overheard on the bus today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I might call them." said younger man.

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

"Where are the jobs?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eleven dollars is not good money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

honey in the heart

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

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

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

one thing more frightening than speaking our truth

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

my family St. Patrick's Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess I'll go eat worms

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

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

Nobody loves me

Everybody hates me

I guess I'll go eat worms.

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

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

Irish girls are the best

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

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

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

if wishes were horses

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


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

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


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

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

making an apple pie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

starving one's self

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

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

I miss her. I hate me.

my daughter and my heart failure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

things making me happy today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

my new favorite person

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

chica mia, mija querida

Just wunnering. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me why. Tell me why.

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

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

as my father's life ebbed away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was gone before that tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then I felt him pass.

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

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

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

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

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

a sense of foreboding

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

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

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

dang dang dang

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

super heroes

A former friend once remarked to me, and as I reflect on the exchange, I am wondering if he had just heard someone else say this, that people's network of friends were like a network of superheroes, that each friend represented a kind of super power and added together provided what a person needed.

I liked the concept. And I am quite sure I'd like to have a super power or two and a network of friends with their own super powers.

This guy, who I no longer am in relationship with (he ghosted me after treating me poorly for years, after I endured him treating me poorly for years. . . . ). As he put it in one of our last face to face visits, he said "we were never friends, we are just two people who met at a conference."  Yikes. He said this nearly 8 years after he had socialized with me. Who socializes with someone for that long if they don't see the other person as a friend. Those words cut me painfully. In hindsight, I think he was doing he shithead best to sever ties with me when he said that.

I have had years to reflect on this guy, to review many of our long-ago-now interactions. I think he is dishonest across the board, a sneaky, sniveling, fearful little man who projects his insecurities onto women and blames them for whatever he is feeling and experiencing. Fuck him. Yeah, fuck him.

I like the idea of one's friends as a team of super heroes, each providing a super power I need.

I need these superpowers, but not necessarily only these. I am just popping off the top of my head. I need love. I need a magic touch that generates a lot more money into my life. I need a committed male lover who wants to be with me and who can't get enough time with me -- is that a super power or does this fall under the power of love?  I want a happy sex life.  I want my daughter to love me:  a specilalized superpower of daughter-mother respect and love:  I need this one most of all.

I need hope as a super power.

I need tenderness as a super power.

I need lots of time in nature.

I need a car (not a super power but geez, I want a car so I can leave Berkeley and venture into the beautiful land I live in. And I want to take road trips again. Right now, I'm jonesing for a road trip to Chicago, then swing by Minneapolis. Are these super powers?

The power to blink and produce what I want might get me a lot of the things I have listed. Or a magic lantern. Or my own genie. Or my own magic power.

That's what I need:  magic.

the gray drizzle

“The gray drizzle induced by depression,” William Styron wrote in his memoir about his depression “takes on the quality of physical pain.” In my own experience, the most withering aspect of depression is the way it erases, like physical illness does, the memory of wellness. The totality of the erasure sweeps away the elemental belief that another state of being is at all possible — the sensorial memory of what it was like to feel any other way vanishes, until your entire being contracts into the state of what is, unfathoming of what has been, can be, and will be. If Emily Dickinson was correct, and correct she was, that “confidence in daybreak modifies dusk,” the thick nightfall of depression smothers all confidence in dawn.

And yet daybreak does come, with a shock and a rapture, to find us asking ourselves in half-belief:"What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment?"

I have no faith in this moment that daybreak from my depression will dawn. And Styron got it so right:  when I am most depressed, I can't remember what it felt like to not be depressed. This is the worst aspect of my deep depression:  I have no memory of happy.  And when I fall into such holes, I tend to fcus on my Katie wound, the neverending grief of her shunning me all these years. I don't htink she cares one whit about me yet I can't stop longing for her. What is wrong with me that I long for someone who took took took from me, all my financial resources, all my ability to give, all her private education, all my love and ceaseless giving and she just turns me off, out of her heart. I don't feel anger towards her. Oh no. I feel anger towards myself, blaming myself for her choices.  She has contact with her father, who incested her when she was five, but me she shuns?  she took took took frm me until I had nothing to give and then she booted me out of her heart. Why do I want such a person to act like a daughter, to show me love, to care about me?

capitalism is not form of government

embrace suffering

"We need pain to alert us for what needs attention. We have been treating it as some kind of enemy to our cheerfulness."

First Nobel Truth: suffering. If you want to be enlightened, face suffering.  ~ Joanna Macy

life has not forgotten you (or me)

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

man's search for meaning

"When a man finds that its his destiny to suffer, he will have to eagerly accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden."
--Viktor Frankl "Man's Search for Meaning"

I miss my dad

My dad had a twinkle in his eye most of the time. The twinkle only left when he was angry, which he was not often in relation to his kids. Dad adored all his kids. He spoiled all of us to the best of his ability.

I miss my kid, sure, but this, my first attempt (a not very successful one, imho) at having a holiday season, I missed my dad. I miss being adored by him, even when I had nothing going on to elicit his adoration. I miss how much he loved all his kids.

A favorite story about my dad. . .

When my sister was an infant, born when I was 14, I took care of her more waking hours than either of our parents. Mom was already doing her best to leave the marriage and her children by working a part time job which paid her college tuition, taking college credits. She only minded my sister and toddler baby brother when I was at school and mom took off as soon as I was on child and dinner shopping prep duty. She used me like an indentured servant and yeah, I sometimes feel that anger cropping up like a little vomit sneaking up my throat and then subsiding.

Dad came home at an unexpected time. I had been getting ready to feed my baby small baby sister. She was maybe four or five months old. I was going to feed her a jar of baby stew, baby food stew, so maybe she was sixteen or seventeen months. My sister was a very late talker so I mix up her age. She was not talking but baby sis did not really talk until age four or five.

And, and I share this with chagrin, I was just going to feed my dearly loved baby sister, who I had longed and prayed for all of my fourteen years until she was born and survived infantcy, a room temperature jar of baby food. Dad came in, saw me grab that jar of baby food, saw me head to the high chair with my sister in it, saw I was not going to heat it up.

Gruffly dad said "Would you like to eat cold beef stew?" Of course baby food beef stew was all goopy. Then dad said "give her to me" and he held her, cooed to her, while he got out a saucepan, filled it with water, slowly simmer the water to gently eat up that baby food stew. And then fed her.

As he fed her he gently chided me, and also called out to my bros who were supposed to help with the baby but never did. Dad was always working two jobs in those days so he didn't know much about who did what and, in 1967, baby feeding and diaper changing was girl work.

I never fed my sister baby food that should be served warm ever again without heating it up. It took only a few minutes in a pan of heating water, as dad had shown me.  I forgive myself because I was a kid myself, with school work, neverending housework, other children to ten (Tom and Dave, toddlers when sis was a baby), endless diapers.

I so loved seeing my dad's tenderness towards my sister Margaret. I so loved Margaret. I so love them both now one alive, one lost to me.

just made my Xmas pie

Every holiday season I think about my holiday pie. I am spending Christmas with people I love and who love me for the first time since my daughter left me. I had to make my Xmas/holiday pie. I like the way memories can float about, like the smells coming from a kitchen readying a holiday feast.

It is a simple recipe. A bag of fresh cranberries (usually a pound) and less than one cup of real maple syrup and a bunch of beautiful pears. Prebake the pie crust slightly. Peel and slice the pears. If you are baking this pie with a child, let the child eat all the pear slices s/he wishes to eat. Layer the fruit artistically. And use a lattice top. It is a very beautiful pie. The red cranberries shine like rubies nestled in the pears. The red peeks through the lattice crust nicely. Serve with unsweetened whipped cream. Let the child taste a fresh cranberry too, if they wish. Explain the word pucker afterwards.

The recipe is not really what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the real reason I love to make this pie.

You put the maple syrup in a saucepan with the cranberries. The actual recipe calls for two cups of maple syrup but one of the reasons I like this pie is that it is not too sweet. Cut way down on the maple syrup and you really taste fruit. Cranberries are tart so they need the syrup but use as little as possible.

Heat the syrup and cranberries gently, slowly. Here is the  reason I used to make this pie: as the cranberries warm up and start to both cook and absorb the maple syrup, they make a very soft puffing sound.

Oh my gosh, I love the sound of the cranberries puffing. I love to do this with a child. I love to enjoy the hushed anticipation as we listen for the first puff. While waiting, this is a good time to kiss the child on top of the head a few times.

As soon as the cranberries start puffing, you have to quickly pull the saucepan from the heat. The thrill does not last long, the puffing is only a few seconds and the sounds very soft. Yet it is a very fine experience. There is a temptation to keep the cranberries on too long in the hope that you will get to hear another mild puffing sound but you must resist. Resolve to make this pie again soon.

Then you layer the cooked berries, the pears and bake, not too long, just long enough to meld the flavors, to lightly bake the pears.  Maybe paste some egg white on the latticed crust so it browns a bit. The one I just took out of the oven did not brown but the syrup was bubbling over:  done!

behold !!

Katie Joy:  you are my sun, my light, my love, my pure joy. Always and forever.

inner christmas

Christmas memory

My parents got divorced the day after I graduated from high school. I had spent most of my unschool time raising my baby sister and baby brother (aged 4 and 7 when the folks got divorces, my babies of the heart!). Mom swore to the judge she would keep those kids in the State of IL even as she knew she had hired a moving company to come to our house that afternoon and remove most of the furniture, including the beds of a couple of her kids left behind.

She disappeared for a couple years with my babies. I used to drink 3.2 beer in my college in Wisconsin which allowed eighteen year olds, back then, to drink 3.2, get drunk and weep about my babies. It hurt so much that they had been ripped out of my life. [Not unlike the greater pain of having my only child begin to shun me at age 17 and she still does at age 35. . . wtf did I do to attract that karma, eh?).

My mom had the balls to go back to that judge and ask him to force my dad to pay his court ordered child support. That judge told my dad he did not have to pay a cent, and never had to pay it retroatively until our mother told us where the kids were in this world. Mom was shocked but she held out another year or so. She told us older kids she was afraid our father would kill her.

My father was a flawed man but not at all a violent one.  I was so appalled to hear my mother telling her older kids, three of us in college when she disappeared, that our father would kill her if she toild us where she lived.

He finally hired a detective to find his kids. He did not try to kill our mother. And then she showed up to demand her child support.

She had a lot of nerve. She left him with college bills for three of her children. She did not contribute a cent for our college. And, kinda pathetically, she had told me that my indentured servitude for her children and housekeeping for, altogether, about a decade, was helping her go to college and once she had her degree, she'd help me get mine.  I wrote to her once at the beginning of a semester to ask for a sall contribution towards my textbooks for that semester. She said, and she was married to a wealthy man and had a full time teacher job, that she could not possibly spare me $30 because she spent most of her salary buying a Winnebago.

I have not been well loved and here I am, 64, and still struggling to see myself as lovable.

To the Xmas memory:  when the kids did return to our lives, they would spend Christmas with dad and the rest of us in Chicago. As the only adult female on the scene, I took over Christmas planning, cooking, gift buying.

So one Christmas while I was in college, or maybe law school (the date eludes), I made sure every sibling got what they really wanted for Christmas. I baked and cooked.  On Christmas morning all the kids, including my two bros also in college, tore open all their presents and then settled in to enjoy them when my dad noticed that no one, not even he, had given me a gift. Not one.

I had chosen virtually every gift that my five siblings and my dad had received (dad paid) but no one had thought to give me a damned thing.

Dad got up, hitched his pants as he often did and said "Charles, come with me, I need your help." And they went to Walgreens. In those days, the only stores open on Xmas were a very few drug stores for medicine. But Walgreens sold other stuff. Dad had asked Chuck to go with him to help him choose something for me at Walgreens.

When they returned home, dad said "I found some presents for you in my trunk. I had forgotten to bring them in." This was not true. He had bought me a couple gifts at Walgreens with my creepy brother Chuck's input. I got some Cachet cologne, a candle and an odd address 'book' that was made of metal, with a slider for each letter in the alphamet. Closed, I was supposed to slide the slider to the letter of the alphabet where I was supposed to correctly post people's names and addresses.

I kept that weird thing for years. I never used it.

Funny. Dad gong to Walgreens and buying me junky presents was more upsetting to me than getting no presents. Truth told, I would have preferred fifty bucks.

Oh, he had also bought an electric hair dryer. That was useful. And he made quite the fuss about how he had kept the hairdryer in the trunk to 'surprise' me. 

I acted happy about my gifts. I did not say anything negative. I just moved our holiday feting along to our Christmas brunch.

My daughter did not like to give me gifts. The last time I saw her near Christmas, when, I believe, she had decided to shun me for the rest of her life, she special ordered a pendant for me that was crafted by a jewelry artist whose work I really liked back then. I had several of the artists earrings and the pendant went with most of the earrings.  It was costume jewelry but it was very important to me because it was the first time my daughter had been thoughtful and went out of her way to get me something she considered special.

flowers for you Katie Joy

Because I love you.

a precondition to love

a miracle

I am how I see others

As a man is, so he sees.
William Blake

It seems to be time for me to study some of William Blake's work. I have always been aware of him. As a teen and twenty-something, I used to tell myself the really great poets were beyond me. Now I know this is nonsense (to think Blake is beyond my comprehension!). I wish I had known this when I was a teen.

I did not get a really great education. Much of my education, especially in relation to great literary art, was about teachers telling me what things. What nonsense!  Like visual art means what the viewer gets out of it, what I get from a Blake, Dickinson, cummings, or whoever poem, is right.

When I gave weekly tours in a contemporary art museum, usually to grade school student groups but sometimes for adults, integral to every tour was my indivitation to the tour participants to trust their own vision, to trust that what they saw in any art I showed them was entirely accurate.

Who is to say what art means? Great artists know that as soon as they release their work into the world, they lose the power to define its meaning. Not just visual artists.

Once I had a then-new, not-not-a-friend ask me, when I had mentioned spending hundreds of hours studying Dickinson's poetry while I lived in Amherst, MA for two years, he said, and this guy has a doctorate from Stanford's English department and taught some kind of poetry classes (Yikes!), if I thought I could understand Emily Dickinson. 

I told my sister the English teacher, who has a MS on fellowship from Stanford and her PhD from somewhere else, scoffed at this guy and said "What? Two brilliant women like us couldn't possibly understand an Emily Dickinson poem?!"  I did not share sis' umbrage with the guy. And this particular guy did, over the seven or eight years we socialized but were not, as he once unkindly put it, ever friends [So why did he socialize with me all those years if we weren't friends? Sheesh.]  I remember feeling soothed by my sister's indignation, by her including me in her belief that anyone could understand an Emily Dickinson poem. Or any other poem.

Now I see the guy I just mentioned very differently than I saw him, oh, maybe ten years ago when he insulted my ingelligence about Emily Dickinson (did he ever spend two years in Amherst? did he read every book written about ED that was available thorugh the Amherst library and Amherst College library?!!! I think not.). Did he ever tour her home, feel her in that home, even hear her whispering upstairs to Lavinia?  I have.

Now I wonder if this guy is/was small and fearful and projected his smallness (smallness of thought) and fear onto me, wonder if he felt limitations and projected what he perceived as his limitations onto me.)

I just recalled an interaction with this guy, which is probably why I am thinking about him now. The day before Thanksgiving, maybe 7 or 8 years ago, we agreed to meet to talk about the stressors in our relationship. I prepared for this meeting carefully, listing specific examples of things he had said to me or things he had done, that had unsettled me. He prepped nothing. He showed up pretty late. He tried to leave early. He, and this struck me as odd, took notes on what I said. He, however, had nothing to contribute. He had nothing to point out in my behavior as unsettling or challenging to him.  He gave no indication that he appreciated the very sincere effort I had made, because I cared about him and our friendship, or what I then believed was a friendship -- who schedules a four hour meeting to work on a relationship and offers nothing?

Two things.

At the end of our conflict resolution attempt, he said "All you have done here is what you always do. Complain complain complain."  I did not always complain. And I had not complained that day. I had shared my experience of his treatment of me because I believed, obviously mistakenly, that he wanted us to have a better relationship.

I talked him to his car. When we got near it, he did say he regretted his complain complain complain remark.  I am sorry to say I did not forgive him.  I think I cried when he expressed regret.

And that brings me to a question:  is expressing regret the same as saying I am sorry? Cause that guy never once said he was sorry for any of his behavior. He would say he regretted my misunderstanding of his behavior, or that he regretted it if I had had an expectation different from his own (like when he showed up for my 60th birthday celebration with him -- and he had invited me to get together -- and said "Hurry up, I only have an hour. I have a work meeting." And it was a Saturday. When I said I was hurt about 'only an hour', he said "I knew you would be hurt." So why didn't he talk to me, during one of the three times I had phoned him the day before to nail down details of our celebration of my milestone birthday, that he was time limited.  I phoned once because we had not confirmed time or location of our birthday party. Then I phoned back to offer to show him how to make very inexpensive, homemade coconut milk. And then I phoned a third time to urge him to bring glass bottles for the hot coconut milk, for he had said he'd bring a plastic milk bottle. Three times we talked, yet he never mentioned he had made other plans and had to cram my birthday party in. And he later said "I knew you would be hurt".

I try, so hard, to avoid doing things I know will hurt someone, anyone, but especially those I care about.  When he told me he had to rush our lunch (I had assumed an afternoon since he had initially invited me to dinner and I suggested lunch to save him money), I said I didn't want to go to lunch anymore and asked him to leave. He would not.  He tried to tgroup me. He asked "is there anything we could do right now that might help you feel better?"  I had already tried to do what would have made me feel better, which was see him leave so I could nurse my hurt in private. I felt a little threatened when he just sat in my home and pressed me to talk. He did not offer to talk, did not offer his thoughts. It was all about me fixing things.  All I wanted was for him to leave me with my sense of wounding and when he tgrouped me, I said we could do the coconut milk before lunch so it would have time to cool. I caretaked. I took care of him, using the coconu milk making to help me cover my hurt.

I didn't want to go to lunch with him after that. I really had asked for what I really wanted, which was for him to leave. Then it would have been up to him to call and try again, invite me again, under circumstances under which he did not know beforehand I would feel hurt. He knew I would be hurt and he behaved as he did anyway.

I am wading through some low days. I haven't thought about the sixtieth birthday thing in years.

I see I still blame myself, as if it were wrong of me to hold the expectation that someone inviting me out for my birthday wanted to show he cared about me.  I am ashamed that I wanted to be treated kindly.

As far as what I "see" in his behavior, I can say now, four years later, that I don't have any understanding of his behavior. I don't understand why someone would invite me out to celebrate my birthday and then show up announcing it had to be a quickie lunch because he had a business meeting on a Saturday.

daddy's little girl? yeah, right. . .

I went to the Apple genius bar today to get help with a software conflict. The Berkeley Apple store is down on 4th Street. It's full of what looks to me to be high end stores. It's a bit of a shopping mecca, I guess. I have only ventured down there for the Crate and Barrel closeout shop and for the very rare trip to Apple. The whole street was lit up, with holiday lights but also lit people, lots of people.

I don't really shop. I see clothing I like in some of the women's clothing shops but they look expensive and they don't look like they sell clothes for not-thin women. I like Sur la Table. I used to be an art docent at the Henry Gallery at the U. of WA with one of the co-founders of Sur la Table, the wife from the couple that founded it. They were very serious art collectors and hosted all the docents at their home so we could see their art-soaked house. Just about everything in the home was a work of art. But, yikes, nothing on sale at Sur La Table. Do they ever have sales? I still use the cookware I acquired when I got married in 1979. but I did need a new garlic press so I got one.

I tend to forget that many people consider current styles in many, even most, areas of life. I bought really good cookware in 1979, and really good stoneware and really good flatware back then. It's all still perfectly good!

I did get a slight taste of the lure of impulse shopping. I walked by a tiny lighting store and they had a few stringy things hanging in their doorway: wires wrapped around stones on a string, or pieces of glass wrapped with wire on a string. Pretty things. Pretty baubles that caught my eye and I thought "This would make a perfect couple's gift for the couple I am spending Xmas with in Canada!" I walked into the shop so I'd have a little time to think about buying that bauble. The two people behind the cash register both perked up to have one customer in their shop. The item that caught my eye was only $25. At first I said to myself "Yes, I will get it" but by the time I looked around for another minute, I began to watch myself. Watch how I was getting caught up in the capitalist version of 'the holidays'.

The real reason I didn't buy the bauble is because the colors of the pretty strung glass bits were not my friend's colors. It was all blue-y. Blue is me.

I was reminded of the year my then-two-year-old insisted on giving her father a Smurfette puzzle for Xmas, post-legal-separation. He was furious over that puzzle -- with me, not her as far as I know. He said "What an insult, giving me a children's toy." I explained to him that our daughter dearly loved the Smurfette doll he had given her, she kept it with her 24/7 and she had been so happily thrilled to give her dad that smurfette puzzle . . . not a Smurf but a Smurfette. He did not believe me when I said she had so happily chosen it and so happily believed she was giving him something special. I don't remember asking him if he criticized that puzzle to her. I hope not. I also pointed out to him that all of her toys were at the house she and I lived in and I thought it wasn't so bad that she had a puzzle she loved at his home.

This reminds me of a few years later, when the Berlin Wall had fallen. Dayton's, which eventually was bought out by Macy's, sold little pieces of the Berlin Wall as meaningless Xmas gifts, sorta the pet rock of that year? I tried to talk her out out of giving her dad a piece of the Berlin Wall because I knew he would see it as an insult, as me making a commentary on how I was, by then, free of any chains to him. And, sure enough, that is exactly how he interpreted that piece of the Berlin wall. and he refused to believe I had tried to talk her out of it. She thought it was a thrilling gift, to have a piece of real, exciting history he could touch!! She was thrilled to give him that gift.

Ironically, even kinda funnily, his favorite 'gift from her' was something I had purchased without her input and I had bought it to mock him. He had a mustache and I bought a ninety nine cent mustache clipper on clearance at a Target and had her give it to him. He bragged about his daughter's thoughtful gift for years. And I never told him she had nothing to do with it. How I loved it that he was so thrilled with that very cheap mustache trimmer. I had been pleased to get off so cheaply.  And I had the grace to never tell him it had been a 99 cent present. Nor did I ever tell him that she had nothing to do with that choice.

Until she left me, I bought him Father's Day, birthday and Christmas gifts (his birthday is tomorrow, Nov 26th!) every year after we separated, even when he was at his height of assholery regarding our custody litigation, such as having me followed 24/7 to collect evidence. Evidence of me driving to daycare, driving to my office, driving to my health club and driving to the shelter for battered women which was hidden in an old CAtholic orphanage.

One year I ordered a baseball from Neiman Marcus signed by Sammy Sosa in the year Sammy Sosa was a very big deal. Our daughter was at college and I did not consult her about that Sammy Sosa baseball but it thrilled him, as I had known it would. He could be like a little boy when it came to sports. Once he asked me how I knew exactly what to get him (this when still married -- he never credited me with any of the gifts I paid for and shipped to him on our daughter's behalf after we separated) -- did he think our four year old begged me to take her shopping for his birthday, or even remembered his birthday without my reminders? Yes he did -- Once he asked me how I knew what gifts he would like and I sang "Because I've got you under my skin . . . ". Which was true, in a bad infection kind of way. Upon reflection, I am not sure our daughter ever even registered the fact that 'she' had given her dad that Sammy Sosa baseball and yet he gushed and gushed over the awesome gift his daughter gave him. He seriously believed that.

Guess how many times he took her shopping for me, or just reminded her that maybe with Christmas coming, she might want to get me a gift? Never. Not once.

My daughter did not give me many gifts. No one had ever mentored her with the idea of giving her mother gifts for Mother's Day, birthday or xmas. The last time I saw her at Christmas, she did give me a nice gift. She special ordered a pendant made by a rhinestone jewelry maker I liked. I had lots of the jewelry maker's earrings and she ordered a pendant to match one pair of the earrings. In hindsight, I think she ordered that gift because she knew she was leaving me. a parting gift?

karma choking me

We attract forces according to our being. - Gurdjieff

go easy on yourself

saying thank you

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
–W.S. Merwin, From Migration: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).
Copyright © 1988 by W. S. Merwin.

is she my people?

the holiday hell hole is gone

My daughter told me in 2001, as I dropped her off at Cornell, that she never wanted to see me again. She was 19, not yet a full adult. I did not believe she would shun me forever. She has not interacted with me since, except for me to complete financial aid papers while she was still in college. I wonder if she ever considered the deep love that allowed me to ensure her education was paid for, while her father refused to participate in financial aid, even after she had told me she would never see me again.

I have had many years to keen in grief. And the holidays are still harder for me than the rest of the year. In the beginning, however, I would be engulfed in heartache before Halloween, dreading the upcoming holidays. Every note of every holiday song I happened to hear, every well-meaning question such as "Have a happy Thanksgiving" stabbed me, even gutted me.

I would hunker down and avoid human contact, unfit for human interaction and crippled by my emotional pain.  I came to think of the span from October through after New Year's as the holiday hellhole.  And it was a hellhole for me.

I had just completed a graduate degree when she left me, ready to launch into a new career. Actually I had already launched that new career. But as it gradually saw that she was not coming back, that my only child would go on shunning me, I spiraled into horrible depression. I never got that new career going. I was well and truly too unwell to work.

Writing this is bringing me down, making me cry. And all I really wanted to write is this:  It is Thanksgiving tomorrow and I am not in the holiday hellhole.  I am not in intense emotional pain. I grieve. I wish my daughter would act like a daughter.  What might that look like? An occasional phone call. A birthday card. Let's get crazy, maybe a birthday gift. An occasional visit, face to face.

I seem to be accepting she is gone gone gone, forever.

I am grateful this Thanksgiving that I am not in the holiday hellhole. I am not happy to no longer have a daughter but I am not in the holiday hellhole. Progress? I am not sure.

cranberry pear pie

Every Thanksgiving week I think about my holiday pie. I can't eat cranberries anymore because of a medication I take. I have been thinking about making my cranberry pear pie. I like the way memories can float about, like the smells coming from a kitchen readying a holiday feast.

It is a simple recipe. A bag of fresh cranberries (usually a pound) and less than one cup of real maple syrup and a bunch of beautiful pears. Prebake the pie crust slightly. Peel and slice the pears. If you are baking this pie with a child, let the child eat all the pear slices s/he wishes to eat. Layer the fruit artistically. And use a lattice top. It is a very beautiful pie. The red cranberries shine like rubies nestled in the pears. The red peeks through the lattice crust nicely. Serve with unsweetened whipped cream. Let the child taste a fresh cranberry too, if they wish. Explain the word pucker afterwards.

The recipe is not really what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the real reason I love to make this pie.

You put the maple syrup in a saucepan with the cranberries. The actual recipe calls for two cups of maple syrup but one of the reasons I like this pie is that it is not too sweet. Cut way down on the maple syrup and you really taste fruit. Cranberries are tart so they need the syrup but use as little as possible.

Heat the syrup and cranberries gently, slowly. Here is the  reason I used to make this pie: as the cranberries warm up and start to both cook and absorb the maple syrup, they make a very soft puffing sound.

Oh my gosh, I love the sound of the cranberries puffing. I love to do this with a child. I love to enjoy the hushed anticipation as we listen for the first puff. While waiting, this is a good time to kiss the child on top of the head a few times.

As soon as the cranberries start puffing, you have to quickly pull the saucepan from the heat. The thrill does not last long, the puffing is only a few seconds and the sounds very soft. Yet it is a very fine experience. There is a temptation to keep the cranberries on too long in the hope that you will get to hear another mild puffing sound but you must resist. Resolve to make this pie again soon.

Then you layer the cooked berries, the pears and bake, not too long, just long enough to meld the flavors, to lightly bake the pears.

gentle sound of cranberries puffing in maple syrup

Every Thanksgiving week I think about my holiday pie. I can't eat cranberries anymore because of a medication I take. I have been thinking about making my cranberry pear pie. I like the way memories can float about, like the smells coming from a kitchen readying a holiday feast.

It is a simple recipe. A bag of fresh cranberries (usually a pound) and less than one cup of real maple syrup and a bunch of beautiful pears. Prebake the pie crust slightly. Peel and slice the pears. If you are baking this pie with a child, let the child eat all the pear slices s/he wishes to eat. Layer the fruit artistically. And use a lattice top. It is a very beautiful pie. The red cranberries shine like rubies nestled in the pears. The red peeks through the lattice crust nicely. Serve with unsweetened whipped cream. Let the child taste a fresh cranberry too, if they wish. Explain the word pucker afterwards.

The recipe is not really what I was thinking about. I was thinking about the real reason I love to make this pie.

You put the maple syrup in a saucepan with the cranberries. The actual recipe calls for two cups of maple syrup but one of the reasons I like this pie is that it is not too sweet. Cut way down on the maple syrup and you really taste fruit. Cranberries are tart so they need the syrup but use as little as possible.