Hopscotch and Jumprope

 

I walked out onto the playground, seeing the kids playing individually and in groups. The sawdust underfoot was frozen into a solid mass, the chunks on the surface frosted decoratively where they hadn’t been stepped on. The sky was a perfectly even gray, the Sun a white disk that you could look directly at. I imagined a flag, like the Japanese flag, but white on gray.

I looked around. A group of boys were throwing a football. I didn’t like football, or playing catch. Boys and girls were on the swings, but there weren’t any swings empty. The jungle gym was crowded. On the asphalt patch, groups of girls were playing hopscotch and jumprope and that weird game where one of them crouched down in the center and they formed a circle around her and sang a song while she stood up. Actually, maybe there was more than one game like that. I had a feeling I’d heard more than one song, anyway.

I didn’t like being on the asphalt during recess. I thought of playing on asphalt as an opportunity to fall down and tear your pants and gouge your hands. Still, I’d always wondered about the games girls played. I’d already learned that boys’ games were magic, and could take you to far-off places and allow you to live other lives, almost as well as books could, if you observed the rituals and didn’t mess with them. It was easy to mess up the magic, of course. What sort of magic did girls use, though? I decided I’d like to find out.

I walked over to where the girls were jumping rope. I saw that two girls were twirling the rope, and the girl in the middle was not watching for it – she was actually not facing towards it, and couldn’t see it coming. She was dancing in time to the rope’s swing, dancing with the rope, as its partner. So . . . .

I watched two girls playing Hopscotch. That was trickier, and finally I asked them to explain it. They were annoyed at being asked to explain, but tried to be polite. They even invited me to try it, but when I tossed the stick they were using, it landed outside of a square, and when I skipped down the squares, I didn’t land inside them, and wrong-footed, and didn’t understand their explanation of what I had done wrong, and went away annoyed.

I didn’t even try with the circle of singing girls.

And so I never did learn the secret of girl magic.

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47247/in-just

Some Words Are Messengers

 

“Did you hear about the new probe that’s just been launched toward Mercury?” I asked Ms. Messenger as I massaged the back of her thigh.

“No, I haven’t. I do usually follow news about space exploration, but I hadn’t heard about it. Who has launched it?”

“It was NASA. I thought you’d be interested, in particular, since its name is MESSENGER.”

“Hah. Well, that’s appropriate, for going to Mercury.”

“Just so. It’s an acronym, describing the kinds of instruments it’s going to be carrying, the things it’s going to be looking for. I forget what-all it’s doing. I believe one thing it will be doing is looking for ice.”

“Ice? Really?”

“Well, at the poles, in deep craters, there are shadowed places where the Sun never shines, so the temperature remains extremely low. Almost as cold as people imagined the back side of Mercury would be, when we thought it was tidally locked and always kept one face toward the Sun.”

I folded the sheet back over her leg and moved around to the head to fold it down to uncover her back. I tucked it into the waistband of her underpants to make sure they were protected and spread oil across her back.

“People thought that? I never heard that.”

“Yes, until the 1960s. The way the Moon is tidally locked to the Sun.”

“Whoa. If that happened, then the night side would never see the Sun at all…it would be so cold…whoa.”

“Yes. Colder than Pluto, which at least gets a tiny bit of Sunlight. It would be the coldest place in the Solar System.”

“Spooky.”

“I’d been meaning to ask you about your name. Do you know where it comes from?”

“I don’t. I only know my ancestry back about four generations, all in this country. I’ve been married twice, and kept it both times, because I couldn’t give it up.”

“Hey, if I married a woman named Messenger, I’d take her name.”

“Good for you.”

“Did you ever see that movie, The List of Adrian Messenger?”

“No, heard of it. That’s the one where a bunch of people turn out at the end to have been wearing heavy makeup to disguise themselves?”

“Yes. A weird gimmick. They didn’t quite have the technology to pull it off back then, you could pretty easily tell who the actors were, most of the time, but it was a fun movie anyway. One of those grisly murder comedies where a large number of people are killed in grotesque ways.”

“People are weird sometimes.”

I went on rubbing down her back.

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91108/words-are-birds

Self-Reflection

I turned away from the keyboard to consider my options. In taking my wife’s half-finished manuscript, I wanted to carry out one final collaboration with her, to infuse her words with my own. I wanted to do this to feel closer to her. I thought I would feel that way, especially since the main characters in the story were obvious stand-ins for the two of us. In a way, it was already her own love letter to the two of us.

To do that, though, I had to wrestle with my own priorities, my own interests, and above all, my own viewpoint. I had to find my own way of looking at it. For instance, I was thinking that instead of writing it in third person as she had been doing it, I would write it in first person as Jack, my stand-in. Or maybe I should write it in alternating viewpoints, as Jack and also as Kate?

The one would require a good deal of self-reflection. The other would be…simply beyond my ability, I was sure. I was married to her for longer than I had been not-married to her, but I hadn’t been married to her for longer than she had been not-married to me. I had raised four children with her, but she had raised five children without me.

Besides that, though, another purpose of finishing The Lodge was to learn more about myself, as Kathe’s husband and as myself. I must learn more about myself as a being apart from Kathe, since that is who and what I am and shall be from now on. After more than a year of widowhood, I am still learning how to do it, how to be a widower, how to live my own life.

I saw a therapist for over a year. She was so good. I wish I were seeing one now. I talk with one occasionally, but we don’t connect as well. I’m not going to blame her, but we don’t make the kind of connections that I did with my previous counselor. So, I shall have to rely primarily upon my own reflections on my thoughts.

And finish The Lodge.

And finish Frankenstein’s World and post it for sale.

And get started on An American Victory.

And when I’m done with that, get started on The Black Coast.

I really do have a lot to do.

 

The Blue Nightgown by Toi Dericotte https://poets.org/poem/blue-nightgown

What You Can’t Know

I turned the cardboard sleeve over in my hands, looking at the photograph on the front, the text on the back. I propped it up beside the television screen which my son thought of as “small”, though it seemed immense to me, as it sat on top of the dead machine that had once been a top of the line television-stereo record player. I opened up my laptop, found the album and began playing it.

Pete Seeger sang “If You Miss Me At The Back Of The Bus”. I recalled how cheery it had sounded when I was small, not really understanding the background, the struggle against cruelty and humiliation it represented. Lehi joined me in clapping along, smiling, but when it was over, he turned to me and said, “Why did they want black people to sit at the back?”

“It was so black people and white people didn’t sit together. They wanted to keep people separate so they didn’t get to know each other and learn that they were all just people.”

“Why are you playing the album off of YouTube, instead of putting the record on the stereo?”

“The stereo doesn’t work. I can’t play any of the records on the shelves, or the tapes in the boxes. I can only play music if I can find it online.”

Pete sang “Little Boxes” and I said, “I used to visit my aunt every year, and my father pointed out the houses across the way as we drove up to her house. They were the same little boxes that Malvina Reynolds was singing about.”

Pete sang “We Shall Overcome”, and as I leaned forward, hands clasped, my face tight with emotion, Lehi put his hand on my arm and said, “Are you all right?”

“Yes. This song just always affects me, a lot. It did when I was little, and it does even more now, because I understand it more.”

He put his arm around me. I put my arm around him. I noticed he was singing along, and I joined in. God, it felt good.

We Shall Overcome Someday….

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Damn right we shall."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49355/ninas-blues

Contact Light 2020

 Contact lIght

 

Contact light, for the year 2020 [Annus Horribilis], the annual newsletter from John M. Burt, sent to all friends and relatives of John and Kathe, originating from 1012 NW Fillmore Avenue, Corvallis, Oregon 97330 USA // Also originating from john_m_burt@hotmail.com // 541-602-6026 // Also posted to john_m_burt.blogspot.com

Well . . . 2020. Did anybody have a good year? If you did, please have the decency to keep your trap shut. Seriously, what HAPPENED? I mean, in January we knew donald was going to squat in our White House for another year, so we knew it wasn’t going to be one of your totally swell years, but did anybody think we were going to be living in a John T. Sladek novel? [Or maybe a Robert A. Heinlein novelette? This really did seem like it was The Year of the Jackpot.]

If you’re reading this at all, you probably know why this was my least-favorite year of all time. Late in 2019, I began noticing that Kathe was forgetting words in a way that didn’t seem like anything that had happened to her before. She blew it off repeatedly, but finally I persuaded her to see a neurologist. It turned out to be someone I had seen for a minor issue a couple of years before, and by the end of our appointment, he was well and truly alarmed. Kathe just wasn’t anything like the woman he had met before. Evidently, his alarm was persuasive where mine wasn’t: she agreed to get a CAT scan. When we went in to discuss the results with him, the source of Kathe’s confusion was very, very obvious: she had a plum-sized tumor pressing on her speech centers. It was a bad news, worse news situation, though. The diagnostic name Glioblastoma multiforme provided the worse news:  besides the battleship, there was a whole flotilla of cruisers all over her brain. Kathe never had a chance.

She did have a choice, though: after having the big tumor out, she could have radiation and chemo for two or three years, or comfort measures for two or three months. The landscape ahead didn’t look appealing, so she chose the short trip. The comfort measures were definitely comforting. Kathe was clear-headed once she recovered from the surgery, and wasn’t in any pain, even at the end. I noticed that once we had passed the 8^th of February, the three-month mark, she started getting a trifle…short-tempered, as though she were impatient once the “deadline” had passed. The end came on the 11^th, while we watched a compilation of music videos which were in rotation in the early years of MTV, when it was a utility, supplying music videos on demand, 24 hours a day. It was a period of great creativity, with good music and good videos. They were also the videos we watched in the Summer of 1984 while we were getting to know one another. Really, the only way it could have been better is if we’d been able to play a hand of Anomaly, the card game we’d invented around the kitchen table that Summer, to make use of a strange mix of incomplete card decks. I held her hand, watching videos with her until her eyes closed, and then watching videos by myself, holding her hand, noticing how her breathing was slowing to an unnatural pace, with long pauses, until finally she took a breath which didn’t look any different from the last one, except that it was not followed by another.

A few days after Kathe died, something brought to my mind a song I hadn’t heard in years. Before I met Kathe, I bought an audiocassette tape from a company that no longer exists, Off-Centaur Press, which sold collections of filk songs, science fiction folksongs most often heard at SF conventions.  When I remembered “Time and Stars”, it struck me very powerfully in Kathe’s absence. I haven't been able to find “Time and Stars” on YouTube or anywhere else, oddly enough, neither a recording of its being performed nor of its lyrics, but I had no trouble remembering them:

 

Our lives are brief as falling stars

That streak the sky like tears

My life is stretched by a slender thread

Across a million years

The Weaver of Dreams has spun our lives

Our webs of joy and pain

She casts them forth for a little while

And gathers them in again

Although 'til now my thread was drawn

In solitary ways

I think your dreams weave through my nights

Your memories through my days

Life's tangled skein takes shape upon

The Loom of What Will Be

Our lives entwine in the warp and weft

Of the Weaver's Tapestry

For there is a Pattern vast as time

The stars weave 'round the Earth

In smaller rhythms weave our years

The promise of rebirth

When the Weaver draws our threads across

Another where or when

I will meet and know and remember you

And love you once again

 

Returning to card game metaphors, are you as impressed as I am at how many of the trumpery are still doubling down, trying to bluff President-Elect Biden into folding? My father told a story like that from his time in the Air Force, of playing cards with some guys, one of whom kept raising and raising, wearing a smile that he was sure was, along with his huge raises, going to get the other remaining player to fold. Problem was, they were playing stud poker, and he had something like a Trey and Five of Clubs and a pair of Deuces showing, and the other guy had something like three Kings up. Mathematically, there was no way his hole card could possibly turn the mess he had showing into a winning hand. The two players who had already folded were looking sad. The guy who was about to rake in a ridiculously large pot looked sick. But there was also no way, by the gentlemanly rules of poker, that any of them could point out to him his blunder. They just had to wait for the poor sap to figure it out for himself, or run out of money with which to raise. That’s pretty much exactly how I feel, reading these ridiculous rants from the trumpery.

The worst of it is, donald himself isn’t the guy bluffing: he’s a kibitzer who keeps pushing one five dollar bill after another at the stupid player, reminding him each time, “Six for five on payday, my dude.”

Besides losing Kathe, I also lost Blackberry House. That house, where I spent most of my life, had always been as much a burden as a blessing. It was a huge old house, in extremely poor condition when Kathe and her previous husband bought it. It was charming in its decrepit way (I once overheard one of my kids on the phone, giving directions to a friend coming over for a play date. He told them to look for “the one that looks like a haunted house”). Kathe worked on it for every year she was physically able to. I helped, as her previous husband had, and the kids, but at the root, the house was Kathe’ project. She did most or all of the roofing (it had a completely sound roof when we sold it), the plumbing (she dug trenches in the crawlspace to get around down there), and oh, boy, did she work on the wiring: one day, finishing a circuit repair, she gave a Tarzan yell and called out, “Everything in this house that works, works because I made it work!”, which had our daughter Mestowet come out of her room to cry, “I want to be like you!”

Another problem the house had was the mortgage. Under circumstances I never fully understood, we had become trapped in a usurious mortgage which essentially meant we could never pay it off - it would simply loom over us, while we paid the sale price a second time, and then a third, without the principle ever shrinking.

There was a tree, too. Oh, what a tree: a cedar that rose majestically into the sky from the corner of the lot, its top a good deal taller than the house, its branches pruned so that they overhung the sidewalk in a way that was charming, although definitely in violation of the sidewalk code. We’d often look outside and see new arrivals and courting couples getting photographs taken inside the frame of those branches. If we were fast, we’d get a chance to run out and offer to take the photo.

We loved that house, but after the kids had left, and as none of them showed any interest in owning the house themselves, it was more house than we really needed. When the city began harassing us about the condition of the attached shed, and we saw just what a disastrous state it was actually in, the next time someone made us an offer on the house, we considered our options and accepted. We were especially happy to be selling to this buyer, because he loved the house and talked about how he looked forward to continuing Kathe’s restoration work. He had an in with the city planning department, and was confident that he could restore the house without interference from the city, and get it the historic designation it deserved.

It was easier to be parted from the house when we knew it was going to a buyer who appreciated it the way we did. When we told Gideon that we had sold the house, his first question was, “What about the tree?”, which endeared him to me all the more. We told him that the buyer would be responsible for protecting the tree from now on, and we would have to accept that.

Too bad, then, that a couple of months after we sold the house, we rode a bus past our old address and the house was gone, and so was the tree. Evidently, the city double-crossed him, and forced him to demolish it. I really don’t think he was buttering us up to get a good deal on the house.

The apartment isn’t bad, mind. Kind of lonely. It’s definitely tricky to think of the space as not having room for just anything - we sold and gave away so much when we moved. Mainly because for decades we had been acquiring things, saying, “Someone will want this.” Quite a few people DID want things we had on hand. We loved giving people things they needed. On one memorable occasion, a hitchhiker passing through Corvallis needed this, that and the other thing (I believe it was three quite different items) and we managed to provide him with all of them. Our hearts were warmed by being able to do this - although our mood was somewhat soured by his then scolding us for being so hung up on material things. Sigh.

Well, now I have two storage lockers full of things I can’t fit into the apartment (down from three), as well as ungainly piles of stuff around the apartment. Once I get some shelves set up, that will help a lot. I still do have things to get rid of. We were selling “Books By The Inch”, and I’ll probably go back to that sometime in 2021.

"When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, 'See! This our fathers did for us.” -- John Ruskin

 Kathe loved this quotation. She had in mind to carve it into a plaque and build it into our house.

That’s the house that has now been demolished, of course. If she had, in fact, placed it, that plaque would now be in splinters in the Coffin Butte Landfill. Her years of labor were not truly for nothing, though. That's no more true than to say her life is irrelevant because she's dead now. She lived in that house, as did her children, as did I, and others besides. We all loved that house. It is a shame that the house is gone, though. She built well. Generations more could have loved it.

 

Notes (in case you’re reading this in a format where the Hyperlinks don’t work)

The Year of the Jackpot: http://www.weylmann.com/The_Year_of_the_Jackpot.pdf

John Ruskin: https://goodreads.com/quotes/7583630

Filk songs: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FilkSong

Glioblastoma Multiforme: https://www.aans.org/en/Patients/Neurosurgical-Conditions-and-Treatments/Glioblastoma-Multiforme

 

 

If I Were Doing My Laundry

I wake up at six to take my pills, awakened by an alarm clock across the room to ensure I get up. I reset the alarm for later in the morning and then, evidently, go back to bed without actually taking my pills. So it is that I awaken shortly before nine, still aching from too many hours without codeine, take my pills with irritation, and get the link open too late, having to turn off the sound in the middle of the meditative exercise, though not after the prompt, "If I were doing laundry".

If I were doing my laundry and paying my bills in this hour, I would try to do them with clarity and presence of mind, honoring the Buddha’s admonishment: “Before enlightenment, do laundry and pay the bills. After enlightenment, do laundry and pay the bills.”

Over the centuries, the things we do remain consistent, in spite of changes to how we do them. We get heat by paying the electric bill or the gas bill or by doing maintenance on the solar panels, instead of by chopping firewood, but we must still do the job of providing ourselves with heat. We clean our clothing by loading a washing machine and a dryer - and by paying the electric bill and the water bill, or by doing maintenance on the well’s pump - rather than by building a fire and carrying buckets of water and then laboriously washing the clothing by hand, but the laundry must still be done.

And we must still handle our needs in an honest and rightful way. We must earn the money to pay our bills through right livelihood. We must treat the people who provide the things we need - and the planet that provides them - with due respect. We cannot dismiss those who serve us by saying, “It is their duty to serve, to be the hewers of our wood and the drawers of our water”, as the Israelites once declared it to be the work of the children of Ham, as Brahmins still say “It is work fit for Untouchables”, as so many Americans still say, “It is n****r work”. We must honor those who do the work - especially if we do it ourselves.

 After, as the host is reading the poem, I learn that the poem is "Homework", by Allen Ginsburg, and quickly find a link so I can read along: 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49311/homework-56d22b44cb0bd

I marvel at the poem, and note that it was indeed by a noted Buddhist.

I recall my notion of many years before, of becoming a Buddhist televangelist, making my Buddhist practice aggressively American, without any of the trappings of "they mysterious East" that so many American Buddhists affect.

I remind myself that I do try to practice the Eightfold Path, just as I try to adhere to three of the four Pillars of Islam (excusing myself from making a pilgrimage to Mecca), and that I am obliged to practice Christianity since that day I contemplated the name, "Religious Society of the Friends of Christ", and drew a conclusion, and because I thought it was a useful and significant conclusion, said it out loud:

"If the name of Jesus Christ means anything at all, I hope I may be counted as a Friend of Christ".

I remember how it felt to say those words, how I was surprised by how hard it was to force those words out, and how much more surprised I was that as soon as I had said them, I burst into tears. Then I remember how inconvenient that was, since I was driving at the time.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Be here now."

Hope Is Borne On Wings

“Oh, look, the dove of peace - that must be a good sign!”

I looked where Hayes was pointing. Sure enough, among the pigeons searching for food on the macadam, one had completely white feathers, which looked dazzling in the morning light.

“Proof, if more were needed,” I said, “that there’s no difference between a pigeon and a dove except what it’s called by humans.”

“What do you mean? It’s right there!”

I hesitated before I spoke again. This was a rare moment of calm in the endless round of boot camp. The rising Sun was lighting up the grounds, making even the bare macadam in front of the barracks look beautiful, especially with those birds on it. That’s why I was out there, in spite of the cold, even though I didn’t smoke. I’d started coming out early since a few days before, when I’d heard the opening notes of  Dreamweaver coming over someone’s radio, amid the noise of 83 men going about their evening routines. I’d wished it were quiet, so I could listen to that beautiful song, regretting that of course nobody else would care. Until someone called out, “Pipe down, guys - it’s Dreamweaver!” The whole barracks-room fell silent, and we all gathered around the radio until the song was finished.

It had been a reminder that there was such a thing as beauty in the world, even this strange new world of gray paint everywhere and runny noses every morning. I’d begun looking for that beauty since then. It was also a reminder that these guys weren’t so different from me, and I needed to work on my condescending attitude.

I didn’t want to start an argument that would spoil the moment. But my inner smart aleck, never far from the surface, spurred me to pursue the point.

“Yeah, it’s right there among the other pigeons. The only difference in that one bird is that its feathers are all white, instead of being gray here and green there and white in a few places. Look at the shape of it.”

“Okay, but still, that one’s white. That’s what’s different about it.”

Gates said, “Back in Texas, there’s a lot of white doves. They’re not hard to catch, and pretty good eating.”

I was interested. I’d never heard of dove hunting before.

“Oh, man,” Ontraverros said, making a mock-disgusted face. “In New York, we don’t eat the pigeons.”

“No, no,” I said, “he eats doves.”

That brought scattered laughter to the group.

“I call my sister paloma,” Ontraverros added. “I wouldn’t ever call her ‘pigeon’.”

“Hey,” Hayes said, “I call my girlfriend ‘pigeon’. Or sometimes ‘pigeon-pie’.”

“Ewww”, I said. “You eat pigeons, too?”

“No, dude, I just eat my girlfriend.”

“Aw, man, that’s just nasty,” Gates said.

“Nuh-uh -- that’s why she’s still my girlfriend!”

The white bird started picking at a loogie on the macadam.

“Okay”, Gates said, “I ain’t eatin’ that dove.”

A pigeon with completely black feathers, as well as black feet and beak, settled among us.

“Look at that one,” Hayes said. “That’s called melanism. It’s the opposite of being an albino.”

Rogers said, “Nah, man, that’s a black pigeon.”

“No, no,” Ontraverros said, “that’s a black dove, man!”

This time the laughter was general.

 

http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=2457

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "The map is not the territory."

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".

The Amassing of Things

Things accumulate around you in the normal course of life. For many people, their accumulation of things is a direct function of how much space is available to hold them. They may become a burden, requiring that you purge your accumulation, and it can be painful to do this, deciding what to keep and what to discard.

The amassing of things, on the other hand, is a conscious process. You intentionally seek out new things to add to your surroundings because each thing is especially pleasing. It displays your wealth, or your good taste, or you are assembling an authentic Victorian parlor in your home, or you simply take pleasure in collecting a lot of something (comic books, stamps, postcards).

We are a tool-using species. We require tools like clothes and pencils and some form of housing in order to survive, especially if we live outside the tropical environment in which we evolved. The conscious amassing of things can be thought of as making a virtue of necessity, but it can become a vice as well.

My wife and I spent many years in a large old house, and it gradually became full of things, many more things than we had an actual use for. We had books, tools, all manner of oddments. One reason for this was that we often had occasion to give people things they needed, and we had an impulse to not let useful things go to waste, going so far as to engage in “dumpster diving” (I preferred to call it “delving”, since we didn’t normally climb inside). When we moved form that house to a small apartment, by far the biggest difficulty we faced was how to “downsize”. It gave us great pleasure to be able to provide a thing that someone needed - a student with an art project, or a neighbor setting up a household.

On one occasion, a homeless man stayed with us for a few days, sleeping on our porch and having a couple of meals with us. When he was ready to move on, he mentioned that he would need to scrounge a few things, like a waterproof covering and a new pillow (I forget what-all, but it was several things), and we were pleased to be able to obtain every one of the things he felt in need of. It was as though he would be taking our hospitality with him.

We were less pleased that after accepting these things, he scolded us for being so “materialistic”, having so many things we could give them away with such a free hand. After he left, we had a decorous laugh over his remarks, thinking that he had failed to understand why we had those things, and that people unhealthily concerned with amassing things would have clung  to the things we had given him, because having twenty-seven pillows was so much more comfortable than having a mere twenty-six.

dayshttps://tellingthetruth1993.com/2020/04/30/of-the-empire-mary-oliver/

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "It is better to give than to receive - or anyway, it is more comfortable."

Thanking Our Dead Teachers

I heard the prompt, “Thanking Our Dead Teachers”, and turned it over in my mind. It could refer to people whose stories I had heard of people who lived long ago, or people of long ago whose books I had read. It could also refer to influential people in my life who were dead - my maternal grandmother in particular came to mind. Yet another possibility was that it described people who have moved out of my life, who might not literally be dead but with whom I have lost touch.

I found my mind carried back repeatedly though to people who had been formally designated my teachers, at school, and who were literally dead. In particular, to a time when I was training to be a nursing assistant, working under supervision at a nursing home. Sent to spend several days in the “locked wing”, where residents suffering from dementia lived, seeing the doors marked with printed signs identifying the residents. Here was JOSEPH BLOEW, his name surrounded with waves and anchors and an American flag, evidently a Naval veteran. Here was JANE REAU, her name surrounded with barns and horses and fence rails. Then I came to a name I recognized, embedded among apples and slates and wooden chairs. With some trepidation, I looked into the room, and found it vacant, its plastic-covered mattress stripped. Evidently, I had “just missed” my First Grade teacher, whose kindness and patience I still remembered.

As fondly as I remembered her, I thought it was just as well not to have had a “reunion” with her, especially not at the very beginning of what turned out to be many years of serving men and women who had spent long lives of self-reliance and had come to such a vulnerable state.

After the writing period of my group ended, and the host read the text which had contained the phrase “thanking our dead teachers”, I was amused to find that it primarily concerned a literal dead teacher, who had intrigued the author by the ritual of licking her coffee cup while sitting in class, making eye contact, an action which caused him to wonder if she were flirting with him. I was immediately reminded of my own years teaching massage, to groups which usually were mostly women, in which I had to take great care to avoid saying or doing anything which might appear flirtatious, which would have impaired my ability to teach.

From there, my mind turned to the fact that I am evidently the only man in this writing group, and my occasional thought that my presence might put a damper on it. Did the women restrain themselves to avoid giving the impression of flirting with me, or of “putting themselves out there” to invite my attentions? Did they presume they would need to defer to me in order not to irritate me? Or feel a desire to freeze me out and encourage me to leave? I did think these things occasionally, even though I’d received only welcome and encouragement.

I remembered a woman saying that a man who finds himself alone in a group of only women was delighted, a woman alone in a group of men was terrified. While sympathizing with anyone who finds herself the “only woman”, I thought to myself that in fact, any man who is even slightly aware of women as people will be at least somewhat concerned about imposing, at least until he is affirmatively made welcome. From there, my thoughts turned to the women, living and dead, who had helped me to understand how to be comfortable in the company of women, and how to make women comfortable in my company, and offered them my thanks. 

https://arts.cgu.edu/tufts-poetry-awards/graduation-2020-what-a-year/

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "It is a blessing to be a teacher, or a student."

Watch Your Head, Sweetheart

My life had fallen into two modes: at home by myself, or when I was going out. “Going out” also covered those extremely rare occasions when someone was coming to visit me. Then, “home” became a part of “out”, the way Kipling’s “They” became “a kind of ‘We’.” In my non-solitary mode, I would wash more thoroughly, make sure I was wearing clean clothes, &c. I definitely became a different person on those occasions, a little bit more like my former self.

I’d never lived alone before. Not this alone, anyway. I’d lived with my parents, or in a dormitory at college, or in barracks with a roommate in the Navy, or with my parents again, or with Kathe. I hoped this solitary life would end eventually, perhaps fairly soon. In the meantime, I was trying to embrace it as an opportunity to lead a different kind of life. Seeing as how I had no choice.

Turning it over in my mind, the only period in which I had slept alone night after night, with no way of reaching another person if I needed to, was during the couple of months that I had spent walking and hitch-hiking in a roundabout way from Virginia back to Oregon after getting out of the Navy. I hadn’t slept in the same spot from one night to the next, usually on the ground, in a sleeping bag with at most a tarp pulled over me. It was kind of unnerving if I gave it much thought, just how strange this solitary existence really was.

Everything was different. In the first few weeks, I’d been busy with moving things out of the storage lockers, consolidating them into one, putting the rest in the storage space of the apartment building, or piling boxes up “temporarily” in the apartment, without having to worry how Kathe would feel surrounded by all of them. Removing the rugs from storage, I decided for myself, without having to consult anyone, that I would lay most of them out overlapping on the carpeting. Then the lockdown began, and I went out rarely, at intervals of days. The boxes have stayed where they are for now, awaiting my decision to carry them up to the storage space, or to discard them. I could go through the boxes here in my solitude, or not. There’s no rush.

The time runs out, and the host reads from the poem that contains the line that made me think of Kathe, her presence and her absence:

https://www.rattle.com/pride-by-diana-goetsch/

Diana Goetsch says, “I’m basically a love poet. I’ve started to understand that after all these years. No matter the subject, I think my mission has something to do with redemption. And I just go for the hardest thing to redeem.” 

So I think, was that your mission, Kathe? To redeem something as hard to reach as me? Alone, I have to answer for myself, and remind myself that Kathe always liked me, and respected me, more than I did myself. When we were having our worst times, she could get beautifully fierce with her desire to reach me as I withdrew from her.

I’m so grateful to you for all you did for me, Kathe. If you had died twenty years ago, or even ten, I would not have been able to survive on my own as well as I have. Your love made me strong enough to be able to live without it.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "You are going to meet someone. Not a stranger."

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.