damaged metabolism, Wendall Barry

©My weight issues are complicated by having been misdiagnosed as a Type II diabetic when a new endocrinologist, about a year ago, confirmed I am Type I. 12 years misdiagnosed. and for another 12 years before that, I took  meds that damage the body's metabolism, with no warnings that one side affect is serious weight gain. I ballooned up on those drugs, sent myself ceaseless message of self hate. I used to wonder if I was sleep-eating but as the only adult in my home, I was the only person who brought in food and it didn't disappear so it was unlikely I was eating unconsciously. Note:  years later when my teen daughter became anorexic/bulimic, I would certainly notice when large quanities of food disappeared overnight.

At a ten day silent retreat once, on the final day when they let you talk, a bulimic living with her parents had taken the retreat just to get away form food cause she couldn't afford any medical treatment (altho if so sick she could not work, and she was, she was likely eligible to be disabled and get on Medicaid and even Medicare . . . another story). I told her I was pretty sure I knew within just a week or two when my daughter's eating disorder got serious. The young woman panicked, wondering if her parents 'knew'. She pressed and pressed me to tell her how I 'knew'.

I told her I did not see how a parent living with a child could not know. Either you see your child is losing weight rapidly or you notice massive amounts of food disapearing. You don't bring in groceries into your own home, and then see they have disappeared and not notice, IF you are living consciously. I suggested that maybe her parents didn't know but that could only be because they were in denial. The poor gal pressed and pressed me to tell me exactly what I noticed. She was so panicked to think her parents might know.


I don't see how someone could live with their child, even an adult college grad child, and not notice if mass quantities of food disappeared from the kitchen overnight most nights. That young woman was positive her parents didn't know. I said "If they don't know, they don't want to know. It's called denial." Poor thing. She couldn't wait to get home and look for signs indicating whether her parents 'knew'.

Some think anorexia-bulimia are different disorders but many medical experts see it as the same disorder, at different ends of the spectrum. Food addicts likely fit into the spectrum. Many bulimics are fat, many are not.  When my daughter stops starving, she invariably slides into binge eating, unless, I imagine, she is in recovery programs and taking very good care of herself. And I sure hope she is, of course. Once she shared an apartment with a non-lover guy (the guy was gay) and she would often eat every bite of food in the house, even things that are unpalatable, like a jar of relish. Then she ate a box of laxatives.  When my daughter got into better treatment programs -- the quality of eating disorder treatment ranges greatly, as in most things -- she was told that eating laxatives as she did turned some of her organs into messy sponges, causing permanent damage from the harsh chemicals in the laxatives. Knowledgeable docs could exam her for two minutes and know she was binge-purging.  Her roommate would be so angry. He'd get up for breakfast and there was no food in the house. He was abusive to her, apart from issues of her binging on his food. Several years ago, he contacted me on this blog asking how to get in touch with her. He said he was in recovery and wished to make amends to her. I was glad to hear it but I could not tell him how to contact her. Now I know where she works. I think he found her anyway.

Eating disorders are like alcoholism in that one is in recovery forever but never fully recovered.

For many, bulimics can be hard to spot. Some bulimics gain weight, even with lots of purging. But some don't. And some eating disorder experts now consider folks who compulsively overeat but do not purge to also be bulimics, bulimics who don't purge.  Some bulimics appear normal size but they maintain that appearance of normality through purging, which is wicked hard on the body.  Your spleen, liver, pancreas, etc. all become like sieves and spongey if you are putting a whole box of laxatives through your body every day.  Other bulimics make themselves vomit and all the vomiting destroys their teeth:  the stomach acids are wicked hard on tooth enamel.

So do I have an eating disorder?  I don't think so. I believe prescription drugs have destroyed my metabolism, which caused rapid weight gain in my early thirties. Once a human body develops lots  fat cells, our evolutionary biology is designed to hang onto the fat for survival, which is why folks lose and, so often, easily regain.

I very genuinely do not believe I have an eating disorder. Maybe I am in denial. Denial is tricky. I believe I have a damaged metabolism. Three of prescription drugs I took daily for over ten years have had class actions won against them for causing the onset of diabetes and this happens because the drugs affect our metabolism. And recently, I have seen ads on my gmail mailbox informing me that Lipitor is being sued in class action because it is now believed to cause the onset of diabetes in some women. I don't think I fit that criteria because the women who develop diabetes on Lipitor tend to be slender.  I did take three drugs for over ten years that have also been been sued by class action and the petitioners won, proving the drugs damage metabolism and seem to contribute significantly to the onset of diabetes.

Can such damage be healed? And if so, how? Not more drugs, that's for sure. And not the typical highly processed American crap diet.

I don't think about the damage prescription drugs have done to me too much. It's hard to know where who I am, how and what I ate and how drugs I took for over ten years affected my body.  My metabolism is definitely very damaged.

On the bright side, I am down 90 pounds from my all time high. I haven't been at my all time high in many years but my set point seems to still be a pretty high one, a fat one.  I can get down much lower than where I am now but I quickly bounce back to my set point.

So. I am way down but still fat. And I would like to move through the world as a not-fat person.  I've been obese about 30 years. I've always thought I'd lose it. I have lost a lot but I can't seem to get to onederland, which is below 200.

And being fat is, by no means, my only issue.  I am lonely, with poor support in my life.  I am so unhappy. I long for a life partner but I am not really fit to be someone's life partner.  I don't see how a person can be happy and well if they are as isolated as I am. I am so vulnerable these days that I am not really fit to form close bonds with anyone.

I know many people find support at support groups. And the world is full of them. Which ones are aright for me? And when I am as vulnerable as I am just now, going to any event with other people around is overwhelming.  I keep thinking if I just had a couple best friends, like I always used to have.  But I am too shakey to develop new friends.

I read somewhere, once, that someone with borderline personality disorder is a bit like someone with no skin. That makes me think of a burn victim, also someone without skin.  When I am emotionally unwell, I have no skin and I am unfit to be around others but i can't get well in isolation. Chicken. Egg.

I feel like I am the emotional equivalent of a quadriplegic -- not to downplay the serious nature of being a quad. I feel I can't control anything in my life so I hunker down in my home like I'm in a bunker, holding on to just survive. Just surviving is not enough.  I don't feel I am living a life worth living. But who wants to befriend someone in excrutiating emotional pain.

I just remembered an exchange I had about 8 years ago with someone i met at a conference. I wrote to him that I felt excrutiating pain and he wrote back in what I am sure was unintended condescension telling me something like "Tut tut, I am sure excrutiating it an exaggeration."  I think he felt uneasy imaging me in excrutiating pain so he just tried to erase my truth, like he was editing a paper only I had shared my truth. I am often in excrutiating emotional pain. It is very hard to love someone in the kind of pain I get into. But I am lovable. And with understanding and caring and love, I can, do and have formed some rich, loving, lasting friendships. Just not lately. No new hones.  I have peopple who love me but they mostly live far away. The few locals that 'love' me spend little, if any time with me and time with people is what I need.

Around and around I go. What to do?

Have you ever done a major housecleaning project and as you work on the project, everything reaches a point of chaos and it is easy to feel overwhelmed? But you know if you just keep going, doing one thing at a time, order will be restored?  I feel like my emotional and social lives are in a damaged, chaotic state but at any moment, things could improve. And in the meantime, I can eat carefully, exercise and maintain my physical health as best I can.

Maintaining my emotional health seems impossible when I am as isolated as I am but going to groups is just beyond my capacity. So I sit. Which reminds me of a lovely verse by the farmer-poet-essayist Wendall Barry:

willing to die'
you give up your will'
be still
until'
moved by what moves all else'
you move

I am being still, waiting to be moved. It's hard work.

We--tell a Hurt--to cool it, by Emily Dickinson

The Black Berry—wears a Thorn in his side—
But no Man heard Him cry—
He offers His Berry, just the same
To Partridge—and to Boy—

He sometimes holds upon the Fence—
Or struggles to a Tree—
Or clasps a Rock, with both His Hands—
But not for Sympathy—

We—tell a Hurt—to cool it—
This Mourner—to the Sky
A little further reaches—instead—
Brave Black Berry— 

©I am not a poetry scholar, altho lately I have been thinking I might be a poet. I am making some serious poetry attempts. Not necessarily serious poems, either by tone or talent, just serious in my effort.

And I am not a literary critic or analyst.

But I love this poem and I esp. love my interpretation of it. I believe Dickinson uses the blackberry as a metaphor for how fragile we humans are. The blackberry surrounds itself with thorns, is prickly in order to be able to grow. Without prickly brambles, birds and other animals would make off with all the blackberrires. It's perfectly okay for animals to eat blackberries. Food is not on earth just for humans.

I think the central line, and theme, of this poem is "We-tell a Hurt-to cool it". She beautifully descrbes how blackberries make their way but in doing so, she also describes how tender humans, surrounded by prickles of protection, make their way. And sometimes, when hurt, we have to tell our hurts to cool them.

Brave Black Berry. Brave humans for taking chances to love, to seek to be loved, brambles gnarl our path. Pricks can hurt us. And, being human, we can voice our hurt and lessen it. We tell a hurt to cool it.

Cheryl's rose quartz ball: feeding her heart

©My now-deceased friend Cheryl got $100 for Xmas. She knew right away what she wanted to buy:  a ball of rose-quartz. She had just visited Lynn, then my business partner. Lynn owned many crystals. One was a very large rose quartz ball, perhaps 6-7 inches in diameter. It was big.  Cheryl had slept with it during a visit to Lynn's when Lynn still lived in Balltimore. In fact, on my next visit, I insisted on sleeping with that same rose quartz. Lynn tried to talk me out of it. I only realized tonight, as I considered writing this post about Cheryl's rose quartz shopping trip, that Lynn had not really wanted me to sleep with her rose quartz ball. I insisted. Lynn said "it is cold too sleep with it, you won't like it" and I said "Nonsense, I will warm it up." And I did warm it up.  I think Lynn did not want my energy sleeping with her rose quartz.  I missed that cue and insisted on sleeping with it because Cheryl had spoken of how much she had loved sleeping with it. Why Cheryl and not me?

It was cold sleeping with it, but only at first. It warmed up. I never felt any special energy with it.  Lynn was, and I am sure still is, a very powerful woman. She probably put a block on the rose quartz for me!  Cheryl spoke of the great dreams she had, the powerful energy she had felt sleeping with that big rose quartz ball. For me, nothing.

Just after Christmas,  Cheryl asked if I would be willing to drive her to the rock shop in my car. This involved taking her non-motorized wheelchair, with me collapsing it, putting it into the car, taking it out and then lifting Cheryl into it. Work, but work I was happy to do.

To go in her motorized wheelchair, she needed her gigantic delivery van with a ramp. And the only van with with a ramp for her 300 pound electric wheelchair was her van, which meant she would have to drive. The only place to lock down her wheelchair in her van was at the driver's position, which had a tiny steering wheel with a doorknob-like handle on it to facilitate steering. Cheryl had very short arms and she could not manipulate a regular size steering wheel so part of the customizing of her gigantic van involved putting in a tiny steering wheel and then making the gas and breaks accessible near that steering wheel, accessible to her very short arms. Cheryl had explained to me that sometimes she liked to go out in a regular car like regular people.

Cheryl, now deceased, was a deformed dwarf with an extremely rare genetic disorder. The deformity was not merely being a dwarf. She had a regular human's sized head, her arms and legs were too short for her small body. On her tiny body, her head loomed large and many saw her as a freak.  Cheryl could have been in those old, gruesome circus freak shows. She was very strange looking and lived life in  a 300 pound wheelchair. Between her different appearance and the wheelchair, she was isolated from what she imagined was regular people, from ordinary living. She had mostly friends who were also very disabled. I got to know most of her disabled friends. Most of them came to our intensives over time. Quads, paraplegics, lots of cerebral palsies. I learned that all of them longed for social connections with normal people but they rarely achieved such connections. Coming to our intensives, during which participants tended to form deep bonds and then continue in the ongoing weekly community gatherings we held year round, allowed Cheryl's disabled crowd to form some close friendships with people living in normal bodies.  Cheryl and her private care attendant eventually became my main babysitter.  I sometimes wonder what my daughter thinks of that time in her life, from age five to seven or eight when her main babysitter was a deformed dwarf and a young man with mild cerebral palsy. On her own, Cheryl could not babysit because if something had happened to Rosie, Cheryl could not pick her up or tend to a cut. But Tim could.

Her arms were so short that she could not reach anything so she could not reach into the fridge to get a soda. She could not reach a stove to prepare meals. She had a 24/7 365 private care attendant. She could not get in and out of bed on her own. Or in and out of the bathroom on her own.  I believe the unmatched head and limbs were related to her genetic disorder, which was Morquio's Syndrome. The average lifespan for someone with Morquio's Syndrome is 18 years. Cheryl died when she was 32.  With Morquio's Syndrome, the bones in the body very slowly deteriorate, sorta melting away.

Cheryl had multiple spinal fusions in her life because the bone around the spinal cord protects the entire nervous system. People with Morquio's Syndrome usually die when their spinal cord has disintegrated and their spinal cord collapses and the person becomes completely paralyzed. Our spinal cords are fragile, delicate and integral to life.

I drove Cheryl's van a few times. We could put in a regular driver's seat. If Cheryl was on any outing in the van, she had to drive because the only spot for her 300 pound chair was at the driver seat.

For some reason, she asked me to take her out 'like a normal person' in my car. This meant more work for me. I had to lift the regular wheel chair in and out of the car and it was not light. And I had to lift Cheryl in and out of the car. She was not light. Having lived a sedentary life, she was very heavy.  It's not like she could exercise.  She looked like the size of a young child but she weighed over 100 pounds. A lot for me to lift.  I dropped her getting her out of the car at the rock shop. She was very nice about it, especially considering that it was late December in Minnesota. I dropped her onto ice and snow.  She said as long as I didn't mind her weight, she didn't mind getting plopped in the slushy snow.  I felt bad but not for long. Cheryl was too happy to be out on what she called a normal friend outing, in a car, not in her gigantic van.

Nowadays, minivans can be retrofitted to accommodate electric wheelchairs but Cheryl had gotten a retrofitted, jumbo delivery van before the dawn of minivans.  Voc rehab would give disabled folks in wheelchairs retrofitted vans so they could work. Lots of folks told voc rehab they wanted to work, got the vans and then stopped working because all they had really wanted was the van.  I imagine scoring a retrofitted van from voc rehab is a lot harder nowadays.

Anyway.  I could say more about that van, and esp. the surreal experience of navigating a gigantic van with super-hyper-power-steering from a five inch steering wheel. The wheel was so small I had to use the doorknob-like stub on it, too, because the span was too small for me to use as a steering wheel, too small for me to turn it without the knob. The knob was for Cheryl, because her very short arms could not turn the tiny, five-inch steering wheel without the knob.  The gas and brake pedals were hand-operated, right next to the tiny steering wheel. Surprisingly, I got used to the weird driving set up quickly. All cars should have such sharp, easy steering.

We got into  the crystal store. Cheryl knew exactly what she wanted. If the store had any rose quartz ball for $100 or less, she was going to buy it. It had one, one that was about three inches, maybe 3.5 inches, in diameter. It was actually perfect for Cheryl since she was very small. It was about as big, proportionally, to her, as Lynn's big ball was to Lynn. Lynn's rose quartz ball was about six inches in diameter. And that was, ultimately, what Cheryl wanted, to be like Lynn.

That's all we did. I picked her up, loaded, unloaded, loaded, unloaded. The wheelchair was hard to unload and load. Cheryl was hard to unload and unload.  Cheryl's joy at being in my shitty old car -- I think I still had the Geo Metro at that point and it was on its last legs, chugging just barely -- and being out in the world like, as she kept saying, a real person, and spending her $100 Xmas gift from her parents on something they strongly disapproved of was worth the slight burdens.

Cheryl squealed delightedly as she told me her parents would be appalled to learn what she had spent their $100 Christmas gift on. This added, I think, to the joy of owning a rose quartz ball.

I can hear Cheryl laughing, smirking, giggling about how she had told her mother she was going to spend the money on a rose quartz ball. Her mother was upset, said it was a waste of money to buy something Cheryl didn't need.  What was she supposed to do?  Be practical with a present?

She was being practical, I told her.  She was feeding her heart.

I get to want what I want: purple flourite is not rose quartz

©Katie and I often hung out in a crystal shop. It surprises me that I don't see many crystal stores here in hippie-dippie N. California. There is a shop on Telegraph, a dingy shop that is uninviting, sells only small bits of crystals. I have not seen a good "old-fashioned" crystal/rock shop in the Bay Area. A crystal is not something I would easily buy online.  I respond with deep visceral responses to stones; that's how I know when I have to buy one. Or should buy one.

I guess a couple of the street vendors on Telegraph sell rocks but, again, it's mostly small ones.

This crystal shop Katie and I used to go to was on University in Avenue, just across the freeway from Minneapolis, near where the Minnesota Women's Press had its offices.

This shop I remember sold smaller crystals but not teeny bits of things. Who wants a chip of rose quartz? Everyone wants, at least, a piece big enough to fold inside one's hand and be unseen, right? That's pretty small. Little bits of stone are boring. Still, if it is all you can afford, go for it.

This rock shop played New Age music, had each crystal displayed reverently as if it was an art gallery and not a rock shop. And it separated the kinds of stones.

One year, post-Thanksgiving, Katie and I stopped in to browse. We almost never bought anything. People used to give ue crystals.  No one gives me crystals today. Gee, I wish someone would. I love receiving crystals.

My former business partner, Lynn, once gave me a tiny, very faintly pink piece of rose quartz. She said she saw an angel in the stone. And so did Katie and I. I wonder what happened with that one. Katie took some stones with her to college. Maybe she took that one. It is not one I would have readily released. Altho at one point, just before I turned fifty and I was going to kill myself before I turned fifty, I sent Katie a lot of stuff, reasoning there was no one near where I lived that would send my things to my child. So I tried to send her anything of value. I was deadly serious and my use of the word deadly is not intended as a pun; it is intended to indicate that I was, quite literally, deadly determined to end my life.

I guess I may have sent some crystals to Katie then. And I also remember giving away some of my bigger ones to the Spirited Work silent auctions.  Our former friend Joni had given me a big hunk of brown flourite for Xmas one year. Joni, unable to resist bargains, had found a stash of big hunks of brown-hued glourite for sale and bought them all. So everyone she loved got a hunk of flourite.

I never liked that flourite, altho I felt guilty that I did not like it.  I think its provenance had something to do with my dislike. If Joni had bought me any crystal because she felt called to buy it for me, I would have treasured it and likely still have it. But she bought a stack of bargain stones. Boring.

Anyway, one year in the lead-up to Xmas, Katie and I were in a great crystal store in St. Paul. We knew all the clerks and the owner because we liked to hang out. It was run by childless lesbians who always seemed to love Katie.   With Christmas in the air, Katie lingered, as she always did, over the many large, inviting pieces of rose quartz. I was in another section, drawn to some other stone. I don't remember which stone I was drawn to, only that I was not feeling the rose quartz.

Besides, we had a huge hunk of rose quartz, a really big one. And a bunch of little ones. And Lynn's tiny one with the angel in it.  I was not feeling rose quartz that day.

Katie said "I know, Mom, I will buy you some rose quartz for your Xmas present."

I said "I don't want rose quartz. I want some of this."  I want to say I wanted rhodochrosite cause that stone is really hot for me but I don't think I ever saw any rhodochrosite in that rock sthop. Rhodochrosite is somewhat rare in USA rock shops. I ask every time I pass one and if a shop has any, it's little bitty bits.  So, altho this is kinda boring, I think I told Katie that day that if she got me a crystal for Xmas, I hoped it would be amythyst. Boring, I know.  I don't really remember which stone I said I was gravitating towards. I only remember not feeling the rose quartz that Katie was gushing over. Her offer to give it to me was loving and joyful.

She said "But I want to buy some rose quartz.!!!" kinda in a whine.  Plaintive, y'know?

I said "You can give me rose quartz if you want to and if you do, I will treasure it because it came from you but, Katie, my love, I get to want what I want. You can give me what you want but if you want to give me what I want, you will give me some of this."

I remember now. It was a cubist chunk of purple flourite. It was not amethyst. It was purple flourite. She did end up buying it for me. I wonder what happened to it?  It's lone gone.

Then the shop clerk said "Excuse me, I hope it doesn't seem like I am eavesdropping but the store is small and I can't help but hear you. I always enjoy listening to you and you daughter. You are so good with her. What you just said, telling her she could buy you what she wanted but that you get to want what you want was brilliant."

I was flattered.

Then the sale person said "If you ever need a babysitter, I'd love to babysit for you. For free.  You and your kid seem to cool. I'd like to spend time with your daughter."

I guess I did not welcome her offer, although I remember internally feeling grateful and internally I was already thinking of when I might use her offer. She did not give me  a phone number or her name so I think I concluded her offer was not fully genuine, that she was just having fun hanging out with us.

Fukushima radiation, fracking, GMO seeds and food: Edvard Munch

Edvard Munch's Scream paintings capture my take on what I see unfolding in this world.

I vaguely recall a musical, that I never saw, that had as its title (I think, fuzzily) "Stop The World I Want to Get Off."

I think of Ray Bradbury's brilliant short story (or was it a novela?), "Something Wicked This Way Comes".

I keep thinking about the documentary Hannah Arendt I saw in early August with someone who has severed our connection.   The severing is cutting me really hard in this moment but it will pass. Time doesn't heal wounds, in my experience, but it does make them more bearable. Losing him is going to hurt forever. So I can't think of the documentary without thinking of losing the man I saw it with. Not a lover, not a friend after all.  The documentary was as much about this time on earth as it was about her analysis of the rise of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany. A German Jew who escaped a death camp, who studied philosophy with Heidegger and was his lover at times, and a woman, no less, she became a super nova as a philosopher. Her brilliance was such that a female, immigrant philosopher could not be overlooked.

Arendt covered the Adolf Eichmann trial for New Yorker magazine. Eichmann was the main architect of the deadly efficient system the Nazi's implemented to slaughter 4.5 to 6 million Jews and a few million others, like lots of Poles, that tend to get overlooked. After watching him insist that he did not hate the Jews, that he had merely done his job well, done what he was given to do, she said she believed he did not hate the Jews. That he personified the banality of evil.  Evil is banal because evil is what happens when human beings dissociate from their own humanity. Cut off from one's humanity, which involves caring about other humans, one can do anything. One can destroy the world economy by engineering a real estate price escalation, selling securities build on the shifting sands of fraudulent mortgages, investment bankers selling the shit securities to their clients and then covering their asses by betting (investing) against the crap paper they were selling. Is it less evil to destroy millions of lives so one can get richer, when one is already rich than it is to kill millions?  The question seems loaded. Many would say killing is worse than anything else. And maybe it is. But I am so unsure about this.

Nuclear reactors are evil. Didn't they have their start in the bombs we dropped on Japan? Unleashing radioactive danger for hundreds and thousands of years to make money generating electricity using antique nuclear reactors that should have been shut down long ago is also a way of killing people. Is it better if you kill people slowly, torment them with miserable lives and blame them if they don't just suck it up and figure out a way to be happy after being screwed over?

I don't want to live in this world. I don't want to be.

I am the person screaming in those Munch Scream paintings.

And I don't think suicide is any kind of escape. I have a strong sense that it is impossible to escape the cosmos. That if I kill myself, and I often long to, I'll just come back with an even suckier karma and the world will be worse. As ugly as the world is now, and yeah, yeah, I know many believe in unicorns, miracles, prayer and that we can co-create a more beautiful world, I don't want to live in the future, which I am positive is going to suck worse. For a long, long time.

David Hockney's BIG show at the DeYoung

©  This is an undisciplined ramble. I talk about lots of stuff but I am going to leave it up for now cause there are a couple things here that are working me and it will help me work knowing they are up. No one really reads me, maybe a friend once in awhile, but mostly it's just me here. And I can do whatever I want. Yes, Katie K, I can use your name and claim you as my daughter. You said "I allow you to use my name on your blog". You don't let me honey.  You can't stop me from stating facts and it is an irreversible fact that I am your mother.  I could write about very personal, private aspects of your past and as long as I got the facts right, you couldn't stop me.

If anyone is reading this, it's a mess. But it is my copyrighted mess. I'll write a better entry on Hockney. I think the show is set me off kilter. Well, maybe I am always off kilter so more off than usual.


First, I need to clear the air for my own sake. I like post-modern art, contemporary art that is not always pretty to look at, which is about something, makes a statement. SFMOMA did a major retrospective of Anselm Kiefer just as I moved to the Bay Area. I went once a week to see the show the whole time it was open because I could not get enough of Kiefer's thinking, and his vision. He had a few beautiful paintings in the show but there were also several lead airplanes.

The lead airplanes are metaphors but there they are black, lumpy, dead. Lead airplanes do not fly. Many debate whether some of his work is direct commentary on the post-Nazi legacy of Germany. My favorite lead airplane is presented with a print of Alfred Durer's etching from, I think, the fourteenth century called 'Melancolia'. This etching is in the NYC Metropolitan museum. Next time I am at the Metropolitan, I will have to take a long look at the original.  In Melancolia we see a large angel with gigantic white wings, the classic biblical image, at least as presented by artists since artists painted. A larger than a human, human-like body and gigantic, beautiful, white wings. Painting about bible stuff has been a common theme in 'classical art' since forever.  I am sure art museums in Iran or Egypt don't have room after room filled with Christian bible stories pictorially represented but any Western art museum that has a comprehensive collection of Western European art history has lots of bible stories.

In Durer's time, melancholia was believed to be what happened to people who had soaring visions for how wonderful human life on earth could be; then when they see the gap between their visions and the reality that the vision will not be reached, at least in their lifetimes, they fall to earth, like a lead airplane. They become depressed when they realize life is not going to be as wonderful as they know it can be. So far, it is my favorite explanation for depression.

In durer's etching, we see the angel has a broken wing. Broken-winged angels and lead airplanes cannot fly. The Third Reich began with high ideals but it was missing something essential and it could not fly.

That's my kind of art. It gets me thinking big, my being soars.

Pretty stuff to look at is nice. I like seeing artists' take on the world. If artists are different than the rest of us, if they are more sensitive and attuned, and their art is their attempt to show us what they see and feel, I want to look at their work and stretch to try to see what they see and feel.

At the same time, capturing any individual's vision of nature, or of humans, or even bible stories presented in visually brilliant pictures is dull to me.

Hockney's show, in my humble, uninformed opinion is gobsmackingly gorgeous. BIGGER is the name of the show and it is not just because it is one of the biggest shows the DeYoung has ever mounted. There are many very big pieces in the show. And it is not a retrospective of his entire oeuvre.  It is, mostly, fairly recent stuff. I think the oldest piece I saw was 2001 and he's an old man, been working a long, long time.

I went hoping to see the early California Hockney.  I saw a Hockney years ago, when I still lived in the Midwest, and the water in a swimming pool, with a glimpse of the ocean in the distance, is still in my mind's eye. The blue won't leave me. Pretty, penetrating paintings.

And pretty much everything in this DeYoung show is pretty and penetrating. And contemporary. One of the first galleries in the show is a gigantic collection of photographs portraying Spring 2013.

Hockney began using water colors for the first time only very recently. He uses paper, as is traditional for water color. He uses pieces of paper and sometimes needs to use several pieces to capture his whoile image. When I first read that he did water color on paper, I hoped it was wet on wet water color painting. I'd like to see what he does with wet on wet water color. An artist has to develop a highly refined technique to do wet on wet water color painting. With a wet paper canvas, the paint seeps fast. The artist has to be quite expert to control what wet water color does as it moves on wet paper. But he's 'just' painting on dry paper with water color. Interesting. I bet it helped him see the world different, to see pictures emerge from a new medium.

Photography is new to him. Hockney plays with technology. He has several galleries full of art 'painted' on an iPad or else photographed with an iPad.  He also uses digital film, maybe also on an iPad -- I have to go back. I rushed through the show yesterday. It was just so much.  I am fuzzy on the technology tools he is using.

I have heard that artists have begun using technology to create art. And I knew this all along. I remember Nam Jun Paik's early video work. Nam Jun Paik, if I am recalling his name right, was a Vietnamese American who was one of the first artists to use video in his work, to create an image somewhat comparable to a painting with video. Gosh, he was using video in the eighties, maybe the seventies.

Of course creative types, some of them, are going to see technology as new tools and toys for their work. Plus an artist has ongoing dialogues with art, other artists, art history and the whole world. If the world is dialoging nowadays with videos shot on iPads, the artist has to keep up. Some of them.

I also quite love artists who do their thing, like a painter who paints realistic, figurative works her whole career. She never leave oil painting. She never does assemblage. She doesn't try all kinds of things. She paints beautiful paintings her whole career. Like Diebenkorn did. And nothing wrong with that.

There is one gallery in the show that filled me up in an instant. I pretty much ran through the rest of the show because this one gallery was so intensely beautiful, visceral. Mesmerzing, really. It had four large digital photos of exquisitely beautiful shots of nature. A stand of trees is one.  Another shows a  road through a canopy of trees that, on the horizon seem to form a portal to another dimension but it is literally a photo of a real road.  These are not static photos. But they aren't quite video, or movies. It is like Hockney has brought a natural stand of trees into the gallery using the photo-digital-moving technique he uses. These 'pictures' take 20 to 30 minutes to run through the whole picture. It is quite a lot like standing outside, watching tree leaves quiver with the wind and noticing how the sunlight subtly changes one second to the next. At first I thought I was looking at four photos, stills, but then the photos reveal themselves as alive. It is close to looking out a window at a forest, or a meadow. Only you are inside an art gallery.

These moving pictures are very, very beautiful.  A part of me is weeping as I remember the visceral experience of seeing them.

The galleries were very crowded. It was a special preview day for members.  But the gallery was pretty packed. I will go back next week at ten a.m. on Tuesday, often one of the slowest times of the week in a museum. The weekend tourist crowd is gone. I like empty museums.

One of my favorite things about being a docent was being able to look at the art alone once in awhile. As a docent, preparing for my custom tours, I could go into the museum on Mondays, when it was closed. During my training, which only had four docent students, we had the run of the whole museum. The teacher and four students.  It's very different, seeing art in a still setting.

I'm rambling. My thoughts scattered more than usual.

A quite large moving, living photo of moving living nature. Wow. These pieces evoked for me very very late Monet.

One of the most moving experiences I have had as an art viewer was a gigantic, comprehensive Monet show at the art institute of Chicago, my home art museum. My mom tried to take me there at least once a month the whole time I was growing up. I guess that's where I got my love of going to art museums a lot. Mom, thank you. You got a few things right, although only a few. Instilling a love of art in me was an eternal, infinite and precious gift.

Anyway, a gigantic amount of space was given over to the Monet show. And the show was mobbed all day every day. I made several trips to Chicago just to see the show. It was a great show, showing his earliest works, bringing you along as he evolved as a painter. You see him moving towards abstraction. I had always loved  a series of paintings called "Morning on the Seine" which are paintings of the exact same spot at different moments in the early morning. From one moment to the next, the color and light change completely, right? This happens all day long every day. Color and light are always changing. Monet tried to capture, with oil paint and a canvas how the color and light of one spot on the Seine changed, one moment to the next.

In this Monet show, you move through his whole oeuvre, beginning to end. The show was brilliantly curated. And then you come to the final gallery or two where you see massive paintings of water lilies painted in such microscopic detail but kinda blown up so it doesn't, at first, seem like you are looking at anything but color and light. your eyes adjust and you 'see' 'oh, more water lilies, closer up'. you can almost see in the artist's mind.

So in this Monet show, you walk into gigantic galleries and see his final, gigantic paintings on the wall. It was such a penetrating experience. My whole being weeped in joy, in appreciation of the beauty. Why don't I spend my life making images of this world's exquisite beauty? I could, at the least, appreciate the gobsmacking beauty that drenches every moment of my life, even in my apartment when it is a mess and I didn't do the dishes. There's a series of paintings for you:  my messy bedroom, shown with the daylight at different moments on a single morning. At 7:02 show my room and the light exactly how it looks at 7:02. Then show it again at 7:04.

If I were a painter, or any medium of an artist, I would not want to paint my room -- although artists often do paint their bedrooms. I have a poster of Van Gogh's little bedroom and its narrow single bed on my college dorm wall.  Diebekorn did paintings not only of his bedroom but one of a close friend when the friend died.  Artists often do bedrooms, often with no one in them.

I guess artists often paint everything if you put them all together.

If I could paint right now, I would do a series that showed the rounded tower-like end of my apartment building. I live on the top floor. When I awake each morning, the first thing I see is where the light is on that rounded end of the building.  The rooms in that rounded end are curve, with a curved wall of windows. When I first moved here, I coveted one of those rooms but they only are given to two bedroom and three bedroom units. I have a one bedroom.

But I have developed this habit of seeing the round tower across the courtyard outside my bedroom window as a kind of sundial.  I have spent many moments, over five years now, trig=ng to memorize what the light looks like on that tower in my first look of each day. And then, usually, not always, I try to guess what time it is based on where the shadows are, where the light is. Since I keep odd hours, the light is always in a different spot. Past noon, there is no shadow on the tower. Very early in the morning, most of the tower might be in shadow for the sun has not risen high enough to cast out shadow.

Say, what an interesting thing to paint. Sun and shadow.

In Mexican bullfight rings, and in Spain, too, you can buy tickets for Sol or Sombra, Sun or Shade. One costs more than the other. I'm not sure which costs more. Does a bullfighting goer prefer to have the sun in their eyes, to feel the sun on their bodies? Or does a bullfighting fan prefer shade, to keep cool and keep their eyes clear to see the bull gored to death?  i don't know any details because I never went to a bullfight. it was hard to go into a bullfighting stadium and just see the stadium.

Honestly, how can civilized human beings, and millions of them at that, be football fans? Football does not seem very different to me than the Romans throwing Christians into a pit with a lion or two and watch the 'show'.  We know that football batters the brains of the men who play it. We know it is ritualized war. It is a brutal physical battle between opposing teams. What does it say about humans that the stadiums get packed and on Super Bowl Sunday people have parties to watch the war game. Late in life, many of the players will be befuddled, suffering from brain damage. Those are real bodies taking hard hits, literally rattling human brains. That's entertainment?

An acquaintance, a male, told me when I asked him if he watched pro sports. He said he did as a young man bu then he realized it was, as he put it, a colossal waste of time. In recent years, he has formed a close bond with a woman who considers him a key member of her family, her family of friends. She's a big football fan. She is a lovely, brilliant, refined woman but she is one of those fanatical fans of ritualized war, a 'game' in which men are bloodied and battered and we now know their brains are damaged. She's drawn him into going to the ritualized war games and Super Bowl parties.

Soccer?  I love soccer. Baseball. I have enjoyed going to games when a man I loved was into baseball. I liked learning the rules of the game, learning all the subtle things going on in a game, whether sitting in the sun or the shade. Say, wouldn't sol or sombra depend on the time of day? Baseball and football stadiums just sell seats and the pricing is based on how good your view of the game is. I have never heard of sports tickets in USA sold based on sun or shade.  In football, you can to be close to the fifty yard line, close to the middle of the action. In baseball, it is desirable to be behind home plate, or near first or third. And no one wants to be up at the top, far away from the game. The closer you are to the game, the better.

But football?

Now don't get me wrong.  When I was married, I went to tons of college and pro sports games. I did it because my husband (and before that, my boyfriend) loved sports. And I had fun learning about hockey (his game-- captain of his college team), basketball (Kevin Mchale, who went on to be a huge superstar for the Boston Celtics, played as an undergrad at the U. of MN. when we were in law school -- college games were cheap). The U. of MN. hockey team comprised most of the team that won the USA's first gold medal in hockey at the Olympics and the coach of the U of MN team, Herb Brooks, coached that team to Olympic gold. And my ex and I had watched most of the gold medal players and Herb Brooks for years. it made the Olympic hockey games that year so amazing for us. We had watched those young men form into the brillilant players that won that gold medal. We watched Herb Broks coach them, up close. A hockey arena at U of MN, at least back in the seventies, was a fairly cosy affair. I have heard there is a new hockey arena, and basketball arena. I bet the new ones are bigger.  I like small arenas but more seats mean more money.

Whatever happened to Hockney?

Morning pages. Who is the writer who wrote a book on creativity that advises artists, and esp. writers to get up and first thing every single day is to just write for a certain period of time. Keep the pen moving she says. I have owned the book, taken a couple classes designed to follow the book.  Julia Cameron?  That's  a guess and I am not going to stop and google it now. I guess this is a morning pages kind of day. Rambling.

There is so much gorgoeusness, gobsmacing beauty in the Hockney show. Someone could spend the day of the Super Bowl at an art museum instead of watching ritualized war that batters the brains of the atheletes. It's a blood vicious sport and it creeps me out that it is so popular. Soccer is played around the world and I know it can get very intense in some parts of the world. But I don't think the atheletes brains are bludgeons with body checks made by 300 pound coke machines posing as humans.

I had a boyfriend in high school who was the left defensive tackle for his boys' school football team.  he got a football scholarship to a Big 8 school. I have heard the Big 8 and Big 10 have changed since I was in h.s. and I never cared. I think my h.s. boyfriend was stupid. No, I know he was stupid. His first ACT score was so low that the unviersity said he had to take it again and boost his score or he wouldn't get a scholarship or get into their university -- Kansas State or Something State -- a big state university that was not a super star in football, not if they had to recruit my h.s. boyfriend. He was angry when my ACT scores were very high. I am a good test taker, I modestly demurred. I was such a dumb cluck then.

I am a dumb cluck now.

Hockney. He's 76.  He's been making art at least fifty years but he stays abreast of his time. He creates gorgeous pieces using iPads and the digital video capacity in an iPad to create gigantic-sized  videos. I just googled him and a profile categorizes his art as pop art.

I don't think the work I saw yesterday at the DeYoung is pop art. It is high level brilliant art.

In one huge gallery, the walls are covered with Hockney's small reproductions of many classical paintings. He does a kind of span of art history from around 1200 to 2013.  He represents the whole Western canon in this sprawling, gigantic piece. The walls are covered - and it is a very high big room, three sides -- with his small scale reproductions of important art from all those years.

It's a complex piece.   he captures art history but his agenda is bigger than that. It felt to me, for a few instants, as if he was trying to gobble up the all of art history, to get it all embodied in his being. And by compressing so much significant art, showing us the path of the Western canon, he is allowing us to see ourselves in that march of humanity. Plus all of the art he reproduces for the piece is gorgeous art. And it is not just about the pictures. He developed a theory that beginning around 1440, artists used camera obscura so they could paint precisely detailed paintings. I guess he wrote a book about his theory. And then he embodied his theory, showing us how paintings changed, hoping we will see the shift he theorizes occurred around 1440.  I could spend a long time in that room alone. And I will.

It was so much to take in.

I knew it was a big show. And my instinct has been that it would absorb me. So I wanted to go on the first day I could, the members-only preview yesterday, so I could get started.

I would like to be an artist. too late for me.

The life partner of an acquaintance of mine, who is himself a pretty good painter, quite her job after her mom died and her inheritance allowed her to stop working. Turns out she is an artist. I had two prints of her work on my living room walls.  I don't know her very well so I don't know if she always longed to be an artist or if the artist thing is newish. And I know my acquaintance, her life partner, cares a lot about art.

I went to the Diebenkorn with a couple friends on a couple occasions. And once I went with an acquaintance. This is the guy who said "we were never friends, we are just two people who met at a conference" so not a friend. An acquaintance. This same peach of a fellow once told me, three days before Xmas that he no longer wished to consider me a friend and he actually said "I am downgrading you to acquaintance." Taken back, I said 'thank you for telling me' and he said, sounding surprised, "You seem very calm and composed." What did he think? That I would become upset and fuss. In truth, my dad was with me in those moments when he said "i am downgrading you to aquaintance."  I heard Chuck, my dad, saying "If I were you, I'd never give this guy the time of day again.  Anyone that would say that to you isn't worthy of you.' and my dad did talk to me like that. Sometimes. And he would definitely have said that if I told him a male friend had said to me, three days before Xmas no less "I am downgrading you to acquaintance." Downgrading me. Dad would have been right! And that insensitive jerk was right:  we were never friends.ç

My dad said I was a gift and any man that didn't see me as a gift in his life was not worth a single moment of my time.

My dad was particularly wonderful while I was going through a painful custody battle divorce.  he let me vent as much as I wanted, repeating myself a lot. And he would rail about what a jerk the guy was.

A few years after the divorce, in one of the rare phone calls with my ex-husband -- must have had something to do with our daughter, because that is the only reason we ever talked to one another after we divorced -- he brought up my dad and my brother Joe. My dad and Joe had been really nice to my ex when he was my boyfriend, fiance and husband. My ex loved going to pro sports events with my dad. And Joe would roll out the hospitality for him, all warm and friendly. My ex was a knucklehead. A few years after the divorce, on a rare phone call, he said "Say, how is your dad and oe doing? You know, I go to Chicago on business somtimes. I bet if I were in Chicago and called them up, they would invite me to see them, probably go to a game. I bet they would be the same great guys they always were."  I didn't say this to him but I had to suppress what I was thinking:  my dad and Joe had never liked him. They had been nice to him because they loved me. And they hated him for the hell he put me through, abusing me, then asking me to get an abortion and then suing for the baby when I didn't.  What a clueless knucklehead to think the father and brother of the ex-wife he abused, not to mention the financial nightmare that custody battle cost. Everyone in my family helped pay for it. No one was going to let him raise Katie because of money.  My family had never liked him but had always treated him impeccably because he was my husband. But that veneer of civility would be over.

A trickster in my mind wanted to encourage Frank to give my dad and brother a call the next time he was in Chicago. I am pretty sure I know how such a call would call. "Hi Dad, it's me, your daughter's ex husband" and dad would probabl have just slammed down the phone.

©

love, lobster two for five dollars and my dad

©  I retain the copyright to everything I write. If anyone uses anything on my blog under their name, I reserve all legal rights to my copyright.

My dad was a compulsive gambler. It caused a lot of heartache and it is why my mom ultimately divorced him as soon as she climbed over my back as her household/childcare slave to get her college degree. Truth told, dad had stopped gambling by the time mom left him but it was less painful to buy the gambling excuse than to admit my mom was a grasping bitch. She just wanted to be married to a more prosperous man and she found one. She claimed three rich men proposed and she chose the one who remained calm when my sister, about age 2 at the time, had a tantrum in a restaurant. I still wish she had married the Cadillac dealer she claimed also proposed. I suspect Ron was the only deal cause other than his money, she stoooped down to marry him. Uneducted but rich and such a male chauvinist and fat - repulsively so. I used to wonder how she could stand sleeping with him on top of her.  I used to fantasize the Cadillac dealer would give all of us used cars. Not Cadillac! Ugh. I never wanted one of those. A modest used car would have been just fine.

All thru h.s. I never socialized (maybe that's why I have no memories of being ostradizd; I spent h.s. caring for my baby bro and sis. My sis born the week I graduated 8th grade and I spent more time with both those babies in the first years of their lives than mom cause mom worked half time to pay her tuition and went to college full time. Mom said 10,000 times "I am determined to finish college before you graduate h.s. and head off to college and then I'll be able to help you." I believed she meant it and I truly believed I was investing in my own future as well as hers. It wasn't until I was in my forties that I realized she was determined to graduate from college before I left home from college cause without her slave (me) she could not do college. She needed my childcare. In those days, day care centers rare. Mostly babysitters were neighbors who charged by hour and I was pressured to rush home, starting in sixth grade through 12th, to pick up the latest baby to save babysitting money. I couldn't play after school:  I had to rush to save babysit money, then tidy the house, usually do a grocery run with a stroller and one or two babies and fix dinner. I did that for six years. Then ONCE in coillege, with my dad left holding the bag for three kids in college at the same time and mom gone -- she disappeared for a couple years with my babies, which was close to what losing Katie felt like but I got them back eventually, I had loved them like my babies cause they were mine.  Once dad said at the beginning of a semester that he was having a hard time coming up with cash for books for all three of us in college so i said "I'll ask mom, she promised for years to help me." my mom had a good teacher job and a husband who paid all the household bills so her salary was pocket money and she had to pay for the kids needs but, still, all I all I asked for was $30 for books, explaining dad could give it to me, financial aid didn't cover the textbooks. and she wrote back and said, Gee, Ron and I just bought a Winnebago (a gigantic one that slept 8) so we can travel with his girls next summer and I agreed to make the payments from my salary so I can't give you any help." I wrote back -- too poor to phone -- and said "Please, mom, the semester has started, I don't have books, I have no way to buy them, it's only $30" $30 in 1974 more than now but geez, I literally put her through college. It broke my heart but my heart breaks easy I guess cause everyone I have ever loved has stomped all over it. Well, I have a few friends who love me who have not broken my heart -- but I have "friends" who have also broken my heart. Like Marc.  These friends take from me and give little. Take take take. And I am such a chump. I give generously whenever I can.

I hated that Winnebago. She used the payments to justify never helping me. A fucking luxury camper in her husband's name.

My dad borrowed the money from one of his gambling pals and I got my books and my dad said "I will never forgive you, Therese, if you ever ask that woman for another dime. Fuck her. She used you and then she stiffs you like that. Have some pride and don't you ever ask her again." And after that, dad made sure I had what I needed and it was hard with 3 kids in college at the same time.

Money had such different value. My college had trimesters, so ten-week semesters, not really like the quarter system. I would get $100 for spending money for those ten weeks and it seemed like a fortune. Plus I had a campus job. I didn't spend much.  I did not ask my mom for money again until Katie's father sued her for custody. And she came through for me, saving Katie. But that was her husband who shelled out, not her. He was a decent man. I kinda liked him but never spent any time with him so he was more like a cartoon than a person to me, unreal.

One year, tho, still seeking my mom's approval, I scrimped and saved to send her a dozen yellow roses for Mother's Day. Yellow roses were my mom's thing. I learned that if I ordered far enough in advance, it was a little cheaper because that company for sending flowers -- blanking the name, it was a national deal that contracted with local florists and charge high prices -- but ordering early meant no long distance call so it waved me a couple bucks. I remember the roses cost $30 -- interesting coincidence. I was so proud of what I had done. so on mother's day, I sorta thought mom would call me and thank me, even tho kids see it as their duty to call mom on mother's day. Finally, the day winding down, I called her. I chatted a bit, said happy mom day and waited for her to say thanks. But she didn't. puzzled, for there had been a card from me included, I was careful of that -- talked to the local florist to be sure about the card -- so I asked her if she got my yellow roses. She sighed a big dramatic sigh -- mom was a drama queen and said "Oh that, it was such a disappointment. When the florist pulled up, I thought Ron (husband #2) was sending me flowers to recognize my stepmother of his girls (who despised her, of course and she never did a damn thing for them -- they lived with their mom and were just kids) so when  I opened the card and saw it was from you and not Ron, I was disappointed."  I wish I were making this up.  I never sent her a mother's day gift again, altho I would call. I doubt if she ever realized why.

Another griper -- when mom had a hsyterectomy and was found to have cancer, she was in hospital long time. I sent her several care packages, obvious with my name on the return. again, she never thanked me. Again I asked her if she had enjoyed getting her favorite treats in a series of thought care packages -- I kept sending them when she went home, cause she was laid up for several weeks. Like Brussels Pepperidge Farm cookies -- her favorite, one week. Brie and good water crackers another. And novels and magazines. I kept it up every week for months and she never mentioned it. when I asked her, she said "I assumed they were from your sister, she is always so thoughtful."  My sister had not sent her a single card.  Even after she knew the weekly care packages were from me -- she knew all along, I had my return address on them -- she did not say thank you.

Story of my life.  Nobody notices me, the people I poured the most love into ignored me.

A happy story. The first christmas after mom told us where she was living -- she hid a couple years, having lied under oath when the divorce judge made her pledge under oath that she would not take the kids out of Ilinois. Two hours later a moving truck pulled up and took all our furniture -- taking her kids beds away without the kids! and then she hid cause she was afraid of having lied to the jduge. She moved to Ohio the day she looked a judge in the eye and swore she would keep the kids in Illinois. Why did she turn up? Because she pissed off the judge. My dad never hired a lawyer, just advocated for himself. He went down and asked the judge, pretending he didn't know he wasn't supposed to talk to the judge without a lawyer, if he had to pay child support when she wouldn't tell him where her kids were. The judge was furious that she had lied so blatantly under oath and suspended child support and said "She won't get a dime until she shows up back in my court and tells me where those kids live."

In those days, there was no interstate custody jurisdiction protection, no PKPA (the parental kidnaping prevention act -- which I literally wrote a book about long ago in another life, for a continuing legal edudation class. It became the handbook for the State of MN until the next continuing ed on interstate custody jurisdiction.  I had written it for my boss, who wanted to get elected as a judge and wanted to appear as a family law expert but I wrote it. He didn't really even underatnd the PKPA. AT the CLE conference, it was painful to listen to his presentation on the act. On the table was my book, two inches thick, full of rich analysis and useful insights for lawyers and he clearly did not understand it. But when it had come time to put an author's name on the book, he left my name off. When I objected, he said "we never had an express agreement I would credit you" and I said "We never had an express agreement I would do all this work for free AND for no credit. My name goes on the cover." Grudgingly -- I wrote the fucking book -- he listed himself as the author and credit me as a helper.  I took it cause fuck him, right? Man that guy was a pig. 

He did become a judge too and then he got pushed off the bench for, basically, being such a jerk. He would joke about wanting to smack his wife around during divorce trials involving spouse abuse. A feminist group monitoried divorce judges and worked to get rid of him. He took an early retirement, using his hearing loss as a disability. He had had the hearing loss all his life and when he took the bench. it was a bullshit and expensive-to-taxpayer way to get rid of an incompetent, abusive boob sitting on the bench.

She told us older kids she had hidden because she was afraid dad would kill her. Baloney. My dad was never violent -- ever, in any circumstance. He was cowardly, actually.

so then, for that first xmas -- all us big kids missed the little ones and missed our mom -- all my brothers rushed to Ohio to spend Xmas and see mom's new home and see the kids. So I stayed in chicago cause otherwise my dad would have been alone. I was about a college junior. Dad said "Go with them, I know you want to, I know you are just staying cause you pity me."  I said "Dad I am staying because I love you." On that Christmas Eve, my dad, who was severely allergic to shellfish, went out and bought two live lobsters just for me -- among a ton of other treats. He swore the lobsters had been on sale two for five dollars off a truck but i know he went to a fishmonger and paid going rates.  And he got his sister to have us over for dinner so we wouldn't roll around alone in the house without all our other kids. How I loved him for those lobster.  I didn't much care for lobsters, altho of course I can enjoy them once in awhile and of course I ate those, flamboyantly savoring them for dad's sake.

My dad was hard in many ways. His gambling hurt us. He incested me when I was about seven (and, I believe,  but do not know, all his kids). One thing most folks don't know -- and I know this from my dad and Katie's -- that even parents who do things like that love their kids and even after things like that, the kids go right on loving their dads. that's just how kids come, programmed to love and they don't stop loving just cause someone hurts you.  

After 'the incident'  used to beg her dad to come see Katie, even tho she had a guardian ad litem after her assault and the guardian ad litem insisted they see each other in court-supervised settings. Two hours in a boring center with a stranger sitting to supervise is a little visit for a drive from Omaha to Minneapolis and I knew Katie needed her dad so I said I would subvert the guardian ad litem and let him see her and just escort them, keeping my distance so she could see her dad. But he didn't want to see her. Once she was hospitalized -- on dec 22, 23, and 24. Of course I told her father how sick she was. Caller ID was new. I got an unfamliar call number but the message was Frank so I dialed -- he was at a motel near the Mall of America shopping with his girlfriend with his daughter in a hospital, hemmoraging huge gobs of blood the size of baseballs and bigger. She had to get transfusions and my severely OCD kid freaked out cause I had to sign acknowledging that the transfused blood might give her aids. back then they didn't know how to test to be sure there was no aids in the blood. And the pig didn't call her, much less go see her in the hospital. He was christmas shopping an ssee shows with his girlfriend.  I didn't tell her he was in town. I couldn't hurt her.

I didn't tell her that throughout her childhood I used to beg him to come see her and I used to write to her other relatives in his family and offer to pay to fly her for visits. I wrote 'she loves you and needs your love" and they ignored me. I didn't tell her that stuff either cause I didn't want her to be hurt if they turned me down, which they did.

then she gets into an IVY and the whole clan brags about having a relative in the Ivy League, taking credit for her and he told her "Honey, we all tried and tried to see you but your mom wouldn't let us, she cheated you out of having our whole family in our life."  He said "now we can finally have a relationship, she can't stop us."

The fucker. I had begged him for years to see her, call her on Christmas and her birthday.

Once, before the incident, she spent Xmas with him and I shipped all my present to her to Omaha. He told her they were from  him and mommy didn't give him anything.

I hate everybody. Esp. me.

I have scrimped and save to buy other gifts for other friends.  I'll tell those sob stories another day.

my night in a VW bus

In the fall of 1972, I spent the fall semester in Guanajuato, Mexico studying with my university. They sent down one Professor, a Spanish professor, who hired a couple local lecturers and a rug maker. Voila, a small satelite campus! The local lecturers were anthropologists and archaeologists.They told us amazing stories of ancient Mexico and right up to when the Spaniards quite viciously conquered the Mexican indios.

The rug maker was a sweet guy who taught each of us how to make one small two foot by three foot rug. I wish I still had that rug. The first half was perfect, each loop perfectly sized, so perfectly a machine could have done it. I used a pencil to make each loop perfect. but it took forever and I wanted to get class over with and get stoned. All I wanted to do was get stoned. So I rushed the rug. I loved the rug because half of it was obsessively perfect and the other half was wild, uneven loops, lazy, quick, rushed loops. I got the rug done in record time and my late afternoons were no longer wasted on rug looping. I was out getting stoned. And my only regret is I got rid of the rug, testament to my pot smoking, errant youth.

We made friends with other Americans who were just passing through, trying to travel all around Mexico in their year off. They saw us students as stodgey, although we had more dope than they did. Young Americans traveling in VW vans as a couple did not make all the Mexican male student friends we two blonde gringas made. My blonde travel pal and I had endless guys followinig us around, all of them hoping to get lucky. My roomie and I had great dope connections. Two blonde American college girls attracted endless packs of admiring Mexican boys who all fanasized that all American college girls had free love sex. In truth,my pal and I were virgins but none of the Mexicans believed us. And all of the Mexicans would score us dope, hoping with each buy that we might have some free love sex with them.  You didn't buy lids in Guanajuato. You bought bricks. The bricks were the size of the much larger house bricks used in adobe homebuilding, bound tightly with metal wire lie a bale of hay back on my uncle's farm in Indiana. Cut open the metal wire and the tightly bound brick burst into a bushel of dope. Our first bushel was the best. Acapulco Gold. It was golden toned and looked like a loose bushel of wide wavy waves of grain, like the golden tops of good wheat at its peak on an Iowa plain.

Acapulco Gold was as good as its reputation, much more powerful than the skunk week sold back home. Plus the altitude in Guanjuato was high. Two hits and we were flying. And we rolled 'em like cigars and smoked one cigar each. Why not? I think we paid $20 for that first kilo of Gold and it was always that cheap or cheaper.


We got to know other Americans, the travelers. These other Americans were a young married couple who ended up breaking up in Guanajuato when the gal slept with a sleazey Mexican womanizer who slept with all the sexually active gringas. So he didn't sleep with me. I was a virgin. He did con me out of my brohter's h.s. football jersey, which was an idem with considerable cachet in Mexico. It had his school'name on it and his number in bulky embroiderered letters. The guy said "You can always get another one" and he was cute so I gave it to him but I knew I could never get another one.  My brother dropped off the team and became the team manager. Managers did not get those cool jerseys. That jersey was super thick, long, warm,cosy and cool. It came below my ass, kept me toasty warm and in Mexico it was very, very cool to be seen in it.  And I just get it away to a guy ally catting with several girls i knew. I was a dope. He was very cute. but he never hit on me.  Maybe that's why I gave him the jersey altho I also remember being disgusted by him because he told each girl he slept with that she was his true love.  I still want that Jersey back.

Before the couple broke up, a few Americans decided we would celebrate American Thanksgving, our first away from home for all of us,, by driving to a nearby town with a steakhouse known for its Argentinian steaks. Huge fat steaks super cheap, by our standards. None of us drank -- we were all too stoned.

The steaks were awesome.

We had intended to drive home the same day but we fell asleep after the steaks and by the time we awoke it was too late to drive on the dark, bad roads.So we agreed to camp under the stars. No one had tents but all had sleeping bags.

I had a bad cold. I was coughing, hacking and wheezing.

The married couple with the van got to sleep in the van which was not exactly warm but at least they weren't on the ground. They whispered to one another and agreed that I was too stick to sleep outside on the gorund so they insisted I sleep in the van. I was shy about intruding into their sex life, which was a big deal to my virgin self.   I knew they had sex in that van most nights but I was very sick and I couldn't resist sleeping indoors. Believe me I wasn't such a virgin that I didnt know they fucked like bunnies in the van. But they insisted I sleep inside, expressing concern I migh develop pneumonia. I was pretty sick. And i didn't really sleep all night cause I hacked all night. So i doubt the couple slept all night either.

As soon as we all got settled in for the night I heard a zipper unzip. I never wanted to beam myself magically out of a space more. I heard that zipper. How could I not hear it. I lay on one side of the van, the woman in the middle, the young husband on the other side. He unzipped her zipper, testing the situation, I suspect, in hindsight. Man, that zipper sounded loud.  It had to have sounded just as loud to each of them as it did to me. And then he put his hand down her pants and fingered her and she moaned.

Oh my gosh, I wanted to escape but I was on the inside. I could not have left the van without making a scene. I steeled myself for a long stretch of sexual play. But they must have come to their senses. I think the gal pushed his hand away. We all knew I could hear it all.

We never said anything.

That zipper was so loud but so was the fingering and the mild moaning before she stopped it.

And I actually believed sleeping in the van seriously helped my health. Really.

I was so sick. It was sick cold out. Everyone not sick was jealous I was in the van but I would have given everything not to sleep in the van.  And sadly there had been room for everyone in the van. It is weird, in hindsight that since the couple lost their sex nest, they didn't let everyone in.

That zipper was so loud. Blue jeans. Levis. Loud zipper.

Great steaks. Happy first thanksgiving abroad.

Z-i-p!  That was in November 1972. I have never heard a louder zipper since then.

on the blue moon . . a few days late

There is some kiss we want
with our whole lives,
the touch of Spirit on the body.

Seawater begs the pearl
to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild Darling!

At night, I open the window
and ask the moon to come
and press its face into mine.
Breathe into me.

Close the language-door,
and open the love-window.

The moon won't use the door,
only the window.

--Jelaluddin Rumi, 13th century


The moon won't use the language-door, only the love-window. Isn't that beautiful?

prayer culture goddess love

I was just reading Paul Krugman's blog. The name of the blog is something like "Conscience of a Liberal" but I might be all wrong in that guess.  I admire the guy's thinking. He is a Pulizer Prize-winning economist, a Princeton professor and a columnist for the NY fucking Times. The NYTimes publishes some conservative columnists but not many.  Plus, consider I know jack shit about economics, never took a single course in it.

I would like to believe that studying economics makes things better for humanity. I would also like to believe science makes things better. I know materials management and engineering is behind the invention of new tools like iPads and solar energy.  I know we are going to snuff ourselves and the earth out if we don't stop depleting our resources faster than nature can replenish them. It took millions of years to create the stuff in the earth needed to make a touch-screen tablet and all the cables and equipment to make the internet. And I know I am leaving out most details. This is broadstroke speculation offered as preface to even broader declarations below.

I don't think western humankind is on the right track. And I don't think eastern humankind is on the right track.  I want to believe, i.e. I hope, that some people somewhere are thinking right.  I am sure some humans are thinking right. But the right thinkers do not have a lot of power, connection, clout, whatever it takes to be heard and attended.

I think folks are focussed 'out there', looking at the physical world they 'see' with their eyes but the answer lies 'within' us. Once, a guy I met at a conference who I thought would become one of my best, if not my best, friends said to me, soon after we met, when I had hope for friendship, that he was not sure what inner and outer meant. I had asked, I think, if he thought he was an introvert or an extrovert and he said something brilliant. I thought it was brilliant, anyway.  He said he wasn't sure if 'going within himself' to get his energy, which was how I had defined introversion (going inside one's self to get energized) involved actually 'going into the within contained in his body, i.e. his private thoughts, feelings, reflections' or if he was actually going way out into the cosmos when he paused to contemplate 'within' himself. Within or without.  I thought "I have found a partner in my work, this guy would get my work".

Almost seven years later, I am sure he would get my work. If he would spend enough time with me to get it.  But he hasn't spent any time with me, not enough to count.  He has not become my friend. And I feel stupid as I see myself still deeply engaged, inwardly (whatever that means) with the sense I have that getting to know him and being known by him is a portal I need to cross.

Fuck this.

Shake this.

I think humanity is far, far off course. As far as I can tell, and I freely admit I don't know jack shit, that just about everyone is spinning off course. Lots, even most, do good work. But the work is not out there.  Choose any work in the world that you think is good and, I am sorry to suggest, that work is undertaken in a dysfunctional system.

What if aliens did land here and offer to take every human on earth willing to go with them to a better planet where things were just?  Would you go?  Would you trust aliens offering you a trip to another planet?  How would you decide? The capacity to make such a choice, I believe, is where we huma s should be focussed. Yes, yes, in the mean time, we need roads, water, power, food, so until salvation comes or the second coming of Christ or the first, depending on your religious dogma, or depending on religions I don't know about. We need bus drivers, car mechanics, farmers, caregivers, and tools and power so all that stuff has to keep going. It's like a juggling circus act, where the juggller juggles two completely different sets of things in each hand and then, to really dazzle her audience, after she has the two juggling acts in each separate hand, she gets a third one going using one of her feet kicked up behind her. This planet is millions of simultaneous juggling of energy acts, most essential to survival, many helpful for happiness.  All slightly off kilter, slightly misaligned.

I'd settle for feeling aligned with just one person.

cloud atlas

It would be hard to do justice to this amazing novel in a movie. A friend commented on Facebook that there is too much violence.  Sadly, I think violence has played an overly large role in humanity.

I want to reread Cloud Atlas but I don't have a copy.  Darn.

After the movie, my friend and I decided to walk to Smokey Joe's Bar B Que.  I was going to share some ribs -- just the ribs, no potatoes. Maybe slaw -- this guy's cole slaw is only shredded cabbage, so I can eat that. The ribs are fatty, so loaded with cholesterol. I remember a line from a Jerry Seinfeld episode when a shiksa girlfriend offers him a pork chop and he says 'heart attack on a plate' and I had never known someone who refused pork because of a health reason, not at that time.  I know plenty now, including me.

But geez, I eat to well now. I literally eat no fat or cholesterol. Once in a blue moon won't hurt me.

But Smokey J's (which I think is the correct name) protects me. Twice now I have walked all the way to his shop, about 1.2 miles each way only to find it closed even though it is normally open at the time I go. Today I found a sign, near 8 p.m. indicating he would be closed to next week.  I like it that the guy closes when other stuff in his life matters more than the day's profits. And I am glad the few times this has happened cause I don't need the high fat ribs.

I have rationalized these ri b forays by walking there and back, at least 2.5 miles, but it is a weak rationale.

So then I thought I get some braised chicken at Berkeley Bowl but it was closed. Then I just walked home, kissed my friend good night at my door and had a protein shake.

And now I am going to try to go to bed early -- this is very early for me, cause I am doing a day trip to Sausalito tomorrow, with picnic.  We're taking the ferry from SF. I haven't ridden the ferry from SF to Sausalito since a trip to SF with my then-nine-year-old, now-30-year-old daughter. It was thrilling to pass close to Alcatraz.

I've been to Sausalito a few times, but not on the water in the SF Bay since then.  Cold and wet, I'll still have a happy day.

I can forget I live where I do because I never go anywhere. This weekend, it's tourist trips all over.

abortion

I am as pro-choice as a human being is ever going to be.  Nobody can prove when life begins. No one.  Any human's right to control what goes on inside their own bodies -- what does a right to privacy possibly mean if we don't have a right to determine what happens inside our own bodies?!! No rights, that what it means if society can make women carry cells to childbirth in their bodies if they don't want to.

I also happen to think it is very possible to avoid almost all unwanted pregnancies, except in rape.  Having said that, I acknowledge a gal I used to swim with when I lived in Mountain View, CA. She solemnly told me that while she was on birth control pills, she got pregnant twice and the second time, she and her husband decided to abort. They already had four kids by then.  I believed her story, because she sure spoke convincingly. Now I am wondering if her ob/gyn might have prescribed a different birth control pill? there are different ones. I won't deny that woman the right to end an unwanted pregnancy.

Ideally, there should be no abortions  I was sexually active for ten years without using the pill and without getting pregnant.  It is possible.  It is possible for women to get to know their bodies, to consciously pay attention.  I got so I literally felt it when my body ovulated. I counted my cycles carefully. I knew when I was fertile and I didn't have sex, or I used a condom and spermicide -- mostly I just waited until my fertile flow days had passed. Yes, this blocked out a week to ten days a month when I could not fuck like a rabbit but, hey, I'm not a rabbit. and I dont fuck.   I make love.

I do not have sex these days, age 59 to procreate.  I have sex to express deep love and intimacy.

So.  Educate young people about sex, hand out condoms liberally , make birth control easy and affordable, and support young people to (1) not have sex without committed love and (2) if they are going to have sex without committed love, use contraception.  My plan won't prevent all unwanted pregnancies  See the above 'pregnant on birth control pills' story.

I sincerely believe thats of educatio about sex and preventing babies can prevent most unwanted pregnancies,

Now to the crazy drive to deny women abortions when raped, Bullshit, I say, No one has a right to make that call but the woman carrying an egg in her uterus that was fertilized by a rapist.  This is a black and white issue,

Now I want to tell you about a labor and delivery nurse I knew 30+ years ago. Denise. I did not know Denise very well.   Her husband had gone to prep school with my husband and we socialized in the same crowd of guys that had grown up together, gone to the same prep school and were all young marrieds having babies.  Denise had several babies by the time I met her and she worked full time so she did not have a lot of time to socialize with me.  I liked her. A lot. But we never really bonded,

Dennis did this thing that she never talked about.  She and her husband had bought an old, fixer-upper house that they seemed to pour endless money into and it still seemed like a dump. But she loved her house. And man, she loved kids. And, gosh, she loved being a labor and delivery nurse

I took my lamaze classes with her and wished she could have been my delivery nurse but I had my baby at another hospital, probably cause of health insurance.

 Anyway, Denise had a crowded house in perpetual renovation mode, three kids, a spacey husband and a very busy life. Still, most of the time, a young pregnant woman would live with her, have the baby, give it up for adoption and go back to her life in someo other town  Denise talked about these young women, all of whom had been raped and found out they were pregnant.  Denise never once suggested she opened her home to those women so they wouldn't have abortions. If Denise was anti-choice, and I believe she pretty much was, she never said so,

And our whole crowd was very Catholic. The prep school all our guys had attended was Jesuit I was raised Catholic, going to Catholic school K-12 but I was and forever shall be rabidly pro-choice.    I liked /denise back then but I love her more now.  She quietly took in women whohad been raped to suport their choice to give those babies life.  If someone is going to be anti-choice, be ati-choice like denise was. She loved those women, let them live with her for free, fed them if they needed food -- although she would take money if they could contribute to her household financing, which was alwys tight, I think, / Denise was often having those parties where the ostresss venefits if people buy stuff and all us gals would go to the parties with strict instructions from our husvands to spend,

I wish when the raging repugnuts like Paul Ryan talk about not allowing abortion even in the event of rape would talk aout what they might offer women who conceive in a rape. Would these popliticians open their homes to the pregnant women, giving them rooom and voard to save the baby? Would they provide for the baby after its born Help the forceed-into-motherhood mother back into the workforce, or back to her life? Do this anti-choice lunatics offer any help to women impregnated by rape?

Maybe Denise just let raped pregnant women live with her for free cause she was a good person. She was definitely a good person, but I suspect she was anti-abortion.  I have much respect for the quiet, humble way she did what she could to prevent abortions,  She helped humans in need, she did it humble and with no fanfare.  Somehow I don't see Paul /rayn r that Mourduck lunatic running for the senatae or thst looonie tunes Atkins opening their home to a pregnant rape victim.

love does not admit impediments

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark 
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
by William Shakespeare, of course

So, what do you think? Is this a homage to romantic love or 'love'? Waiting for the cross walk light to change as I headed to my farmers market, I experienced an embodied awareness of "loving beyond all impediments" that was thrilling. I slipped into the golden tunnel, which is the phrase I use to represent a state of love/bliss, when everything upon which my being lights is radiant with love. And I am pure love, a light being, floating. As I sailed down the sidewalk, through the market, and back home, I felt like I was floating a few inches above the ground, for I had undergone a shift into a lighter experience of being. I got it. I got that any impediments to loving other beings is entirely within me. I falter in being loving. When I falter, I look for what is wrong with the other person. There is never anything wrong with the other person.  I know, too well, that many (most?) slip into thinking there can be, there is, something wrong with the other but this is pure fallacy. Pure delusion.  Even a serial killer is a creature of love. It is not my work to find fault with a serial killer or, even, Hitler. It is my work to see the creature of love that exists in all beings. Every human is always love; sometimes humans are asking to be loved past the illusion that they are not lovable, and serial killers would fit that category. I get why people can say "I would love you even if you did despicable things". The despicable things are illusion, ego mired in physical reality.  I got that any time I do not see other beings as radiant loving energy, the failure to love is within me. The blocks to love are from within me and only within me.  When I fail to see other beings as creatures of love, I am failing to project love.

An old lesson I have learned before. An old lesson I need to keep learning. Any failure to see love is my failure and mine alone.

August always seems portentous to me

On two different August firsts, my mom had two different baby girls who each died after very short lives. I had four brothers by then. I was unhappy. I totally believed having a sister would make my life with four brothers and a wacked out mother more beareable.

Mary Ann was born when I was five. She lived two months.  I remember a poignant scene a few months after her death. I went into the living room with a bed pillow cradled in my arms, holding it as if it contained my baby sister Mary Ann. I said "Look everyone, Mary Ann did not die. She was just asleep and now I have found her."  I remember how I felt: warm, loving and happy. I knew I was pretending. I knew my baby sister was dead. But I wanted her to be alive. Those few moments pretending she was alive were wonderful. Then I saw my dad, who seemed quit far away but he was only across the living room. He was smiling but also he was crying. Even at age seven I could see that dad didn't know what to do.  He didn't want to stop me, didn't want his rebuke to hurt me. I think he saw I was acting in grief. I was also triggered, lost in grief.  But at age seven, I was sensitive to dad's sadness and I dropped my game of pretending Mary Ann was in my arms.  I remember what motivated me. I had never held my baby sister. I longed to hold her in love. Now, as an adult, I know I can hold her in love in my heart but at age 7, with poor parents unable to parent me in their grief, I was on my own.  Dad saying nothing and I ended up putting the pillow back on my bed. I still remember the pain that crossed his face though as I said "Look, Mary Ann is alive, here she is" as I pretended to cradle her in my arms and pillow.  We never spoke of my pretend baby sister again. I understood I had done something wrong. But had I?  No one, absolutely no one, had ever talked to me about my loss, as if no one, not either of my parents, had ever considered that I grieved.

Mary Ann lived two months. She actually came home for a week or two. Her tiny lungs were so underdeveloped that she had been kept in an incubator. After a couple weeks at home, when I had been afraid to ever ask to hold her so I never had, we were all afraid her fragile lungs would take her. And they did. She returned to the hospital and diet a day or two later. If we had not brought her home, might she have lived?  I heard my parents whisper such questions late at night when they thought no one listened.

Our family did not own a car when Mary Ann was born. Mom pumped breastmilk all day and once a day, after a full day of work, dad would take the milk to the hospital, see the baby and then come home and give us cheerful stories of the good color he thought he saw in her. I love the idea of my dad taking several buses, trekking across Chicago, carrying the special cargo of expressed breast milk to his baby. It seems so valiant and so loving. He did it every day she lived and was in the hospital.

The night Mary Ann died, we all knew she was dying and the whole family knelt together in prayer that time, too.

Eight or nine years later, my baby sister Katherine Ann was born. Mom had given all her girls the name Mary, or Marie (I am Therese Marie), to invoke the power of the Virgin Mary in her daughter's names. In my childish superstition and grief, I wondered if that middle name Ann had cursed Katherine. If mom had given her Mary's name, as she did all her other daughters, would Mary have saved her. Ann? Where did that come from? Katherine only lived 8 days. She never came home. I never met her alive. I only met her at the funeral home. We had a private funeral, only my parents, brothers, me and our paternal grandfather. No aunts and uncles. Was such a small group honoring that tiny baby supposed to help our grief? I would have loved to see my many cousins. I remembered that at Mary Anne's funeral, I had had fun playing hide and seek in her funeral home. We used forbidden rooms for our games. Lots of rooms in a fancy funeral home. Since we were the only funeral in progress, we cousins ran into empty wake rooms and played like normal, happy kids. Then some adult, an aunt or uncle, would come along and yell at us for our disrespect but we were not disrepsectful. We were copiong with big, painful events.

Katherine had weight 3 pounds when she was born. She was much tinier than Mary Ann had been, who had been bigger at birth and who had lived a couple months so she had grown. All babies, jsut about, lose a bit of weight at the beginning. When a 3 pound baby loses a few ounces, it shows big.  Katherine was small than most of my dolls. It was hard to believe she had been a real human baby.  Her feet were the size of my fourteen year old, not fully grown, thumbs Her head was smaller than my fit. We dressed her in a doll dress, for newborn dresses were way too big.

I was glad I got to see her and sad I got to see her. It was scary and sad to see such a tiny human. I have heard some preemies nowadays are born even smaller and live, although very few such tiny preemies lead normal lives.

It must have been hard on my parents. It was hard on me, although no one, absolutely no one in my whole life, showed a moment of concern for my loss. It felt like my loss didn't count. Maybe no one in my world had been aware hof desparately I had prayed for a sister.

Then, just one year after Katherine, mom had another baby. Mom stayed in bed her whole pregnancy, requiring me to wait on her hand and foot. This was not boys' work so I had to do it. And I did it gladly because I wanted the baby to live. Mom told no one she was pregnant that time, because, she said, she did not want to have to tell her parents about any more infant deaths.

Happily, my sister Margaret was a full term, regular weight baby. Healthy from the start.  Mom brought her home in a few days. I was given the great honor of choosing her coming home from the hospital outfit. I chose a yellow checkered jumpsuit. I had wanted to buy something pink and frilly but my mom always scorned at girly clothes so I had tried to please mom with that yellow check. I didn't really like it. I look back and wonder if I ever let myself do anything I really wanted to do.

I was mortified when my mom pointed out that the yellow jumper had been intended for a boy:  the flap where a penis opening would go for an older boy had been stiched shut. I had seen that stitching, for I had combed over all the choices in the clothing shop. I thought it signaled that the outfit was gender neutral. Mom shamed me over that crotch stitching, giggling that I had bought my baby sister a boy's outfit. I stung with that shame for a long time.

But my baby sister mad up for that shame and all others. At last, at age fourteen, I had a sister. She was a let down. I had never really considered that a newborn infant was not going to become the confident and playmate I had longed for. But a new baby is a very fine thing for a longly teenager. I could love her as much as I wanted and, love being magic, she loved me back.

I was in heaven every minute I spent with Margaret. And I always had my baby brother Dave, who I had been the primary caregiver of since he had been born when I was eleven. Those two babies were my cocoon of love.  Nothing they needed was a burden to me. Caring for them was pure joy. I was in a cocoon of bliss The sadness of losing Mary Ann and then Catherine washed away in that joy.

Every August 1st, which was both Mary Ann's birthday and baby Catherine's birthday,  reminds me of the losses but also the joy I later found with Margaret. Catherine only lived one week. August 6th if my brother's Tom's birthday. Mom was still in the hospital with her sick preemie. Dad had all the children at home praying together, on our knees. We did not pray that Catherine would live, for I guess it was known she would not. We prayed that she would live past midnight and die on the 7th, not on Tom's birthday.  Catherine's death hit me less hard than Mary Anne's. Catherine had the good grace to die on August 7th. On the night of that August 6th, with our mother still in the hospital with her baby, dad had my four brothers and me knee with him and pray for for Catherine. We prayed for horus. I might be remembering wrongly but I think we prayed that she would live until midnight so she did not die on Tom's birthday. She did live until the 7th, did not soil Tom's day.

Once while Catherine was still alive, dad took us all to the hospital. He begged the hospital folks tolet us in to see our sister, who was going to die but the hospital did not relent. So we settled for waving to mom, who came to her hospital room window. She held Catherine in her arms but it was too high up to see the very tiny baby. That was the saddest moment for me:  seeing that tiny baby, too far to really see her, knowing I never would know her.

August always kicks off slow and sad, which is partly why I make a fuss about my August 16th birthday.

love

Sometimes you hear a voice through the door calling you. This turning toward what you deeply love saves you. 

~Rumi♥

nice problem to have

My bras and underpants are too big for me. It is fun to see formerly tight underpants get so loose they won't stay up.

My bras were tight before I lost all this weight but now they are actually getting baggy. I have not ever lost so much weight. I am getting back down into weight territory I have not been in for twenty years.

Basically, I never wear bras. I put one on today because I was going to see my hematologist. I 'dressed up' for her. Ha.  I don't bother with a bra for my primary care gal.  I think I have some bras I couldn't wear cause they are just too small. I'll have to see if I can find them.

Boring story but fun for me. All my clothes are baggy on me and will just get baggier. I aint buying any until I lose a whole lot more of the clothes get so big I can't wear them. Not likely to happen sice I only own baggy knits to begin with. My main pants have been bicycle pants. When the bicycle pants get loose, then I'll buy new clothes.