loving myself

I have not been loving myself as much as I could. Or should. Should. When it comes to love, should there be shoulds?!!!

I just haven't been as nice to me as I can be. I hereby resolve to be kinder to me.

One thing I am doing right now that I am being very unkind to myself about is I am not exercising very much and I am sleeping too much. How much exercise is enough? And how much sleep is too much? I don't know, of course, but I beat myself up on these topics.

I have a lot to flink (feel and think) about the exercise but I'll be brief: I love swimming laps every day and I will resume swimming laps every day when I am ready. I actually think I am just about ready right now and I would be swimming if I had the sleeping thing under control.

I am sleeping all day during the day time. I stay up all night writing and reading. It is 5:40 a.m. After I post this blog comment, I will go to bed and sleep all day. The lap swim time at my public pool is noon. If I sleep until 2 or 3 p.m., which I probably will, I can't swim.

Which brings me to my real worry. But should it be a worry? What is wrong with sleeping all day if I feel like it? Nobody in the whole world cares a fig what I do. Basically, I'm just waiting to die. If I want to pass the time allotted to me in this hellish existence sleeping in the daylight hours, well, who cares? Nobody, that's who. Nobody cares if I sleep all day so why the fuck do I berate myself for doing it?

I love rolling over mid-morning at 10 or 11 a.m. to check the time. I am usually pleasantly surprised by the time. I don't know what time I thought it would be but I am nearly always surprised by the time it is. I love this moment of pleasant surprise.

Next, I resolve to get up by a certain time. If it is 10 a.m., I might resolve to rise by noon. I tell myself that if I rise by noon today, then I can be rising by 11 a.m. soon and then I can resume swimming.

Then I go back to sleep until 3 p.m. I am no further along on my vague goal of rising in time for the lap swim.

Of course, there is a lap swim in the early evening. I could swim then. But I have never liked swimming at the end of days. Although, come to think of it, I swam in the late afternoon for many years while raising my kid. Katie went to an aftercare program at the YWCA in our city. I would do my laps before I picked her up. It seemed like such a good, pious plan, to swim every day before I picked up my kid.

well, time to . . . time for what? I can do whatever I want all day every day.

Katie Joy Kreifels, Katherine Joy Kreifels

Happy birthday, my daughter. I miss you. I love you. I live in Berkeley. Call, write. Tell me you are alive and well. Or tell me you are struggling.

I will always welcome you back. We can forget the past. Not that you have done anything wrong. You get to be you, my dearest. You get to do whatever you want. If it was right for you to cut yourself off from me, then so it was.

If it ever becomes right to reconnect with me, please know that I will always welcome you back.

I love you forever, Katie.

I am so sorry for anything I did that contributed to your decision to cut yourself off from me.

Life is an unending series of choices. Remember that you can always make new choices. You can make new choices about me

i wanna go camping

When my daughter was about two years old, while we were visiting my mom, we went on an early Christmas shopping trip. My mom could go crazy spending money at Christmas. Some years, she would buy anything we asked for. I am not talking about when I was a kid. Money was tight as I grew up. My mom's second husband made my mother wealthy. She often said she loved being able to indulge her grown up kids because she had not been able to when they were kids.

But the free-flowing Christmas train was new in my life. I had not yet realized my mom had suddenly started spending extravagantly. This is how I found out.

We pulled upto some shopping mall in Pennsylvania, parking in front of a camping store. As we rolled out of the car, me pulling the little pumpkin out of the carseat, getting out the stroller, mom said "I want you to think about this: if you could have anything at all for Christmas, what would it be?"

I looked at the tents in the camping store and said "I want a fantastic dome tent just like that one" and I pointed at a fancy Eureka domer that slept four. It was just what I wanted for me and Katie. No teeny tiny tent for us gals.

Mom went in and bought it.

Now that was a fantastic present. Completely unexpected, abundance, indulgent, magical.

I loved that tent. And Katie and I used it a lot.

Then Katie left home for college and my sister moved to New Mexico. She asked if she could 'borrow' my tent since she didn't imagine I would ever go camping again. You know, as I reflect on this story, I see that my sister has often decided that certain eras of my life were over. Like she used to often declare that clearly sex was over for me when, gosh, it clearly was not. Whatever gave her the idea that I did not want to have sex?!! How did she know?

And how did she know that I would never go camping again, like what, since my kid left for college, I was done with the out of doors?!!

But she did have an adorable toddler, my niece Isabelle, and there are lots of beautiful places to camp in New Mexico. And it was a gorgeous tent that would have cost a pretty penny to buy new.

So I carefully agreed that she could borrow my tent. I put it in the original box. One great thing about this Eureka tent is that it did all the things it promised to do. It lasted forever and it compacted tightly every single time you packed it. You could keep it in what amounted to a very small box in a closet. It did not take up much room. And it was easy to ship. You just slapped a label on it and mailed it.

I told her she could borrow my tent but when she was done with it, she had to mail it back to me.

My sister purges her household kinda obsessively. She doesn't think people should keep stuff. She says hanging onto old possessions is bad karma, bad fung shui. And I am sure she is right. But I don't cede her right to decide which of my posession should be abandoned.

A couple years ago, I said she could have my daughter's old Xmas books and then she helped herself to all my daughter's books, plus all my daughter's toys, which were in storage at our brother's. She did not have my permissions. She just took these things and then she purged most of them, saying they should be thrown out.

Oh well. it was not for her to say but she did it.

But the tent. I fucking loved my tent. Not just the tent. The magic of that cold night in Pennsylvania when mom bought it out of the blue. I still remember how warm it was in the camping store, still feel the cold on my cheeks and hands as we waited to be waited on. Katie and I chattering about the great trips we would have with that tent!!

So Marge moved to New Mexico. She used the tent a lot. Then she married a rich guy in NYC and decided that if she ever needed another tent, her rich husband would just buy another one. And she threw my tent out. And when I complained, she said her rich husband would just buy me another one. I objected over the phone. I begged her to mail me my tent. It was so not about money.

I bet I could buy a tent pretty cheap. But I don't see how I can go camping without a car. Or, maybe, a friend to camp with.

I have hardly seen anything of California. My gosh, I know from movies that this is a very beautiful place. All I have seen of the ocean is Ocean Beach in San Francisco, the waterfront in Sausalito and a beautiful beach near the Golden Gate that my friend Kenoli took me to once.

Kenoli is wonderful in many ways. One way in which he is wonderful is he takes friends on rides to pretty places. Now he has a girlfriend and never takes me anywhere. I want a friend to take me on rides to pretty places, to show me pretty things.

And I want to go camping. I bet if I put my mind to it, I can solve this yearning.

spring just in time for summer

It has felt warm the last couple days, like I expect California to feel most of the time. It is warm enough so I don't need to wear any wool.

The rooftop garden on my apartment building is all blooms and blossoms. Squash are coming in. I wonder if tenatns can help themselves to the squash. The squash seems an odd choice. There are maybe twenty gigantic planting tubs. They put flowers in all but two. One tub has tomatoes and one has squash. Both the tomatos and the squash are stuffed into the tubs, with no room to spread. It makes for an odd energy; the plants are dense and interesting in that denseness. . . but that's not what you would do if you wanted to yield tomatos and squash. Maybe whoever made these choices just wanted the interesting look. If you approach the smashed squash tub as a flower pot, it is interesting. Weirdly so.

The rest of the roof is all pink blue purple white. I like flowers. It happened quickly. All green. Then all color.

subway dates?

I hardly ever go out in the evenings these days. Yesterday, Friday evening, I rode BART through San Francisco and saw lots of couples out on dates. How cute is that?

I've seen subway dates in movies but not in real life. It never occurred to me that young women would get dolled up, wearing frippery and then get on a subway.

I also saw a couple clusters of girls, young women, I should say, who looked like they were headed to a club.

For some reason, I have not been grokking that people have dates. Where have I been?

here's what happened (the grief meteor)

I was waiting to buy some pie. The customer in front of me was a young mother with a perfectly plum, rosy-cheeked infant hanging from a pouch just like the one I had for my Katie. This was a spectacularly gorgeous baby. I smiled at her and asked the mother if this were her first child and the mother nodded ecstatically. I knew she was in the best cocoon of all time and space: her and her baby. When she blissfully said, yes, this was her first, I said "Isn't it even more awesome than you ever imagined? Like didn't you know before that having a baby was going to be fantastic but still, pow! it is way way way better still?"

I don't know what came over me.

I wanted to hold her baby and nuzzle her baby and then I wanted to nuzzle her, the mom.

Oh my god, I could be standing in a real coffeeshop (this was a real one) with my real daughter who could be holding a real grandchild in a pouch just like the one I had for Katie.

The baby in the pie shop grabbe my finger pleasantly when I proffered it.

The pink in this baby's cheek might be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, even more beautiful than infant Katie's pink cheeks. This is possible because the universe is full of endless beauty.

I was very happy.

And then the young mother asked me how old my baby or babies were and I remembered that my baby, if she lives, will turn 27 next Friday. I had already remembered about 4:34 p.m. Central Standard time on June 26th but this remembrance was very limnal, way way peripheral. I was pretending I was not remembering.

Then it was all real.

And then the perfect young mother said "I am going to turn 27 next week."

How am I supposed to live with this?

when I first lost my Katie

When I first lost my daughter, my grief heat would begin to intensity as the calendar sank into the Christmas hellhole. I don't care much about Christmas. The whole Christ creation myth is too male centric to be my creation myth but I do understand that humans seem to have a need for culture, ritual, myth, story and that is what Christmas is about. For Western Christians. More or less. Life being more complex than I can explain.

Nowadays, I don't have the annual xmas hellhole, which is something. I guess. Maybe. Who knows.

but there is still 4:34 p.m., Central Standard Time (Omaha, Nebraska time), on June 26th, when Katherine Joy Kreifels was born weighing seven pounds, eight and one half ounces.

From the first instant I learned about that half ounce, I have loved it more than all the others. I used to look at birth certificates whenever I could to see if any other baby had half an ounce recorded. So far, she was the only one. Most babies are born on the ounce. Most doctors round off.

Just now, I paused to think about that ounce and for a teeny tiny moment, a lump rose in my throat and I thought I would stop breathing. Then I hoped that I would. For good.

I did not.

How did the doctor chose 4:34? You don't get to ask doctors things like this. At least I didn't. The doctor who delivered Katie was covering for my obstetrician who was out of town for his daughter's wedding. The first out-of-town trip Dr. H had been on when one of 'his' babies was born. When he accepted new obstetric patients, he tried to manage his patient load. He tried to distribute due dates to be fair to himself, his family and his patients. And he worked especially carefully to not accept due dates when he planned to be out of town. Dr. H was a sweet, old-fashioned obstetrician who loved all his patients. Katie was the first baby born in his medical practice when he was out of town because he was so careful about scheduling. His nurse apologized to me about eight times and so did he. Don't you love it that I had such a nice baby doctor?

Maybe if Dr. H had delivered Katie, she wouldn't have left me. The man who did deliver her repelled me. After Katie was born and 'they' took her away form my side for a few minutes to clean her before giving her into my arms, the doctor who delivered Katie took care of me. And then he said to my husband (I wish I were making this up), "There you go, he-who-shall-never-be-named, I sewed her nice and tight for you. She'll be as good as new for you." I know many people believe the world is too litigious and they blame lawyers but I think I should have had grounds for a lawsuit for that doctor for saying such an ugly thing during my miracle of birth. Not to mention that this vulgarity was uttered by an obstetrician. How can misogynists be obstetricians?!!

I keep thinking the worst of my Katie grief has passed. Then out of the blue, like a meteor falling from the heavens (mixing lots of metaphors, need to edit, will not), I will feel sad about something, anything, sad about something that has nothing to do with my plum plum but it turns out all grief is Katie grief.

I am only heartache

There have been no deaths in my life but I feel like I am shattered by unbearable, unyielding, unending grief. Tonight I grieve endless loss and no loss. So I am going to read, and reread, this poem by Auden. It captures how I feel this evening even though I have no new loss burning me.

Funeral Blues* by W. H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos, and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let the aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put gray bows around the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East, my West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.



*This poem is copyrighted. I imagine an Auden heir owns it. I do not quibble with poets making some money for their work. And I do not begrudge Auden's heirs some money because fortune put them in the position of being an heir to a work of art. Auden's heirs did not create the scaffolding of culture that we all have to live our lives in, somehow. But what I think would be 'right' is that people who have a call to be poets ought to be able to be poets and to have adequate means to live. And so should their heirs. But art ought not be be copyrighted, not any more than the sun or the wind. If we lived in an economy whose only reason for being was to ensure all human needs was met, there would be no copyrights, no heirs. and Auden's heirs would have all their needs met. And everyone could freely enjoy this poem.

here's today's dilemma

I have a medical appointment in Palo Alto at 4:30 p.m., today.

There is a one-hour BART ride and a fifty minute Caltrain ride, plus wait times on various train platforms, between me and my appointment.

I am barfing. When I first got up today, I was glad that my appointment was way at the end of what seemed like a long, long day. I told myself that I might be well enough by 2 p.m. to travel to Palo Alto. I really need to be on my way by 2 p.m. if I want to get to the appointment.

I have never personally seen someone throw up on a bus or train. Of course it must happen now and again. And, come to think of it, I actually have thrown up on a Caltrain train once. Fortunately, I had a plastic bag with me and managed to pull it out in the nick of time.

Well, actually, I am now recalling me and other trains, me and barfing. Some people vomit much more than others. I am such a someone. I barf more than anyone I have ever met.

So. Do I go to Palo Alto today? The modern medical establishment threatens to bill me if I cancel at the last minute. My insurer won't pay for a no-show. What is wrong with this picture? I am too sick to get to the doctor and it is not socially acceptable for me to puke on BART or Caltrain.

Oh woe woe woe is me.

I'm going. I don't really have a choice. I can't pay for the no-show appointment. But I am drowning in self pity.

i like it when this happens

I like it when I fall asleep sitting upright, surfing the internet or reading. I love the way I doze off, then catch myself and wake up and then doze again.

Very satisfying.

and another thing

Berkeley has a bunch of worker-owned cooperative businesses. I haven't researched this but I bet many of these places got going in the sixties, when Berkeley became known for activism.

One such worker-owned operation is The Cheese Board. The Cheese Board (TCB) got started as a cheese shop. And there still is a cheese shop that sells, I am told, good baked goods. I have never been in the cheese shop.

Along the way, TCB opened a pizza shop next door to the cheese shop. I don't know if the workers at both stores own both stores. But I'm curious about this detail.

I stopped eating pizza after I was diagnosed with diabetes. I just can't justify the carbs. The wheat in pizza crust spikes my blood glucose, the cheese clogs arteries. There's just not much nutritional bang in my pizza buck.

Plus not many commercial pizzas taste good. Pizza Hut? Ugh. Domino's? Ugh to the pizza and ugh to the fact that Domino's is owned (or usta be) by a rabid anti-choice guy and on principle I would never eat Domino's.

The Cheese Board pizza is perfect pizza. They only bake one kind each day. The ingredients change daily. It's always vegetarian. Good cheese, very thin crust, olive oil, always lots of garlic and some vegies. No tomato sauce. It's greasey, cheesey, garlicky. It always drips grease and cheese. I like to wipe my fingers on the brown paper bag they put it in when I get it to go, which I always do. I like mildly burning my fingertips because I scarf it down so fast. I like the way the cheese is so melty that sometimes it drips on my chin and mildly burns my chin.

In other words, The Cheese Board bakes perfect pizzas.

There is always a line out the door to buy their pizza and the line always moves fast. Most evenings, there is live music. I always get one slice to go because the place is always crowded and always open to the outdoors and it's been way cold for weeks. I don't want to shiver while eating. Plus all the cheerful noise is hard to take on my own. I want to sit in the happy buzz and chat with friends. But I don't have any friends. No one loves me. No one wants to go out for a slice with me. Okay, there is some hyperbole here.

On Thursday, there is a farmers market about a block from The Cheese Board. I have told myself that I can only buy a slice at TCB if, and when, I go to the Thursdays farmers market. If TCB were on my block, I think I would buy a slice every day and regain the weight I have lost.

I love The Cheese Board pizza.

Once, gosh, back in the eighties, I practiced law, hung out my shingle, solo. I focussed on attracting small business clients. One client was a couple who owned a couple small businesses. In one business, they sold beer making equipment for home beer brewing. And another business involved a Cinnabon franchise. And another business involved selling frozen pizzas.

I wish I could remember the gal's name, cause I really liked her. Him, I did not really bond with.

I have been recalling her cheerful lectures about how pizza, when combined with a tossed salad, was a surprisingly nutritious meal. I thought she was trying to convince herself, like it was important to her to believe she was selling healthy food to humans. Then she got out of the frozen pizza biz when they bought the Cinnabon franchise. I don't recall her convincing me that Cinnabons were surprisingly nutritious.

I could eat a slice of The Cheese Board pizza, with a tossed salad, every day for a long time before I would get bored with the routine.

my fruit saga continues

I peeled and sliced a bunch of peaches. The peaches were so juicy that I thought they were too wet for a peach crisp, which is what I had intended to make. So I decided to use the same ingredients that I use to make banana bread and see what kind of peach bread I would get. Plus I tossed in a bunch of blueberries. Once again, I forgot to add butter. Then, with all the dry ingredients in there, it seemed way too wet so I added a bit more flour. Then I baked. Also, I did not add sugar. The peaches were so sweet!

I don't know what to call what I got. It's a bit like a bread pudding. A peach bread pudding.

It is delicious.

I am eating too many carbohydrates. And I swear I'm done with peaches for the year.

Peaches, like much in life, confuse me. If I buy them unripe, they are hard and need sugar. If I buy them ripe, they are juicy and don't do well for pie.

I think that if I ever get a peach pie impulse again I will buy frozen peach slices, violating my intent to only buy local and in season. But this is okay because I really shouldn't be eating peaches or much fruit. The carbs, the carbs. The blood glucose, the diabetes!

Peach bread pudding is mighty tasty.

Food seems really expensive to me. When did that happen? There are sixteen bucks worth of juicy peaches, plus a few dollars worth of blueberries in a small-loaf-size thing. It cost me over twenty dollars to make this thing.

I am bored and lonely.

12 peaches=$16.00

I bought eight Zen Mountains and four Spring Princess, organic, peaches at the farmers market. I wanted enough to make a deep dish pie. I'm gonna bake some blueberries with the peaches.

I bought a generous pint of organic blueberries for $7.00. Truth be told, it was more like 1.5 pints. Things were slow at the market and the guy really wanted to sell his blueberries. Two or three more weeks of blueberry season, he said. I bought the blueberries because, like my father before me, I don't like to resist a bargain. When I saw, first, that a pint had been reduced from $8 to $7, I was interested. Then when I saw that the pints were oveflowing, I could not resist.

My mom used to say that my dad would buy six left boots if the price was right. Me too, maybe.

Now that I have all this fruit, thought, rolling out a pie crust seems like too much work. I'm going with a peach crisp. Plus I'll freeze some sliced peaches. I bought too many.

The blueberries, I can add to my next banana bread.

I don't know what has come over me but I am baking stuff. Shopping and planning might be more important than the eating.

I'm going to invite my neighbors over for peach crisp and coffee, the ones on my hallway.

I miss the past, times when I had lots of friends who might stop by. I don't have anyone like that here. Not yet.

I'm not really supposed to eat this food. One piece of peach crisp will have more carbs than I should eat in an entire day.

I'm sad and lonely.

I am not an American racist

A guy on the bus was using the speaker on his cell phone, shouting into the phone because he was holding it in his lap instead of at his ear. Plus he had the sound cranked up full blast so everyone on the bus could hear the person he was talking to. I could not understand the language he was speaking.

There are signs all over the bus, signs with icons instead of words about rules on the bus. These rules, by the way, are the law. It is illegal to listen to electronic sound devices without earphones. It is also illegal to eat or smoke. it is not illegal to use a cellphone: but it is illegal to blast cell conversation to the whole bus.

This guy was shouting and it was bugging me but I initially decided I would ignore it. He would eventually get off, right? But then the bus driver, while stopped at a corner, looked back in his mirror and said 'Who's playing that music? Who isn't using earphones?"

So then I got the offender's attention and told him he needed to be a little quieter. I pulled out my ipod earplugs to signal that he needed to use earplugs or get off the phone.

The guy told me that he was not a dirty Mexican, he was a Brazilian visitor in my country and that I was being an American racist.

I had not suggested he was Mexican. In fact, I was sure he was not Hispanic because I did not understand him when he spoke on the phone. I am fluent in Spanish. If he were Mexican, I would have spoken to him in Spanish.

Most of the time, when a nonwhite person tells me, in a public situation like this, that I am a racist, I let it slide because it has been my experience that when a nonwhite person who does not know me sees whatever I am saying or doing as racist, that person is not actually seeing me. That person is, excuse me, only seeing with their own racist eyes.

Everyone has racial preconceptions and biases so, I submit, everyone has some racism. But lots of nonwhite people don't seem to understand that if they see all white people as racists, that is a racist attitude.

Oh well.

But this Brazilian guy really bugged me when he accused me of being an American racist. It is not racist to ask someone to be respectful on the bus.

anyway, I said "I am not a racist. And thanks for telling me you are Brasilian. I interpret that to mean that you are a Brasilian asshole."

Then he put his cell phone away. Then he started talking to a black American sitting next to him. We were all on that bus a pretty long time. The black guy spoke very softly and I could not hear much of what he said. But I think the gist was that the black guy was telling the Brasilian guy to fight the power of racism and that white devils like me would get their own.

It was so not racist of me to ask the guy to use earplugs.

I used to be a lawyer, which is probably part of the reason I tend to be aware of the rules for public behavior. If there is a law that requires people using electronic noise to use earplugs, hey, it's not just me being a bitch to ask someone to honor that community agreement. Because that is what a law is. It is a community agreement. We're all sharing this planet. We all have to get along. We all need to accomodate ourselves to the commons.