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Mike’s second movie.
Crank up the volume. (sorry rakkity – 7.8 mb)

Click here and then scroll down to see the unpainted building.

Link to the Concert In The Park

Jennifer

Loyal readers of the blog may think I’ve forgotten that I already wrote about calling the young man who killed my grandmother in a car accident, but this is a different grandmother and different phone call. 

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My mother should have realized by December ’87 that there was an important reason she had been losing weight for a year or so and had begun to have difficulty in keeping food down, but she refused various medical tests which she had previously vowed never to have again. By March ’89 she was diagnosed with untreatable stomach cancer. In April, May, and June pagan spirituality became increasingly important to her. The Goddess was going to save her. Also in that period of time she talked for hours on the phone with all kinds of people about the exciting connections she was making between things she heard on the radio about physics, observed about birds, saw in art shows, remembered learning about the native people of ___, etc. When I overheard snippets of those phone calls, I wondered: What would my experience be on the other end of the phone? Clearly, I would listen because she was (my sister / my daughter / my best friend from college from whom I hadn’t heard in 10 years), but would I be excited by the connections she was making or would I think she was crazy? Would I have any idea, on the other end of the phone, that this 5’ 7” tall woman now weighed 85 pounds?

My mother had read, and had asked us all to read, Bernie Siegel’s Love, Medicine, and Miracles. We weren’t supposed to think that she was going to die. This from a woman who had considered euphemisms to be way worse than many people consider swears – she never could respect people who said “make love” instead of “have sex” or “pass away” instead of “die”. (I know, I know, Bernie Siegel wasn’t suggesting we use euphemisms, but that we all live love and hope. Screw that.) Despite that, it was not too hard for us to tell those who asked how she really was. But my grandmother (her mother) didn’t ask any of us.

My mother asked for and we planned a big solstice celebration. Just as the sun would turn, would travel the other way, at the summer solstice; the Goddess was going to begin healing her then. We double-checked with the hospice worker who came to the house, “How long?” I didn’t really need to double-check. I was gaining 20, 30, 40 pounds and making a new life inside me, due to be born just after the solstice, she was losing 20, 30 pounds and … (no euphemisms, now). Her favorite creation myth had been the Wintu Indians’ story about how birth and death came to be, because the gods had first planned humans to experience neither one, but ended up with both: “They will know the gladness of birth. They will know the sorrow of death. And through these two things together people will come to know love.” (Take that, Bernie Siegel.) So I knew. But we really weren’t sure her mother knew.

So I called my grandmother. I haven’t been able to reconstruct the words I chose, but I suspect I thought that by focusing on the cycles my mother so appreciated, I could pretend I wasn’t using euphemisms. The conversation wasn’t quite as hard to have as it had been to anticipate – my grandmother did know. I learned then that there is no age after which it becomes easier to lose a child. (Or if there is, it isn’t age 88.)

We had the solstice celebration. My mother died four days later. Three days after that I had a terrifyingly brief labor and m’hija, La Chica, was born.

I suppose many people will remember my Noland stories. I worked for Noland for three years before he died, at the age of eighty-one, last May 16th. He left his wife and two sons. His youngest son, the one whom he cared the most about, hung himself yesterday. Danny was thirty-eight.

The next time I fail to answer my cell phone I just might be here . 2.2MB QT

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Side View

Departed : Sunday 4:35 AM

Arrived : Monday 2:50 AM

*Viewer Discretion Advised*

During yesterday’s office visit we discussed all of Helen’s health issues. Near the end (no pun intended) our friend Bambi asked, “It’s with some reluctance that we bring this up, but is it time for hospice care?” To which Helen’s doctor responded that traditionally that’s something to be considered when the patient has six months to live. That, she said, does not apply to Helen.

Peter and I shopped for computer speakers while our father drove our mother home, but when I got back to my parent’s house I walked into my mother’s room and closed the door. I wanted to be alone with her.

Me: “I have a favor to ask. The kind of thing that only a mother might do for her son.”

Helen: “Is this another one of your questions I have to brace myself for?”

Me: “You could say that.”

Helen: “Well?”

Me: “I think you know how much I hate to be wrong.”

Helen: “I think I do. I might have an idea about where that came from.”

Me: “That’s why I usually don’t offer opinions. So I can’t be held accountable. So here’s the thing. I’m in huge bind. A while ago, sometime around the end of the summer, I told my friends that I was worried you wouldn’t last the winter.”

Helen : “But I did, didn’t I?”

Me: “Yes you did. And you can see my problem. Now that Dr. Bieker has given you more than six months how do think I look? Or better yes, how do you think I feel? Not only am I wrong, dead wrong if you will, but I’ve had this outpouring of sympathy from my friends because I had them convinced your end was so near.”

Helen: “And now you want me to die so you can feel better?”

Me: “I guess that pretty well sums it up.”

Helen: “You know I would if I could.”

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Ten minutes after our talk, long after her laugher had subsided, Helen asked, “If I did, would you feel guilty?”

Jennifer, I have no idea what a kousa is, but here are three early morning photos. Nearly every block has a tree or two. Jeffrey tells me the Rhododendrons will blossom with the late blooming azaleas. Maybe you should move here rak? I guess the vistas in Colorado outweigh the two week growing season.

Diane, Helen and I were rooting around in Helen’s room looking for cufflinks for Matt’s prom shirt. When Brian and Joan were still teenagers and still talking to each other, they worked together making kiln-fired copper enamel ceramic jewelry. Earrings and cufflinks and maybe a tie clasp or two. I thought how cool would it be to see Matt wearing their art? No, I didn’t yet know if Matt would share my enthusiasm, I first wanted to find a matching pair.

While my mother and Diane focused on the obvious places like the jewelry box on her dresser, I pulled open the top drawer. Deep in the back, behind the bobbie pins, buttons, the green golf ball, the squeezed dry tube of Ben Gay, and the “I Like Ike” button, I spied a strange looking salmon and gold glass jar with a gold octagonal cap. It fit nicely in the palm of my hand and I twisted the top off. Sprinkled sparsely on the bottom, like pollen on a flower petal, was saffron colored dust. I stuck my nose in and inhaled.

“Mother, how come I don’t smell anything?” I asked as I rubbed my now itchy nose filled with saffron shavings.

“Why would you?” she answered. “Ruth Hetzel brought that jar back from India. Those are Sy Baba’s ashes.”

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Is this what you were looking for Travis?

Michael and the mainecourse wizards of poetry analysis,

I’ve been dissecting this interesting poem about Astronomy, and think I understand the first three stanzas but not the fourth:

When The Smoke Clears

The mind, that rambling bear, ransacks the sky
In search of honey,
Fish, berries, carrion. It minds no laws …
As if the heavens were some canvas tent,
It slashes through the firmament
To prise up the sealed stores with its big paws.

The mind, that sovereign camel, sees the sky
For what it is:
Each star a grain of sand along the vast
Passage to that oasis where, below
The pillared palms, the portico
Of fronds, the soul may drink its fill at last.

The mind, that gorgeous spider, webs the sky
With lines so sheer
They all but vanish, and yet star to star
(Thread by considered thread) slowly entwines
The universe in its designs—
Un-earthing patterns where no patterns are.

The mind, that termite, seems to shun the sky.
It burrows down,
Tunneling in upon that moment when,
In Time—its element—will come a day
The longest-shadowed tower sway,
Unbroken sunlight fall to earth again.

— by Brad Leithauser

Brian walked into our kitchen at 4:15 AM on Friday, and at 9:30 that evening we both walked into our parents’ kitchen (what is it about these houses with kitchen doors?) in Evansville. That’s 10:30 Boston time – eighteen hours door to door. We stopped five times for gas and once for hamburgers and ice cream (Graeters) near Columbus. While it was a blast for me – I got to hang with my older brother, we both vented about family matters, I could rest my weary orbs and still make miles, and those miles, they just flew by – for Brian, well, he’s flying back with Matt and Diane on Wednesday. “The problem with a crummy memory (which he doesn’t have but he’s making a point here) is I’ve forgotten how horrible it is to be locked in a car for eighteen hours.”  Look, he’s my older brother; he’s not as flexible as I am. The most entertaining moments of the trip (for me) occurred during those gas stops. I’d hop out first and then watch him roll out of the truck onto the pavement and then try to stand up.

Brian pulled me over to this Mustang in Ohio and waited until I noticed

the license plate.

ALL things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
One time it was a woman’s face, or worse—
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land;
Now nothing but comes readier to the hand
Than this accustomed toil. When I was young,
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs;
Yet would be now, could I but have my wish,
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.

William Butler Yeats