small dick Don

In the past week, I have had a few conversations with neighbors expressing their faith and/or support for Donnie. One neighbor said he is thrilled every time Trump fires someone because it is like a huge forest fire such as we have had of late in CA: he says the fire will destroy everything and then 'the community' will rise up and care for one another. To this I said "where will the community get food and water is its been destroyed?" and he shrugged and said 'the community will rise up in love". Another neighbor exclaimed that she is horrified to hear criticism of Donnie because we should support our president and we should all be praying for him all the time. Seriously, what goes through some millenials beings that they think the suffering through starvation (it's okay with these folks to wipe out food stamps, medical access, social security and more because we'll have to start fresh. This guy is young. He laughingly jokes about how maybe he'll head out of town with his tent for awhile and live off the land. "But what about folks who don't have a car, who are old and disabled and can't take off and camp until the community figures everything out."

un balanceo cósmico

Todos estamos balanceada por el cósmico.  Este planeta se mueve todo el tiempo en el cósmos, alrededor del sol.  Poca genta se puede sentir este balanceo. Estamos precocupados con demasiados cosas. Pero, que es más important de sentiendo el cósmo?  Yo digo que nada es más importante de sentir la energía y la magica de este universo.

Cuando me voy nadando en una piscina, me siento el movimiento de este planeta. Cuando puedo ver el cielo durante nadando, me siento el movimento del universo mas claramente.

Cuanto me encanta este sensación.

Te amor, mi chiquita Katie.  Llama tu madre, escribe tu madre. Besos. Katie. Yo sé que ya no eres mi cuiquita pero palabras así es todo lo que tengo de me hija unia. 

a cosmic rocking

I didn't do fifty laps yesterday: I did forty. Today, I pushed myself. Fifty laps would be one hundred lengths. I stopped at ninety and now I am feeling like a failure, which is, I hope, absurd.

On weekdays, I can hop a bus for part of my long walk home but on Sundays, there is no bus. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to walk home if I kept swimming.

I am very interested in pushing my endurance limits. I am going to keep pushing myself to swim longer. And harder. I am swimming just a bit faster than I was. I am fascinated by my sense of drive. Where does it come from? It is an energy in the universe, isn't it? Not just me. What drives someone to be a long distance runner? Or a triathlete?

There is, of course, a masters swim club at my pool. They finish their workouts just before my lap swim sessions begin. The masters swimmers have a call to push themselves. Where does it come from? I think this kind of drive is similar to the impulses that move tides or move, for example, the sun and the moon. It is a kind of cosmic rocking.

everybody is a star

Once, at Midway Airport in Chicago, stuck waiting at a gate for a delayed flight, I noticed lots of the people around me were carrying what looked like musical instrument cases. So I made some remark like "Are there musicians here?" It was most of the original Sly and the FAmily Stone (Sans Sly and with a few new musicians). I hummed a few bars of "Everybody is a Star" then told the, so far, guys that I had played that song over and over and over as a teen. The guys pointed to the two women singers and said "They are the ones that sang it all along" and then the women sang that song for me, a capella, at our gate. Not the Godfather of Soul but it was a lovely interlude. The band had performed at a WI casino and were flying to CA to perform on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz on July 4th that year. They said if I came to the concert, they would dedicate 'everybody is a star' to me before the audience. I could not make it. And then. . . for real . . . I was on a bus in Berkeley once when a man rolled a gigantic musical case onto the bus. I asked him if he was rolling a cello or a large guitar. He said it was a large bass guitar. Then he went on to say "everything I have is from music, god has given me my musical gift so he could give me everything." as we chatted he told me that Sly (of the family Stone fame) was his first cousin and he had played for Sly's band when it was a big deal. Of course I told that musician about my Midway brief encounter. He was heading to a subway station to busk for money.I wanted to follow him off the bus but I had places to go, people to see. I regret that choice.

It was so lovely listening to those women sing 'everybody is a star' for me at the airport gate. Everyone at the gate applauded when they were done.

I didn't own many albums, like, ever but in h.s. I had some. I really got into Sly and the Family Stone.

I grew up in Chicago, on the South Side. Nearly every weekend, on Fridays, I went to casual dances called sock hops (we did not dance without shoes but that's what they were called. .  ). I believe the term 'sock hops' was coined when students actually had to dance in socks when dances were held in their wooden-floored gyms. By the time I was in high school, we danced on linoleum gym floors, nearly every Friday. There were always live, no-doubt inexpensive cover bands. And our Chicago cover bands played a lot of Chicago music. Black music. Not that Sly's band was all black. He started the band with a white man I met at Midway in Chicago! Those cover bands always covered a lot of the Four Tops, and lots of Motown which was really jumping with music when I was in h.s. in the sixties. So not totally Chicago Sound.

And those cover bands often played 'everybody is a star'.

I was keening over the wrong thing about Katie Joy

My daughter, Katherine Joy  (its not slander to write the truth!! I get to write the name of my daughter:  truth.) has not talked to me, except to get me to handle her financial aid details for her last two years of college, since I dropped her off at Cornell. She did scream, sneer and very painfully insult me when I went by her office building in Chicago a couple years ago and she may have had a panic attack, which was an ongoing challenge for her when she was still my daughter. Another person who worked in the building let me and my brother intisde because it was fourteen below zero outside.

I mention that I was invited in by someone else who works in the building to make it clear that I was not trespassing.

I went up to the door of her office suite but did not try to enter. I did not knock. I was pretending to the nice guy who had let us in that I was looking for a restroom. Turned out the restroom wss inside her office suite. So I made a show of looking until the man who had let us in got on the elevator and disapeared. The receptionist at her employer's called out to me, asking me what I wanted. I opened the door an inch and said "I am looking for the restroom." She said "There are no public restrooms." And I turned around to head to the elevator and leave with my brother. We were at the elevator and it was just arriving when Katie came out screaming.

Katie would not have seen me if she had not come out to have a screaming fit tantrum. When Dave and I stepped on the elevator to go down to leave, she ran down the stairwell that wapped around the elevator, an exit route I did not know about.

I was acting like someone leaving because I was leaving.

But when she came out screaming abusively at me, accusing me, ha ha ha, of behaving badly when I had been politely leaving. . .  well, I've written about that and I am sick of ruminating on my past brokenheartedness.

I have been focused, all these years, on the wrong thing.  I have excoriated my whole being, and done so thousands of times, seeking to figure out what I did that lead to my daughter's decision to disown me.

All these years, and its coming up on 18 years. She left when she was 17. She turns 36 this June. Again, I recite truthful facts. If she is coy about her age, well, it is not my job to be sensitive regarding any needs of hers I might imagine. I can write truth and not be accused of slander.

All these years I have blamed myself. All these years I have been, not always but a lot of the time, very mean to myself. She was the angel daughter of every parent's dreams and I was some kind of unconscious monster who had, unconsciously, abused my child.

She is wounded. She is damaged. And she projects her wounds onto me and blames me.

She was mean to me for years and I put up with it, I willfully ignored her steady unkindness and bullying. Oh, she let me drive her all over kingdom come while she did whatever she wanted in the city we lived in, while she stole money from me to do things. I know she stole because she told me she did. I had thought my money wasn't stretch as far as it had been but it never occurred to me that she would steal from me. 

I had such positive, happy, loving faith in her that I just did not register her steady unkindness towards me.

Rob Jack, her boyfriend at her first college when the two of them were just sixteen and seventeen, used to say, right in front of she and I, that it pained him how she steadily criticized me when I wasn't doing anything wrong.  (she also met Michael there but after moving to Chicago to cash in on Michael's rich relatives' connections, they broke up.). Gee, Rob noted her unkindnesses towards me but me, daffy down dumb old me, I focussed on my love for her.

I know my love for her carried her through years that may have otherwise been harder for her. I know this because no one ever loved me and supported me as I did my daughter.  I always felt, saw and relied upon a love ray that spanned from me to her. That love ray as my reality for her. Love of her was my realilty.

I just never focussed on the way my love rays towards her were scooped up, even inhaled to feed her wounds, but no love rays came back at me.

She wouldn't give me birthday gifts or Mother's Day gifts.  And I gave such slights no power.

The poor woman is so damaged that she wrote, in a 2012 email I only first discovered a ewek or two ago, that she 'loves' me and she was working on being aable to interact with me. In 2012, she had not interacted with me since I dropped her off at Cornell in August 2001. As I closed the trunk on my car, she said "I am done with you". She did contact me once a year thereafter so I would deliver her financial aid needs.

She took and took and took. Clearly she knew what she intended to do years before she did it. She waited until she got me to help her get into that Ivy and she had the balls to contact me once a year for her financial aid. She used me callously, uncaringly and coldly. And I let her.

Daffo down dopo.

My dad, when engaged in self denigration which he sometimes slipped into, would refer to himself as "el dopo Charlie' or "old Mickey the mope".  How I miss my dad. I believe he would say right things to me about my excised heart.  When my sister turned out to be a cunt, dad once said to me "It kills me to see you crying over how she treats you. You have to accept she has turned out to be a bitch, to be nasty. You have to accept that and move on." And even my mom said about my sister, when sis was shunning me (she shunned me unless she saw a way to use me -- where do these nasty humans learn their craft, where did Katie learn how to treat her mother like dogshit on her shoe?), mom said "she only interacts with me because I have money she wants. YOu don't have money. If you did, don't worry, she'd be talking to you to get on your good side to get some of your money, like she does to me."

let wounded heart lie open

 author of this poem:  Michael Leurig

When the heart
is cut or cracked or broken
Do not clutch it
Let the wound lie open

Let the wind
From the good old sea blow in
To bathe the wound with salt
And let it sting

Let a strawy dog lick it
Let a bird lean in the hole and sing
A simple song like a tiny bell
And let it ring

make everything sacred

Love's greatest gift is its ability to make everything it touches sacred.  ~ Rumi

Questionnaire

  -- I am reminded, for no rational reason, of my daughter playing Emily Dickinson. I have question for her: how much hurt is she willing to inflict to protect that within her that she, futilely I suspect, seeks to protect by breaking my heart anew, again and again and again . . .  I don't think eviscerating me, crippling me, could possibly be a benefit for her. Hurting another never heals someone's pain, it is a sin, I think, to willfully hurt others. It is a sin to have taken so much from me and then dumped me once I ran out of money to give her.

Katie, please name how much pain you are willing to inflict on your mother to protect the unprotectable within yourself. WTF did I do?

Questionnaire
by Wendell Berry

How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.
For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.
What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy
In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.
State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

out with lanterns

“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” -Emily Dickinson

i want you to know

swimming

It is cold and raining in Berkeley. We need the rain. Even with the rain, CA veers hazardously close to chronic drought.

It feels very very cold to me. I am surprised that I shiver, that my feet are icy all the time, when it is only fifty degrees outside.

When I first moved to the Seattle area, I had two or three of the coldest winters of my life before I adjusted to the climate. It did not get frigid cold in Seattle and Puget Sound but the air was densely humid, fog rolled around. This was especially true when I lived on an island but also true in Seattle.  I was not only cold all the time but the air was so damp that things hung to dry, inside where it was dry and warmish, could take days. I learned clothes need some dryness in the air to dry and there aint much dryness in Puget Sound.

N. CA is a bit warmer than Puget Sound but SF and the East Bay are also much foggier. Living down on the peninsula, in Silicon Valley, in Mountain view, when I first moved to CA. It is meaningfully warmer and dryer in Mountain View. Plus my apartment down there had its own heater that I controlled. Here, my building is super green with the heat in the floor. Supposedly I control the heat with my thermostat but I do not. The building sets the temps. I can hit the thermostat to raise the temp but that rise lasts, maybe, half an hour and it takes that long for the heat to rise, and poof, it goes back down.  So my place, now, is nearly always chilly. 

I wear wool socks all the time. Up in Seattle, I wore two pairs all the time but summer. There is a real, hot sticky, muggy summer in Seattle. There is not hot summer here.

I just looked up at the title to my post. I was going to write about swimming. Hmm. . . what was I thinking a few minutes ago?

I kinda like swimming in the rain but when it is very cold, for here, it is harder to get out there, for all the pools I have access to are outdoors.  Walking from locker room to the pool, even without taking my pre-swim shower, is frigid. And walking back to the locker room,  which is when I believe my feet go frigid, is hard.

Oh woe is me. A Third World problem, eh?

our job is to love . . .

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.
That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business.
What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved.
It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves.
Love, therefore, is its own reward 
~Thomas Merton

overheard on the bus today

For much of the year in Berkeley, the buses are jammed with UC Berkeley students, who cram the busses and seem to think the local public transit system is part of their private campus life.  Mid-afternoon on weekdays, when Berkeley High lets out, yes, the buses are fleetingly packed with high school kids but I like the energy of those kids.  The h.s. kids are still kids, they still see unfamiliar grown ups as objects that automatically merit their respect. If not respect, then generational deference. High school kids offer seats or at least get out of the way.

College students don't exactly disrespect adults. And don't get me wrong. I am not a genuine senior citizen. Not quite yet.  I have no visible disability.  I am not automatically entitled to a seat on the bus. Plus when I am going to a Berkeley destination, none of my bus rides are very long. I can stand on the bus for a few blocks and I don't mind standing. I do mind, however, the sense of entitlement of the college kids.  I have never seen a college student offer a seat, not even to people with canes.

Fuck the college kids. The reason I am thinking about them at all is because they are all gone right now. All the students have gone 'home' for the holidays. School is out. The only people riding the bus today, a holiday, are the well and truly poor.

There are plenty of poor white folks here. But the public transit population in Berkeley and Oakland is predominantly African American. When UC is in session, you see lots of Asian kids and more white kids on the bus. On a holiday like today, it's blacks. And some whites. I am, after all, white and on the bus.

So today on the bus, a tall, young, African American male adult hesitates to get on the One. He asks the driver if the 'R', the rapid One, is running.  The Rapid doesn't run on Saturdays or holidays, so no 'R' today. The kid, the man, was going to Fruitvale. The One will get him there in about forty minutes, slowly snaking its way through Berkeley, then all the way through Oakland, to the outer reachers of Fruitvale. BART would take the kid there too but BART costs twice as much. First the guy ducked back off the bus, to weigh his options.  I bet he was thinking about BART but frugality won out. He had a card loaded for the bus ride. BART meant cash. Reluctantly, he got on the One.

At the first stop (he got on, as had I, at the beginning of the route), a gray-haired black man got on, someone he recognized. Quickly, the two man exchanged details about where they staying. Both of them living in shelters. The older man, seeming to feel sheepish, said "Last time you saw me, at your grandma's, I was all fucked up.  I'm paying for it now. I'm getting back on track.  I gonna be all right."  The younger man offered supportive sounds, like "You can do it, You be all right" and the older man kept reciting his path.  "I didn't lose my job, I still work for the airlines, but I can't go back until I go through the program, to learn how to manage my anger. The program cost $400.  I got to pay $400 and then go, complete the program, then they gonna take me back. I still got the job, but I can't do the job until I get $400."  Then he pulled out a brochure for a day work program.

The young man was interested. He has no work either.  He staying in a shelter. The young man asked the old man where he was headed right then. The old man said "I'm going to the Such-and-Such. They do free food, they have raffles. They don't open up until six and they only take so many, so you got to be in line. I want to get in, get that free food, maybe win a prize. They are pretty good prizes. Bus passes. Food coupons. Like that.  You should come with me. You would be welcome."

"No," the younger man demurred.  "I headed to Fruitvale. I paid for the bus now.  I get off here, I can't get back to Fruitvale later." Then he said "Tell me about that work you talked about."

Then the older man pulled out a brochure, handed it to the young one.  "It's good work. They pay eleven dollars an hour.  There isn't always work but if you keep going, you get work. And then when they hire, you know how it is, it is temp to perm. But you keep going, you keep working it, you'll get on. Here, take this."

"I might call them." said younger man.

"It's easy to get there. You go on BART and then you can walk, not too far. Eight blocks. Close enough to walk."

"Where are the jobs?"

"You know, out that way, San Leandro, Fremont, Walnut Creek. But so far, they all close enough to walk from BART."

I just read, yesterday I think, that something like fourteen percent of all African American men are in prison. The unemployment rate for African American men is so high that I have blanked that number. Forty percent?

I don't know anything about those two guys on the bus.  But I know their social class. They were born poor, they gonna die poor and in between, they might enjoy some spurts of middle class living but for the most part, they be scrambling for a room and food.

"A free meal sounds good," the young one said at one point on the bus ride.  "Last night I went to 'Such and Such to eat. It was good. But it cost nine dollars. Well, $8.72 but by then you talking nine dollars.  Nine dollars just to eat dinner."

Nine dollars is a lot of money for one meal. Nine dollars for one meal time thirty days is $270, right? And most folks want three meals a day. It is cheaper to eat 'at home' but when you are living in a shelter, forced to hang out all day outside the shelter, no kitchen, you eat out. Nine dollars. Even McDonald's meals are unaffordable.

I saw my homeless friend Kathy. She's not homeless these days. She has a room in an SRO. SRO means single room occupancy. In the old days, it was called a flop house, skid row.  When I first moved to Berkeley, she was homeless, waiting to get a room. But she still has to pay rent. She pays her rent by begging. She has long white hair. She's at least my age. Not eligible, she said once, for disability, not old enough for Social Security. Can't work. She was living on the street in downtown Berkeley when I moved here. I don't think she remembers me from one time to the next. I think she lives by instinct, like an animal in a natural setting. She is friendly when people are friendly to her but she makes no bonds. How do you make bonds when you have no base? How do you create a base when you can't hang onto to a room?  Someone loved Kathy when she was a toddler, kept her from running into the streets. Playmates and neighbors knew her as child, then a teen. She's known decades of friendship but never found a toe hold. She's just hanging on, waiting to die.  I know she has a room now because I don't see her so much. I think she might have got on disability cause I don't see her begging anymore, never see her selling that homeless news.

Lately, in my neighborhood, there have been little clusters of very young beggars.  Scruffy clusters of young kids usually hang out on Telegraph but the business owners there are constantly working to get rid of them and they have to go somewhere. So they go downtown. The storefronts down here have better overhangs, its dryer in the rainy season. Kathy was sleeping downtown when I met her two years ago cause there are more drop spots at night, she told me. She moves to areas of Oakland in the dry season. It's rainy season, probably why I have been seeing her lately.

I get angry at the young clusters of beggars. They are always smoking cigarettes.  I don't give any beggars money. I give Kathy five dollars whenever I see her. Let me explain why.

Once, sitting next to her on the bus, I told her I was glad to see her, that I hadn't seen her in a while and was glad to see she was okay. She told me that while she was begging that day, a guy gave her a ten dollar bill. She lit up as she told me about that ten dollars. She hardly ever gets ten dollars from one person.  Later, the guy walked by her again and she asked him again, not paying attention to him. She said 'You know how it is, to beg you don't pay attention to the people, you just ask for spare change, you don't look at them." But I saw he gave me a dirty look. He was offended that I was asking again because he had just given me ten bucks. I remembered him, of course I did, but I hadn't looked at him when he came back. I started to apologize, she said, but he was gone. I feel so bad.

I decided that day that every time I see her, I will give her five dollars. And I do. Sometimes I don't see her for months. And to tell you the truth, I wish I wouldn't notice her.  I wish I didn't notice poor people and hear snippets of their lives. I seem to hear folks on the bus all the time talking about 'good jobs, paying good money' and then they say 'eleven dollars'.

Eleven dollars is not good money.

I think I already wrote about the guitar lady. A few months ago, with the electricity out at Peets, she asked me to go into Starbucks to buy her a tea, said she would pay me. I got her the tea and she paid me, but not the full price I had spent.  She said she was short because someone had stolen her guitar. This was a couple months ago. Then just before Christmas, she was at the top of the BART escalator. She usually plays her guitar inside the BART station. That's how she supports herself. But she was at the top of the escalator, looking for her regular customers, I think. I think she couldn't just stand in the station where she usually plays and beg so she was hoping to reach out to her regulars at the escalator. She kept saying "Someone stole my guitar, can you help me get a new one?"

I decided to give her the bill I had in my secret pocket. I have an awkward, zippered pocket on my left sleeve. I don't know what it is supposed to be for but I keep bills in it. If I had pulled out a twenty, I would have given it to her but I pulled out a ten. And I gave it to her. Another woman stopped just as I handed over the ten and stuffed a one dollar bill in the jar. The guitar gal thanked the one dollar lady and barely looked at me. I wanted her to light up over the ten.  I wanted her to be grateful but she didn't even notice. I don't think she saw that I have given her a ten. What was I gonna do, point it out and ask her to recognize me?

I see her all the time. She never acknowledges me. I wonder, am I appearing to ignore her? Does she ignore me because I seem to be ignoring her?

I am one of these people.  I am slipping further and further away from the middle class, from what I want to all normal life.  I know exactly what that poet meant when she wrote about The Bell Jar.  She felt like she lived separate from others, separate from normal. She felt like she was shut off from whatever others had that she lacked, like she didn't quite have enough oxygen. A bell jar.  Frosted glass. Cut off.

I remembered that awful movie, starring Meryl Streep based on a novel called Ironweed. The Streep character lived in flop houses, scraping together money from one day to the next to get a room. When she was lucky enough to have a room, she laid out her few things to make the room homey. She had a scarf that she put on the dresser. She hung on to a few mementos.  Her life was hard. She grasped hard for rays of light. She was better than me.  Just about everyone is.

Who was the guy who wrote that line, life is solitary poor nasty brutish and short?  Life is solitary, poor, nasty and brutish but where did he come up with short?  It's way too fucking long.  I hate my life.  I hate me.

honey in the heart

Honey in the heart.* This line gives me happy feelings.

*This is a line from 'The Well-Dressed Man" by the poet Wallace Stevens. Here is the whole poem, a good one.

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket's horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house...
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

one thing more frightening than speaking our truth

I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you…. What are the words you do not yet have? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language. Next time, ask: What’s the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end. And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking. by Audre Lorde (via Awakening Women Institute) | Artwork by Yelena Bryksenkova

my family St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day was a major holiday in my family, my very Irish family. All of my great grandparents had been born in Ireland, some of my grandparents. One family tale had my maternal grandpa being born 'on the boat over'.

Now I imagine grim, dirty hulls of large wooden ships filled with poor Irish. Some adults having sex. The women doing their best to prepare food. The children all huddled down there, not getting enough light. I can't imagine lots of books. I hope there was happy singing.

It's not like my Irish immigrant ancestors came over in first class.

We sometimes had other relatives over for, of course, corned beef on St. Patrick's Day.  We sometimes went to parties in church halls. We sometimes went to other relatives. We always ate corned beef. And mom always made corned beef at home, even if we ate out. It was as if we could not be Irish and not simmer corned beef all day on March 17th.

Once some well known and very Irish movie star came to my grandfather's chuch, the one my dad had grown up in so it likely felt to my dad like it was his church. Tickets were sold. Tickets were bought. It was a hugely big deal in our family to go to that dinner, to be in the same room with a famous Irish movie star. I was pretty young. My standout memory:  the corned beef served was not as good as my mom's and my mom was never much of a cook.

I tried to make St. Patrick's Day feel festive for my daughter but I did not raise her surrounded by Irish Americans. It would be just her and me and her Irish Girls Are the Best t-shirt.

when I was in grade school, my mom dyed my white blonde (in those days) hair green with food dye. I loved that.  I dyed my daughter's hair green at least once, at least, but I don't remember if she enjoyed that.

I miss my dad more today than usual. He was always very proud to be Irish, to be from Back of the Yards, to be a Chicago Irish person.

I miss every  crumb of happiness in my past.  I wish I knew how to be happy in my present. 

I guess I'll go eat worms

If my mom had any genius in her, it was her mastery of cleverly shaming her daughter, her only daughter until I was 14, with brothers all over the place.

If I expressed any sadness or disappointment to my, um, mother, something I quickly learned not to do -- I was on my own growing up, my dad abandoning his daughter to her mother almost entirely, he liked his sons --  my mom would say this diddy she claimed was a 'poem':

Nobody loves me

Everybody hates me

I guess I'll go eat worms.

I did not know the word shame when she said this, like when I was five and six years old, but I felt deeply ashamed when my mom would recite these lines in a sing-song-y screech that I think my mom thought was cute.  I felt a lot of shame. I was ashamed that I felt bad. I felt ashamed that I had believed my mom might care that I felt bad. And, after the first time she said this shit to me wihtout offering just a little bit of comfort, like a listening ear for a couple minutes, I was very painfully ashamed that I had turned to her for emotional support.

My mom never offered me emotional support, not even a listening ear.   When she would say that nobody loves me whine to me, gosh, I felt bad. But I never considered telling her I didn't like it because she would assuredly have said something even more wounding.

Irish girls are the best

When my daughter was a toddler, I bought her a XS adult green t-shirt that said 'Irish girls are the best".  I put her in black tights, a belt and called it a dress.  I must have been at least separated from her father because he would have forbidden me to use that t-shirt as a dress. He usually forbid me to do pretty much anything other than housework. Creativity was not his jam. He told me many times that my creative choices were crazy.

I had my daughter wear her Irish girls are the best t-shirt on St. Patrick's Day for years, perhaps until she got to around middle school age and began to treat me a lot like her father did.

But, come to think of it, I am certain she wore Irish girls are the best at least once on St. P Day, to her high school.

if wishes were horses

It is a Ralph Waldo Emerson line:  if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.  It is not a particular great quote, imho. It is etched into my being because my mom said it a bajillion times as I grew up.  My mom had a perfect touch that empowered her to say snide, hurtful things that were sneakily slipped in, things another adult who happened to overhear her might not realize was a dig.  She said the wishes horses thing when I was unhappy and wanted to be happy, not so subtly mocking me -- I felt her stinger -- just for being a normal human with feelings, longings.


I wish I would fall asleep and never awaken, be dead.

Weirdly, I had a 'funny' exchange with my property manager. I joked with her that I'd be leaving this building in a pine box and she winced just now and said "I never go into apartments when residents haven't been heard from, it would just gross me out to find a dead body." I said 'Geez, I was not imagining dying here, just that I'd be living here until I check out, like in a hospital or nursing home.


Not so funny in the way I told it. Oh well, I am so depressed that I am catatonic, just about.

Bloom! it is, after all, spring (almost)

making an apple pie

My housecleaner is helping me go through all my cupboards, closets and drawers. I throw out a lot. I discover things I need that I forgot I had. And sometimes, he asks if he can have something.  I wish he did not ask because I like him and care about him but I don't like him asking for things I have kept and cared about for 30 or more years. Most of my 'treasures' are not treasures to anyone but me and they are treasures to me because I either associate them with my daughter or my mother.

I have a very good, fine kitchen knife that I paid $87 for about 30 years ago. It is a German knife. It is a knife you can use for just about anything. It can rock on a butcher board as you slice and dice.  I keep it in the box because it is such a fine knife. I don't want the edges getting knicked in my cluttered draws. Although my drawers are being decluttered.  My cleaner guy said, and I am still a bit flummoxed by what he said, "If you want to sell it, I'll give you a few bucks for it." He said this right after I had showed him the very faded $87 price tag and told him my mom had bought it for me when Katie was five or younger. So thirty years. My mom long gone. My daughter long gone. And my one good knife. My one great knife.  The model of my thirty years ago $87 knife is no longer sold by Wusthoff but simlar knives like it, also by Wusthoff sell for $129 and $139. Of course, the blades are steel. I wonder what Trump's tariffs might do to quality knife sales? Why would I sell my one prized, great knife, one I treasure so much I clean it, dry it and put it in the original box to keep it safe?And for a couple of bucks?

He saw a luggage tag on Tuesday and asked if he could have it. I had wondered what happened to the only luggage tag I had ever owned. I have new luggage but no tag. Last time I flew home from NYC, my bag came out of the luggage conveyor with no tag at all for I had used those paper bits the airlines offer with not-strong elastic. Gone.  Plus my suitcase came two airplanes behind my own.

Look at how I run on. This is about baking pies with my Katie.

She always wanted to help. She always wanted to imitate me. If I got on my knees and scrubbed a patch of our kitchen floor, she did her tiny toddler best to imitate me, sometimes pretending because she did not have her own scrubber.  I spent a lot of tie in our kitchen when she was very very young, and we still lived in Omaha. Our kitchen was mostly "L" shaped. In the corner of that 'L', under the cabinets, there was an air vent. She loved to sit in front of the vent, for cold air on hot days and warm air on chilly days. This allowed her to remain very close to me.

That vent in that corner was below the only real counter space we had. So when I baked a pie, I sliced my apples after peeling them. Oh, sometimes she and I went applepicking together. Sometimes we had open house in our home and served apple pie. The day before our open house, we would bake lots of pies all day, plenty to eat and enough, hopefully, so every household could take one home.

My favorite thing about making pies with Katie when she was one and two was how she helped.  She could not peel or slice the apples and risk getting cut. She could not yet measure the spices and sugar. So the way she helped me was she stood nearby, watching everything I did. I actually rolled out pie crust in those years. She watched me do so closely. After I had added sugar, cinnamon and whatever spices I was adding to the apples, she would stir the apples to spread the sugar and spices.

And then the very very very best part:  she would suck the sugar and cinnamon off a few slices.

It gobsmacked me that she did that, that she loved to do it, that she believed she was helping as my tastetester (as I had named the job).

I loved those pies. I loved her. I still do.  I don't remember kissing her on top of her head while making apple pies. For some reason, I started the head kissing as we listened for the cranberry poofing on our holiday pie. We would grow still. I felt much love (I guess she didn't, eh? I guess she loved to lick the sweet cinnamony pie slices? and I was a chump.)

Pies. It was a mother daughter activity I loved very much.

Sometimes, I managed to find some cinnamon ice cream to eat alongside our apple pies.

Those were the days. I thought the love embedded in them would never end.

starving one's self

When my daughter was still my daughter and in treamtne for aorexia for a few years (and she sure looked anorexic when I saw her briefly three years ago in Chicago!), she once remarked to me that being hungry, starving herself gave her a sense of great power and that power comforted her.

I have been fasting a lot lately. I often remember her comment about how starving herself gave her a sense of power.

I miss her. I hate me.

my daughter and my heart failure

I had a glimpse of my daughter a couple years ago. I went to her office building, not intending to go in. A guy came along and let us in the security building. It was fifteen below zero out and he waived us in. When he asked who we were there to see, I tried to stall. We had decided, my bro and I, that we would not go in but when that nice man, who I thought was a janitor for he wore blue work clothes, waived us in, I just couldn't bring myself to tell him the thoughts that came to me. I had urges to tell him my daughter worked in the building, she hadn't talked to me in about fifteen years and I wanted to see where she worked so I could know where my daughter spent part of her life. So I said the name of her firm and then the guy came up with us, still being kind, making sure we got to the right business. Or maybe he was worried we were a security risk, I am not sure, but I think he was being kind.

So I went up to the door of her office suite. I did not open the door. I just looked aorund for the restroom the guy had said was right down that hall. Turned out it was inside the suite. I did not open the door until the receptionist called out to me and asked what I wanted. I said I was looking for the restroom -- keeping up my story for the guy I thought was a janitor. The janitor seemed satisfied and he left. And Dave and I began to leave. We were at the elevator ready to go down and exit when Katie came out of her office suite screaming. She kept screaming that I was crazy and trespassing. Not really. I was invited into the building by someone who worked in it. Not a trespass.

She was speaking to me as if I were scum, vermin, dogshit on her shoe.  I just couldn't run out like a kicked dog, run off like a dog by my daughter. I was waiting for her to stop screaming and being verbally abusive. I kept a calm tone and I did not try to engage her except to say "I am leaving when you stop talking to me this way."

I felt so humiliated. She began to threaten to call the cops, which scared Dave cause he has a record of criminal convictions.  Then I just had to see if my beloved daughter would actually call the police on me. What did she imagine, that the Chicago Police would send over a couple of squads with sirens blaring for a well mannered, alleged, trespass? She called. And boy did that hurt. And the dispatcher asked her some questions, like what was I doing? She said it was her mother and that her mother was severely mentally ill.

I see, in hindsight, that she could not quite bring herself to lie to the police. She did not lie and say I was behaving in a threatening manner or destroying property.  I wasn't doing anything but waiting for my daughter to stop talking to me like I was dogshit on her shoe. Is that so much to ask? That my daughter, whose life is built as much on my sacrifices for her as on her own hard work?

At least she didn't tell any lies but the one about me being severely mentally ill. At least she didn't flat out lie about some behavior that I was not doing in her thirst to sic the cops on me.  She always seems to forget I am trained and will always be able to think like a lawyer. I think she forgets what a detailed memory I have. I remember pretty much everything I learned in law school and from the years I did practice law. I worked with cops for a few years, yeah, daughter dearest. Cops don't fighten me. Well, of course I am white but I know a fair amount about what it takes to get the Chicago police to rush over squad cars. She would have had to tell some kind of whopper to get any cops rushed over to that building. At least she didn't make up another lie (for it is a lie to say I am severely mentally ill) to try to get the cops buying into her cruelty.

And did she ever take note that I remained calm through that encounter? did she note that if she had not come out of her office suite, she never would have even seen me. Dave and i were waiting for the elevator to exit and we would have. She could have seen us depart without HER creating a scene which she probably blamed on me.

I do not have a mental illness, although I do have a tormented heart and soul over the loss of my only child.  It's like I am in a twisted form of purgatory, futilely waiting for my daughter and unable to invest in my own life with the huge hole in my being.

Oh man, it hurt to hear her snarl to the cop dispatcher that I was 'severely mentally ill'. I wanted to point out that severely mentally ill is psychosis, hallucinations, uncontrolled violence.

I tend to imagine she has told everyone in her life that I am severely mentally ill to explain her evil choice to shun her mother.

I am so unhappy.  I have heart failure physically and emotionally.  I wish I would die.

things making me happy today

Swimming. I am no longer counting which means I surrender to the physicality of moving through the light-dappled water, in an amniotic buoyancy. I move, move, move and I forget exactly where I am. It is so wonderful.

The water is different every day. Like everything else, I guess. The way the sunlight reveals itself in the water is quite different each day. And the way the water holds warmth is different each day. There is some part of my thinking self that keeps askng 'why isn't the pool a uniform temperataure?' Some days the pool is a uniform temperature. Some days it is not. Why? Why? I think about this instead of counting. And I like thinking like this much better than counting.

Today there was a large cold spot in the middle of my lane. In one instant, I would be moving in water warmed by the sun then with a stroke or two, I would be cold. Kerchunk. After hitting the cold patch a few times, however, I began to look forward to it. I looked forward to the wonderful moment when I would move past the cold spot and reenter the warm. In and out.

Another thing making me happy is that some of my fellow swimmers have begun to talk to me in the locker room, awarding me with their attention. "You swim so long. I kept looking over and noticing 'she's still in the pool!' You were in when I got in, you were still in when I got out. How long do you swim?" Just like a child who wants his parents to wave at him each and everytime he comes around on the merry-go-round, I love having someone notice me.

I lost a prepaid swim pass two weeks ago. I asked the lifeguards if someone turned it in but no one had. Today, when I left the pool, the lifeguards gestured for me. Someone had found my swim pass the day before and turned it in. A very small thing but it added to my happiness. I love it that someone turned in my swim pass instead of using it. And I love it even more that the lifeguards know I am Tree Fitz. I love the lifeguards, of course. I love all the other swimmers, too.

There is one guy, age 84, who swims with a baseball cap. I look everyday but, so far, he manages to swim for half an hour without ever getting the hat wet. Is he bald under there? Does he wear it to protect himself from the sun? There is another guy, also 84, who has a very fat belly. It sticks straight out from his frame, enormous. He swims over an hour nearly every single day -- and he has for thirty years -- I know this because he brags in line. How does his stomach manage to stay so huge when he swims so much? This guy, with the big tummy, wears a wetsuit. I can't help thinking he must wear it to, well, hide his tummy, which, of course, he cannot do: it sticks out with or without the wetsuit. It touches me to think he is self-conscious about his tummy. Also, it makes me sad, because I imagine that he has to eat huge amounts of food to maintain that tummy and still swim an hour every day.

I don't know these people's names but I love them. I used to have a much narrower perspective on what I thought it meant to love people. Now I think the capacity to love other people, and to be loved in return, is as abundant as sunlight or the stars. I have found that I can love everything upon which my eyes light, just like an infant. I am not always in such loving space but I love it when I am. I am today.

my new favorite person

A Chinese woman is part of the longstanding gang of swimmers at my new pool. She swims in my favorite lane of the pool and all the guys love her. By 'the guys', I mean the eighty-something men who swim at the same time I do everyday. I am spring chicken in this crowd. There is a pack of younger, alpha swimmers but, trust me, I belong with the geezers.

Anyway, the guys have all been friendly to me but China girl ignored me.

She went to London for a week. I was so happy she was gone because I got to swim in my sweet spot.

This morning, as I approach the pool gate, early Beatles blasting away and me dancing, the guys all said something, nodding friendliness at me and I just kept on my earphones and rocked on. China girl was back. She is sixtyish, also chicken, as my dad would have said. I was thinking "Now she'll see that I am going to become a regular too." Also, I was thinking "Why didn't she stay in London? And when is she heading to Taiwan for Christmas?"

"Why doesn't she like me?" I whined silently as I stripped down to my swimsuit poolside.

"You look fantastic, you lost weight!" said China girl. "I go away one week, come back, you look great!"

"Thanks for saying that!" I exclaimed, "I have lost ten pounds since I moved here a month ago."

"Keep up good work," she says, "By Christmas, maybe ten more pound!" And she made the thumbs up sign.

I am thinking of implementing a new policy. I am going to assume everyone is wonderful.

chica mia, mija querida

Just wunnering. . . .

I have had a particular tough day today.  I was in an old gmail email account that I don't really use anymore. For years, I used it solely for emai listservs. I stopped using it for actual email that I check daily when I moved to CA twelve years ago. Over the years, I would toggle over to check on a few list servs I watch but I have migrated any listservs I want to follow, and they are fewer and further between these days (email lists are getting old fashioned!) to my main email account.

So I am in this email account I opened around 2000, back when you had to have an invite to have a gmail account -- that long ago! -- and suddenly I see a couple emails sent from my daughter in 2012 that I had never seen.

I read them. Get this. She wrote that she loves me and she knows it hurts me that she shuns me (my language here) but she's working on connecting with me but would I please respect her privacy.

Sure, Katie Joy, I'll respect your privacy just as soon as you tell me why you shun me, for over 17 years. YOu made your cruel decision when you were still a child. In Steiner's model of human development, you aren't a fully adult human until around 28. And its been long time since you were 28 so you slash my heart every single day for a choice you made as a child.  And you talk to your dad, who, according to Hennepin County Child Protection, a child therapist specializing in sexual abuse, the Minneapolis Police, the Omaha Police and a MD in MN who examined you, incested you but I am the one you shun.   I still have the Hennepin County Child Protection report and later reports when Hennepin County appointed a guardian ad litem for Katie and ordered a full family study by Hennepin County psychologists. So I am not slandering anyone. I am referencing legal government documentation.

I think you have blocked out your memories of what he did. Paul, that therapist you saw for a few years, told me child predators count on the memory playing tricks. He told me he believed your dad was actually planting his evil onto you by suggesting I made it up. Say, do you remember when your dad suggested it was one of your male cousins, as if you didn't know it was your dad.

Is that why you shun me, because your father incested you and you have lied to yourself into believing I planted such ideas?  If that is your truth, write and tell me. And I will let go. I won't let go without you telling me why you have come close to destroying my life.  No, you have not come close. Your decision to shun me has destroyed me.  I am in emotional agony all the time, tearing up, crying for no apparent reason.

I had just finished a masters, I was launching a new career that I loved and then you shunned me and I fell apart.  I am like a baby bird fallen out of the next, all broken and unable to heal myself.

The thing about one of your August 2012 emails that I only just read this week:  it was my birthday week but instead of happy birthday you coldly threatened me with a restraining order you could not get in IL since I am, um, in California, far far away.  If you want to really have no contact or not hear from me, you really ought to stop making legal threats like calling the cops to have me arrested when someone who works in your former work building let me in -- I could have found him if the cops had come. I didn't care about the cops. Chicago police was very unlikely to show up for hours, if at all, and they would not have arrested me. I waited until you called the cops on me, and I was behaving calmly, because I wanted to see if you would actually call the cops on me when you were the only one screaming and hysterical. I was not the one acting crazy.  And then to read your restraining order threat i those August emails -- its just so cold and completely inconsistent with you statement that you love me, that you are sorry your shunning hurts me, that you are working (It had been ten years as of 2012 and now its been 16 years. . . ). . .

My mom had lots of sayings that she tended to trot out at the wrong moments, sneering at me and her other children when we were hurt and seeking her comfort, something my mom never offered. One of her sayings, one I musta heard her say, to me or others, a bajillion times was 'you get more flies with honey than you do with vinegar".

Making threats that reference the legal system, to your mother, is the way an ungrateful, unloving daughter behaves. You could have said you didn't want contact without threatening me.

so the other day, reading those 2012 emails (and how the heck did I ever miss them and it is so puzzling to me that I suddenly found them. . . I think I archived them but did not read them in 2012 for they were still bolded in my email box, the old one I haven't used regularly since 2006.. . but how would you know?)  I know you don't like me sending you notes and leaving voice messages but my behavior is not sick. I am acting like a mother who gave everything she had to give to her only child and that child shuns me.  I have been polite.

I did leave a couple wild and angry voice messages after I found your 2012 legal threats and the "I know this hurts you and I love you".  If you cannot treat me as if you love me, don't say you love me. And please, for your sake and mine, don't ever threaten me with legal shit. It is so cold. It's a hella lot like, um, your cruel father, the one our marriage counselor said had no threshold of decency. Looks like maybe your threshold of decency is also nonexistent.

Tell me why. Tell me why.

Oh, and slander?  Truth is the only defense to slander. If I am reciting Hennepin /county /child Protection documentation, that is my truth.

WTF did I do?  I've been thinking a bit about Rob Jack. He was a good kid and I liked him, and I imagine I would have liked him no matter what. ?But I really liked him because he said to you, in front of me, more than once, that it hurt him to hear you constantly put me down, to constantly complain about me when he never saw or heard me doing anything awful. Like you and he would spend time with me and he would think I was a perfectly good person but when you were alone with him, you'd denigrate me in such ugly terms. No wonder Rob broke up with you, for you showed him how unkind you could be.  Sure I have flaws, all humans do, but being cruel and lacking a threshold of decency is not one of my flaws.

as my father's life ebbed away

My father had a massive stroke that left most of his left side paralyzed. His left leg could walk in a heavy limp, he was never able to use his left arm again for anything and the left side of his face drooped frozenly. Many years before that happened, when he took me shopping for back-to-college stuff, as we walked through a parking lot to get to the department store, he saw a man with a paralyzed left arm limping. He stopped, pointed that other man out to me and he said "That's the kind of thing that could happen to me" (I guess he had been told he was at risk of stroke because he did not take care of his diabetes?). He went on a bit, saying how self conscious he would be and how unhapopy he would be. As he spoke, I have a strong intuition that a paralyzing stroke was in his future. About ten years later, it happened and then he lived a few more years, getting progressively dependent and progressively miserable. I lived in MN, he was in Chicago. I visited him a few times a year, bringing his first grandchild. Every time I saw him, he spoke of wishing he would die. Near the very end, when some of my brothers had taken over his health care choices and ignored me (they always had ignored me and were furious when I voiced, just once, an interest in our father's care and esp. his wishes).  It was customary in our family for my four brothers to bully and brow beat me. As the second oldest child, all my brothers (well, not really my baby bro David) were almost encouraged to see me as a lesser being. Encouraged by each of our parents and the culture of the fifties and sixties as I grew up.

I visited him at least once a month as he seemed to be approaching the end of his life.  I also wanted my daughter to know her grandfather as much as she could. Dad doted on all babies, esp ones related to him. How he doted on Katie, his first grandchild.

In the second to last visit, we went down to Chicago for the weekend before Katie's last week of school. It surprised me, and pleased me, when my dad urged me to stay.  He wanted to spend some time with me.  I reminded him Katie had one more week of school and we'd be back the next Friday. He said "How cares about a week of school?"  Well, Katie did. our Waldorf school was centrally important to our lives and school was indescribably important to Katie. The last week was a special week that she would have been hurt to miss.

On that visit, he was in a nursing home and not on machines. By a week later, he had been moved to a facility that provided more intensive care, like a feeding tube and oxygen mask.

In our penultimate visit, he kept asking me to pray that he die. I said I would pray that God's will unfold for him, pointing out to him that asking me to pray he died was not something I wanted to do. I did want him to end his suffering. His eyes became so expressive then. He could just about shout at me with his eyes "please let me die".

I believe he understood that two of my brothers were making the decisionsm giving docs the impression they were in charge. They did not have a power of attorney. I did not fight because I never won fights with my brothers and my dad was dying.  I reasoned that the last thing any of us needed was more sadness. So i sat with dad as much as I could, leaving Katie with sisters-in-law.

When  returned and he had the food tube in his mouth, he could not talk. His eyes said it all. As I stood next to him, whispering about my love for him and telling him Katie stories in hopes of pleasing him, he kept on begging me to let him go. He was in a small room with another patient in the next bed. I got close to whisper for a bit of privacy. As I whispered, I knew what I wanted to say to him.

"Dad" I whispered with as much loving tenderness as I have ever had in me, "I can't do anything about the feeding tube or the oxygen mask but you can. Joe and Tom would not listen to me even if I asked them to remove the tubes.  But you can let go dad. You can close your eyes, pray, feel reverent and just let go."

My dad died within two hours of what I said.  I never told anyone I had said that, except my aunt the nun. She, ever the pip (she left the convent later on, married a divorced priest, even scored a pension from her order when released from her vows!), called me to find out if my dad was really truly near death because she didn't wnt to drive from Chicago's North Side (she was my mom's sister, not dad's) if he wasn't really dying. I described my last visit with him, talking to her within an hour of the visit.

I was often challenged by my aunt the nun, tales for another time maybe. Even as a young child, I thought she was condescending, with a superior air. I heard her dissing my mom a few times, accusing my mom of slovenliness, my mom with four, then five, then six kids and Jody just sitting there criticiing her kitchen table for not being properly cleaned. Jody did not lift a finger to help. And damn, that table top was not dirty.  I didn't discuss my contempt of my aunt the nun with any siblings for a long long time.

But the day my dad died, probably the one time in my life when my aunt the former nun (now former) approved of something I did, she said, after I told her I had told him he could just let go and his suffering could end, she said "Good. Someone should be talking to him like that. it sure sounds like he is dying. I guess I will drive down to see him tomorrow."

He was gone before that tomorrow.

After talking to Jody, I rounded up my kid, my three nieces (i have more, three were around then) and took them all to the Aquarium and the Natural History Museum. These museums are separated by Chicago's 8 or 10 lane Outer Drive but there is a passenger tunnel under the speeding cars and the wide roadbed.

Katie loved the coral island. I treated the girls to a dolphin show. Or some fish show. Then we straggled over to the Natural History museum. Mainly the girls wanted to see the gigantic dinosaur skeleton in the lobby.

I had gone to both these museum dozens, if not hundreds, of times with my dad.

The girls, that day, were taken by the pedestrian, underground walkway. If they screamed, it echoes rilliantly. So they ran around there like crazy creatures screamint, listening to the echoes of their screams and running around to see how their noise changed as they changed positions.

I left them in that tunnel and sat on one of the ledges along the grand staircase up to the entry to the Natural History museum. I saw, feeling myself to be in a bit of a bubble. The girls noise recedes, the traffic noise, which whips around both sides of the Natural History museum muted and I flashed on endless scenes with my dad at the Aquarium, the Natural History Museum, amusement parks and, the favorite museum, I think, of all my siblings and me:  the Museum of Science and Industry.

My reverie was lovely. And gentle. In my mind's eye and in my heart, dad became a gentle man doting on his little children.

And then I felt him pass.

Later, describing that scene to my mother, who happened to be in Ireland with her second husband that day, she asked me the time, converted the Chicago time to Ireland time and said she is sure she had felt him pass at the same time.

I loved every squeal my nieces and daughter made.  I felt wave after wave of wonderful love. My dad's love for me and all my siblings.  My dad's love for all those noisy, happy girls, who were aware their grandpa was very sick and likely dying but as kids, they remained happy in each moment.

Gradually the actual physical scene I was in returned to my focus. It was a hot day in June.  I was grateful the girls had been apart from me as I sat with my dad, energetically, as he passed.

And I was grateful dad had been able to release himself from his suffering.

I would give anything if he were still here. I wish he had taken care of himself. He would be in late nineties now.

a sense of foreboding

My inner voice has become much more noticeable than it ever has been. I did something today that I kepet putting off because everytime I considered getting the task done, I felt queasy and miserable. So today I finally went to the place, did the paperwork. And it was a disaster. Really awful. I came home having wildly suicidal thoughts, which I don't have much anymore.

I would like to be not alive but I am disinclined to suicide.

But when I hear someone died, famous or not famous, I listen for the age they were and if it was very old, I cringe. I don't want to live to be 97. Take me out now.

dang dang dang

I decided I would make another cranberry pear pie, to take to my weekly writing group tomorrow. The pie dough was moldy, the pears were too mushy. I waited too long. And before I realized it was too late, I had poured my Canadian maple syrup on the cranberries only to see that the cranberries were inedible. Well, if I were truly starving, I'd probably have eaten most of the stuff I just mentioned but, so far, I skip moldy, spoiled food. Call me fussy.