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

 

 

Exultation Is The Going of an Inland Soul to Sea

The waters along the Oregon Coast are seldom warm enough for comfortable swimming - at least by my standards. After a few childhood experiments, I gave up all pretense of going to the beach to swim. Instead, I went to lie on a blanket on the sand in August and listen to the waves come in, or to walk briskly along the beach in February with my jacket zipped up, admiring the dramatic crash of the wind-tossed surf.

“I loved your ad,” Eos said as she walked at my side. “It’s true, everyone says they like ‘long walks on the beach’, but where are they? We’ve been walking on the beach every day this week, and we’re almost always the only people walking. That’s why I clicked on it and sent you a message.”

“Really? Not because I said I’d always liked older women, but at my age there aren’t many left?”

She laughed.

“That was probably a contributing factor.”

“You really are almost the only woman younger than I am that I’ve ever…had designs on.”

She laughed louder at that.

“You’re not anything like old enough to use a phrase like that.”

“Very few people are alive who’re old enough fo it to really fit. Anyway, my options are limited. I’m definitely too old to call it ‘dating’, and we haven’t done more than kiss so far, so I shouldn’t call you my lover.”

“That’s a fair point. Then again, I kind of like the idea of calling you my ‘boyfriend’.”

She showed me how much she liked it by stopping me with her arm and pulling me into a long and very enjoyable kiss.

“Oh, my, Grace…how would you feel about stopping in at my place and doing more than kiss? Or anyway, have some more kisses like that one?”

“That sounds really good. I could feel your body responding to that kiss, and that made me want to kiss you a bunch more.”

We resumed walking, about half a kilometer from my apartment building (we’d taken the bus to the south end of town for our walk). Even though I was looking forward to a hot “makeout session with my girlfriend” (and Eos had a point - there was something exciting in using language like that at my age), I didn’t feel any urge to rush. There was still wind and surf to hear, frothy waves to see, hardpacked sand to feel underfoot.

There was still Eos to walk beside.

 https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/exultation-is-the-going/

[Interesting. Just last night, I happened over a quote from Moby Dick about the thrill that passes through you when your ship passes out of land. It didn't come up in the lines I composed, but I was struck by the coincidence while reading the poem.]

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Take the plunge."

Be With People Who've Submerged

On the screen I saw naked bodies swimming down a street. The masks that covered their mouths, noses and eyes were the latest kind, invisible to the naked eye. I only knew they were there when they turned the right way, so that the optical difference between the air inside the mask and the water outside was detectable. They could have been in San Diego, Newport, Norfolk or a dozen other coastal cities, until I saw the antique cars parked at the curb, and the lights shining inside the ground floors of the buildings they were swimming past. Barnacles clung to the windows, coral was growing on the cars, but the illusion of a place which somehow still lived in spite of the risen sea was excellent.

A handsome middle-aged woman pointed at lettering painted on a window, COME TO MIAMI, as she swam past. Another, who could have been a teenager except that she had the silver hair of one who allows it to whiten even while she keeps all other parts of herself youthful, pointed at an illuminated, animated sign which read, BE WITH PEOPLE WHO’VE SUBMERGED.

Miami was the first city in North America to lose its main drag to the rising sea, and the only one which flaunted it, placing waterproof lights in its ground-floor windows and parking derelict cars at the curb, as though it were a new version of lost Atlantis, instead of demolishing the buildings to make it easier to use the water. It was also the only city that had gutted selected buildings and pressurized them, allowing people to continue to inhabit the ground floors.

They’d invested billions in making “life among the Submerged” into a special lifestyle, found only in Miami. I wondered if anyone actually bought into it.

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Act, while action is still possible."

On This Table

“So, on this table we see that given the air pressure and oxygen content we currently have inside the cylinder, we should be able to breathe comfortably.”

“What about temperature?”

“Seven degrees. A bit chilly, but nothing we can’t handle by reducing the opacity of the Sunshade.”

“What’s stopping us, then? I want to have a look at the place.”

“We’ve been requested to wait until the Sequence Head has arrived, so she can be the first to take a breath of air inside.”

“Tssh! Like in an old SF movie: I’ll bet she enters in a vac suit, cracks her helmet, takes a long breath and says, ‘Ah, good. There’s oxygen on this planet’.”

“Well, be fair: the Sequence has been paying everyone’s salary for the last fifteen years. The moment we’ve all been waiting for is the moment we’ve all been waiting for, including the Primary Committee.”

“Meh. Whatever.”

“Just stay inside until she gives the word.”

He tapped at the environmental controls. The air pressure dropped, enough to make my ears pop. A chill breeze came through the fans.

“Hey! Did you just crack the seal? When you were explicitly told not to?”

“Nothing of the sort - I just matched the air in here to the cylinder’s air.”

“Smart aleck.”

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49622/perhaps-the-world-ends-here

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Why ask me? Look on the table."

On Eagles’ Wings

As we walked along the sidewalk, Dad paused and pointed upward. All I saw in the sky was the contrail of a jet.

“Look…it flies!”

“Haven’t you  seen them before?” my brother asked archly.

“Heck, I’ve even been in them - but isn’t it a wonderful thing? It’s good to appreciate it.”

That was very typical of Dad. He was always going off on something and demanding that we notice how wonderful it was. One time, he’d picked up a rock off the ground and said, “See how there are pale bits in this gray rock? They’re fragments of older rock that’s been recycled into new rock. And look at the pale bits.”

He pointed at the largest of the pale chunks. It had little flecks of something shiny in it.

“This planet is old,” he said emphatically. “The rocks cry out, ‘Ancient I am! Ancient of days!’”

He’d tossed that rock aside, but I had picked it up. It was a pretty cool rock, after all.

As his hand dropped from pointing out the airplane, I looked at the sky a bit longer, seeing the tree branches and the telephone wires. I remembered a walk we had taken when I was three or four. He’d pointed out different things and told me what lived there: trolls lived in street drains, tiny four-eyed people lived under potted cactus…cats rode bicycles on telephone wires. That last one had stuck in my mind, and I seldom looked at telephone wires without picturing cats on little bicycles racing along telephone wires.

Dad put a strong emphasis on seeing wonderful things in life - and on making them up. I didn’t think that was contradictory of him.

 https://youtu.be/VW0jDEM1Qxc

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Don't just look -- LOOK."

Dreaming Yourself Across Magical Landscapes

My phone went off, reminding me that it was bedtime. Somehow, getting to bed at a reasonable hour had been more of a luxury than ever since the plague had struck, but I was determined to make it happen. I’d been comfortable with my schedule, until a week before, when I’d had an online appointment with my doctor and said I was “accustomed to sleeping about five hours a night”. She’d given me a tolerant smile and said that until recently I’d been “accustomed to being twenty pounds overweight”, and I’d managed to change my habits there, hadn’t I?

I’d been more than a little taken aback by that analogy, and had promised to mend my ways. She had given me a link to oneiros.org, which offered advice on how to sleep, and I’d been trying to follow it. I’d been especially tempted by the site’s promise that I could train my brain to dream more frequently and more vividly.

I pulled my phone from my pocket and for a moment allowed it to continue to play its pleasant tune, a song I remembered fondly from my teenage years. Then I silenced it, saved the chapter I was working on and shut down the computer. My doctor had been right about that one, too: I was writing better now that I was sleeping better. I thought this book would be an even bigger seller than my last one.

I went into the kitchen, microwaved a cup of water, opened my box of Sleepy Tea, admiring its image of an anthropomorphic platypus in pajamas sitting before a table with a steaming cup of tea, its bed in the background. I steeped a bag, enjoying the smell of the tea, and sat to relish it while I held a slim book of haiku.

Finishing the tea, which I took without honey so I wouldn’t need to brush my teeth again, I put the cup in the sink and went to my bed, shucking off my pants and sliding between its sheets. I plugged in my phone and opened oneiros.com on it. I selected “Sleeping Porch on a Warm, Rainy Summer Night”, and heard the distinctive sounds of rain falling on shrubbery and a shingled porch roof.

I turned out the light and drifted off to the sound of the rain, with occasional thunderclaps rolling in softly from a distance.

I woke to the screech of my alarm clock across the room, reeled to it and silenced it. I picked up my dream journal and made this entry, noting that I had once again dreamed of going to bed in a setting much more conducive to sleep than my real one. This one had really been remarkable, with its exotic advanced technology. I wished I had a phone like the one I’d dreamed about, a little flat slab like a piece of black glass with an Internet connection. I supposed there would be phones like that one day: when I had one, I’d probably give up my landline phone entirely. I looked over at my desk, where a sheet was sitting half-finished in its roller. I promised to work on it tonight after work.

As I dressed, I decided I would also stop at the library after work to use one of their Internet computers. I’d find out if there really were such a site as “oneiros.com”, and if so whether it bore any resemblance to the one in my dream.

I pulled my notebook from my pocket and opened it to my shopping list. I wrote “Sleepy Tea?” Maybe it was a real product that I’d seen on the shelf. If not, I’d buy another box of Walden’s Chamomile.

 

https://spad1.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/when-my-car-broke-down/ 

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "If you can dream, and not make dreams your master...."

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."

That Doesn’t Mean It’s Always Pleasant

Jack looked up at the tree. Kate had been right, this was clearly Grandmother Tree. As they stepped under its canopy, Kate dropped her pack. Jack did the same. He pressed his back against it, spreading his arms wide to place his arms against the trunk, with one hand to take Kate’s.

It felt right to embrace Grandmother Tree this way, looking out over the mountainside, but not sufficient, so after a moment he took off his parka and pressed The Sweater to the rugged bark. He thought of stripping further, to embrace the tree in just his broadcloth shirt or even his bare skin, but the air was chilly, and he might not be able to hold to the tree for long. Anyway, this felt like sufficient contact.

Jack felt Kate take his hand, and looked over to see that she had dome the same, removing her coat but leaving her sweater on. He wondered if she had a good enough view, but then gave his full attention to the sight before him, of the tree-covered mountain and the next mountain, its top shrouded in a cloud.

He put his head back, his neck and scalp in contact with the cold, wet bark, and his eyes closed without his noticing. His attention was given over entirely to his contact with Grandmother Tree, feeling as though his body were becoming one with it, feeling the stress put on the tree’s towering bulk by the wind, feeling the sap moving slowly, so slowly, inside the trunk. It felt as though only Kate’s hand in his kept him from losing his humanity completely, and he kept a firm hold on it.

His eyes opened, and he imagined a pair of eyes opening in the tree’s bark. He wondered if he and Kate were providing the tree with the rare gift of sight, allowing it to appreciate its surroundings with a new sense for a moment.

Snow was beginning to fall. It seemed to be falling in a very limited area. Were they on the leading edge of an advancing snowcloud? But it really did feel as thouh the snow were falling just for them. After only a couple of minutes, the snowfall began to drop off.

“Jack.” Kate’s voice seemed very loud in that quiet place. “Jack, the snow is moving. I think it’s leading us.”

Jack reluctantly pulled his body away from Grandmother Tree, surprised that it was so easy to disengage. He turned his body to look where she was pointing. Sure enough, there was a tiny patch of falling snow in the air, moving away from them, leaving a trail of snow-breadcrumbs.

He pulled his parka back on, shouldered his pack while Kate did the same, not taking his eyes off the snowfall. They began to walk in the direction the trail of snowflakes led them.

“This is quite a leading.”

“Yes. We must be close.”

 

http://growingupinthecloud.weebly.com/uploads/1/2/8/8/12888976/eagleman_david_-_sum_selections.pdf#:~:text=Sum%20In%20the%20afterlife%20you%20relive%20all%20your,sleep%20for%20thirty%20years%20without%20opening%20your%20eyes. 

This morning's Creating Together session was different: the meditation exercise, of leaning against Grandmother Tree on the mountainside, the arrival of a small patch of snowfall, all seemed perfect for The Lodge, a story which Kathe left unfinished, and which I intend to complete. Writing from Kathe's notes feels good. I feel as though it helps me stay connected to her, especially since the lead characters are named Jack and Kate, and she definitely intended for them to be stand-ins for John and Kathe.

I think this bit of writing is going to go directly into The Lodge, with little or no change, as part of their quest for the remote sculptures which serve as anchors for life on Earth.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Our ghosts are always with us. That doesn't mean their presence will always be pleasant."

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."

Elseworlds

https://youtu.be/bRRjlIycb9o

 I like making up my own Elseworlds stories - I'm sure that's not a rarity.

I think it's too bad that Wonder Woman's German Expressionist Elseworld was based on  The Blue Angel rather than Alraune.

A girl named "Diana" is raised on an island in the Baltic Sea by a group of scientists who think of her as a science experiment rather than a person. She is physically and mentally extraordinary, but seemingly heartless - until, of course, her existence is discovered by Luftwaffe pilot Stefan Traeger, who awakens her capacity for love.

One of my favorite "Imaginary Elseworlds", though (one I'd REALLY enjoy actually seeing) is, "Crash Kent on the Planet Krypton" Yes, a retelling of Flash Gordon in which reporter Lois Lane and football player Clark "Crash" Kent (an ordinary Earthman in this universe) wind up accidentally flying in Doctor Luthor's rocketship (blue with red fins, of course) to the rogue planet Krypton which is on a collision course with Earth. There, they find it inhabited by a myriad of strange races, from the winged Hawkmen of the flying city to the swift-footed Flashmen of the central desert and the Aquamen of the Sea of Monsters.

It is a world ruled by the bald tyrant Dox and his many sons (although his Number Five son seems to be dubious of Dox's reign).

Crash, naturally, disapproves of Krypton's system of government, and joins the underground, but it seems there is little hope to overturn the tyrant...until Crash happens upon a legendary artifact, a green ring which glows like a tiny lantern....

Admit it, that would be a way cool Elseworld.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Maybe"....

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".