that doesn't matter. The greatest soldiers didn't get medals, the scientists who contributed most never received a Nobel Prize. No-one knows who wrote "Away in a Manger" or "Darlin' Corey". No-one will know, but it happened, and it is happening now.
I have her. She isn't "nothing".

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "She's really something."\\

There Goes The Plum Tree

Our plum tree, which has dropped excessively-juicy plums onto the grass and sidewalk near the corner of 10th and Jefferson for far longer than I have lived here, is speeding up its decades-long process of falling over.  Its roots are tearing out of the ground, and its branches are touching the grass.

We will get plenty of big blue handle-carefully-they're-soft plums this year, but I think that will be it until one of the suckers coming up from its roots starts bearing.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "To everything there is a season."\\

A Bit Late, But . . .

I have decided to give up Facebook for Lent.  I will make a sincere effort not to go onto Facebook until Easter Sunday, an occasion I will otherwise not observe.
Persons who are genuinely interested in our current situation, especially Kathe's health, may visit this blog, or e-mail me at john_m_burt@hotmail.com

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Outlook is good."\\

Pete Seeger, 1919-2014

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/chi-pete-seeger-dead-20140127,0,3986283.story

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlSpc87Jfr0

Ninety-four years, none of them wasted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y7P4n2uT0w

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Seeger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt9jWoXmrLw

An American hero.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvyvBRfJuIE

http://peteseeger.net/wp/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXKJ1jPuaoI

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "To everything there is a season."\\

A Small But Wonderful Thing Happened Today

I almost didn't notice it at the time.

I was telling Gideon a "Gideon story" (I tell him a lot of stories, and Kathe is after me to start writing them down -- I know she's right...) in which Gideon was with a group of carolers.  They sang "Stille Nacht", and Gideon told the group that his Dad had written a book about the Christmas Truce.

Gideon interrupted to ask if it was true that I had written a book "with pages, that people read?"  I told him, not many people so far, but I had hopes that it would sell more eventually.  I opened my laptop and showed him the illustrations I had used, and he pointed to one of my advertisements and said, "I have seen that!"

  

 

 

So I guess now he knows it's true.  In the morning, I will sit down with him and page through the copy I had made at CreateSpace.

I'll try to find a passage from the book that I can read to him.  

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Maybe the soccer game?"\\

Happy Anniversary, Kathe

Love You, Dad

My father will always be with me.  Like today, when I was handing over a check marked VOID in order to set up direct deposit for my paychecks, and I heard Dad's voice saying, "This is so much easier than in the old days, when you had to actually take a check and void on it".  Love you, Dad....

//The Magic Eight - Ball says, "He loves you, too."\\

I'm Ready to Beg, Folks

Unemployed for close to two years, nobody is hiring, my books aren't selling.

If you have not bought one of my publications, please consider it. I personally think The Christmas Mutiny is a good story. I also think highly of my short stories "Hansel and Gretel Lost in the Bardo", "The Men Who Saved JFK" and my manual on massage technique, With a Friendly Touch, all of which are available for download at Amazon.com.

For the next seven days, if you e-mail me at john_m_burt@hotmail.com or text me at (541) 602-6026 to inform me that you have bought one of my stories, I will reply with 1) my personal thanks and 2) my new story "Dragons Live Forever", a 375-word flash piece which has not yet been offered to the public.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "You can always ask."\\

Makayla Kelley Burt

My first grandchild.


//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Let the stars beware."\\

Good Cookies

http://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/oatmeal-chocolate-chip-cookies.html

I make them for Kathe and me to eat on the paper route.

Still wish I could find Becca's recipe card for the recipe I used to use.

Or ask Becca about it....

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "She loved her mother. And she loved you."\\