66 dollars

I just planted $66.00 worth of flowers. At pony-pack prices, that's a whole lot of posies. I planted snow drops and red-carpet steppables (you can walk on them, although I hope not to) and grace ward lithodora and trailing lobelia and geraniums and pansies and verbena and one regal begonia. It had better be regal for 7 bucks. And sweet peas. I love sweet peas. I planted a big pot of sweet peas and planted sweet pea seeds all around it just for insurance.

willow fencing









I will post a picture of all this crap just for you. I pulled dandelions by hand and edged the front retaining wall bed with a willow-stick fence. I didn't get out my dandelion puller, although I have one. I use that for the big jobs. WE don't have any dandelions in OUR backyard. It is pure, pristine, all green sod--pure grass. My dandelion puller is great, though. It is a machine I bought when swearing off roundup, but I've backslid since and poisoned stuff with limited remorse. I'll say this and reap the backlash, but I don't really know if we'll be around to reap the rewards of our collective bad behavior, Al. Probably some metaphoric Korean gunslinger will wipe us all out in the nick of time, just as the level of roundup in the water supply reaches tasteable levels. Toxic? Who cares? Does it TASTE good?

I know this is only my blog, and I know I have neglected social or political commentary. I know. I know. But this recent killing spree, this most recent catastrophe of oversight and neglect (I won't attempt to say of or by whom) is just further evidence to support my belief that the human race has yet to prove its adaptivity.

I hate politics.

I just plant my garden and love my husband and miss my son and feed this new family of mine who is one more today with a grandson, Michael, here for dinner and fishing on the Willamette in the morning. And during the week, I make money by watching over 15 little gray-headed women plus Abe. Abe is the only man, unless we move Sam in. I don't think they would get along. Sam is too pushy. Abe is a softie. The ladies, some of them, are dying this Saturday afternoon. I make no predictions. This isn't the lottery. Not an event but a process, to quote often trite self-help jargon...But Alice and Pansy are fading slowing into the west. Godspeed.

blueskys

On the way to the beach yesterday I prayed for good weather. I actually said a prayer. The forecast was for drizzle and me without a coat, thus the devout-ish behavior: oh, jesus, don't let it rain on me. As we came through the pre-dawn darkness into a clear bluesky morning, I felt comforted by the great beyond. Although, the notion that there would be could be specific cosmic interest in my personal dryness is extremely unlikely, I am comforted by these beliefs that I cannot undo. But I am also betting I wasn't the only one out there praying for no rain in this sodden city.

I love it here. I love our sod. Wait, I'll go use my honey's computer to post some pictures, or wait, maybe I'll try to load some on my flash drive and put them on this one. I can't figure out shit. There. I did it, as you can see.


the backyard















the new fence
















the sod















So, I pounded the sand in search of the now-elusive razor clam. We got 24, and they were big, so it was like a double limit (15 each=30), really.

It is a bit cumbersome to hunt for clams. You have to carry the gun (see previous posts) and a blunt-ended stick to pound the sand with, like a shovel handle.

Did I ever tell you the story about my old Dodge Polara that I drove for a thousand years and every time I turned off the ignition I had to hit the starter with a shovel handle to get it to start again? Yes? No? Nevermind. That was another life. I'm talking about clams, here. These connections in my head go on and on.... kind of like asha's diner/dive dendrites.

So, there I was, pounding the sand in search of the dime-sized hole with a tiny water spout that is the tell, the "show", of the clam's hidey-hole. Then comes the difficult part: it takes two hands to run the shovel, so you have to do something with the stick. AND, because time is of the essence, you have to be quick. You can't, like, set the stick on dry sand and go back for the clam because: a. you don't have time -- these guys move fast once you've tamped the sand and woke them up. and b. all sand looks pretty much the same. Run and set the stick down, come back and voila! no clam... So, I dropped the stick and went for the clam, stick be damned--and all this in the midst of rushing surf. I still maintain that clamming would be alot easier if you could just get the ocean to lay off for a minute. In and out, in and out, in and out. It is relentless and inconsiderate. Water that won't hold still.

So, there I still was. And I have tossed the stick, got the clam (hooray!) and now, gone back for my stick. But it has been washed away. I begin to search the beach, the ever-moving surf, for my stick. It is a wooden shovel handle with a green metal end. I see an old man carrying two sticks and I walk toward him. I say, "I lost my stick." He ignores me. I think, oh, it must not be MY green ended stick. It must be HIS green ended stick. I am gullible that way. I keep walking. I think old people would never steal. I think old fishermen are intrinsically good, although there is no basis in reality or history for me to think this. My brother Doug is a fisherman, and I lived on the docks in Charleston for too long and hung out with fishermen and woke up out to sea with fishermen who did not have my best interest at heart (although at that time, my best interest was a somewhat fluid concept) anyway....

I wander around in the surf, wasting precious time. It is now an incoming tide, after all, and the clam beds are now being covered inch by inch, minute by minute, and I only have 8 clams and can get an honest limit of 15, and have come all this way and don't want to go home without my fair share. So, I can't find it. My stick. My husband notices, says, "That guy has it." Same guy. So I walk over to him and ask in the nicest possible way,

"Did you just pick that stick up?"
He ignores me again.
"Hey," (I'm closer now. Its my stick alright.) "Did you just pick up that stick?"
He glares at me.
"Did you lose it?" he asks.
"Yes," I tell him.
He flings it aside in the surf and walks off.
I have to lunge for it.
I was close enough to reach it, but he just flung it and splashed off.
Meanie.

It was then I noticed his bag of clams: a giant net bag dragging behind him with probably 50 huge clams in it. He must not have got the memo about the 15 razor limit.


the take

















What a prick. I don't usually use that language for old guys, but I'm making an exception this once. Actually, he probably had a commercial tag, and has an attitude about tourists. But I ain't no fucking tourist. I live here. I was born here. I deserve.

So, here I am this fine friday morning, skipping work. I love to skip work the way I used to love to skip school. I hate obligation. It is the essence of my disorder. I am going to take Sid to the vet to get his rabies shot, his nails done (what about mine?) and a long walk in between so he'll forget all the meanness of this civilized and disease-ridden world.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

mafioso

I drove to a nameless nursing home today to interview a person who has Alzheimer's disease and see if I want him to come and live out his days at my place. The wisdom of interviewing someone with Alzheimer's escapes me, but I'm always up for an adventure.

I remember walking through the halls of a nursing home back in the day, and this woman, this shell person-- nothing left but paper skin stretched thin over sharp bones, draped into her wheelchair sort of like a pie crust before it has been pressed into place, stick arms flung outward, legs splayed -- said, in a sandpaper voice, "If this is a rest home, why can't I get any rest?"

And now, perhaps heeding her comment, they are called nursing homes or rehab centers, but walking through the halls, little has changed. One thing. One thing has changed. They don't tie people up anymore. They (we) seat them in wheelchairs, pin a magnetic device on the back of their shirt, attach the other end to the wheelchair, and tell them to stay put. Of course, they, without benefit of memory, do not, and a godawful alarm goes off, scaring the shit out of the poor little person who has no idea what generated it. But it does not keep them seated. They rise, then they fall, break a hip and keep the place in business. Now, I know it seems mean to tie them up, but you may see the sense in it. And the rule is, if a person can release a seat belt on their own, they can wear one. But the point is, if they can think, they don't need one. A mystery, to be sure.

Anyway, it is curious to me, the notion of rehab for people with dementia. I wonder if, when I have dementia (I assume I will), if they can finally teach me to do my exercises.

So, I interviewed Sam. His wife had come to see me, told me she had been taking care of him at home for years and, like so many wives, he was getting to be too much. Sam was a bigshot. A real mover and shaker, with buttloads of money, wheelin' and dealin'. Now he has become too much, hard to handle, verbally abusive, still thinks he's running the show. But this time, he has walked away in the middle of the night and fallen down. And that is what usually happens. Before "the event" the wife almost always says something like: "It isn't that bad yet." But it is. Usually. And once they land on my doorstep, some of the denial is broken. and some bones.

So I walk into the room, and Sam, friendly guy, says, "Hey, come sit over here." So I do. But here's the thing: He's tiny. He's this little bitty ninety year old shell man in a wheelchair. He couldn't kick his own ass. So, I sit down with Sam and his best friend, who's name is also Sam. Who looks like a mafia hit man. Friend starts to talk to me and Sam yells: "Hey! Shutup for five minutes. I'll do the talking." And he has the voice. The man voice. I say, "Sounds like you're a guy who's used to having people do what they say." He turns to me, nodding. "I'm the boss," he says. I nod. "So I see." And it kind of goes on like that for awhile. I tell him his wife has been to see me. He says, "Yeah. She's the scout. She reports to me." Which, acutally, seems pretty true. So, I try to ask him questions to test his memory, but his friend thinks I really want the answers and tells me the facts. I don't care about the facts. I know what I need to know. I say, "How long you been here?" Sam says, "Six months." Friend says, "It's only been a coupla weeks," which I already know. Sam doesn't let him hardly get the words out before he yells, "HEY! YOU'RE JUST A GUEST. NOW KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT FOR FIVE MINUTES AND ACT LIKE ONE." I smile. This is better than TV, and I like TV.

So, I'm not sure I'll take Sam. He would be fun, but I'm not sure he'd fit in with my little harp-singing-gray-headed ladies. If I had strippers and bouncers, maybe, but that just ain't what's going on.

Pearl got two cabbage patch dolls today. She named them Roger and Tulip.

vonnegut

I wrote this poem a long time ago, maybe 30 years. It rhymes.

Cat's Cradle: For Newt Honniker

I live in a cat's cradle murmurring lies
rock me to sleep as I feed on goodbyes
motion perpetual take me away
silent as morning comes bringing the day
faithlessly dreaming I sleep the day long
sunlight surrender to right nor to wrong
but trades for the moon and stars, absence of light
and breezes that carry me into the night
waking, I'm tangled and helpless and new
my cradle in ruins; my feelings untrue
so weave me another one
feed me a lie
capture me endlessly
murmur goodbye.

jbs
I loved that book.

what i don't know

...could fill these pages.

Tribute to Kurt Vonnegut. This is my favorite Vonnegut quote:
"There are two kinds of people in the world:
the ones you know and the ones you don't know."

exerpt from Cat's Cradle.

It has been a humbling week--one preceded by statements of such hubris, such unmitigated certainty as this:
"Pansy is dying."

And she is. As I am. As we are. As we do. Just not today.

Pansy IS dying, in the way that any 96 year old woman with end stage Alzheimer's Disease, is dying. She is dying more predictably, say, than I am (if you don't look too close at my metabolic profile or driving habits.) But I meant it. I said, as succinctly as Bill Murray in Ghostbusters said it, "This chick is toast." I meant right now. Pansy is going to die now. A week at the most. And I know this because I have such vast experience with death. I know so much. I am a professional. I know this shit inside and out.

And I was wrong.

We pros have those kind of lotteries. We guess. We suppose. We think we know. We think we know how long it takes in the absence of water. We think we know how people will do. But we don't. We don't know shit for sure. But sometimes, sometimes, we use our outloud voice when we oughtn't to. And people are listening.

The funny thing is that I feel like I failed because she lived. Lives. Lives on in spite of the tragic things that happen to people who don't know they are sitting up and can't even put their hands out to block a fall. I feel like I stole a moment from her family, who are so ready to release her to the great yawning gasp that we call the other side, that I beckoned for the reaper on her behalf and did so without her permission.

I know I am making way too much of this, but its my blog. Nobody blamed me. I'm the only one on my back. I only hope I can recall, in that moment when some other family is looking to me for certainty, that I don't have any. That I have experience, but no answers. That death is private and unknowable.

So Pansy lives on, to die another day.

happy easter

I started my day sitting next to a friend who is a heathen, as are many of my friends, dissing easter. It is common knowlege that I like Jesus and we have a good natured banter about all that, but it does wear thin. I don't get why non-christians celebrate easter, and to her credit, she does not. I like the fact of the resurrection, of my own resurrection, of our collective resurrection. It is a message of hope, and I need that. Spring.

The backyard is covered with cherry blossoms. The new sod looks as though a snow storm just ended. Maybe we could make a blossom man. Or lay down and make blossom angels, but we aren't supposed to walk on the sod.

I have a headache that I have had for about three weeks. It is actually a situation caused, I believe, by the position required to play the harp. I am not accustomed to holding my arms up and out and plucking and concentrating for an hour. It is definitely a learning curve. It is a pretty bad head/neck/back ache, though, and I hope it passes. I can't think to write.

home theatre

We walked two blocks to the Clinton Street Theatre and saw Black Snake Moan. Samuel Jackson and Christina Ricci. She is so odd. But, I liked the movie and love having a theatre so close to home. It isn't a good theatre, and the sound is pretty bassy and hard to understand, and the decor is post apocalyptic, but other than that, the popcorn was pretty good. Three bucks for a movie and 2.50 for popcorn is about right. They don't pretend to be anything they're not.

It was a housework day, and I got out of cooking Easter dinner for mother in law. I said, "I don't want to cook or do dishes." I'd like, for once, to have a holiday myself. I like holidays. I hate housework. Hate it. But, I got through it. I did the dishes, swept and mopped the kitchen and bathroom floors, changed the sheets, vacuumed, dusted and did like four loads of laundry. No wonder I'm tired. Kurt put sod down in the backyard yesterday and I guess that gets him off the hook for this weekend. But not Nicole.

So, its Easter Saturday, and I miss my son as usual at holiday time. But it is not the adult boy who I miss. Its the Easter basket, egg-finding, blonde-headed little boy who always knew where to look, who was famous in the family for saying, "This is the worst Easter I've ever had," when his soda was flat and warm, and now we all say it when anything goes mildly wrong on a holiday. I remember growing up in a house on Peach Street -- 1314 South Peach -- funny the details you remember.... and we would always find an egg the next year, in the gutter, in the garden tool shed, some nasty remnant of Easters past. I love coloring eggs, and have never not done it until this year. Last year you can look at the post and see that I did it by myself. The eggs were so pretty. But there are no kids anymore, and it just doesn't make sense. I may do it anyway. We'll see. I do enjoy them.

We drove to Newberg to see the monk last night, took the motorcycle. It was a beautiful night and a great ride and the monk is good but getting very old. I like to see him during holy week because he calls it that, and it is that for him. He says it like it is a busy part of his work week, as though there is increased pressure to be holy as part of his job description. I'm sure there is alot to do with all the visitors to the monasatery and all that. When he sees us, he blinks his eyes and says, "wow" like we are a vision. He thinks K looks like a movie star. So do I.

another night

A new woman moved in. She is from Austrailia. She is a gardener. These are the things I know about her. What I don't know is so much more. It makes me consider what is known about me. (mememememememememememememe) But really. If I go nuts. Or when. Or more to the point: when they discover I am nuts, where will you find the cookie crumbs that will lead you to who I am? How would you know, for instance, that I hate lotion that smells like fruit or baked goods? Or that ballons scare me and I hate the feel of a butterfly on my arm? Would you see that I had painted a wing and use that information to decorate my room with angels, not knowing I can't stand angels? Would you know never to comb my hair when its wet and that I hate tight clothes and rarely need a sweater? Would you know better than to sneak up behind me or startle me? That I like to sleep in a TB cold room but no matter how hot it is I need a sheet. Could you ever know how much my son means to me or what a miracle my life has been? And if all of this trip is documented, who will read it outloud so the ones who do the work will know.

Today, the Austrailian Gardner cried and cried. She was so lost all day, and I had no way to lead her home. I didn't know, for instance, that at one point in her life she had lost her son -- lost track of him -- and that the young man she was looking for this morning was him. It took most of the day to figure it out. She can't really find her words anymore. She knows what she wants to say, but can neither speak or understand spoken words. She can read, and so I write.... Finally, she said the word Presbyterian, and I knew who to call. I called her church friend and she came and we unravelled the mystery. In the meantime, I went out and bought some geraniums. When in doubt, plant shit.

There is a priest where I work. He lives on the other side, the normal side, the (mostly) undemented side. I watch him for a couple of reasons: holy men interest me, devout people interest me, anyone who can maintain faith in the presence of reason interest me. Not that these are reasonable times. Hardly. I have an innate mistrust of priests because I was raised by a Pentecostal mother who told me the Pope was the Antichrist, and priests his handmaidens, so to speak. So, my interest in them is complex. I give them wide berth, even at deathbeds -- and you know me and deathbeds. I'm never quite sure what they're up to or how they figure they have more of a connection than I do. But this guy, he showed up for Rosetta and she wasn't even Catholic. He sits on his wheeled walker on days when the sun shines, off to one side of the sidewalk in the grass. He faces the sun, eyes closed. His tolerance for time is impressive, for quiet, for solitude. For prayer.

Off to bed. I practiced my harp, so can lay down without guilt. I am learning to accompany myself with my left hand and play melody with my right. Now, if I can sprout two more and applaud myself, or just one to pat myself on the back, all will be well.

dylan

I am all alone. It is night and I am alone. My husband is patrolling street signs in another town, shining a flashlight on each one to make sure they still shimmer. It pays the bills--that and the mad house.

I was alone once for a long time. And now it is an absence I don't quite know how to fill. So this is what I do. Word play.

I am disturbed by song lyrics this evening. I was watching TV, nothing new, and a commercial began, the melody and lyrics of "catch the wind" (in case you don't know them as intimately as I):

In the chilly hours and minutes
of uncertainty
I long to be
in the warm hold
of your loving mind
just to feel you
all around me
and to take your hand
along the sand
ah, but I may as well
try and catch the wind.

when sundown pales the sky
I want to hide awhile
behind your smile
and everywhere I'd look
your eyes I'd find
for you to love me now
would be the sweetest thing
t'would make me sing
ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind.

Bob Dylan

I love that song. Now, I know it is the combination of those words and that music that softens my mood, that returns me to childhood--adolescence, really--days spent in hand-patched levis, cross-legged in Lithia Park, learning the melody on my first recorder, my only gift under a slim Christmas tree and the only thing that mattered to me, and what it took for my mother to make that happen...

But here's the thing........... I know I almost scared you with that sweet image, but really, that's the problem, isn't it? All of those images are used up: beaches, sunsets, romance, all that shit. It is so fucking difficult to find an original metaphor these days, these days where fist and bone have replaced heart and soul. And for those of us who put words together and take them apart for fun and torture, we are damned lucky if we can say what we mean and mean what we say, dodge trite and stay true. If we can say that which almost certainly has been said better, but not by us, and twist it one more time for the record, well good luck. The few the proud, the verbose. But we are many, now, and the metaphors show some wear here in blogland.

It was beautiful when he wrote it, and when I heard it and knew it for poetry, and was captured.

fuschia saturday

How it really went was not quite so nice as expected. It was a perfect morning. K went fishing, I dinked around the house, all that. When he came home it was time to go do the free dirt thing. So off we went. Earlier in theday I had run out to buy sphagnum moss to line three of my baskets. In case you didn't know, moss turns to peat after awhile and is not so great to line the baskets anymore. (But is great for soil, so saved it all and gave asia a bag of it. As I was out looking for moss at the local overpriced garden store, I found two divider trellis pieces and although they had "sold" signs on them, the signs were not convincing. They looked like they had been sitting in the same place for quite a while. I found a garden store worker and asked what the story was. She found out that somebody had said hey I want those I'll be right back with the money and never came back. So the story was that I could have them for half price. Yay. So home I went with my moss and two wooden dividers to place between our backyard and the homeless shelter next door.

It isn't really a homeless shelter, and truly, anymore there is little to complain about since the mad dogs who used to live there got kicked out. Now, there are just poor crazy people who need a small place to hide out in. They don't talk much at all, don't open their curtains, don't own vehicles, and don't stay up late, so why am I bitching? Anyway, the wooden dividers are really nice and clean up the fence line well.

So, back to the story... K gets home and off we go to Freddy's. We find a parking place clear across the parking lot and load a basket to the hilt with all of our pots and truck them over to the garden department. All the fuschias are gone.
GONE? This can't be. Last year I had to settle for petunias in my back yard pots and I never really got over it. I have nothing against petunias, but they are kind of leggy and sticky and I wanted fuschias and that is that. So we had the Hawthorne store call the Hollywood store (not the real Hollywood, it is a section of portland which doesn't resemble Hollywood in the least so I don't know what the story is there) and they had TONS of fuschias left. Hooray. We hopped back in the truck after re-loading all of the pots, and making sure the moss wouldn't blow out as we travelled beyond our neighborhood. As we pulled into the Hollywood Freddy's, the skys parted and a torrential downpour began. Ah, springtime. Ah, April showers. But it was still March. We charged through the rain, sidestepping rivulets and near washouts in the parking lot. These are the kinds we got:

8 bright purple (white with purple center)
4 royal airforce academy (pink with purple center)
4 blue eyes (magenta with dark blue center)
4 pink marshmallow (white with hint of pink)
3 lena (creamy white with pink center)
and two others I can't remember.

I'll post pictures as they bloom. I usually fill the pots with other hangy things like trailing lobelia and allysum.

I understand that by not linking to other blogs that I am not doing my part for blogland. I feel bad about that. Will mend my ways in two weeks.

houseboats

It is a dream of mine to live on a houseboat. Simple. Work would get in the way I am pretty sure. It already does. My sister-out-law is moving to town from Alaska and we looked at one for her. I would do that. I would. I know two women who live on them, one in Vancouver and one on the Channel. One single, one married. We talk about it, husband and I, and it may, like so many other of our dreams, become reality.

It is Saturday morning on Clinton Street, my favorite time. I woke up to a blog by my best friend l. about closing all of the libraries in Jackson County. Tragic. A beautiful commentary that I hope she sent to someone else. Orwellian. End of civilization.

I am not doing what I had planned to do this morning. K went fishing and it felt so good to just be home that I didn't get dressed and go out at the butt-crack of dawn like I usually do. I am home, drinking coffee and typing. My favorite.

It is a big day in my world: Fuschia Saturday at Fred Meyer. WooHoo! So I empty the dirt out of too many pots and stack them in my truck ready for the free dirt. Free dirt! Can you imagine? They are always a bit disconcerted to see us roll up with our piles of pots. In line in front of us are ladies with flower pots they can hold in their hands. Little painted things, all porcelain and fragile. Mine are industrial types: Huge vats of dirt and moss ready for the planting. It has been such a dark winter that it seems early, but here it is! Fuschia Saturday is upon us. I must find sphagnum moss to line three baskets and a few accompanying plants to fill in between the fuschias.

The back yard is shot. We are going to have to try sod. I guess the ground stayed too wet and drowned the new grass we planted back in October. It was a wet one. so there is just mud, and it has to dry out a little before we can sod it. Fortunately, due to all of our last summer's projects, there is little square footage to cover. Sod should be easy, but I've said that before. It is all easy for me: he does it and I watch and hand him things. Like this Thursday morning when the sink fell off the wall in the bathroom: he just gets the stuff and fixes it. Me? I make a little island for bathroom stuff by the kitchen sink and expect never to have one again. I adjust easily. I remember when my heating stove started leaking in my house on 4th and Oak in Central Point and I couldn't fix it and nobody else would and I heated the house by pouring cups of diesel fuel into the heat box and it leaked on the floor and my whole house smelled like diesel all the time, and my clothes, and I just lived in it and lived in it. Helpless as a newborn duck. And it isn't that I was unwilling to fix it, I just couldn't care about it enough to get it done. Paralyzed by poverty. I came to expect so little. Deserving is a powerful thing. Expensive.

I hate it when I feel like I am reporting instead of writing...when poetry leaves me and I am stuck with the facts. It is a barren landscape and I cross it with uncertain steps, each footfall hoping to land on softer ground.

Ah, there it is.

When my sister-out-law was here we went to the Japanese Garden. Oh. I want to go back when the irises are in bloom. It was perfect, silvered clouds in broken blue sky, cherry blossoms postcard perfect. But alas, too many humans. Ants on a hill. It was the height of cherry blossom time, so to be expected, I guess. We (me and K) talk about going to Europe, and I think, okay, okay. A couple of thoughts recur: I am terrified to fly. Sincerely. And second: If I could just get everybody out of the Sistine Chapel and take a private tour, that would work for me. Or Ireland. Or Greece. My husband wants me to get to those places, but again, the flying... and the people. I hate crowds. I don't go to parties. I don't have fun. It scares me. It always has. The amount of whiskey it took for me to have a good time at a bad party(and that by rumor, second hand reporting, and public record) was obscene. And knowing my social phobias, I always had to get a head start on the party favors so that by the time I got to the party, it was over for me. I have literally fallen face first through the door on my way into a party. Over before it started. By design or default? Who can say?

So home I am and home I'll stay. OH! we are planning a long (2 week) vacation this summer. We will head out from here east to Wyoming then North into Canada. A tour of the Rockies. (low numbers of humans, I'm hoping) We will camp and fish our little hearts out. We may hop place to place, or find somewhere we like and hang out. The Odell lake thing is off. I have trouble dreaming quite as large as my honey. All I want to do on vacation is not work. Really. That's good enough for me. We looked at renting a Hummer, but seriously, talk about obscenely conspicuous consumption. I hope we just take our truck. I bought an atlas of the US and Canada and am obsessively planning. I don't mean to follow the plan, but we'll have one. It passes the time.

tour guide

I have spent the better part of this weekend being a tour guide. Yes, me, the one who couldn't figure out why she kept winding up at the airport. My sister-out-law is moving to town and suddenly must find a house to buy. I am voting for the houseboat in Scapoose, but that's me. She is a country girl, moving from Alaska. She is the only quasi-family member I would not be horrified to have around. She is a grown up, and therefore, okay with me.

Portland is a big city, but a small town. I drove her around my neighborhood, and some others I am semi-familiar with, and we found some houses that people didn't want anymore. We drove through felony flats and showed her why she isn't interested in all that. After, we had dinner at Salvador Molly's. I love their food although it is very noisy in there.

Why is it that semi-hip restaurants get to be so noisy and dirty with so-so service? And why is food that is too spicy to eat and enjoy, enjoyed by some as a sort of masochistic rite of passage? I don't get it.

Later same month: Addendum to all of this... my sister outlaw didn't get the job after all. I am disappointed. She is disappointed. We are disappointed. I miss the people who know me. Not that there is so much to know, but there is so much to tell. She has the backstory. She has the goods on me. We killed and ate rattlesnake together (kind of a cross between scallops and chicken, in case you were going to ask), did a road trip with two cases of good wine, listening to only Roseanne Cash and Carole King's Tapestry. I wore this black, beaded antique top with hand painted roses and danced the beads off and woke up in Charleston with two bikes chained to the back of the van. I never did like wine.

Ah, well. Another life.

cardboard rosetta

Rosetta is dying. She is, perhaps was, a socialite, a fainter of victorian proportion, hand to forehead, grasping for balance as each ripple shakes her well-heeled world. We will keep Charlie, her 25lb cat, who comes to sit on my desk when Rosetta is not feeling well. He spreads his bulk across my paperwork and makes himself clear, staring at me until I go check on her. I don't seriously believe in the whole cat-as-medium thing, but I believe in Charlie.

I had the wierdest dream. I dreamt that I had to share my office (recall that I don't share well, play with others, run with scissors)and it was like a secretarial pool with lots of desks, no dividers and lots of old and crabby social workers. ick. So I grabbed a chart and started leafing through it and in between the pages I found a doll, flat cardboard, tattered, long and thin, naked with godiva-long gray yarn hair and bright crytal blue eyes. As I held her in my hand, I realized she had a pulse. It was the strangest dream. I'm sure it was Rosetta.

sunrise on the island

It was an early morning on Sauvie's Island, water turned onyx in the dark, sunrise slow and persistent, under and between the clouds, layer upon layer of gray. Boats launched in the still night, small red and green lights the only evidence of their passing. As the dawn arrived, Sandhill Cranes flew overhead, giant pteradactyls, making a clicking noise as they fly. From what I hear, they fly upwards in a spiral formation until they are out of sight and head to Texas on the Jetstream. Sauvie's Island is a bird sanctuary. You can hear the geese gossiping in the trees clear across the Columbia, their numbers in the thousands, darkening the sky as they rise as one and head off to the next empty cornfield.

Barges pass, loaded with all kinds of cargo, so heavy and huge that they push the water, actually suck the water from the shore -- the river a thousand feet wide -- and as they go by, the water backfills and slaps the shore with wake after wake after wake. Occasionally, they pull out so much water that they ring the bells on the beach poles, novices running to hook a fish that isn't there. There was a seal out today, feasting on the fish we didn't, and boat people coming too close to shore for the comfort of the beach guys. Scotty throws weights at the boat people and shoots at the seals, but Scotty wasn't there today. Score one fish for the boat people.

Just as we were about to leave, one of the poles bent and hubby ran for it but lost this one. We had been napping in the truck, and I tried (valiantly) to leap out of the truck and reel in my line in case the fish ran for it and our lines got crossed up, but my foot was asleep and there was nothing I could do but shake it off and wait for the tingle to subside. By that time, all was lost.

Last night, the salmon was so good. Fried in butter with steamed rice and sauteed brussel sprouts. Best food I've had in a long long time. A sixteen pounder gave us enough steaks for 7 meals. At 9.99 a pound at Freddy's, that is a $160.00 fish. And I guess if you count fifty bucks for a fishing license plus salmon tag, gas to get out there day after day until you get one, season after season after season, Freddy's might be the better deal after all, but there ain't no sunrise at Freddy's, no cranes, no mighty columbia.

pearls

I want to write about the unit, the sadness, the insanity of it all, but the sun came out and I left work early to come home and move my tulip pots into the light, and rake dead leaves sitting too long on the back patio. I wanted to be in it. Inside Spring. I don't want to miss another one. I missed too many, too many sunny days spent inside a bathroom stall, too many moments for planting and regeneration spent in dark bars and back alleys. Too many long nights spent talking about all those things I would if only I could. And I can and I do. But that is abstract, and God is in the details.... or the devil. You decide.

A string on my harp spontaneously broke. Just up and snapped. It is repaired now, and on with the music.

It is Saturday morning, and Haley is asleep on the couch and I am not alone in my home the way I like to be, but I know that it won't be long until these girls are grown and gone, and that they also like their time alone. They are women. They need to regenerate just like I do, and for this short time, this time before take-off, we share this space. I miss my son.

Pearl doesn't care what our names are. We are pretty much all the same to her. Servants. She calls us Mira or Bobby Sue or Gilligan if she's really annoyed. She doesn't care about much but her sister. Her sister lived on the "other side" and came over each day to have dinner with Pearl. She wasn't ill, only old, and she died in the night. Pearl's family doctor made an appointment to talk to her and wanted to be the one to deliver the news. A family doctor. She's said they set him up in business years ago, and she's 90-something.

Pearl's husband died a few months ago and like most widows she misses him like a body part. "I'm too young to be left alone," she says to me. I just nod. I'm not going to remind her that she's 90. Deep down, she knows it. At the moment she's somewhere back in the days when she and Joe were dancing at O'Conley's downtown. She has that look in her eyes. "I'm a ship without a rudder," she says, sitting in her wheelchair, her sunday-go-to-meetin' leopard print mumu spreading around useless legs like frosting on a cake. She says "sunday-go-to-meetin'" as a joke. She is a modern woman still, checkered eye-glasses, chewing gum, a wicked sense of humor and appreciation for servitude.

I am up early and heading out soon. Husband is fishing. I am not. Too early, too dark and too cold for me.

Update!! first springer salmon of the season: 16 pounder, Sauvie's Island, 9:00 a.m. I don't have to figure out what we're having for dinner: salmon, rice, roasted veggies.

impermanence

We went for a drive today, out to Astoria and on up into Washington. I've never been to the places we went. I like Oregon better. I love Astoria. I'd live there. But throughout the drive, I was struck by the deterioration of wood homes. The great old houses of the 21st Century are falling apart. I mean really falling apart. The closer you get to the coast, the truer it is. What the fog and salt air doesn't get, the blackberries do. If you stand still long enough in Oregon, blackberries will consume you. Its a fact. I saw house after house slowing sinking into the landscape, becoming one with nature, tilting, sliding, gravity exacting her payment for time spent. I lived (a relative term) in this house (another relative term) in Inglewood or Inglenook or something. A small coastal town. The house was sinking into Shinglehouse Slough (thus the affordable rent) it did not have windows to speak of, black plastic covered the windows, and we had to hop across log rounds to get to and from the back door. Electricity was questionable. On an incoming tide, water would reach the floor, short circuit the kitchen, and you couldn't stand on the floor and touch the countertops at the same time. So, undaunted, we hopped chair to chair, my four year old son's memory inspired by ECT. But that was a lifetime ago.

We drove through Rainier, the town of, and I asked, innocently enough, where is Mt. Rainier? My husband laughs, is still laughing even now, and says, "Seattle." Well, why the fuck would somebody name a town Rainier if you couldn't even see it from there. And maybe on a non-cloudy day you can, but that is hardly the point. I mean, Portland is a port, and there are other more aptly named places, Ashland, for being at the base of a volcano, maybe. I can't really think of many examples, but I was a little embarrassed. And because we drove past the old Trojan nuclear plant and I said, "I thought that was in Washington," and again, the laughter. But really, if you think about it, when you're driving down I-5 from Seattle and you look off the side of the freeway and there it is, and you know damned well that you're in Washington, and that in a few miles you'll cross the fucking bridge into Oregon, well, anyone would conclude that Trojan is in Washington. But it isn't. Its in the Oregon bump. I will admit to being somewhat geographically challenged. I am easily disoriented. I hardly know where I am most of the time and have no sense of direction, but I always have enough gas and I know for sure that given enough time and petrol, that you can get anywhere from anywhere else.

And back to the impermanence of wood, why is it that eventually, once a house really begins to decompose, the owners paint it purple? I don't think it is a good house color under any circumstance, but when the shingles are rotting, the cattle have long since broken through the fences and gnawed off the windowsills, that a person would think, hey, I know what will give this place a fresh look: purple paint.

But I do love farm country. I love rolling up to a breakfast joint at about ten-thirty on a saturday morning and watch the last call babes having breakfast with Mr. Lucky. I'm mean. I admit it. Only in a small Oregon town would you see the sign: Tanning, Toning and Saw Sharpening. nuff said.


All the way out, a radio station was playing Beatles A-Z. I know this guy who picked Ringo Starr up hitchhiking outside of Vegas. I happened to mention this to my husband who knew Sherman. Sherman Parker was, and may still be, Ruch Oregon's most inert individual. He lived in a shack with a dirt floor, not because it was hip, but because he didn't notice. He did not bathe, that I know of. My husband found it far more difficult to believe that Sherman had ever left the Applegate Valley than the rural legend that he had rescued one of the Beatles from car trouble. Or that a Beatle would have car trouble at all. Sherman is alot of things, but he is no liar. He won't even drive a red, yellow or orange vehicle becasue he thinks those colors are "of the devil." He didn't always think this way, and in fact at one point was so loaded on PCP that it took him 12 hours to crawl from the garage to his house -- a total of maybe 100 feet. Usually it only took him half an hour. :)... but the Ringo story is that Sherman drove to Bakersfield -- for car parts, the only thing that motivated him-- and on the way, passed a blown up van and stopped to help. There was Ringo and some Vegas dancer and he gave them a ride into Bakersfield. It could be true. I, myself, have never seen a Beatle, but I loved them. George most of all. When I was young it was important to say which was your favorite. You had to commit.

So, that was my day. It was good to get away.

frankie

I know that I am still a young whippersnapper to Frankie. Frankie grew up in the south and is named after Frank James. Story has it that they had their last stand on her grandmother's porch. And I figure what the hell, it had to happen on somebody's porch and it could have been her's and its a good story. And I'm a liar too. Nothin' wrong with that.

So I'm leaving for the day, and I hear her yoohooing from her room, "Honey!" So I'll be Honey for a minute and I go in there. She's blind. I'm not sure why that matters, but I'm sure it matters to her.

She is crying. I sit next to her on the bed and stroke her face. "I'm old," she says, the pink satin quilt her son brought is pushed to one side and the old wool blanket is up around her chin.

And that's the thing. Was a time, many many times over, that I looked in an old woman's milky eyes and said, "Hey, you're just a spring chicken. You're lookin' good. Nothing stoppin' you!!" Only the arrogance of youth would deny what an old woman knows for certain.

This time I just said, "I know," and I held her hand. Its what I would want. She prefers the old wool blanket, but the pink satin makes her son feel better.

the dream

This morning I was reminded of my house dreams, the ones where I awaken within the dream and find that I am in the process of moving, and that somewhere along the way I have given up my home, my long time residence, for a place that seems at first glance extraordinary. It is furnished with beautiful antiques, which admittedly are a little baroque for my current tastes in furniture, but there I am wandering room to room, until it seems that all the rooms are really connected, and there are no whole walls, just unfinished framing in places, and it is dark, and the further I get into the back of the house, which seems to go on forever, I find things that belong to people: an antique hair brush and mirror set, clothes in the closet, a razor and toothbrush. And I am not alone. I come to a back room and an old woman is sitting in a rocking chair with red long-johns and I know she is the other tenant, and I have given up my privacy to live here and I can't go back.

So that is the dream.

I am working too much. I am tired. I am hungry. I am dealing with too much. But I am finally alone this weekend, and I went out this morning to find squirrely bread, which I like alot, and frozen blueberries and frozen cherries, and two perfect white long underwear shirts. I bought two because I can.

So my sweetie is fishing and I am not. And I have a day to myself, yay, to practice my harp, and straighten my world, and wander through antique shops to my heart's content. My heart's content. Yes. I will do my laundry, and not just throw the million dollar lingerie in the dryer because I'm too lazy to care for my things. Work takes on too big a piece of my mind, and I get home, and it takes a minute for things to settle back to where they belong. Home.

porch

It wasn't really warm enough, but it was a morning for cleaning and rearranging, and the overstuffed chair ended up on the porch to make room for guitars and harps and other assorted items. Nobody sat in the chair anyway. It was just a collector, something like a butler who holds out his arms for your coats, but unlike a butler, never puts them away. A catch-all, which seems to be what any semi-flat surface in my home becomes under my lack of survellience. And the only way I ever clean my house is if I rearrange it: thus, the chair moves to the porch sort of like one of those little square plastic toys with moveable squares, precursor to the rubiks cube, where you have to move the squares around in sequence, but you never get rid of anything, much like all of my acquired treasures. I've thought about this, and wondered at the underpinnings of my lack of domestic skills, the causes and conditions that have made me the crappy housekeeper I am. I've honed it to one narrow point of light: poverty.

I have moved so many times, and so quickly many of them (I once thought I'd start a company called Midnight Movers), that I may never feel permanent. I was always moving in or moving out, so cleaning always involved moving furniture. Stay with me, this may make sense eventually. That, and bad furniture. I always had free sofas that were on the verge of un-useable, consequently the sofa turnover rate was high, and I'd be replacing the last gasp of upholstered charity as the next item, often stolen from a goodwill box, was brought in (middle of the night, big men, low light), Then and only then, would I clean the space left by the old one, not out of necessity, but opportunity: There was the vacancy, full of dust bunnies (dust rabbits) toys and lost socks, begging for attention. Even I couldn't deny it.

Okay, poverty and laziness. I'll concede the point.

But that's not the point. The point is that we had breakfast on the porch and although my feet were cold, it was good to breathe the late winter air. I am a porch sitter by custom, and love to watch clinton street from my perch high above the sidewalk. I love the snatches of conversation: "...can you believe that for a family of four?" and "...pushing her bike up the middle of the street with no lights on." And the morning-after girls, in outfits that must have looked better in the dark, with uncomfortable shoes they no doubt had not planned on walking home in, uphill no less, bed-head and smeary, wishing they hadn't. I think. But I would think this.

So my love and I had breakfast on the porch, bacon and eggs and flourless, flax toast for me, potatoes and an english muffin for him.

the water is wide

Tiger Lil was humming.

Wait, let me back up.

I've been practicing my harp and am actually learning to play it. It matters to me to learn this, and surprises me (the arrogance) that there are still things I want to learn. I'm not sure if stasis is my goal, but save that thought for another day.

I am learning to read music. Rather, I read music, and am learning to play the harp correctly, not by ear. So I am actually able to play music I have never heard before. But learning this way, I am never really certain if I get it right. I have been practicing a song called "The Water is Wide" for two weeks. Because I have never heard the song played by anyone but me, I'm not really sure what it sounds like.

So there I was, getting some lunch together in the dining room, Lil singing in the background. She's a soprano. A really good soprano. But she no longer knows the names of things if you ask her. She could say it outright if it came from her stream of thoughts, but if you interrupt it, there is no recall. Just generalization.

I am filling my plate with salad and I hear this tune, this haunting melody, and I think, because I am self-centered, because I too live in my own world, that the song is in my head, that I am just hearing the notes together because I play them over and over again, day after day, and this song has become part of me. Because I don't know this song, really. I just know these notes together, and how they sound when I play them. And Lil sings on.

So I rise to consciousness, aware of the tune, and look around me. I realize Lil is humming, and I look at her and experience the frustration of knowing she is unable to answer a straightforward question, but I must know. I must.

"What is that melody?" I ask her.
She looks at me with wide nordic eyes, "I'm..." she can't even find the words to say she doesn't know.
I try to bail her out. I have to know, but I accept that she will not be able to find her words. "Is it 'The Water Is Wide'?" I ask.
Her eyes light up. "It's wonderful." She exclaims, hand to her heart, eyes seeking more information from me, begging me to tell her something she can hold for just a moment.

Because moments are all we have.

Any of us.

So we hummed the tune together, and I confirmed what I knew. And she sang a few of the words, but not many, settling for da da da da da in the loveliest soprano range. And I promised I would bring in my harp the next day, and did, and we had another moment together. And it is selfish of me to have wished that when I showed up with my harp the next morning, that she bounded across the room (at 93) to greet me, but she didn't. She just hummed, and it was another day... another moment.

But the thing is, I recognized the tune, so that means I was playing it right. I am learning. She is unlearning. I am grateful for forward life.

oscar day

We watched Babel last night. I'm sure it was great. It was certainly truthful and disturbing. The story of one gun. But I don't think I will ever like the post-modern chop of moving making. I don't like having to start and finish a minimum of three different story lines in one movie. I just love a good story. I loved Little Miss Sunshine. One story, well told.

I love the Oscars. Love the dresses and the hair. Love to see who shows up and hwo doesnt'. We've seen The Departed, but not the Queen or the Last King of Scotland. I'm not a big history fan. Just entertain me. I'm superficial. I haven't seen Blood Diamond or Dream Girls, but not for lack of trying. Just haven't found the time. We did see Pan's Labryinth, which was unexpectedly dark. We thought it was a fairy movie and took the girls. Oops. Glad they weren't five and six.

So, today is Oscar day and I will dedicate my evening to it. Today, I will look for leather furniture. I'm sick of mine. Not really sick of it, but it needs to be re-upholstered, and it would probably be cheaper to buy new. Brown leather. yummmmm.

long time gone

Brother Martin turned 82 yesterday and told me I was a treat. I love treats. He has been a monk for 55 years and pitched his last game of softball the day before he went into the monastery. He said if he would have had a better job he probably wouldn't have. I like that about him. No agenda. No big entrance fee. No drama. Just a monk. I would make a shitty monk. I hate to think of myself as high maintenance, but if my black turtleneck sweater isn't clean, I'm fucked. What I look like is way too important. Way. Consuming. Brother Martin has no look good. He carries around his hearing apparatus in a worn cardboard box, the pick-up aimed toward the audience. And I have little regard for staged simplicity: for simple shoes that cost a bzillion dollars and simple not-quite-white cotton towels that cost 28 dollar apiece, for that just right hemp bag that creates the illusion of simplicity when in fact it is high democratic costuming. I remember when I made most of my own clothes out of muslin that was 38 cents a yard. Now, the simpler the fabric, the more it costs. I'm certain there are excellent reasons for this, that slave labor and transportation isn't cheap, but it is a sellers market, and in se portland, we are so fucking homogeneous in our uniquity.

That isn't a word.

Brother Martin speaks about god with a familiarity that comforts me.

silver bullets

We went to the Bob Seger concert. What sticks in my mind now is that he seemed so happy. And not like he was happy about making a comeback, which he didn't really seem so much to be doing. He just seemed glad to still be making music and giving all of us what we came to hear: old Bob Seger music. He played everything. I danced my ass off to his music. He was never someone I followed to any degree, for instance I don't know when his birthday is like I do Paul McCartney. I never thought about him as a great musician. I don't even think he sees himself that way. But really, to consider Bob Seger with any depth of interest is to miss the point. He played really good dance music during a period of time when I danced alot. So, as he played to the gray-headed and the bald, I was just happy to be in the audience. He played a few new songs, but really, he played for us, the many for whom his value is reminiscence, not current acclaim. And there were a bunch of us. Grown ups, NPR listeners, voters, homeowners, grandparents, come for a look back at our long drawn-out, collective adolescence.

bladdered

I am so sick of this. I am so sick of having a human body. I guess the alternative is not to, so will press on. I am on the second course of antibiotics, this one with the complementary yeast infection. I am more fragile each year I live. I have done things, years of bad things, that have taken their toll. Exacted the price. Paying the piper. But generally, if I quit whining long enough to consider those in sincerely bad condition, I would feel bad for complaining.

I tore my kitchen apart yesterday. I took the bookshelf from upstairs and brought it downstairs, took all my jars of beansricenoodlesandseeds, cleaned them and arranged them nicely, one jar deep, on narrower shelves. I took the other bookshelf back upstairs the hard way. Alone. My goal, other than Martha-like organization, was visibility. I have a jar of tabouli, for instance, that I never think to use because it is hidden among the lentils. I love tabouli and may make some. Yes. I think I will. There was that era, back in the seventies, when mason jars of grain, stacked knee deep on fruit boxes, was the height of hippie organization. Well, I still have the boxes and the jars. Stuck in the 70s, that's me. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, baby.

So it is Saturday in the middle of a three day weekend. We are going to see Bob Seger tonight. Should be good. Should be a pretty gray crowd. I just want to hear "Turn the Page" and "Against the Wind." I love those songs. Drivin' music.

23rd

I drove to NW 23rd today and walked into and out of each of the shops that I was certain would have exactly what I wanted. They didn't. Not at all. There were fake sock monkeys (not made of cotton socks) and some nice things, but all in all, it was a bust. I will go upstairs and take a picture of my actual sock monkey for comparison. Or you can go online and see for yourself. Now that sock monkeys are a big freakin' craze, they've improved them. I demand authenticity. Well, most of the time. I got that sock monkey for Marky when he was barely born. He reminds me from time to time that it is his, after all, not mine. I won't give it up until I am certain he won't lose it. I traded salt-dough christmas ornaments I made for a Christmas bazar to get it. One of the women at the bazar was selling her homemade sock monkeys and we bartered. It was the in the days before money. The relative value of things has changed.

Well, without pictures, without poetry, there isn't much more to say. I am unable to describe my world.

harbinger

I heard the chirping out my window this morning, a robin, I'm sure, as happy to be closer to spring as I am. I love spring. I want to plant more stuff, get my hands in the dirt and dig in. I am never as happy as early spring and the promise of light. I am an Oregonian, and while I can endure the long gray months without complaint, and the rain with acceptance of what it takes to be green, I am always as relieved at the first sign of spring as though it might never come again, as if the seasons might just change their order and start again at fall, skip the warming for this year.

I wasn't always like this: jubilant, hopeful, peering around each corner with gleeful anticipation. Nope. Used to be the sound of birds intruded into my long day into night into another day.... That sound, that sweet one finger melody, plucking away at the robin's vocal chords, would bring daylight crashing in, reminding me of a life I had lost sight of, of unmet responsibility, a child that had to be off to school, a job I had little ability to perform; a house that needed tending, dishes still in the sink, unused broom in the corner, dust rabbits -- not bunnies -- big fucking rabbits, lurking beneath things that hadn't been moved in years.

It was a long run.

I love birds.

urban myth

I'm sure Portland has a bunch. The Rogue Valley has a couple: the Gold Hill Cemetery is haunted by a female ghost, and this: We were trying to figure out the name of a little hamburger joint in the Rogue Valley that was around 30 years ago. It was on Riverside and Edwards, and I can't remember the name. But I do remember the name of Dell's. Dell's Hamburgers made cheap, greasy little burgers with chopped lettuce and onions, mustard and dill pickles. The buns were shiny with grease. They used to be ten for a dollar, then 5, then 4, then 2 for a buck. The story, the urban myth, goes that the cook had a heart attack and died on the grill. I have no idea if it is true, but it could be.

I'm not sure why I felt compelled to share that, but now that I'm gone from the valley, it concerns me that no body is going to tell the tales anymore. Nobody is going to care that the fat old lady who flipped burger at Dell's died doing it. I guess I imbue (is that a word?) myself with the abilty to immortalize via this verbal vehicle (alliteration ain't for sissies). How much wood would a wood chuck chuck? Or would I be imbuing them with immortality. Who cares? Not me.

We had a dance today on the unit. It was spontaneous, as things must be without benefit of memory. There was nothing going on so the girls put on some oldies and they just started groovin'. Since there are almost all women, and finally, women wihtout egos, they danced like women will when faced with a world without men: tapping their little white shoes to "Wait. Oh yes wait a minute Mr. Postman. Mr. Postman look and see oh yeah if there's a letter a letter for me e e" And when one of them, we'll call her Dolores, looked up and said, "Me too," it was so surprising to see her want to join in. She had a ball. We all had a ball. Egos be damned. I danced with them, three little women and me, dancing in a circle, Tiger Lil' with her head back, eyes closed, rockin' and rollin' hips remembering just what to do.

change

I bought new undies today, and pink pajama pants, and all in an effort to make me feel better. Nicole got her first job after filling out her first application. She needed shoes and stuff to start, so the shopping was on. I am still sick, although the wireless connection up here is better since moving the router a bit, and while that has little to do with wellness or illness, I am happier for it.

Here is my current list of distractions:
Harp practice
Reading mysteries
Food
Meetings about what is wrong with me
Romance
Step children
Making a yo-yo quilt
Money and how to get rid of it quickly
Work, to keep the money rollin' in

See, writing isn't even on the list.

Writing. There. I listed it. The odd thing is that I don't feel as though my writing is alive unless I post it here. I used to be of the mind that writing had to be on yellow paper (see previous post), that anything not handwritten was simply absent the Hemmingway portent. And that may be true. But I like my blog. I like this venue. It has allowed me to let go, for the most part, the notion of editing (some of you will bemoan this aspect) but really, releasing the inner editor is exhilarating. Kill the fucker. He never lets me finish anything. He has the muse tied up in the closet, duct-taped to the vacuum cleaner that never gets used in the winter, and we may not hear from her until the weather changes. She's not even fighting it. I don't think she cares any more than I do.

hmmm.

Sick as I am, I practiced my harp this morning. It is very specific--harp practice: certain fingers on certain strings at certain times in certain orders in certain arrangements of wrist and knuckles. I got through my exercises. Now I only have to do them one more time today.

Haley wants to be a fire dancer. Last week it was the banjo and a washboard. She wants those flaming things for her birthday. I'm sure we'll find some for her. A girl's gotta work.

I dropped out of the writing group. Did I already say that? I did. I just simply said, "I'm dropping out." And I got a nice letter from the nice person who kind of organized it saying she wanted to stay in touch.

sicker

No workie today. I am sitting on my sofa with Sid staring at me becasue if I am home and the sun is out, he must walk. The "W" word. We spell it or he is a pest. Truth is, it is winter and he doesn't get enough exercise chasing the ball in the kitchen. Poor Sid.

First harp lesson from Elizabeth. Very good. I hesitate to make snap judgements, (Ha!) but a better instructor, I think, than Jewel. Very descriptive of fingering style with good exercises and clear directions. But every teacher is different. I learned this about writing instructors: use a pencil and yellow legal pad only.... use the computer only for editing.... write only using an outline.... just let it fly, no outline if you are a real writer.... blah blah blah..... Jewel was the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants-type, which I often prefer, but not with the harp. I want to learn it right, then break the rules. But you should see the harps. These harp teachers have a minimum of 6 harps each it seems. But Elizabeth's concert grand pedal harp is spectacular. I just hope I don't have to own one someday. It will be like my husbands bikes, boats and guitars. He is always on to the next one, always saying this is the last one I'll ever need.... but I know better. That concert grand harp is huge, and it is a pedal harp. Mine is a celtic harp, looser strung and easier to play. I was happy to learn that after buying it. So much I didn't know. And looser strung is always preferable, yes?

Maybe I will take some tylenol, bundle up and take Sid for a walk. He deserves it and I want a cup of K&F coffee to start my motor. How bad could it be? It couldn't be worse than daytime TV.

sick

I feel like crap and I am annoyed at people who come to work when they are sick. Especially salaried martyrs who don't have to show up, who overestimate their contribution, and who, working in the aging industry, create marketing havoc as residents drop like flies in august in the wake of their snotting, blowing show of work ethic gone mad.

When I get sick, I get really sick. It scares me. Thus, the attitude.

a. and asia were in town and we had a nice visit. Soon, asia and I will be a force of two. Soon. a. took many pictures up in my attic, unescorted. I took a chance and left her unchaparoned. Her daughter just shakes her head. Check out the sites. It looks like a. caught some angel making a break for it out the attic window. Just to be clear: those are not my wings. I am no angel. I only live in the garret and type. The harp is incidental. When you see the angel of death, she will not have my face. I take the stairs like anyone.

And speaking of the harp, I liked Jewel, but had to come back to reality and take lessons from someone closer. Elizabeth Nicholsen. will be my new teacher. Jewel lived over an hour from our house, and had a driveway steeper than the back of God's head. I made it, and would have opted out of the country girl club if I hadn't (when in doubt, go fast) but I did. I flew up that hill. It was a beautiful setting, and she has concerts there, so hope to make it back out there one day. I hope I didn't piss her off by taking one lesson and bailing, but biz iz biz. It was a sweet view from a far hilltop, Chehalem Mountain, and I'm glad I went. It was the typical rich hippie dwelling: lots of bare wood, all original art. Very nice. Elizabeth, on the other hand, lives in the hood.

I am practicing. I took my harp to work with me and there is no better audience for a beginning harper than Alzheimer's patients. Tiger Lil' made me pick out "Danny Boy," which I did, and she accompanied me in high soprano. Perfect pitch at 96. It was like typing with one finger because I don't know the fingering for it, but I found the notes, and made the music. But even harp practice is beautiful.

Well, I will lay my body down, and wait for the family to come home. I hope I don't get bronchitis.

toys

Recent photographs of my new harp. It is a Dusty Strings FH26, maple. Beautiful. I can't play it, but am learning. I am taking my first lesson today from Jewel somebody. I hope I can take her seriously. Dancing Trees or something. But I just really want to learn to play this properly before I form the bad habits to which I am prone. And, I hope I don't completely neutralize her abiilty to help me because I am so judgmental.

That being said, here's my harp. I am now a harpy.

madonnas

I am interviewing potential new caregivers to work on the unit. I tend to look for nice -- willing to teach the rest. But sometimes nice just isn't there, and sometimes nice is all there is. Like today. Her name was Bellaria. Nice name, huh? She was nice. A volunteer eucharist minister in her spare time when she wasn't caring for her dying parents. Now I'm not sure what a eucharist minister is or does, but it sounds nice. Selfless. A value that I deny, personally. I mean, if you are being a minister of any kind to preserve your mortal soul, I dont' think you can really set all of that down to altruism. Not even a little bit of it. That being said, she was very very nice. She looked like a mexican postcard of the freakin' madonna.

So you can probably tell by the direction of this story that it ends poorly. My caustic wit won't go unnoticed. Its a giveaway. I don't care. I'm not trying to be opaque, here. And don't go licking your chops thinking she was some kind of wolf in a lamb suit. Like I said... she was nice. So I interviewed her for a fucking hour. A fucking hour of my precious time. I told her everything I've ever known about Alzheimer's (which, if I can tell you in an hour, ain't much). And then, just when I'm ready to close the deal, offer her the job, she says what so many say prior to one of two things: an outright lie or a dealbreaker.

Drumroll:

She says, "I have to be perfectly honest with you."

I pause, wonder to myself which will it be? lie/dealbreaker--dealbreaker/lie as I look upon the mother of Christ in her radiant latino-ness, and wait for the sword (that has been hanging over my head, I just hadn't seen it prior to this very moment) to fall, and I wait.

She goes on to explain the depth of her honesty, why it is so important to her, how she has come to a point in her life where relationships, even one that is only an hour old, matters more to her than money --and suddenly I feel like I'm talking to a drug addict who is helping me look for the wallet she only just now stole from me--

But in the end it isn't like that at all. It is much more superficial than that. She says: "I really can't stand dealing with bodily fluids."

You're laughing. I can hear you from my garret window.

I was banking on this chick. She was Christmas morning.

So I take a deep breath (all the better to blow her off) and try to explain in my nicest possible voice--because dammit I'm nice too--that if you're considering even the barest of an avocation among the elderly HONEY you'd best plan on being at least knee deep in shit.

Of course I didn't really say it like that. Of course not. I wouldn't do that.

upstairs

I got a bean bag chair for the garret. A craigslist special. Worth nothing and not all that comfortable, but it will work until I find something and then I can sell it again on craigslist for more. I am upstairs typing and the wireless connection is good. I am happy.

I can hear someone on the stairs. I wonder who it is.

I have very little furniture up here: a bookcase, a small end table and a mirror. And a small heater. No phone. No running water. Its just like living on Yale Creek only with electricity. I didn't mind living without electricity, I liked wood heat, cooking on a woodstove, and kerosene light is lovely, but I really didn't like carrying water uphill or down. It is one of those things that you can look back on and tell your children about. I know the exact weight of five gallons of water: 45 pounds. I lived in the woods. The actual, way out beyond where anybody else lives, woods. I lived in a beautiful cabin made of graduated logs, each hand-peeled pole smaller than the next, bottom to top, with paned windows and railed loft and porch, with a notched pole to climb into the second story. It was a beautiful place. I know I have posted this poem before, but it reminds me of the price of solitude.

yale creek

i strung pressed leaves and snake grass
on sewing thread
and hung them in the windows
to rattle in the wind
transparent in the light
filtering through the pines
i decorated around the old blood
running down the hand-peeled log wall
just to the right, inside the front door.
i never thought to wash it off -- that little bit of history--
proof that things had happened
without my consent
beyond my control
in that beautiful cabin
of wood
and blood
and handmade lace.

american idolatry

I admit many of my shortcomings here on the blog, and TV is one of them. Since I moved to Portland I have watched American Idol. I refused to watch it before, but it has been standard fare for... this will be the third season. It is my decision. I time my life around it. I tape it. But it has changed. Used to be there was the occasional crappy singer in the mix of people who were really trying, or an occasional geek that was seeking national attention with some schtick of some kind, but now... now the line-up is nothing but retard after retard trying their damnedest to belt out some hot new song like "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?" I mean really. It is easy to take potshots at the idiots who are passing judgment, and they certainly bear some responsibility, but it is me, it is us, we, the viewing public who thrive on train-wreck TV, and the trainwrecks are getting worse. I know, and my husband is quick to point out, that there are larger issues on which to take the moral high ground than reality TV. He is absolutely correct. They are easy targets, those poor retards. And admittedly it was hard to see Jewel doing something for money and being a part of it. But shit, she could be a 24-carat asshole and I wouldn't know it, she sings those pretty little songs and I assume she has some integrity, that she is Sarah-fucking-McLauchlan. She may or may not, but there she was, knee deep in it, making fun of nutbags.

I wrote a letter to the editor of the oregonian thanking her/him for putting an article on the front page.

If one of them ends up on top of a building with an uzi, firing at random, it is very unlikely they will hit Simon-- who is only the most visible asshole telling them their sad little lives are even less liveable now that they have been told they are ugly and they can't even sing. How mean is that?

weather, interrupted

I know this will shock you, but the crack team at First Alert Storm Team 8, Winter Blast 07--didn't call this one. So, as they cry "eminent domain" and usurp my taped episode of The Young and the Restless for an endless forcast, which is really more like the weatherperson's version of a late birthday card, I am annoyed, but not surprised. Five days ago they had the entire tri-county area on call, forced overtime, for a storm that never showed, snowplows at the ready, schools closed in advance, just in case the little kiddies might get wet.

Score one for weather! Sneaking one by the team. Go, God.

Driving this morning at 6:30 was silent and beautiful. Driving home, not quite so lovely, although it requires a certain level of meditation to stay with it, 15 miles an hour for 15 miles. It always surprises me that people really don't get how to do it-- how to drive in snow... to just go real slow and cruise on through. Avoid hills. Avoid steep places. Avoid using your brakes or, well, pedals in general. Its kind of like a stick-up: Just aim the vehicle and don't make any quick moves. When I got home there were cross-country skiers on Clinton Street.

I am a little surprised that no one has commented on my garret paint job. I will assume it means no one likes it. Well, that's okay. Nicole says it looks like a shabby child care center. She has a point. I love it. I still do. I am ordering a fatboy because I can't really get anything else up the stairs (see previous posts) and I'm not sure I could force it up, but it is more likely. And I must have something to sit on.

It will look better with furniture, and carpet.

misplaced grits

The cook at work decided to recognize the day with catfish, hushpuppies, johnny cakes, mustard greens, black-eyed peas and missippi mud pie. The thing is, I work in possibly the whitest part of Portland with ninety-some-odd, ninety-year old people who stood in line asking if there were any peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches to be had.

It seemed like a day not to work. I was reminded of the days when I, a child of 13, campaigned for Bobby Kennedy on the steps of Medford Mid High School. I have read that Decency died with the Kennedys. I don't know. I know I live in an indecent world, with cameras recording heineous acts with disturbing nonchalance, distributing unspeakable images for the masses to devour at their leisure. We are hyenas. All these centuries of evolution gone for nothing. Nothing at all. For leisure. I remember this bad movie -- a Jack Nicholsen movie called "The Crossing Guard". John Morris (I think) played a drunk driver who got out of prison after a long stint, and when asked at a party if he missed freedom, said, "if all freedom means to you is entertainment, then its over-rated." We have sold the collective soul for entertainment.

So, I worked... on this day of mourning for a womanizer who had a good speech at the right time.

pics

I decided to do a catch-up posting and get all the pictures out. Hope you enjoy them. I've finished painting the garret, pretty much, and I love it. We put some carpet down just to cover the floor and will find some pieces to go with the new look. So far, it is so frigging cold up there that I can't move my fingers. And the stairs are so narrow there is nothing to sit on. I'm considering bean bags. They make huge bean bags now. Sumo bags. Fat boy bags. Look it up. I think that would work well for me. Lounging is my natural position. I am supine.



New additions to the monkey clan














My new harp. I just got it today. I'm considering a career change to thanatology. Actually, my husband found it for me. I love that he sees me that way.
















Sid makes the catch













The landing














Sid trots away with the only thing that matters to him















Haley and Sid on the way to the park.


















Looking down the stairway from the garret













The attic













One corner and the door













The window.













the opposite corner













The window again

haves

As I walk away from the unit, I usually take the time to say goodbye to anyone who is paying attention, kiss Alene, hug Rosita and make some hysterically funny remark as I type in the secret code that gets me through the keypadded door and out of there for another day. Last week, I did what I always do, and upon leaving, turned to Bonny and said, "You're in charge."

It was a joke.
She has dementia, you see.

She can't remember that the clothes she is wearing are her own unless they are red, or that the fruit rotting in her little apartment isn't treasure (oh, poverty... thy shadow is long) but she remembered that she was in charge. And she's been complaining ever since.

Or is it every since? Ever. I think I say ever since.

At any rate, Bonny's been showing up at my desk each morning, exhausted from keeping an eye on things. She tells me how lazy the girls are when I'm not there. I know this already. Job security, I figure. For both of us. But then her daughter called and said Bonnie is distraught. Worried sick. Too much responsibility for her. So, tonight, I led her to the med room, introduced her to the med aide and told her that Jeanette is on duty and if she has any questions, Jeanette will be in charge until I get back in the morning. She was relieved. She didn't want to let me down.

I hope that when I stop working, I stop.

I went to my writing group, and will likely go back. It is of some value. It may work. I am not inspired. I have not written. I was criticized, which I love, and she had a point. One. Two women showed up, and were serious about writing, although neither write like me. They are more like real writers. Not just liars with pencils. And there was a point in the conversation when I knew I was not like them, a point at which the difference between us narrowed to one bright point. They were talking about retirement: how long have you been retired? Since 02. Oh, I've just been for two years. They turned to look at me. I looked back and forth between them, knowing a comment was required. I couldn't just smile and nod. This was get to know you day. Show and tell on the first day of school. "I'll work until I die," I finally said. And the clincher was this.... they said, in unison: "Why?" And I, other shoe ready to drop at any minute, think to myself: I could lie, say I love to work. I love my job. It gives my life meaning. Instead, I went with the facts. The fact. One.

Money.

I said it simply and with as little shame as I could muster. I will work until I die because I have to. Because you, you retired ladies, are looking at the working poor-- a fingersnap from under the bridge. I know the distance between me and the shopping cart women and I know that they are cold tonight. I was one. No. I wasn't. But I've lived in the back of a pickup truck and in a burned out cabin and on my brother's screened porch next to the train track and in Joe Estramada's logging yard. (I didn't tell them all that last stuff. I just said money.)

And that separated the haves from the have nots in one fell swoop. But I'll go back anyway.

I was listening to a woman this evening and she said when she writes, her soul opens-- or her core or some such shit-- and what I know is that it is very difficult to write a lie on paper. Not without an eraser nearby. I know this because I am a fiction writer, and the truth leaks out around even those lies. It can't be helped. It is especially difficult to commit untruths to paper if you are a criminal trained in the old school: where men were men and women were scared... (you thought I was going to say sheep... but you didn't go to my school.) where you don't cop to shit, baby. Not on paper. Not in your outloud voice you don't. So lying is best left to the wind, the unproveable singular voice. If a lie is told in the forest and nobody hears it, can it still be used against you???

The room is coming right along. One of the walls is done. What my husband doesn't understand (and doesn't really care about all that much except that my ways with paint are curious to him) is that each wall is a separate painting. It is as fun as it gets for me. The first wall is terra cotta paint with a mocha wash over it. Gorgeous --like my bathroom down south only richer color. I bought a turquoise vase made of papier mache and a small turquoise bird with its head tucked under its wing. I will bring in the entire monkey population of this house when I am done. We brought in two new monkeys over Christmas: a cowboy and a cowgirl. I really need to post some pictures to photobucket and load them so I can get to them from this computer. We have some shots of Sid actually in flight, catching the frisbee.

Nicole dyed her hair purple today and cut it in a pixie cut. I couldn't get away with it. She looks just right.

friday

A woman came into my office today to discuss her sister in law moving onto the unit, and when I asked her what she usually wears, she said "waltz length gowns." I'm not sure what that means, just like I'm not sure what "tea length" means.

What does it mean? And when did the length of things relative to mealtimes and dance steps stop mattering? Go go boots, for example.

It sounded elegant, spending those golden years lounging around in waltz length gowns, sipping mint juleps on the porch. I picture waltz length as very long, sweeping the floor, dustballs forming at the hem if you are in my house. But I think I am wrong. I think it is nearly ankle-length. Same as tea length.

Oh god. Who cares. Sometimes it seems like it is all just a death sentence. They all die. And we all die. I know this.

But in the give and take of it all, on Tuesday I got to throw one back. Audrey. I liked Audrey, loved to have her live with us and hated to let her go. She is very anxious and fixated, but she is not demented. Not yet. She shows some wear for 93, but all in all, she is still more organized than I will ever be. So I sent her to the other side.

Picture this: An assisted living facility with 90 some-odd, 90-something people on the one side, blissfully imagining that life will continue much the same as it always has, that leisure has meaning, that death will come in the night, "on little cat feet," like winter or fall or dark of night that Sandburg described, leaving a tidy corpse; and that madness will remain on the other side--my side--mannered and forgiving, touching only strangers and the unclean.

So they don't visit us very often--the 90-somethings--because they fear what they could easily become... are in fact becoming... but occasionally, one of them loses her mind, slips through the crack and stays with me. They cluck among themselves when this happens, those who remain, and they make sense of it all, and bring her leftover donuts from bingo for a week or two, and blame her daughter in Texas for visiting only at Christmas. Then they stop coming and repair the crack so they can't see it anymore. But it is still there, yawning and hungry, waiting for a single missed-step.

So it isn't often that one returns from the dead as Audrey has. She returns to the living with the stain of the untouchable. The old ones point and stare as though dementia were contagious. It may be.

my bad

I'm ba-ack. My fault for loading the computer with msn. I told them, No, I didn't do anything stupid, but I had.

dead

The laptop died. It'll be back by close of bizness tomorrow, or so they tell me.

I have finished the primer coat up in the garret and it sucked up almost two gallons. Gallons. But I slopped it on good and heavy.

I fired somebody today.

My husband is playing Moonlight Mile on his acoustic guitar in the background. I love that song.

She didn't see it coming. Not one bit. A real managerial coup. Bummer that it feels like shit to do that. I shouldn't be a boss. I should be bossed. I need bossing.