small dick Don

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

un balanceo cósmico

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

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

Cuanto me encanta este sensación.

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

a cosmic rocking

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

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

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

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

everybody is a star

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

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

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

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

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

I was keening over the wrong thing about Katie Joy

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

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

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

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

I was acting like someone leaving because I was leaving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daffo down dopo.

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

let wounded heart lie open

 author of this poem:  Michael Leurig

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

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

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

make everything sacred

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

Questionnaire

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

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

Questionnaire
by Wendell Berry

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

out with lanterns

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

i want you to know

swimming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

our job is to love . . .

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

overheard on the bus today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I might call them." said younger man.

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

"Where are the jobs?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eleven dollars is not good money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

honey in the heart

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

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

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

one thing more frightening than speaking our truth

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

my family St. Patrick's Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess I'll go eat worms

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

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

Nobody loves me

Everybody hates me

I guess I'll go eat worms.

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

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

Irish girls are the best

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

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

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

if wishes were horses

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


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

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


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

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