Did that really happen? About facts.

Let’s parse it.

Did:  depends on tense (time) of verb.  If past, then “did.”

That:  item referred to, could also be an event.

Really:  ah, now we’re into it.  Short answer, no.  Not really.  As in the fly on the wall would not have seen it.  But yes, really, as in it’s really part of the story.  Take it out, and the thing has a hole.

Happen:  See really.

Essays are works of art.  Do people do what is described in my essays?  Yes, somewhere, at some time, perhaps in the future, perhaps after the oxygen is used up and we are breathing nitrogen, but yes, people do.  Especially if it fits the rhythm and rhyme scheme and has internal consistency.

Is there a blend of the actual, the possible, the plausible, and the not really?  Yes, definitely.  A storyteller named Raelinda Wode in and around Boston told “true stories that haven’t quite happened yet.”  I knew exactly what she meant.  As a songwriter, I possess a floating “I.”  It’s the “I” who is speaking that particular story.  Does that person borrow from my life?  Do I borrow from hers?  Yes, we share.  I thought Raelinda was very clever, because most people would think it a charming twist of words; most writers would know that’s exactly how it is.

So, don’t panic.  I don’t have a spouse.  I have a person who needs to be referred to in one recognizable word that the reader will not get all hung up on en route to the point of the sentence.   Am I really cleaning out her grandparents’ house?  Well, I have, and I did, but right now, I’m typing.  You see?

Reality is slippery.  We like to think that because our language has past, present, and future, that reality does, too.  But in fact the story we tell that we call reality only exists because we are speaking it.  The reality we think the words are describing never really happened. Once you write about it, it’s something other than what it was when it happened.  It’s words on paper.  It’s a poem, an essay, a novel, a song lyric.  It’s a story.

Because I am writing an essay, some readers may assume, perhaps rightfully, that I am talking about me and therefore am reporting facts.  That’s where this essay comes in.  To let you know not to take it as gospel, but to hold it lightly, to visit with me a while and see if you liked spending time.  See if it did anything for you or moved you in any way.  But don’t think it’s entirely about me.  It is about somebody, maybe even you.

One more thing, and this is about politics, so if you only want to read an essay about essay, skip this.  I’ve started using the word spouse, because I miss having the option of using a whole vocabulary that you can only use if you are the marrying kind and heterosexual, something I just can’t seem to get lined up.  One, then the other, but not both.  Until now, sort of.  They passed the law, but the fight is not over.  We cannot yet marry here in Vacationland.  We have to wait 90 days for the law to go into effect and then only if the opponents of homosexuality (choice of words deliberate) fail to introduce what is called a “people’s veto” and try to get a majority to strike down the law in an election.

But I don’t want to wait to use the word.  We had a very sweet conversation around the dinner table, my beloved and I, pulled out several dictionaries (one trait about her that totally fires my charcoal), and chose a word we would use to refer to each other when the right to marry became a reality for us.  It was something:  Two changeable, independent, moody Sagittarians getting misty-eyed over the possibility of getting hitched up in legal matrimony, just like any other fools in love.  It was that moment when we admitted out loud that, yeah, this is for-evah, and we don’t have to hide behind “well we couldn’t if we wanted to, so we don’t have to have the conversation.”

So sue me for being imprecise, tag me for lying, hang me up for stretching the “truth.”  I just wanted to let y’all know that we ain’t got hitched yet, there will be a party, and, yes, it really happened.

Cleaning House

For better or worse, I am a natural organizer.  I can sort and categorize, chop it up, rearrange, toss and recycle madly, easily.  I can think like you think, then I can break it all up into something else.  I don’t usually know at the outset how long it’s taken you to build up your layers, but at some point pretty early on, the tearing down is complete, in my head — long before I’ve touched the first pile.

It’s too late to be chronological about my summer project:  I’ve already begun clearing out The House.  It’s the house my spouse’s (we decided against “wife”) grandparents lived in when Gram died, the house she was born in.  Her parents built and lived in it after they were married.  I have turned the first pile (compost metaphor intended), and it is accurate to say that neither Gram nor her mother, Helen, threw anything away. How the menfolk managed to live in among, down, behind, or through all that saving is beyond me, but they did.

The process of untangling, while not the reverse of the process of tangling, I’m sure allows me to experience what it must have been like to live it while it was happening.  How many days did I avoid walking through the parlor because the way was narrowed by the hulking presence and jutting handles of the back inversion-thingie?  How many closet doors have I opened, only to quietly squeeze them shut again, whispering to a future emptiness to come help me when I get to it?

Everything, as a rule, must be gone through.  Because alongside offers for free publications, magazines, file folders, empty ice cream cartons, a support hose, and a comb might also be the deed to a cemetery plot, or, today, a five dollar bill.  Legend has it someone found a diamond ring in the pantry between the samovar and a Band-Aide tin with Helen’s passbook in it. There are those who believe The House cannot be emptied. I’ve been working there for maybe a month, and I’m still discovering places where stuff is hiding.  The other day, just randomly, I found piles and plastic bags, and cardboard boxes full of whatever-it-was in a space that might have been a cupboard around behind a chimney, in the kitchen, that had not a door but a piece of wood covering it up.  I stuffed them into trash bags without even asking.  Like you would ignore spinach between someone’s teeth, or a nasty fart.  Whatever treasure may have been pressed between styrofoam trays was probably too mouse eaten to matter.

I could go on, but, really, it’s too easy.  It’s a writer’s paradise, a list-maker’s dream, a cataloger’s nirvana.  What does emerge, though, like the image in a photo mosaic, is a kind of story of their lives, and each artifact comes with a string of questions that threaten my tenuous hold on “the facts.”  How, for instance, did Helen’s perfectly preserved purse end up at the back of the top shelf in the front hall closet with nothing in it but her wallet, a 1967 dime, and a patient menu from the Mid Maine Hospital?  And was there a logic that placed it there with two neatly wrapped parcels containing (I’m pretty sure) every Christmas card she received in 1966?  Wacky alliances like this abound.  Questions like, “Who is this is a picture of?” just pale.

I have vowed a hundred times over that when I die I will have nothing left.  I will have already dispensed with my accumulations.  In fact, I am constantly resisting the tide that wants to pull stuff into my life and constantly piling things up by the door to take out.  I don’t want anyone pawing through my stuff after I’m gone.  I want to control what’s left behind.  Let’s face it, I want to be there when the box is pried open and explain it in my own words.  I want to tell the story the way I want it told.

I am aware as I dismantle their mess that these people threw it together without a shred of self-consciousness.  These were not to be bequeathed.  These were their lives, their living, the things they did and thought about, and all too plainly now, the things they didn’t do and hoped for, for later.  That being the case, I am humbled and awed at evidence of so much life crammed into physical space.  I am sobered by the unintended consequences, both burdensome and beneficial, of living our lives.  I am numbed by the meaninglessness and charmed by the minutiae, struck by the dailiness of it all. And as I have always had a weakness for people who wear their weakness on their sleeves, it’s okay to say that they certainly had their neuroses.  Gram was obsessed with health.  I think she thought she could get healthy by clipping articles about health and saving them in the bottoms of cookie tins.  Don’t get Gram wrong:  she didn’t eat sugar.  She probably bought the tin at a yard sale.  Still.  Here I am recycling articles about jogging and peripheral neuropathy, and there she is, dead.

And, faced with the task of pushing a lot of stuff back out into the world, I am wondering, as in seriously questioning, if it has any usefulness left to it.  Yes, there will be sales.  Yes, there will be ads placed and ads answered.  But, is there a market for it, are people poor enough to want this, wealthy enough to collect it?  Who will I meet and what will I learn in doing this?  Is there a jackpot item here?  Have I thrown it out?

This isn’t the first time I find myself witness to the private lives of strangers.  I am generally trusted and trustworthy, but also, let’s face it, a voyeur and avidly curious.  I can usually walk the thin line by focusing on the task at hand and having a principle to work by that keeps my thinking from straying into the indecent.  I have my own neuroses, of course, not least of which is this compulsion to clean up messes. I didn’t ask to be like this, and I think that is the point.  Who we are is revealed to us through the actions we can muster in the face of our raw reactions and instincts.  Not in our stuff, the notes we take, the things we file away, the records we keep.  All the living associated with these pieces of paper has already happened. Now it’s my turn.  I’m the living, and here I am, standing amid piles and piles of what’s left.

I think I am right where I’m supposed to be.  We are a civilization on the brink of realizing that we are connected to each other and learning how to behave as if our lives depended on other people doing okay. We are at a time of standing witness to the consequences of our past actions, but only standing long enough to get it, then taking actions to remedy and create goodness in whatever ways we can, with whatever we are holding in our hands at the moment.  That is the resourcefulness we learn from having to live in hard times, close to the bone.  That’s what these people did, and that’s what I must do.  I hope that whatever unconsciousness they suffered can be reborn in me as awareness.  That evidence of their imperfection will lay the groundwork not only for celebrating who they were, but also for understanding who we all are.  I feel blessed to be witness to both the ephemera and the ephemeral.  I am holding them both in my hands today, and I am reveling in the richness and mystery all around me.  And, I can’t wait to see what this house will look like empty.

Ten Wonderful Things About Waterville, ME

Okay, I only have one. It’s Waterville House of Pizza, proudly wearing the WHOP acronym on their polo shirts. Best Greek pizza. (Well, only Greek pizza.) And the way they didn’t raise an eyebrow when I ordered my pepperoni and broccoli pie last night. It helps an improv [pizza] artist to have that kind of support.

It’s funny. I haven’t written because I haven’t known much about joy. Probably all the more reason to write. Or at least actively explore. My body is sore. I’m alone today and planning to take my first bath in my new apartment. I *wish* I could cue up my song “Moving Day” and put it up here, because this is how I’m feeling. Granted I have moved, but it’s more how I’m feeling in my life than anything about this new apartment.

“I made a special point of taking a walk today
I found an auto parts store and a copy place…”

It’s about what’s here, in my life, when I stop the mad press to create the right livelihood that has eluded me all these years. I feel like Oedipus trying to escape his fate. My feet, are, in fact, sore. Which is what oedi-pus means in Greek.

“Tried to memorize the names of these new streets
I like the feeling of a new world under my feet.”

Well, at least I used to. Now, I just get tired and want to go home. I have a tendency to wrench things away so that I don’t become attached to false securities and things of the past (ten minutes ago), and then suffer more loss of identity than I thought I would.

“First it all comes apart, then the insides come out,
then you can’t find a place to sit down, and then, Moving Day…”

At least for a while, I’m no longer striving for anything. Until I don’t want to improve anything, including myself. Apparently it isn’t enough to eschew self-help books to rid one of the desire to improve.

(Add an e to improv and what do you get??)

One thing I have never been good at is life just as it is. Even when it’s just a-okay. The thing that used to scare me the most is having a humdrum life with nothing special or noteworthy in it, and now the thing that scares me the most is never learning the art of thinking more about others than myself.

Is there a practice out there for that? I suspect it’s up to me to create it.

Okay, the other nine wonder things about Waterville, ME are the next 9 people I see who are, like me, just perfectly awesomely okay just the way they are.

But that’s a cop-out. Here goes –

Wonderful thing Number 2: Today I saw a bald eagle on my walk with the dog, by the high school, on the other side of Messalonskee Stream.

Number 3: Colby College, especially the January Program, which is free.

Number 4: The other great downtown places to eat, Jorgensen’s, a real coffee shop with Wifi, Thai Bistro with rocking crab maki, and Soup To Nuts, which has huge muffins and uses compostable to-go containers.

Number 5: It’s walkable. The other day I locked my car keys and my apartment keys inside, as I was rushing to get to my frame drum class. I walked. How cool is that.

Number 6: It has three privately owned bookstores and zero big box corporate bookstores.

Number 7: Hardy Girls Healthy Women, a local nonprofit dedicated to helping create nurturing communities for girls, instead of identifying a few problem girls and trying to fix them.

Number 8: The Public Library.

Number 9: Easy voting. This is actually true for all of Maine. Register and vote on the same day. The way democracy should be.

Number 10: Tons of gorgeous, huge, ancient trees, all of which are turning shades of gold right now. You can walk down the street and shuffle ankle-deep in Fall leaves, just like the town where I grew up.

Honorable Mention: The house on Gilman St. that has the fabulous Hallowe’en decorations.

“I like to sing so I sang as I walked today
It’s like a calling card that helps to unfreeze my face.
Tried to memorize the steps that brought me here
It’s been an all-around-the-world kind of year…”

mastering the moment

Joy is…

She stands, head leveled at an unseen, felt, impending stirring, and she whines a little, nothing unusual. She whines a little more, and I look up to see her one front paw rising a little from the ground as if she’s trying out a new step or offering finally to let me clip her nails. I absurdly notice that her claws are clipped evenly, at about the same time that I see that she has started to tremble and that now her other paw is coming up, and now she is starting to flop for the door.

It’s like this when she has a seizure: She wants out. She paddles down the steps on her chest and belly, flopping onto the grass. I hold her barrel, her middle, her shoulders, while she steps and writhes, panting carefully, the seizure not taking control of her breathing.

She’s drooling now. Her eyes are unfocused amber lozenges, root beer, maybe, open. She knows instinctually to surrender to the waves and gyrations, and to allow me to hold her up, then help her lower to a crouch while the last small waves shudder out in a tremble.

I keep my hands on her, one on her haunch and one on her shoulder. “Mama’s here,” I murmur, “Mama’s here,” while she catches her breath and the focus returns to her placid eyes. I put my face close to hers and she licks my muzzle. I plant a kiss on her snout, leaving her to recover on the grass while I pick up pen and resume my writing, one eye on the page, one eye on the dog. She keeps one eye on me, too, then gives up a sigh as I pick up the pen. We are each exactly where we are supposed to be.

Soon we are bathing in Tuesday, wind a-swirl around us, all of life a-stir and unsettled. We two companions, take it in, doing that look-across-at-you-and-there-you-are-being-you-oh-goody thing we have shared ever since she barked and scolded her way into my car all those years ago. I often wonder if she had already made up her mind to end her days as a runaway, or if, like me, her life lived itself out through her. despite her intentions.

I don’t feel I’ve chosen anyone, the mother I was born to and now am helping take care of, or the dog I adopted who now has seizures twice a year. I don’t feel I’ve chosen anything about me, whoever that is. I feel I am as intimate with others as I can be with the moment we share, and as related to others as the items on God’s to-do list.

Everything works better with a minimum of drama and thought, when heart and hands are free to act on instinct, and nobody understands why or how, or needs to. This is what is meant by simplicity, not that there aren’t details to untangle and ramifications to understand, but that within the myriad eventualities and actualities there can be a still, calm center that does what it does in response to what is, then simply waits, ready for the next moment.

It’s why Honey-Bear can have a seizure one minute, take a nap, then be back to digging up chipmunk tunnels the next. And why I can pick up the pen and resume my encounter with the blank page.

The last thing I wrote was, “I think I love being conscious when I am and miss it when I’m not. I love the present moment more than I thought I could love.” Today, the freedom to live in that deeper, truer place, on the page and in the moment, is my joy and all the evidence I need of grace.

between here and there

“So, what part of Maine are you from?”

“Um, well, I’m from New Jersey.”

I’ve been taking a walk around the developments behind my mother’s apartment complex in the mornings before she’s up, while it’s cool and breezy.  The robins are fierce in their activity at that time of day.  I notice two have built a nest in the space above my mother’s patio slider.  They swoop furiously away whenever I wander out there for air.  A couple of geese honk and flap their way over to pick at the lawn of the empty building behind the apartments.

One morning I picked mulberry leaves, very pointy oak leaves, and a cedar blossom, of all things, something I’ve never seen, to bring back to Maine.  I checked on the stand of bamboo in the yard that has the rusted metal sculpture of some kind of bird, maybe a chicken?   I didn’t have my glasses on, and I wasn’t brave enough to trespass.  It didn’t matter.  I moved on as a man came out onto the deck carrying a potted plant.  My heart ached to have some bit of dirt I could get my hands into.

This morning I ventured into King’s Croft, a condo community.  I discovered that I don’t know what a croft is, and that the streets with signs that say “Not a Thru Street” are, actually, through streets.  I noticed that beyond the carefully sculpted gardens lay the remnants of what once were the woods.  Back when the Cherry Hill Mall was built, there was nothing but woods around here.  The Mall cropped up out of the woods.  Now it’s the other way around.  Patches of wildness hide behind people’s back yards.  There are occasional foot paths through these patches of wood and dirt.  It’s almost irresistable to cut through and walk on dirt, if you can.  If you’re me.

When I was little there were two things I did when I was lying in bed trying unsuccessfully to fall asleep.  I would fantasize that I was camping out under the hedges, under people’s windows.  Something about being right under their living room windows and also under a bush, next to tiny creatures and leftover raindrops made me feel safe and secure.  The other was to somehow project myself way up into the sky until I was in outer space looking down on the earth.  There I would amuse myself by flying, doing somersaults, and hanging upside down. 

When my mother moved here, after my first year in college, I came back for the summer and tried to have a summer like you would in a neighborhood with a yard.  It was impossible for me to penetrate the concrete and landscaping, in either direction, even in my sleep. 

This place is designed for people who don’t want to walk on uneven surfaces, who don’t want bugs to land on their skin, who don’t want to smell things or hear things, or taste things, or touch things.  This place is for shopping and driving and watching TV.  At night I am lonely for people sitting around and playing music, cooking, or just plain talking.  Last night, I was so lonely for talking as my mother lay snoozing along side the blare of the TV and the onslaught of TV-speak and TV reality, that I walked in and tried to give her some ibuprofen just to make contact.  We ended up having a big fight about nothing, then making up.

Tonight she can’t remember the fight, but does remember something, because she keeps saying, “I don’t have to watch this, I can turn it off, you know.” Thinking I keep getting up because I can’t stand the TV, when, really, it’s because I can’t get my browser to work and I am  restarting the computer and walking away to do the dishes in between.  Does she remember that I wept and that she held me like a mother is supposed to after that? 

Wherever it is I’m from, I want to walk there.  I want to walk the length of this country, to be like Walt Whitman and Peace Pilgrim.  I’m convinced it’s the only way to know anything about life on earth.  I wonder how long it would take me to walk from my home in Maine to Mom’s home in New Jersey, and if I have the urban wilderness skills to pull it off.   At one time, I could have written an underground guide to toilets in Boston.  Maybe I could pull it off.

I’m daunted by practicality and impracticality. They seem to meet in the same impossible place.  Taking care of my mother here is scarily like I’m back during that horrible summer after freshman year, except instead of staying continually stoned, I am constantly going out for walks and meetings.  But still longing for dirt, still lonely for the warmth of a hearth, still looking for a place I belong, out somewhere between here and there.

trueing the wheel

Dear Beloved Fellow Traveler,

I have been thinking a lot about the lighted screen and watching myself tick tasks off a to-do list, keep track of my expenditures at time of purchase, and get totally stressed over childhood patterns erupting in my life, as I react to the news that my 82-year-old mother has fallen and broken bones in her foot and needs 24-hour help.  Somehow, these things are related.

I’ve been thinking about misery and suffering, seeking to arrive at the fountainhead from which they spring so that I can stop drowning.  The source seems to be my to-do list, my finances, and my mother’s broken foot, and the lighted screen seems to be a help.

But I know enough of what seems to be to look around behind all that and find something deeper that isn’t rooted in stuff – metal, circuits, paper, pen, bones, skin.  The only place left to look is within myself.  It must be my own mind that is the source of all this pain.  At one time, Western medicine’s idea, handed down from the Greeks, was that a person’s personality imbalances were caused by imbalances within the body’s humors.  Too much bile made you melancholic; too much blood, sanguine.  The New Thought people turned it around, believing that one’s thoughts create one’s physical condition.  Louise Hay’s mantra is, “It’s only a thought, and a thought can be changed.”

Quantum spirituality proposes that we are a matrix of thought, feeling, cell, light, impulse, and energy; changes originating from anywhere in the system create changes everywhere in the system.  Think of the circle of the bicycle wheel, which can only be in true everywhere, not in segments.  When I tune my frame drum, a turn of the tuning screw at one point affects the sound elsewhere and everywhere as a whole.  Living is much more like tuning a drum than creating a to-do list. Although lists and check registers keep me from wandering aimlessly, they also cause stress by their dissonance with how my soul is put together.

While I was in panic mode over my mother, I carried my cell phone with me and answered it every time it vibrated against my bare belly, clipped to the waistband of my slacks.  I interrupted treatment sessions with little old ladies, explaining to them, “My mother fell, I’ll be right back!” and off I’d go to find a nook in the nursing home to confer with my brother.  I retrieved messages as soon as they came in and made calls during lunch.

I was able to sustain this for two days before feeling I would crack under the strain of multi-tasking and squeezing my own needs out through that crack.  To be someone who relieves my own anxiety by jumping on my horse and riding in to save people and to be part of the events only via text messages and emails, is to be a tortured person indeed. 

Granted, I am the healthcare person in the family, I speak the lingo, I understand the parts of the system related to old people, but that didn’t prevent the emergency room from sending her home unable to walk or the orthopedist from casting her foot without a making a referral for home-based therapy. 

A conversation with a wise friend convinced me I would have to make self-care a priority.  She pointed out that rushing down there and missing work and income would only make me crazier.  She reminded me that my mother is her own person, with her own life to live, her own life path, and her own loving God taking care of her.  She shared some of her experience with caring for an elderly family member, and through her sane approach I saw that in fact the essence of my childhood pattern is to put my own needs on hold to act in everyone else’s drama.  The role, of course, is Florence Nightingale.

As I reprioritized, the whole situation settled, at least for the next few days, giving me time to research other options and my brother time to attend to his life’s priorities.  I “lost” my cell phone for a few hours, went to a recovery meeting, cried a little, laughed a little, connected with people who were warm and loving.  Right before bed, I called Mom, knowing it would help me sleep better, and she and two friends were partying over TV and Philly cheese steaks.  There.

Today is mine, and I’m putting writing before vacuuming, drumming before showering, alone time before going into work.  (Yes, I get up early, but it’s worth it.)  I browsed the Internet a little, did some banking, which always quiets the stress of unattended-to finances.  And I am watching the thoughts come, dance around, and fade.  The cell phone is in exile in another room.  On errands I leave it in the car.  I’m not that important today.

I’m committed to making something of joy of the minutes I have.  Instead of shaking on an agreement, my partner and I kissed and hugged.  What the hell!  I like the word “warm” to describe the life I aspire to, a life worth living.  Computer screens and cell phones are not warm.  But if all I have in this moment is my brother texting me from the emergency room 400 miles away, I’ll take it.  Lukewarm is good sometimes.

I’ve been fantasizing about going totally low- to no-tech.  My friend Dana says it just doesn’t feel right in her gut to be on the Internet, that where she needs to put her focus is “right here,” pointing to the space in front of her body.  The present moment does have a location, and that location is here. 

I have a theory that these technologies are substitutes for an ability, yet to evolve in humans, to be conscious of a much larger now, the whole world of human life, all at once, just by tuning in, like a ham radio operator twirling a dial.

I feel it coming, ever faster, the time when, if we have lost the ability to connect with our neighbors in ways that have to do with the interdependence of our matrix, then no amount of high speed or unlimited long distance is going to keep us afloat.

One day I hope to be able to tune in without a device.  I hope to be able to feel the anguish and joy of childbirth across the ocean, sense the weather patterns that wrap the globe, enjoy the rhythms of infinite improvisations of my human family.  I hope to be able to experience this one, big, warm, happy, miraculous life, here, now, always, anytime.

Until then, I can be reached at …