erudite

I want to write a poem in words no more than five letters long.

new boat
first day out
the buick
the orca
the old '58
wide river under us
wave upon wave
water not just blue
no big fish on
just bread and tuna
buoys will be buoys

good morning

Go Terry Schiavo go... She should be gone soon, and her parents will finally experience the grief they have been avoiding all these years. That is, unless they, as I suspect they will, dive headlong into rage over their selfish loss and continue to avoid it. The lengths we go to to avoid sadness...

Bulemia... If you look in an odd little book by Louise Hay called "Heal Your Body" she describes bulemia as the ultimate in self-loathing. The refusal to feed the self. That is not a quote, but it was something like that. It is the physiological manifestation of the barbie-syndrome. And what a paradox... to tube feed someone who induced vomitting to the point of cardiac arrest.

I do know a few who have chosen tube feedings over death, but few really know what they are choosing. They are choosing "not death." And the amount of care and maintenance required to prevent pain and decay is astoundng. The social cost, because money always runs out, is monumental. Life at any cost is a technological travesty. It starts with the ER (to simplify a complex argument, it really goes much deeper and into the religious fabric of this nation...world...universe....) The ER, the ambulance, the paramedic zeal, is where quality, not quantity of life, should begin. Their decisions are far-reaching and based in protocol that is imbeded in a health-care system that is based on belief. Everything is. Life IS precious. Mine is. I sit in conferences daily and review the code status of people who are a b'zillion years old and still, in the face of ongoing nursing home life and all it entails, want to be resuscitated... brought back to do some more time. And I guess that's the thing: It looks like doing time to me, but that's probably because I'm not doing it. But to experience the bone crushing reality of CPR in the elderly is barbaric. It is not life-affirming-- it is death-denying. We all gotta throw off this mortal coil at some point. (what DOES that mean???) I'm for dying whenever you like. I don't object to euthanasia, as long as it not state-funded or legislated. I won't vote for sex or death. It is nobody's business and like JoAnne says (or would say if she could figure out how to post comments) ..."for every complex question, there is always a simple answer which is usually wrong." or something like that.

Well, here's how superficial I am: I'm heading out to spend 200 bucks at Home Depot. In my world, that's a good day. My big plan is to get plants for my garden and paint for my metal outside chairs. I need a sandblaster and good paint. They are bouncy old blue chairs, and worthy of maintenance.

what?

Well, Bill Mahr is saying Bush may not have got it so wrong after all... that democracy is taking off like a brush fire in the Middle East.

I personally think he is the anti-christ.

Bush, not Bill Mahr. But it is an interesting turn of the talking heads. Pictures at eleven.

dyin' on republican time

Well, I say let the Schaivo chick go. Is that her name? She looks like any number of long-term tube patients I've cared for over the years. Vacant. I remember Mark--what was his last name?-- who's mother Janet came in day after day, drunk as a dog, and fed him the pureed meat of nursing home fare. He, at least, retained a sick sense of humor, but nobody knew he could even think for about five years after the car wreck. I guess someone finally said, "Blink once for yes, twice for no." and he did. For twenty years. He wished he was dead. There was this one guy named Jerry who kept pulling out the tube, so angry, so enraged by his life. It was a failed suicide. And they, the big medical THEY, just wouldn't take a hint, so, hands bound to bedrails, he lived until some too many years later, pneumonia took his side. That's the thing about these guys, these human preserves, they don't die. They live a long and often fairly healthy life because they are monitored for every sniffle. They never miss a flu shot. They are protected like the national trust.

Speaking of national stuff... do you think Jeb Bush will be the next president? President Jeb. That is so terrifyingly possible that when I heard it announced on the news as a casual segway from the Schaivo debate, the Schaivo Stunt, that my stomach, and that of my husband's, did flipflops. The right to live. I just want to go on record to say if that happens to me, pull the plug. I'm alright dead or alive. I'll just go on blogging...

And speaking of husbands, I guess the Christian Right has a stronger marriage deal. Covenant marriage. You have to stay in it unless... abuse, adultry, (let me try to get these in alphabetical order) alcoholism, liberalism, not wearing clean, pressed khakis to church, you just plain don't like the guy. I don't know. The list seemed ridiculous. And it turns out you can now upgrade your current marriage. You can do a Covenant add-on. The thing is, you could divorce. They could.

Personally, I've never held alcoholism against anyone. Why start now?

Hey!!! We got a boat. A 1958 Wacanda. It looks like a buick-- or an orca. Watch for us on the Willamette.

Dan Rather's Last Day

I should be watching his news channel, but I'm not. I never did like him that much.

St. Helens blew up. We were driving up Powell and saw the plume. It was happening just then. Right then. It was great to be aware at the same time it was happening. There have been other monumental events that I was unaware of--the seventies come to mind--and the first half of the eighties. Anyway, we dashed, as did half of southeast Portland, up to Mt. Tabor, which, it turns out, ain't all that great of a view. But the thunderhead-like cloud of smoke and ash had mostly dissipated anyway, and we went on to look at a fishing boat.

My husband wants a boat. We have nowhere to put one, but that doesn't seem like much of a barrier to him. He'd carry it on his back, I'm thinkin'. Greg, the fishing god, says that the fish are biting now because of St. Helens. It shook them up, he thinks. I think its just that he finally caught two springers. Big ones. My husband will be impossible to live with until he catches one.

There are a million things to blog about, but I'm exhausted from giving bad news to good people. Remember Ruby Miles? The one who called me and said she was lost in California? Well, today I had to tell her that she had to try harder in therapy or her Medicare benefit would run out. Try harder. She's ninety fucking years old. Try harder than what? Than she did when she was eighty? Come on. She examined me with the watery gray eyes of the weary, and said, "Do you like being a social worker?"

Well, I don't. Not at all.

popeye

Today. I read asia's flirt with separation from all known things and consider my own departure. This is no flirtation, mine (not that hers is... just her language always feels that way to me.) I'm here to stay. Cataclysmic change is good. In the midst of bliss I am up against myself though, and this time there is a witness to all that I would maintain in secret. I am whaddiam. Ask anyone.

sauvie's island this year

First day on the beach this year. I love it out here, sitting in my director's chair wrapped in a sleeping bag, gloves on, trying to write with dinosaur fingers, fingers that competed with Sharon Thompson in second grade for best penmanship. She won, but hers was boring. Mine had flair.

It isn't all that cold on Sauvie Island, on the Columbia, mist rising from warming water. 41 degrees now. The fish like it about 45. Who knew they were so particular? Anyway, the mist is a-rising, bad moon still in the sky, slowly giving way to the sun, red around the edges. Sid is with us, his first trip out, his first sand experience, sniffing and snorting like a pig. He is as fun as anything. I swear. I layered my clothing, and by noon am down to one long-underwear shirt. and, of course, pants. I got my fishing license yesterday so we could have two poles in the water. The water is flat, silver, with reflections of leafless trees on the far bank some 300 yards away. Big freakin' river, the Mighty Columbia. Lots of river traffic -- fishing boats, tugs and barges so heavy they cut the water so deep it pulls the water from shore and releases it, slapping in its wake, rolling along the beach so strong it rings the bells on the fishing poles. I think I've talked about how the beach fishing goes out here. They sink pole holders in the sand, stick the pole in the holder, dangle a bell from one of the eyelets, pull up a chair and wait. It doesn't seem to matter who's bell rings. They all go wild for a real bite. And you can pick out the uninitiated right away when a barge goes by and rings the bells. They run for their poles, certain the clever salmon has chosen this moment to strike. Then, sheepish, return to their chairs to wait all day for probably nothing. They usually only do this once.

The same people come out, day after day, year after year. The season starts earlier, but gets rolling in March. There's the boys from St. Johns, a whole batch of relatives who set up camp each time, and they have women, so I like them best. They put up a pop-up shade thingy and line it with tarps and inside is a woodstove. Always make friends with the people with heat. They bring "the Pacer," a mentally ill brother who likes to fish. He sets up his pole, then marks off his area -- about 15-20 feet of sand-- and paces back and forth in front of his pole all day. Not fast and not always, but its his spot. Its what he does. Then there's Oxy-boy, an idiot with a bad beatles haircut and a running script for Oxycontin. Now we call him the announcer because he never shuts up. When somebody has a fish on, he runs back and forth, shouting every move: "He's getting the net!!! Its on the beach!!!" Annoying.

And this is my life. I sit in my chair, watch my husband reel in the poles and cast for the 4th time today, once each hour, and realize this is my third year on the beach with him. His fourth. I remember the first time he asked me to go, and I said, I love to fish, and he was so surprised. And I sat right where I am sitting and watched him fish, and fell in love. I could have watched him fish forever. And I remember thinking then, way way back then, a lifetime ago, that if I could have any life, any life in the world, I would have this life. THIS very life. And now I do. It is my life, now. And I still prefer sheets with a thread count of 250 or better, and real Fiestaware just that shade of yellow. Sid broke one of my oval Fiestaware platters this morning and he (K) doesn't understand my need for matching plates or just that color. He doesn't have to. And in the middle of my perfect life, I am still myself. Eternally.



The moon may have been full Friday night. I don't keep track.

spring

This is the first day this year that I've felt my socks--you know? That feeling that they are just one layer too much. And its not like they are heavy socks. Just light little things, but my feet were ready to feel dirt. It is so warm. Some Portlander's are worried, but I suppose it'll work out. It'll be wet before we know it. Hard to say. Maybe I drug the dry south up when I came. Anyway...

I met a woman at work today. I was sitting at my desk, drinking the third cup of coffee, arriving like I do at the butt-crack of dawn. The phone was ringing and ringing, but from a distance. I walked up to the front lobby and answered it. She had called from her room. She asked if I was missing a patient. She didn't know who she was calling -- thought she had made an outside call. She asked, "Are you missing a patient by the name of (we'll call her) Ruby Miles?" Well, it was early, and to tell you the truth, I never really know whether somebody may have made a break for it during the night, so I took the cautious route--my least favorite, but most useful when liability is at issue. I said, "Well, anything's possible. Who's calling?"

"Ruby Miles," she answered, her voice crackling like paper through the line.

Ah. My critical assessment skills spring into action. "She's nuts," I tell myself.

"Hi, Ruby," I say. "Where do you think you are?"

California. And I've got to get back to Gresham."

Oh. okay. I tell her I will find her. She tells me I couldn't possibly because she is somewhere in California. Trust me, I tell her.

I walked down the hall and around the corner and into Ruby's room. I introduced myself as the person she had been talking to on the phone. She was just lost. "But I'm in California," she insisted. "Well, I'm in Portland," I said, ever observant. "How do you explain that?"

She couldn't. But she tried. It was a long story, beginning in childhood with a mother who wouldn't be happy. Wouldn't have dinner out. Would rather wait at home for a husband on a three-day drunk who would come home with bargain jewelery, a handful of magic beans, hoping to secure forgiveness, which we all know is free, but damned hard to come by.

She said, and kepy saying, "I have a good education. I'm not like some of them. I love to go out to dinner." And she told me her story as she fiddled with the remote-- a strange creature to the elderly-- with bent fingers like tree roots.

tripe

I hate it when I get abstract. Who gives a shit about my life? It is Sunday now, and I feel just a little less entitled than I did yesterday, having had enough TIME to myselves. We didn't do much. Left to our own devices, we rarely do. We sit, we consider, we are so deep.

Anyway, you should check out L's blog soulwake. She doesn't write often, but I usually like the drift. I forget

beautiful day

I'm sitting here with two cups of coffee because that's the kind of girl I am. Too much is not enough. Bacon frying in the kitchen, dog at my feet, husband out on the beach waiting for the bell to ring, and I have time to myself. In a marriage, this seems a little rare. Time with no one else to consider but me. The girls will be here soon enough, and time will be shattered again, split in several directions, and I am self centered. I took half of Thursday and all of Friday off just to have some time to do self preservation.

When I was alone for so many years, I pushed against the edges of lonliness, tried to find the way out, and could not. It was lonliness for a long time, but the eventuality of that kind of resistance is acceptance or death, and I accepted my own company. I became alone instead of lonely. It is a little fracturing however.... When people claim they have come to terms with a single life, that they enjoy their own company, what they don't tell you is that it becomes essential -- that time, those voices, that company of critics and supporters who live in the cobwebs of the fine, fine mind, and who, in the presence of happiness and marital bliss, will shut up for awhile, but not forever. Well, they're back. They tell me my life is only about housework and tripe and that I've lost myself.

To make their point, I had to turn the bacon. I love bacon. That's all I'm having for breakfast. Just bacon.

So, back to the abstract of my life. The point is, I was perfectly ready to lose myself, to start over. All over. Square one. I didn't even see it the last time I passed it. And now, I am finally finally not alone, but I live with the mind of a woman who has made alot of pretty important decisions without considering anyone else. I don't share. I don't play well with others. And its a damned good thing I am nuts about my husband, because I am nuts. Anyone will tell you. And slowly, slowly, I am learning to risk the unveiling of my terrible secrets. They aren't even secrets. That's the terrible thing. There is nothing. And I guard it like Buckingham Palace.

I am not making sense.

Anyway, the bacon is done. Eight pieces. I will eat four and save the rest for my love. I hope he catches a big fat springer. My valentine said: Sit, Stay, Be Mine.

That's marriage.

the history of my hair

The sun is out and the come-hither, finger-crooking, insinuation of spring is in the air. We are (read: he is) cleaning up dog shit and building a pen. We're taking the yard back, Sid. Fair warning. We were having a standoff about the shape of the pen relative to the yard, and I guess I won, although it had little to do with the dog. It was about effort, and whether to sink another post or angle the fencing and hook it to the existing fencepost, which would have looked like fucking Oaklahoma. My husband, who I adore, and who indulges the Martha Stewart part of me, sunk another post and the pen is square with the fence and all is right in my world. Order. If I can't have it inside my head, I'll take it anywhere else. And I got some stepping stones to tiptoe out to the pen, and teach Sid to tiptoe back in. He is a great dog, but had turned to digging in the boredom of our long work days. It will be an adjustment for all of us. I moved a huge fern over under the lilacs. I hope it likes it there. Should be better, its out of the sun,

Well, I'm blonde again, and for those of you who missed the parade of passing colors over the past couple of months: too late. I'm blonde. I'm very blonde. I'm blonde to the bone. I've tried to grow up, and grow gray, and let it all go, but I'm just not there yet. I should explain that this is a process. No. I'll spare you. The thing is, I want my hair back, and it just isn't going to happen. I am a blonde, actually. I always have been. And when I was laying on the beach five days out of seven, and living in the trees, I had streaky golden curly blonde hair down to the middle of my back. Almost. And its just gone now. Gone. It didn't happen all at once. I remember the first time I frosted it. And RAVE perms. The first edition of spiral waves. And it is ridiculous that I did those things... but not these things. You can't go back. Lorretta knows it. She never did anything to her hair after she tried to go blonde when she was twelve or something. Once you apply the bleach, its just a matter of time. And the real thing is, while I was frosting and playing and messing around with my hair, some of it turned gray. Gray. Me. And its okay for Asha, but I don't know how to have gray hair. Hers is silver anyway. My biggest mistake was starting to straighten it about two years ago. When Maria said, "Jou need a makofer." and I did it. I fried it. So, about a month ago I tried some dark blonde, which turned kind of pinkish gold. It wasn't bad. I kind of got used to it. But I still had this plan to recapture that sunkissed hair of my former life, and I wanted the underhair darker and you get the picture. So the pink wasn't enough contrast, so I just lived with it for a month. People said they liked it, but it wasn't me. Then, yesterday, I dyed it darker blonde, which really means brown. And it looked dyed brown. I panicked and broke out the bleach. I pulled it through a cap and did a really heavy frost and now I look like myself again.

I am blonde.

I have a dilemma: they're putting American Idol opposite West Wing. Shit. That's how superficial I am. I swear I've never watched American Idol before, but I got hooked.

So, the sun is down, I'm baking chicken cordon bleu with asparagus, and it is the night before Valentine's day. A year ago I got my diamond ring. A year.

synchronicity

Haley's birthday party. She's fourteen and too cool to breathe the same air as adults. She knows the words to more punk songs than I ever did. She is cool. And so, it is hard to be a stepmother. Makes me miss my son. We had come far beyond the birthday parties of childhood -- when I could get it together, his birthday so soon after Christmas -- and through the discomfort of adolescence when it seemed nothing was enough, and into the adult phase, where we admitted to liking pie better than cake and mexican food better than that. And we found a little Mexican restaurant down there that we liked and had dinner there each year, just him and me. It was our celebration. Our family of two. It seemed insensitive for us to slip away and celebrate like that -- there were lots of family who would have liked to join us -- but it was my time with my son, and the time was running short. I just didn't know how short, or how much I would miss him.

So I make my husband celebrate for his daughter. They don't know how. And I shopped for her--just little things... a sketch book and a wooden model for figure drawing because she, like me, appreciates Varga; and colored pencils, and because I couldn't resist: an aquatic frog and a vase and a plant and rocks. Don't ask me why. I had to do it.

So in she comes, after school, carrying the package she bought with her own money. And she had purchased a fish bowl and a beta and a plant and rocks. We looked at each other and smiled.

This stepmother thing may not be so hard after all.

come saturday morning

There are girls littering the furniture and the carpet and there is nowhere to sit but here. I am forced to write. The silent saturday morning-afters, when the ladies are sprawled until noon -- proof of the wild night life of adolescent girls in Portland. They were out at the Paris Club at a punk show. All ages. No booze. Hard to believe.

I am sick again, with a cold that I am protecting like a baby I don't want to ever see grow up. I fear bronchitis like a sword hanging over my head, capable of taking a month or two from my life without asking. I am taking Zicam and looking for Airborne, that new thing that is supposed to make you not get colds. It may be a little late. I am headed for Nature's to get immune restorer, but I am exposed to snotting and snorting people who are dying of viral pneumonia day in and day out, and I am so susceptible. SO susceptible. I hate feeling weak. I hate buying medicine.

Well, its tax time and I'm married. One of the conditions of this arrangement was that I file my back taxes before I moved. Well, of course I didn't. I hate paper. I really do. Before I got sober I didn't even open my mail. Ever. I think I 've admitted that in this running commentary on the truly mundane. "Hey, you should read Someone's blog!! Its all about mail and death!!" Anyway, I used to have these paper bags full of unopened mail labelled "later" and "even later than that" and I finally had to have somebody babysit me while I opened them all. It took all day. Vivian sat with me. (God bless her. She taught me how to shop. She introduced me to debt.) But anyway, I opened all that mail and there were hundreds of bills, mostly meaningless, but there was money: rebates, refunds, etc. etc. etc.... and all sitting in the closet during the bottom of my life. I could have afforded one more hit. I didn't know.

So now, I just mailed off my 2003 taxes and paid the accountant for the 2002 taxes I sent in last spring, and now I am married. Now all the receipts I have saved over the past year will have to be sorted and added and I just hate this part. But I'm going to do it today. Mark my published words. I will not procrastinate. Not yet.

At work it is so heavy every single day. Geneva died. I couldn't even write about her husband. He was so odd. Maybe I did. But I learned so much from him. He was insane, actually a zealot. A religious fanatic. Married to a woman 20 years his senior. May-December romance, I guess. More like November-December, but you get the drift. Well, she was dying and he couldn't get it. His faith, a difficult thing for most to manage under the circumstances, prohibited him from seeing it. He was waiting for a miracle. As far as I could see, it was a miracle she was still breahing. And it isn't that I don't believe in miracles so much as that I see them in the day to day of rising suns and full moons and green buds sprouting through winter soil--now there's faith-- but he was praying for his own personal miracle so he could keep his own personal wife. He was so self-centered. It was all about him. He asked, "Who will hold me when I am wailing in the night." And I thought: Jeez. Can't you just hang out with her and hold her hand and cut her some fucking slack? But of course he couldn't--he still wanted to have sex with her. And oh, boy. Did the staff eat that up. Nursing home sex. It just isn't easy to explain. And here was the thing for me... in order to protect the patient from her humping husband, I had to counsel him, and in the counseling, find compassion for this very odd man. Consent is such a funny thing. Must a wife, albeit a dying wife, consent? Is it understood within the bonds of marriage? So I said, in my limited institutional authority that substitues for wisdom, "If you believe she is consenting, you should at least close the door." And that opened one for us as he began to cry. He told me about his beliefs -- ad infinitum-- and I listened. I tried to find a place in the conversation where I could deliver the bad news--because it is seeming like that is my job these days. The physician's don't seem to want to do it. And really, nobody knows. But you do know. You do. And the families, as much as they don't want to know, want to know. Finally, he said, "You think she is close to death, don't you." And, faithless whore that I am, I said, "Yeah. I do." Simple. Simple. And like JoAnne's computer screen says: "for every complex question there is a simple answer and it is almost always wrong." Yes. So yeah, Geneva died. And he wailed. But by that time, we kind of knew each other, and we were not strangers and being a Christian Scientist, he is grinding against his belief that he will now be forever damned because he allowed medical intervention while he waited for his miracle. "You don't think God would fault me for that, do you?" I told him I didn't. But that's me.

Sometimes I wonder if everything we believe is true, just by virtue of belief. That whatever we think will happen after this life, will be manifested for us. That for each of us, it is all true. Everything. And we believe some horrible things, we humans. Horrible things.

bubblewrap

Stressed? Try bubblewrap...

One Good Line

Another day on death row. We used to laugh at the lowering of our own standards: "If nobody dies, its a good day." Well.... they're gettin' lower. It was a pretty good day.

Last week we went to get new cell phones. One of the great things about being married (there are so many) is consolidation. He puts both phones on one lower bill and pays it. How can I go wrong? I know there are those of you out there who disavow (well, you'll disavow almost anything. admit it) the loss of womanly independence and the right to fuck up your own credit, but I'm loving it. I married a responsible man. And those of you who know me can relax now. Quit worrying. I can't sink the ship. I'm not driving.

So anyway, there we were, in cell hell, the ATT/Cingular phone store. If it was Safeway, there would have been a mass exodus, people would have mutinied in earnest. Take a number my ass. My husband, bless his sweet unexpecting heart, said, "We'll just run by and pick up the phones on our way to the meeting." "Okay, Honey" I said, knowing--knowing all along how it goes. He tells me, "I did this all over the phone already. It will be a breeze." I smile. I know we'll never see the meeting. He says, "Don't worry, I even have the guy's name I was talking to. Sergi." But I know we'll spend the evening looking at ear buds and lime green disco phone covers and leather phone holders and god knows how many different kinds of the same damn phone. And there is one chair for a bzillion people, and I keep thinking of Asha, who says don't lean on things... if you stand without support you will have better balance and be more graceful, and I know she's right, but I'm so tired after a long day among the old and older. But I do it: I stand. And I am all the more graceful for it, if you can imagine that.

Back in cell hell it finally became our turn. OUR TURN. Then its all fun and games, shooting the shit with the twenty-something kid who tries to explain the difference between analog, digital and gps. The shape and frequency of radio waves. Remember: I don't care. But we sit there like a tree full of owls as he explained ad nauseum about how there are no long distance charges. And it was like being in the dollar store. It's how much? a dollar. how 'bout this? Dollar....

Sergi says:

There's no charge for long distance
NO charge?
Yeah. There's no long distance.
What about when we're out of the calling area?
Yeah. Then too. NO long distance.
What about...
Nope...
But...
No.

And on it went. It was all one dollar. NO LONG Distance.

But then came the part I want to talk about. We started to talk about guarantees and bringing things back and what do we do and (as Cooky says) who shot Willy. I'm sure you know what happens when you bring back a cell phone without the box. I don't have to explain that do I? It's as though the box was the single most important feature of the purchase. "Oh, I'm sorry, we can't return it if you don't have the box." Now, let's not even talk about how impossible it is to get the damned thing out of the box in the first place, let alone back in. And to maintain the box in its pristine original condition. You'd think it was a first edition Hemingway. But you gotta have it. That's gospel. I'm tellin' ya.

So, the guy, his name was actually Sergi (Sair-gay) tells us about the phones. We ask, "How's the reception?" And he says the thing I'm writing this whole goddamned post about. He says: "None of our products are guaranteed to work. That's why we have the 30 day guarantee."

I had to hand it to him--he kept a straight face.

I didn't.

I used to sell drugs. I'll admit it. The statute of limitations is up. But I sure as shit wish I'd thought of that line. I really do. "I'm sorry, none of my products are guaranteed to work." To amuse you, this is the best one I came up with after many years of practice: "This shit's so clean you won't feel it until about fifteen minutes after I'm gone."

See. There's a reason I have to be a social worker for two more months. It's pennance.

tributes

So, my theme has changed from apathy to, well, whatever is a step up from that. The primal shrug. It isn't so much that I don't care, as that I can't care about everything as much as it seems to need to be cared about. There you have it.

I'm so happy for Mark that he finally made it out of there. Another one. Another in an endless line of lives that have, six degrees of Kevin Bacon, touched mine. He was so smart. The history is this: Mark cracked his head while four-wheeling at 19 years old........ then, died at 45ish. Long damn life. He should not have lived. Quadraplegic, mostly deaf, half of half of one eye. But you gotta hand it to the guy, he could still appreciate Victoria's Secret catalogs. God bless testosterone. He could hand spell, and so could I. That was the basis of our friendship. That, and I had the rarely respected authority to boss around the people who took care of his body. I tried to take care of his mind.

He wasn't a very good speller.

Or driver. He had an electric wheelchair -- one of those giant red Jazzy models that take up more room that they should and weigh as much as my house. But the thing about Mark was he never really got it that he couldn't do stuff. He kept a very high opinion of his abilities, all evidence to the contrary, and was fearless.

He thought he could roam the streets in this wheelchair--no eyes, no ears-- and we just couldn't let him. I wish we could have. I wish I could have just opened the door and let fly. But better judgment won out and he remained imprisoned. Cared for. If we had care about him rather than for him, we would have locked him in a room with scantily clad women drenched in hot mustard and barbeque sauce and let him indulge himself to death. He did love mustard. I tried to explain to him, time and again, the importance of safety and my burden of protection. But he didn't get it.

The place where he lived, where I lived from 8 to 5 monday through friday for years and years, sat on top of a hill, with locked doors and window alarms. One day the locked door was just open, just barely, and he charged it in his electric wheelchair. He made it as far as the curb, tipped and fell into the street. As I ran out behind him, righting the ten-ton chair with six other staff, his fingers were madly spelling "I- l-e-a-r-n-e-d." I don't know if he did or not. We took the chair away from him. It wasn't safe. It wasn't. Still, I hated doing it. But he was running over people, and that wasn't okay.

With the old people, tributes feel different. With Mark, it just seems a long time comin'. There is no life to review. There is a State system of care provision that is imperfect and easily indicted, and Mark was a victim and recipient of it. It is better than nothing. Idealists would not agree with me, but fuck them. Idealists don't want the Mark's of this world free or visible. They think they do, but they haven't been to the circus. They haven't seen the man behind the curtain. Mark was not pretty. His life was miserable and expensive, and I can't speak for him, but it looked too damned hard from where I sat.

Some tribute, eh?

daughters

There's more. There always seems to be more. Once you begin to see the story of it all, the willingness of the aged to tell the tale, there is nothing but story, and in between, paperwork. Frances Lee's mother sits in a wheeled recliner during her waking hours. She yells, over and over again for her daugher and for water. She can only drink thickened liquids, so her question is never answered, her thirst never quenched. Her daughter visits almost every day. They are from Kansas, the Kansas of long ago, with prairie-straight hair, parted in the middle and wound into braids that sit on either side of her head like Danish. If you listen, you can tell their hair used to be red. She was telling me a story about her mother becasue her mother is sitting in the chair dying, and I'm new, and she hasn't told it to me yet. She warns me that she never shuts up, but living among the dying, I've learned to end conversations. She tells me about her grandfather, on mama's side, and " his big cavalry moustache and long red hair." How he fathered thirteen children with an invalid wife (ya think?), and raised them all. She tells me about all of the children in her mother's family, how one of the 13 was murdered while she was walking home after a bingo game. I was kind of surprised to learn that they played bingo during the depression, but I guess life goes on. They shot her through one eye and she lived for awhile. She reminded me that back in those days, they didn't keep you in the hospital if they expected you to die--they sent you home. And they made her mother sleep on the sofa so Mary could die in her bed, and all she remembers is that the cat had kittens that night. That's the story Frances Lee's mother told her, handed down to her, and she tells me so I'll know a little of her mother, the woman she was before she was taken by Alzheimer's. She's back-woodsy--Frances Lee is. Could have stepped out of the cast of Deliverance. She doesn't understand medication. Calls them magic pills. She's old herself. Her mother must be a hundred.

So that's the story for today.

one teensy little lie

I lied today. I have said for a long time, and this by way of literary bio: I'm a liar, not a writer. Truth be told in these few pages....

But there I was, hard at work among the dyin'. I was in Ardith's room, asking the "20 stupid questions." They range from, "Have you had any hospitalizations in a psychiatric facility," which almost no one answers ambigously; and "Are your bowels regular?" But my favorite by far is this: "What is your lifetime occupation?" My favorite answer to this question so far is this: "Oh, honey. Get a chair. This is going to take awhile." And it did. It took me awhile to find a chair, because I was in a hurry, and I only had 12 spaces to fill in and I tried to pry the one fact out of her. Just one word. Sum it up. Snap it up. I have work to do. And then, as the moment settled around me, as I saw the longing of her unexpressed story, the madness of not being able to say it outloud, of having to play it over and over again in the waning light of a vanishing mind, I sat. Impertinent. Stupid. And she told me of her husbands, and her life as a model. A model. As her body spread around her like shade. And just a little about her children. And this is the lie of it all.

Ardith died this morning.

You can't judge families. I know this. If there is one thing I've learned about dyin' is that there is no right way and no wrong way. Everybody does it different. Some teach us how to live, some how to die. Ardith's daughter hadn't visited her very often at all and the staff judged her for it. They had a tough relationship, from what I hear. And I don't know anything. But she showed up this morning--the daugher--and she was the way daughters are upon the death of a mother: Orphaned. Lost. It doesn't matter what went on before. The gaping wound of childbirth and all the years between lay exposed to the neon halflight of the hospital room, her mother's trinkets lining the shelves above the single colonial maple dresser she had hung onto, stautes of dancing dolphins and stuffed valentine bears, precious trash, dollar-store bingo prizes, all packed and moved in an instant. And the staff was mad at her. She was desperate to know if her mother had asked for her, if she was mad at her, if she loved her. She asked that: "Did she say she loved me?" No one could answer the question. What can you say? They are all good Christians, and I'm the kind of Christian you'll find in Anne Lamott's book Travelling Mercies. Barely Christian. Just barely.

So I made up a story. It wasn't a whole lie. I had let Ardith tell me the story of her life. I just made it a little bigger, a little sweeter, a little more of what she was looking for. A little more about her.

She thanked me. It was that easy. Then it was over. And I let the rest of them think I made the whole thing easier on her, but really, as always, I was just making it easier for me.

barbies

Mae died. I'm not sure when. It doesn't really matter. It hardly mattered that she lived at all. I was only one of many who cared for her, who lifted her from bed to chair and back again with the help of many other paid people. But I cared about her. She was odd. It was her psychiatric diagnosis: Funny Looking Kid Syndrome. Look it up. It sounds awful, but it seems that the endless barbs of the young and insensitive take their toll. Her appearance, however, did not keep her father from fucking her, or shipping her off to the nuthouse when she delivered an 8 pound tumor at the age of 11. Oh, I know I'm not supposed to tell these stories. But they are an enduring part of the medical record and I just don't want them to die with her. Who else will tell them? She was sterilized. Probably for the best.

To look at her was to view the work of an unskilled sculptor-- a haphazard face, eyes too wide set and off by several degrees, big and round and accusing. Her hair, thin feathers around her face, had no color really at all. Her body didn't work very well. I don't know that it ever did. Like so many, she found comfort in food, in the food from her own metal tray and the trays of nearby, less observant, inmates. Rolls of Mae spread around her like shade, and as she grew ill toward the end and the fat began to go away, and she began the long process of disappearing, her skin simply stayed, stretched like pizza dough over bones as pourous as sandstone, subject to gravity like the rest of us.

The thing is.... she had this Barbie collection. Looking back, it seems unusually unkind to have purchased Barbies for Mae. Shit--it seems mean to buy them for me. It seems mean to make them at all, but that's not the point. I wonder what happened to them -- those skinny dolls, the gold standard of body types. They must have been worth a mint. She had boxes of perfect, unwrapped barbies, guilt presents no doubt from dear old dad. But I don't want to focus on the legends, the hospital stories, handed down like nasty treasure from one shift to the next, morsels of sexual myth that keep the interest of underpaid caregivers, and which may or may not be true. They seem true. They could be true. She did give birth at 11. They did call it a tumor. She came to the nuthouse and stayed... long before the trend in therapy was in full swing. She grew up there. Then, we brought her to live with us.

Living with Mae, which is what you do if you run a residential unit, was sketchy. Its funny. In her chart -- the location of pure truth-- it said things like: suspicious... does not trust caregivers. Hoarding behavior. Well, no shit. What they don't say is that the people who come out of those places, those warehouses for the undead, are crazy if they aren't suspicious, if they don't want to keep all of their worldly goods in plain sight. She wasn't nice -- that much is true. But she was consistent. She didn't like anybody. We coined the word "snarky" to describe her, then, when State surveyors said it wasn't a word, we found it in a british dictionary. She was snarky. She embodied snarkiness.

Oh hell. Mae is dead. It's not that I wish she wasn't. I wouldn't have wished her life on anyone. I guess I just want to say out loud, in the only way I know to say things out loud, that she lived, and in the living, enriched my life.

I just wonder what happened to the barbies.

blame

Whew. Well, I'm feeling better and a little less shocky today than yesterday, yesterday than the day before. We got up Saturday morning and my husband is a guy not to leave things undone. Get on the phone to the insurance people and get it rolling. So, it is rolling. From the moment of impact, however, it now occurs to me, it is all about controlling the information -- the assignation of blame. It starts from the first comment, when she gets out of her car and says, "I was trying to run it. Were you?" I did not answer that question or any other in a natural manner. Insurance keeps me from the real truth, which will come out as I allow it. "I'm not sure." I hedge. "I just stood on my brakes as soon as I saw you." You. Your fault. You should not have been where you were and now we are where we are: standing in the middle of Division during rush hour, the cold hard street slick with sleet. Say that three times fast. And I control my human impulse to care about her. If I care about her, if I commiserate, I will have to pay my deductible, I think. So I maintain my distance, make the appropriate calls, and control the flow of truth. A bit at a time. Leaking out like truth will. It begins to dawn on me that it is okay to go through yellow lights. That this accident, may, in fact NOT be my fault at all. I look at it from her lane (at this point I am still wandering in traffic. The policeman not yet curbing me.) I look up and see the sign: Left turn yield to oncoming traffic. That would be me. I was oncoming like a _________ (you decide.) But not very fast, or the wreck would have been worse. So I begin to adjust my perspective. By morning, the wreck was indignantly not my fault and the insurance company -- hers, not mine -- had better come through. Its funny.

So, blame momentarily assigned, we got a little rental car, a kar, a toy, a KIA. And I am so jumpy. Jeez... If a light turns yellow, god forbid I am anywhere in the vicinity. So, we decide we are due a trip to the coast in a cheap little car with cheap gas. So, off we go to Bi-mart to buy me a pair of waders because it is winter and we are going night clamming. Sneaking up on the damned things in the dark, waves hopefully not sneaking up on us, off we went. The road over there was beginning to get snowy and I was a little concerned for the trip back, but it was such a good diversion from the wreck that I didn't really care. We got a dozen medium clams-- me, the lady with the lamp, K digging like mad when we spotted one.

Now, it is Sunday night. We've eaten the clams, the truck is in the shop, and our world is spinning on its axis, as well as it has since the Tsunami.