We went on a grand adventure to San Francisco and parts south last weekend; Mary and I and fourteen friends, all vocal musicians of the best kind, took the cream of Badarak choral compositions and sang the hell out of them. We did a (fairly) formal concert in Los Altos at Matt Broadbent's Congregational church, and then the next afternoon sang Evensong in Grace Cathedral, nestled in the middle of the jewels of stained glass light and the lively but forgiving Gothic acoustics of the place.
We made some wonderful re-connections (including with an old flame of mine -- now THAT was something, and it was entirely pleasant, much to our mutual surprise), and some good new ones. The trip was planned really pretty well if I do say so, and those details which could have proven disastrous had they been mishandled worked themselves out by the grace of a merciful God and the confident guidance of Marco Place (whom I have officially adopted as one of my long lost brothers, merely born of a different mother).
Just as I was beginning to get my feet under me again, was physically able to watch a harrowing 5th ALCS game till the final out, then sleep the sleep of the accomplished and the just, we received some sad and shocking news: A friend and neighbor of ours, who was diagnosed with ALS a few weeks ago, took his own life last night. It seems he and his wife had talked about it, had each and both considered the kind of life that remained for him -- and for her -- and had made this decision. He went to a local abandoned swimming pool while his wife was running errands in town, and put a gun in his mouth.
Now, I have come to understand, over sixty-four years of paying close attention, that dying is not necessarily the worst thing to happen to anybody. It may be the worst thing to those left behind, one of those shockers that life hands us to get our attention, to urge a sharp left or right turn in our own journey, but the guy that actually goes on is probably better off. Certainly in this case I think he is; and his wife, a strong woman with a healthy sense of proportion and basic good humor, likewise. She will make the most of the next five years, which otherwise would be a living hell, literally, and honor her husband by so doing.
That does NOT mean, however, that we have to like it. My oldest and wisest teacher stresses this, over and over again; we must accept the clear and conscious choices of other people, and bless their lives, but nowhere is it written that we don't suffer the shock, nor mourn the loss, nor share as best we can the periodic tumults of grief and anger endured by those closest to him. I DON'T like it, I don't like the FACT of a disease that puts someone through such exquisite and prolonged torture while keeping the mind entirely aware, conscious and sensible of every single inexorably diminishing physical faculty. The idea of ALS must make anyone with a ghost of claustrophobia shrink in horror, to be entombed alive in an entirely unresponsive, racking body.
I have to say I would probably do the same thing.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Do's and Don'ts while in the hive
Back when I was trapped on the set of "Ordinary People", i.e., living with my hubby and four children in the upper middle class northern suburbs of Chicago, saddled with a real but less extreme underground rumble of Aeschylean tragedy, I had a friend in similar straits. The main difference between us was that Ana was born and raised a Midwestern girl, that is to say she was blonde and leggy (my mother would have said "corn-fed" but then my mother could be pretty waspish when it came to leggy, blonde women), and had struggled with a life-long submission to the Northern European female ethic of clean and tidy surfaces. In that world, you just don't speak of any subsurface, unscrubbable grime; if you don't speak of it, it isn't there, plus then the neighbors won't know about it. My struggle was different in that I didn't have to fight myself while I fought the system; all I had to do was resist while seeming to comply until I could get the hell away from it. Ana's plight was a lot harder to get out of, and it was costing her dearly.
Anyway, one bleak winter day Ana said to me, through tears of frustration, "Why is it that I have to Do Do Do all the damned time? Why can't I just Be Be Be?" I couldn't answer in any useful way; all I could do was listen to her, agree with her and try to comfort her, and finally offer her the name and number of my shrink (with whom she had an affair soon after, but that's a WHOLE 'nother blog).
When I was small and my mother would be cleaning or cooking or paying bills or doing anything but sewing (which she loved, right up until the finishing part of a project), my sisters and I were careful to look as busy and helpful as we could, so that her resentments wouldn't turn themselves toward us and drive her to a lot of snarling and smacking. During my first marriage (the traditional one -- I haven't qualified the other two, but I will as soon as I get clearer on them, or, as Garrison Keillor says, as soon as they're funny), the DoDoDo precept was clouded by similar resentments on my part, and bewilderment on the part of my very traditional husband, who had no idea of nor curiosity about the symbolism of wifely drudgery. (The constant exhaustion and worry was yet another layer, but there didn't seem to be anything anybody could do to fix that.)
Many years and, God knows, many social revolutions have passed since then, yet Ana's entreaties still haunt me. As with other ingrained habits, I find that over time I have trained myself to monitor carefully and relentlessly my state of Busyness at any given moment; should I find myself unaccountably wool-gathering or reading something merely entertaining and not buhroaaaaaaadening, something in me snaps and I start in with the chiding and mental self-slapping-around. I've lived long enough to know that slapping ourselves around is destructive, pointless and probably excessive, since there are plenty of people lining up to judge and reprove and disapprove of us and our behavior; doing it to ourselves is just piling on. I don't like it in football, I don't like it in myself. Or in anybody I love, for that matter. The trick is to root out the original stimulus for the self-slap, and retrain the inner Swedish Grandmother. (Leggy blonde or no, that woman is fierce and very stubborn.)
This is all coming from a mesomorph, you understand; it is even possible that I'm transforming, breaking out of that athletic chrysalis into a full-blown soft, sedentary, bulbous endomorph (Jabba-the-Hut comes to mind; and you just shut up, Helga). What I have never been is one of those wiry, active, occasionally jittery ectomorphs; you know them when you see them: they're always moving, they eat like pigs and burn it off immediately, they twitch when forced to sit still for more than a few minutes. I had an ectomorphic sister, I live with one, at least one of my children is one and I think his wife is, too, thank a merciful God. The worst of the ecto's are smug and self-righteous, and they easily get away with it in this American world which is dominated by the Puritan ethic. The best of them just keep trucking, hying themselves off to the gym when they can't stand being still anymore; they happily pick up the ball when the rest of us are prostrate from frenzied or unaccustomed activity. Ectomorphs are the people you want to have around for fund-raisers of all kinds. They also come in handy for a blitzkrieg of the house because the Swedish grandmother is coming to town; they KNOW what she's looking for.
The trick is to accept that most of us AREN'T ectomorphs, to let 'em go, to be thankful for the kindly meshing of body/mind/spirit/metabolism types, and enjoy whatever it is one is doing or, better, NOT doing at the moment. Tall order. Any suggestions?
Anyway, one bleak winter day Ana said to me, through tears of frustration, "Why is it that I have to Do Do Do all the damned time? Why can't I just Be Be Be?" I couldn't answer in any useful way; all I could do was listen to her, agree with her and try to comfort her, and finally offer her the name and number of my shrink (with whom she had an affair soon after, but that's a WHOLE 'nother blog).
When I was small and my mother would be cleaning or cooking or paying bills or doing anything but sewing (which she loved, right up until the finishing part of a project), my sisters and I were careful to look as busy and helpful as we could, so that her resentments wouldn't turn themselves toward us and drive her to a lot of snarling and smacking. During my first marriage (the traditional one -- I haven't qualified the other two, but I will as soon as I get clearer on them, or, as Garrison Keillor says, as soon as they're funny), the DoDoDo precept was clouded by similar resentments on my part, and bewilderment on the part of my very traditional husband, who had no idea of nor curiosity about the symbolism of wifely drudgery. (The constant exhaustion and worry was yet another layer, but there didn't seem to be anything anybody could do to fix that.)
Many years and, God knows, many social revolutions have passed since then, yet Ana's entreaties still haunt me. As with other ingrained habits, I find that over time I have trained myself to monitor carefully and relentlessly my state of Busyness at any given moment; should I find myself unaccountably wool-gathering or reading something merely entertaining and not buhroaaaaaaadening, something in me snaps and I start in with the chiding and mental self-slapping-around. I've lived long enough to know that slapping ourselves around is destructive, pointless and probably excessive, since there are plenty of people lining up to judge and reprove and disapprove of us and our behavior; doing it to ourselves is just piling on. I don't like it in football, I don't like it in myself. Or in anybody I love, for that matter. The trick is to root out the original stimulus for the self-slap, and retrain the inner Swedish Grandmother. (Leggy blonde or no, that woman is fierce and very stubborn.)
This is all coming from a mesomorph, you understand; it is even possible that I'm transforming, breaking out of that athletic chrysalis into a full-blown soft, sedentary, bulbous endomorph (Jabba-the-Hut comes to mind; and you just shut up, Helga). What I have never been is one of those wiry, active, occasionally jittery ectomorphs; you know them when you see them: they're always moving, they eat like pigs and burn it off immediately, they twitch when forced to sit still for more than a few minutes. I had an ectomorphic sister, I live with one, at least one of my children is one and I think his wife is, too, thank a merciful God. The worst of the ecto's are smug and self-righteous, and they easily get away with it in this American world which is dominated by the Puritan ethic. The best of them just keep trucking, hying themselves off to the gym when they can't stand being still anymore; they happily pick up the ball when the rest of us are prostrate from frenzied or unaccustomed activity. Ectomorphs are the people you want to have around for fund-raisers of all kinds. They also come in handy for a blitzkrieg of the house because the Swedish grandmother is coming to town; they KNOW what she's looking for.
The trick is to accept that most of us AREN'T ectomorphs, to let 'em go, to be thankful for the kindly meshing of body/mind/spirit/metabolism types, and enjoy whatever it is one is doing or, better, NOT doing at the moment. Tall order. Any suggestions?
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Bespoke guilt
I was chatting with a friend the other day, being funny and confessional at the same time: "I'm so ashamed. I fell off the wagon. I bought shoes." He thought it was funny, and said so. Later we were both in the company of a third friend, and (still not comfortable with having bought the shoes, and seeking further reassurance) I did the same riff. This friend hadn't learned her lines, however, and said, "I'm glad you're back in the money. I read about your adventures as the Welfare Queen." I replied, "Gggghhhh." Not at ALL what I was looking for, and now, two days later, I still can't shake the effects of the dig.
In the first place, when I walked into the gathering, they were talking about defensive bridge play, and I (again being SO funny) interrupted, "WHAT MAKES YOU SAY THAT?" Not getting the giggle I wanted, I overplayed it, "WHO'S DEFENSIVE???" The rest of them really wanted to get back to their discussion, so I let it ride. I don't have a particular problem with people not thinking I'm delightfully witty one hundred percent of the time, but I can see now that my defensiveness interjection was in fact the naming of The Juls Lesson for Today.
Second, the friend who made the welfare queen crack is, has been, and ever more shall be politically somewhere to the right of Ivan the Terrible (as someone once said about Trisha Nixon), and I know this, I've known it for years now. When we're together, I am usually careful not to bring up any issue on which we disagree -- not politics, CERTAINLY -- and in a previous blog, I referred to myself, with great irony, as a welfare queen because I had taken advantage of a state system that will pay for mammograms for low income women. My friend is not a nasty woman, she had expressed concerned about my cancer scare, and I am confident that she is glad that at least in New Mexico every woman can have a thorough annual breast and cervical cancer check for free.
On the other hand, she's been well trained to go into some kind of a spasm upon hearing certain phrases, "welfare queen" being one of them, and if I have been a supplicant at the public trough and then go out and buy SHOES, for God's sake, that is good reason to smack me. It's what's wrong with America: the Welfare Queen takes my friend's MUNNY and buys frivolous things with it, probably takes food stamps and buys cigarettes. Et cetera. I don't know exactly how the reasoning goes, since I don't listen to those talk radio guys because they make me so damned mad, but I know -- now -- that the opinions they bray override personal relations every time. Ideology trumps connection, as with Lenin and his Beethoven: he wouldn't listen to Beethoven because it made him feel things, and consequently made him less effective at, say, torturing and executing ideological dissenters, and he was committed to The Cause before all else.
So I got smacked. It wasn't personal, but I surely took it personally. And THAT'S the lesson. My friend is entitled to think and say whatever she wants, even to fight for her beliefs to the detriment of her friendships if those beliefs are closely held and more important to her. The object lesson for me is that my guilt is MY guilt, and, in the end, no amount of reassurance from other people will assuage it. It's my job to stop the guilt cycle for myself, and not depend on friends and loved ones to bail me out of what is really a self-destructive syndrome. What do they call the alcoholic guilt syndrome? Shame-based or something like that? Well, if one is determined to BE ashamed, that's how it's gonna be. Either buy the damned shoes, shut up and nevermind (Mary's choice for me) or pass them up and exert a little self-damn-control and reward myself with well-earned smugness.
A shrink friend once told me that guilt is the only man-made emotion, invented by organized religion as an effective tool for social control, and reinforced by modern society for its usefulness as a marketing device. Kids don't really have a choice about buying into guilt -- parents will pick up anything they can lift to get a child to do their bidding, and it's what THEY learned at the mercy of THEIR parents, yea back unto the thousandth generation -- and kids learn guilt and use it themselves. Guilt-tripping can prevent more violent measures, and, in its passive-aggressive form, is anonymous, so why not use it? No reason, until it, or its perversion, kicks back and the concomitant shame does damage to our connection with ourselves, and, as happened the other day, with our friends. The very minute we get the I-fucked-up stomach ache is the time to abort-abort-abort whatever thinking led to it. The event (e.g., shoe-buying) is not the point at all; the point is the willful infliction of shame and diminution on a psyche that is struggling to reach health and wholeness. That's the sin. There are plenty of people and institutions whose mission it is to make us feel bad about ourselves, and when we do their work for them, there truly is no hope for us.
So stop it, stop looking for approval, or paying attention to recrimination, or even sympathetic commiseration; any one of them merely reinforces the original guilt. Pretty new shoes make me feel better about myself and my ugly feet, and that's just A Good Thing all around.
In the first place, when I walked into the gathering, they were talking about defensive bridge play, and I (again being SO funny) interrupted, "WHAT MAKES YOU SAY THAT?" Not getting the giggle I wanted, I overplayed it, "WHO'S DEFENSIVE???" The rest of them really wanted to get back to their discussion, so I let it ride. I don't have a particular problem with people not thinking I'm delightfully witty one hundred percent of the time, but I can see now that my defensiveness interjection was in fact the naming of The Juls Lesson for Today.
Second, the friend who made the welfare queen crack is, has been, and ever more shall be politically somewhere to the right of Ivan the Terrible (as someone once said about Trisha Nixon), and I know this, I've known it for years now. When we're together, I am usually careful not to bring up any issue on which we disagree -- not politics, CERTAINLY -- and in a previous blog, I referred to myself, with great irony, as a welfare queen because I had taken advantage of a state system that will pay for mammograms for low income women. My friend is not a nasty woman, she had expressed concerned about my cancer scare, and I am confident that she is glad that at least in New Mexico every woman can have a thorough annual breast and cervical cancer check for free.
On the other hand, she's been well trained to go into some kind of a spasm upon hearing certain phrases, "welfare queen" being one of them, and if I have been a supplicant at the public trough and then go out and buy SHOES, for God's sake, that is good reason to smack me. It's what's wrong with America: the Welfare Queen takes my friend's MUNNY and buys frivolous things with it, probably takes food stamps and buys cigarettes. Et cetera. I don't know exactly how the reasoning goes, since I don't listen to those talk radio guys because they make me so damned mad, but I know -- now -- that the opinions they bray override personal relations every time. Ideology trumps connection, as with Lenin and his Beethoven: he wouldn't listen to Beethoven because it made him feel things, and consequently made him less effective at, say, torturing and executing ideological dissenters, and he was committed to The Cause before all else.
So I got smacked. It wasn't personal, but I surely took it personally. And THAT'S the lesson. My friend is entitled to think and say whatever she wants, even to fight for her beliefs to the detriment of her friendships if those beliefs are closely held and more important to her. The object lesson for me is that my guilt is MY guilt, and, in the end, no amount of reassurance from other people will assuage it. It's my job to stop the guilt cycle for myself, and not depend on friends and loved ones to bail me out of what is really a self-destructive syndrome. What do they call the alcoholic guilt syndrome? Shame-based or something like that? Well, if one is determined to BE ashamed, that's how it's gonna be. Either buy the damned shoes, shut up and nevermind (Mary's choice for me) or pass them up and exert a little self-damn-control and reward myself with well-earned smugness.
A shrink friend once told me that guilt is the only man-made emotion, invented by organized religion as an effective tool for social control, and reinforced by modern society for its usefulness as a marketing device. Kids don't really have a choice about buying into guilt -- parents will pick up anything they can lift to get a child to do their bidding, and it's what THEY learned at the mercy of THEIR parents, yea back unto the thousandth generation -- and kids learn guilt and use it themselves. Guilt-tripping can prevent more violent measures, and, in its passive-aggressive form, is anonymous, so why not use it? No reason, until it, or its perversion, kicks back and the concomitant shame does damage to our connection with ourselves, and, as happened the other day, with our friends. The very minute we get the I-fucked-up stomach ache is the time to abort-abort-abort whatever thinking led to it. The event (e.g., shoe-buying) is not the point at all; the point is the willful infliction of shame and diminution on a psyche that is struggling to reach health and wholeness. That's the sin. There are plenty of people and institutions whose mission it is to make us feel bad about ourselves, and when we do their work for them, there truly is no hope for us.
So stop it, stop looking for approval, or paying attention to recrimination, or even sympathetic commiseration; any one of them merely reinforces the original guilt. Pretty new shoes make me feel better about myself and my ugly feet, and that's just A Good Thing all around.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Monsoon enough
As one who grew up with most of the works of Kipling, I was pretty sure I knew what a monsoon was. In the first place that HAS to be a Hindu word, and the phenomenon has therefore to be one unique to the tropics: muggy mornings, giving way to torrential rains in the afternoon, which leave clear but even hotter and visibly steamy evenings and sweaty, mosquito-plagued nights. Oh, yes, and spices and heady flower fragrances float in the heavy air as well. Isn't that what you thought, too?
Well, think again. Here in the high desert, what the locals call the monsoons arrive usually in time for the opening of the opera season (plus or minus July 1), in order to provide for the early arrivals a meteorological pre-game show through the opening in the back of the stage. Thunderheads and rumbles build throughout the afternoon, and by evening there is as likely as not a gully washer (lavadora del arroyo?), at least in Santa Fe, also usually in Albuquerque. Not so much in between the two cities here in Cochiti Lake -- one day out of 6 or 7 we'll get rain, but we get every single mutter and clap of thunder. The heat -- the DRY heat, they say proudly -- continues, and the sweat dries instantly on the skin. If there WERE frangrances in the air, you couldn't smell them because the inside of your nose is cracked and bleeding from the lack of humidity. (The humidity rests stubbornly at around 12% today.)
The monsoons came early by a month or so this year, and it's not a big deal to anybody but Grreta, our beautiful but slightly neurotic shepherd/husky. The fact that it's a big deal to Grreta makes it an enormous deal for the rest of us in the household, as well as for those neighbors who are kind enough, and love Grreta enough, to want to help us deal with her. At the very first sign of thunder (we don't even know it's coming except for the behavior of our little harbinger) Grreta whines, she quakes, she runs around the edges of the room, she crawls under tables, unplugging appliances and electronic equipment as she goes, she paws at doors, she scrubs the carpet, she climbs in and out of the bathtub and pulls down the curtain rod as she does so. If we have been foolish enough to leave her loose alone in the house for one of these episodes, she will likely as not pee on one of our beds. If anybody approaches her to try to put a leash on her, she growls and snarls. We used to cram Grreta into a crate (viz. "Marly and Me"), but by now (age 10) she's just damned well had it with that, and so she snarls and snaps alarmingly, twisting and turning and bracing her legs so that it's pretty scary and a huge effort to get that job done. We gave it up.
There is not enough Rescue Remedy or canine tranquilizer in the world to reassure this dog. She just will not be persuaded that every day, every single day for months, there is not a mortar assault on our bunker, from which we will all die, Grreta first. That we haven't died in ten years of thunderstorms in Atlanta and then the so-called monsoons of New Mexico means nothing; today could be the day the mortar round finds its target and we will die. Grreta first.
The only solution, and it's an imperfect one, is to restrain her; we risk dismemberment by attaching her leash, and then we affix the leash to a (large) object, like the leg of our ridiculously heavy coffee table, or the frame of a bed. Snubbed up in this way, Grreta seems at least to be if not mollified, then contained. She seems to feel slightly better if she's in company (it's always good to have an audience if you're chewing scenery), and the fact of the restraint seems vaguely comforting. "Stop me before I pee again...." If she should need to pee in earnest, she won't do it, likewise will not eat nor drink. She wants to be left alone (but closely watched, if you can imagine) to shudder and quake exophthalmically.
I have some experience with prima donnas, and after a lifetime of trying to modify the behavior by ignoring it, isolating it, or desperately changing the subject, I have surrendered to it. Damned if I'll applaud, but it's taken its toll on me so I'll just let it go. If I can hear the audio of the broadcast of the Wimbledon finals, then I'll just nevermind nevermind nevermind.
Update: I finally had the mammogram last week, so everybody can stand down now. An interesting side note: When a welfare queen such as myself shows up for her Medicaid-covered mammogram appointment, one of the Blue-Toothed (not literally, although those things look a lot like Patrick Stewart's Borg appliance) reception bimbos, now trying to spell the perfectly phonetic Hoochaneetsa Plaza North, makes you an offer. You know how when you're playing blackjack in Vegas or Reno (or the Sandia Casino for that matter), and the dealer's first card is an ace, she offers you insurance against the possibility that her next card will be a face card or a ten, otherwise known as the idiot bet? This is like that. For an additional but paltry sum of $40.00 plus tax, the radiologist will scan my film through a CAD program. I pursue the matter:
I: Doesn't he read it first, with his eyes?
Bimbo: Well, yes.
I: Medicaid doesn't cover it?
Bimbo: No; it's just an added reassurance.
I: If I have cancer, won't they include that test, among others, like an MRI, in my "program"?
Bimbo: Well, yes.
I: So if I decline this once-in-a-lifetime offer (you'll excuse the expression), I can have the CAD-read anyway if I need it?
Bimbo: Well, yes.
I: I therefore decline it.
Bimbo: OooooKAY. [Subtext: it's your funeral.] Please sign this form SAYING you decline it. [Subtext: it's not MY fault if you die of an overlooked TUMOR, and it's not Doctor Gary's fault either. So don't even THINK of suing. Before you die.]
Can't wait to see "Sicko" -- it's gotta reaffirm everything we already know about the absurd and rapacious health care system in the United States.
Well, think again. Here in the high desert, what the locals call the monsoons arrive usually in time for the opening of the opera season (plus or minus July 1), in order to provide for the early arrivals a meteorological pre-game show through the opening in the back of the stage. Thunderheads and rumbles build throughout the afternoon, and by evening there is as likely as not a gully washer (lavadora del arroyo?), at least in Santa Fe, also usually in Albuquerque. Not so much in between the two cities here in Cochiti Lake -- one day out of 6 or 7 we'll get rain, but we get every single mutter and clap of thunder. The heat -- the DRY heat, they say proudly -- continues, and the sweat dries instantly on the skin. If there WERE frangrances in the air, you couldn't smell them because the inside of your nose is cracked and bleeding from the lack of humidity. (The humidity rests stubbornly at around 12% today.)
The monsoons came early by a month or so this year, and it's not a big deal to anybody but Grreta, our beautiful but slightly neurotic shepherd/husky. The fact that it's a big deal to Grreta makes it an enormous deal for the rest of us in the household, as well as for those neighbors who are kind enough, and love Grreta enough, to want to help us deal with her. At the very first sign of thunder (we don't even know it's coming except for the behavior of our little harbinger) Grreta whines, she quakes, she runs around the edges of the room, she crawls under tables, unplugging appliances and electronic equipment as she goes, she paws at doors, she scrubs the carpet, she climbs in and out of the bathtub and pulls down the curtain rod as she does so. If we have been foolish enough to leave her loose alone in the house for one of these episodes, she will likely as not pee on one of our beds. If anybody approaches her to try to put a leash on her, she growls and snarls. We used to cram Grreta into a crate (viz. "Marly and Me"), but by now (age 10) she's just damned well had it with that, and so she snarls and snaps alarmingly, twisting and turning and bracing her legs so that it's pretty scary and a huge effort to get that job done. We gave it up.
There is not enough Rescue Remedy or canine tranquilizer in the world to reassure this dog. She just will not be persuaded that every day, every single day for months, there is not a mortar assault on our bunker, from which we will all die, Grreta first. That we haven't died in ten years of thunderstorms in Atlanta and then the so-called monsoons of New Mexico means nothing; today could be the day the mortar round finds its target and we will die. Grreta first.
The only solution, and it's an imperfect one, is to restrain her; we risk dismemberment by attaching her leash, and then we affix the leash to a (large) object, like the leg of our ridiculously heavy coffee table, or the frame of a bed. Snubbed up in this way, Grreta seems at least to be if not mollified, then contained. She seems to feel slightly better if she's in company (it's always good to have an audience if you're chewing scenery), and the fact of the restraint seems vaguely comforting. "Stop me before I pee again...." If she should need to pee in earnest, she won't do it, likewise will not eat nor drink. She wants to be left alone (but closely watched, if you can imagine) to shudder and quake exophthalmically.
I have some experience with prima donnas, and after a lifetime of trying to modify the behavior by ignoring it, isolating it, or desperately changing the subject, I have surrendered to it. Damned if I'll applaud, but it's taken its toll on me so I'll just let it go. If I can hear the audio of the broadcast of the Wimbledon finals, then I'll just nevermind nevermind nevermind.
Update: I finally had the mammogram last week, so everybody can stand down now. An interesting side note: When a welfare queen such as myself shows up for her Medicaid-covered mammogram appointment, one of the Blue-Toothed (not literally, although those things look a lot like Patrick Stewart's Borg appliance) reception bimbos, now trying to spell the perfectly phonetic Hoochaneetsa Plaza North, makes you an offer. You know how when you're playing blackjack in Vegas or Reno (or the Sandia Casino for that matter), and the dealer's first card is an ace, she offers you insurance against the possibility that her next card will be a face card or a ten, otherwise known as the idiot bet? This is like that. For an additional but paltry sum of $40.00 plus tax, the radiologist will scan my film through a CAD program. I pursue the matter:
I: Doesn't he read it first, with his eyes?
Bimbo: Well, yes.
I: Medicaid doesn't cover it?
Bimbo: No; it's just an added reassurance.
I: If I have cancer, won't they include that test, among others, like an MRI, in my "program"?
Bimbo: Well, yes.
I: So if I decline this once-in-a-lifetime offer (you'll excuse the expression), I can have the CAD-read anyway if I need it?
Bimbo: Well, yes.
I: I therefore decline it.
Bimbo: OooooKAY. [Subtext: it's your funeral.] Please sign this form SAYING you decline it. [Subtext: it's not MY fault if you die of an overlooked TUMOR, and it's not Doctor Gary's fault either. So don't even THINK of suing. Before you die.]
Can't wait to see "Sicko" -- it's gotta reaffirm everything we already know about the absurd and rapacious health care system in the United States.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Through the eyes of Katharine Hepburn
People only remember the aged Katharine Hepburn for her shakes (she SWORE it wasn't Parkinsons, and it turns out it wasn't), or for her old tree metaphor, but nobody mentions her weepy eye. One (I think the left) was always red and drippy, and that's how my spring allergies have decided to manifest themselves the last couple of years: red, itchy, constantly weeping (right) eye. My glasses are always crusted, and stay askew on my nose from my constant reaching up under the lens to blot the drip. Handle the cat, swipe a little dust off of a table top, even read the Sunday paper, and I have to treat my hands as if they were radioactive -- wash them IMMEDIATELY and in the meantime NOT touch the offending eye. (Was it Solomon who said if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out? Well, I'm almost there.)
Anyway, Kate's eye got some kind of a permanent infection from when she threw herself, several times, into a Venetian canal at the insistence of the famously hard-nosed David Lean, the director of "Summertime". Terribly romantic movie (Rossano Brazzi was breath-taking), and a terribly romantic way to get a chronic eye infection. It's not all we have in common, Kate and I: she was only a few months younger than my mother, and they bore a startling physical resemblance to each other. Mother could do a devastating Hepburn imitation (better even than Anthony Hopkins', "Yowah killing yowaself with yowah drinking, yew know..."), something about calla lillies being in bloom my deah, reahhlly they ahh. And Mother was invited to play the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine in a staged "Lion in Winter" off Broadway, and damned near did it, but her health declined very quickly about then and it didn't happen.
Mother had played Eleanor very convincingly all of my life, up against my father's Henry II -- the dinner table battles were epic, those two bitter and noble and frightened monarchs battling it out with everything they had. (That table is where I got the nervous stomach that used to make it easy for me to lose weight in a crisis.) They had a passionate relationship, my parents, and God help those of us who had a stake in the outcome of any particular skirmish. We kids almost fit the pattern of the princes, too (except for being female): the eldest not very imaginative but fierce, the middle one always scheming but with no physical courage whatsoever, and the baby (moi) everybody's favorite but not at all inclined to rule. (The fact that that baby was not too bright I don't want to dwell on.)
So here I am with allergies, peering at the world through salt water, asitwere. This condition will fall off rapidly as soon as stuff out on the mesa stops its vigorous blooming; in the meantime I pop Benedryl like Pezzes, and continue to mop the eye.
For a brief time in the last week we thought Beaux Eaux would be coming back to us. After a massive and demonic communications foul-up, after I had paid for a motel room in Colorado Springs (non-refundable), and rented a car big enough to haul an 85-pound dog and his enormous crate, after getting so damned mad I could spit, it turned out that nothing, NOTHING, about Beaux's situation was as reported, and the place where he lives now is just fine. The people who have him apparently got a slanderous report on us and our feelings toward them and their dog-handling, so they're pissed too. They told us to butt out, not to contact them (good God, you'd think we were talking about a grey-market child adoption here), and further off-putting instructions. When I'm not getting mad all over again, I can take comfort in the fact that they renamed him Bodhi (which is perfect for that great soul), and in that we don't have to turn our lives upside down all over again. I'm glad and sad, but that chapter is closed now. Repairing relations will take a little longer.
Update on the great breast (leave that one) uproar: I got in to see a GYN, and got a (very) brief breast exam. He was not particularly excited about the lump, which had all but disappeared in the time between making the appointment and actually seeing somebody. We did make another date for an overall screening (hereinafter to be referred to as "screaming"): mammo, pap, etc etc etc, for six weeks later, so this clearly was not an emergency. Everybody can stand down now; I am grateful for your concern, truly I am.
We are busying ourselves with finishing the home improvements begun pre-Beaux Eaux, with firming up arrangements for our vacation at the end of August, with planning a choral tour to San Francisco in October and another one to Australia in May/June 2008.
Y'all tell me your favorite summer reads, okay? I think I'll actually be finding some time to do that!
Anyway, Kate's eye got some kind of a permanent infection from when she threw herself, several times, into a Venetian canal at the insistence of the famously hard-nosed David Lean, the director of "Summertime". Terribly romantic movie (Rossano Brazzi was breath-taking), and a terribly romantic way to get a chronic eye infection. It's not all we have in common, Kate and I: she was only a few months younger than my mother, and they bore a startling physical resemblance to each other. Mother could do a devastating Hepburn imitation (better even than Anthony Hopkins', "Yowah killing yowaself with yowah drinking, yew know..."), something about calla lillies being in bloom my deah, reahhlly they ahh. And Mother was invited to play the role of Eleanor of Aquitaine in a staged "Lion in Winter" off Broadway, and damned near did it, but her health declined very quickly about then and it didn't happen.
Mother had played Eleanor very convincingly all of my life, up against my father's Henry II -- the dinner table battles were epic, those two bitter and noble and frightened monarchs battling it out with everything they had. (That table is where I got the nervous stomach that used to make it easy for me to lose weight in a crisis.) They had a passionate relationship, my parents, and God help those of us who had a stake in the outcome of any particular skirmish. We kids almost fit the pattern of the princes, too (except for being female): the eldest not very imaginative but fierce, the middle one always scheming but with no physical courage whatsoever, and the baby (moi) everybody's favorite but not at all inclined to rule. (The fact that that baby was not too bright I don't want to dwell on.)
So here I am with allergies, peering at the world through salt water, asitwere. This condition will fall off rapidly as soon as stuff out on the mesa stops its vigorous blooming; in the meantime I pop Benedryl like Pezzes, and continue to mop the eye.
For a brief time in the last week we thought Beaux Eaux would be coming back to us. After a massive and demonic communications foul-up, after I had paid for a motel room in Colorado Springs (non-refundable), and rented a car big enough to haul an 85-pound dog and his enormous crate, after getting so damned mad I could spit, it turned out that nothing, NOTHING, about Beaux's situation was as reported, and the place where he lives now is just fine. The people who have him apparently got a slanderous report on us and our feelings toward them and their dog-handling, so they're pissed too. They told us to butt out, not to contact them (good God, you'd think we were talking about a grey-market child adoption here), and further off-putting instructions. When I'm not getting mad all over again, I can take comfort in the fact that they renamed him Bodhi (which is perfect for that great soul), and in that we don't have to turn our lives upside down all over again. I'm glad and sad, but that chapter is closed now. Repairing relations will take a little longer.
Update on the great breast (leave that one) uproar: I got in to see a GYN, and got a (very) brief breast exam. He was not particularly excited about the lump, which had all but disappeared in the time between making the appointment and actually seeing somebody. We did make another date for an overall screening (hereinafter to be referred to as "screaming"): mammo, pap, etc etc etc, for six weeks later, so this clearly was not an emergency. Everybody can stand down now; I am grateful for your concern, truly I am.
We are busying ourselves with finishing the home improvements begun pre-Beaux Eaux, with firming up arrangements for our vacation at the end of August, with planning a choral tour to San Francisco in October and another one to Australia in May/June 2008.
Y'all tell me your favorite summer reads, okay? I think I'll actually be finding some time to do that!
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
The Film at 11
This is just a quickie update, with the promised film at 11. Here are some pics of Beaux Eaux at his new home. He looks happy, and God knows the terrain is a lot more luscious than ours here.
I don't have snapshots of the aforementioned breast anomaly; there are some things that are just way too much information, even for me. About that, though: the lump has all but disappeared, after the application of some do-it-myself Reiki and a couple days' worth of broad-spectrum antibiotics. I am, however, bowing to the considerable pressure and getting screened next week. (Okay, okay, OKAY. Jeez.) I found that there is a program in New Mexico for just this situation, i.e., a woman of a certain age has a breast anomaly, and needs to be screened and can't pay for it, so a branch of the state's Medicaid program covers it. The program was not easy to find (11 phone calls), nor yet to arrange (5 more phone calls to date), and I cannot imagine what would happen if I were (a) illiterate, (b) non-English speaking, (c) intimidated by officious, SUSpicious and overall disinterested bureaucrats, and/or (d) had a real and serious, malignant mass in my breast. I would die, I guess, and in a particularly horrible way.
On the other hand, I am here to tell you that should something come up, I will NOT surrender my body to the tender mercies of the New Mexico welfare health system. Make no mistake, this state is a Third World Country, Bill Richardson notwithstanding. It's the Haiti of the continental United States. If I happen to turn up with some kind of cancer, I am headed for Sloane-Kettering on the next plane. If I need a hip replaced, ditto to India, Thailand or Belgium. Et cetera. Let the word go forth.
Right now we can't be bothered with such trivialities; on Friday my oldest bestest friend comes to town for a few days, and we are scurrying around cleaning up after the Beaux Eaux scourge, planning trips to Santa Fe and Taos, stocking the fridge, preparing the Margarita mix. This is almost an annual event, looked forward to by all of us. I can't WAIT.
So, I'll get back to y'all after she leaves, and after I've been screened. (Let's not kid around: a mammogram is what someone described as lying down on the floor of your garage in sub-zero temperatures, placing your breast behind a back tire, and getting someone to drive over it three or four times. It won't kill me, but it will be NO FUN.)
I do thank you all for responding with concern and encouragement. I really have the very BEST friends.
I don't have snapshots of the aforementioned breast anomaly; there are some things that are just way too much information, even for me. About that, though: the lump has all but disappeared, after the application of some do-it-myself Reiki and a couple days' worth of broad-spectrum antibiotics. I am, however, bowing to the considerable pressure and getting screened next week. (Okay, okay, OKAY. Jeez.) I found that there is a program in New Mexico for just this situation, i.e., a woman of a certain age has a breast anomaly, and needs to be screened and can't pay for it, so a branch of the state's Medicaid program covers it. The program was not easy to find (11 phone calls), nor yet to arrange (5 more phone calls to date), and I cannot imagine what would happen if I were (a) illiterate, (b) non-English speaking, (c) intimidated by officious, SUSpicious and overall disinterested bureaucrats, and/or (d) had a real and serious, malignant mass in my breast. I would die, I guess, and in a particularly horrible way.
On the other hand, I am here to tell you that should something come up, I will NOT surrender my body to the tender mercies of the New Mexico welfare health system. Make no mistake, this state is a Third World Country, Bill Richardson notwithstanding. It's the Haiti of the continental United States. If I happen to turn up with some kind of cancer, I am headed for Sloane-Kettering on the next plane. If I need a hip replaced, ditto to India, Thailand or Belgium. Et cetera. Let the word go forth.
Right now we can't be bothered with such trivialities; on Friday my oldest bestest friend comes to town for a few days, and we are scurrying around cleaning up after the Beaux Eaux scourge, planning trips to Santa Fe and Taos, stocking the fridge, preparing the Margarita mix. This is almost an annual event, looked forward to by all of us. I can't WAIT.
So, I'll get back to y'all after she leaves, and after I've been screened. (Let's not kid around: a mammogram is what someone described as lying down on the floor of your garage in sub-zero temperatures, placing your breast behind a back tire, and getting someone to drive over it three or four times. It won't kill me, but it will be NO FUN.)
I do thank you all for responding with concern and encouragement. I really have the very BEST friends.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
A smorgasbord of Life Events
Beaux Eaux has gone to a new home. Dear friends are separating. And then there's this lump in my breast.
Relatives of neighbors showed up last weekend to audition Beaux, and for 48 hours we all danced around (well, Beaux did most of the dancing, bless his little white socks), and in the end we sent him off to Colorado (yes, that's right -- Colorado, the land of the brindle-killers; they tell me that they will see to it that the brindle-killers will not have cause to come after Beaux; I keep my fingers crossed). We are all happy with this choice; Mary and I felt a clear resonance with the adopters, Beaux hopped in the car with his usual elan, not even looking back (except when they actually drove off -- that was a little rough on me), and the adopters seemed to me to be glad to have him. I understand that there's been a rocky adjustment in his new house, e.g., it turns out Beaux isn't housebroken, but then we crate-trained him and so we didn't KNOW that. Also, the adoptive family has found him to be a Project, though that's not really a surprise; they've had (and presently have) big dogs, and while it's been some time since the resident big dog has been an enthusiastic big puppy, it's all coming back to them. As we all know, you can't hate Beaux Eaux -- his sense of humor is just too apparent, and his basic sweetness always gleams through in the end. So it's fine; we miss him, but we are glad to have our lives back.
Well, I was glad to have my life back for less than a day after the departure of Beaux; these old friends each individually called me the next afternoon telling me that their marriage is probably over. It's not that I didn't expect it: it's been rocky and painful and dramatic for over a year now, and I've held the odds pretty much at 50-50 all along. It's not even that I think they should preserve their union at all costs (God knows I'm the last person to suggest that, being the ragged survivor of non-divorcing parents, and a contented multi-divorcee myself), it's just that we all thought -- hell, we all knew -- that these two are soulmates, and their connection has endured for 25 years (some kind of a record in the modern era). It gave us some hope for life-partnerships in a few golden cases.
Richard, the husband, has been wandering out in the ether with a classic midlife crisis, not really making sense, not really behaving like the Richard we all know and laugh with. Linda has been in turn hurt and frantic and frightened beyond measure, not to mention angry (angry being something she's never really been very good at or enjoyed at all). It's unfortunately a very familiar story, and I just wish it were not so. I would have thought that Richard would find a more creative, original way to express his mid-forties angst, and I grieve for that as much as I do for the collapse of the Empire. Linda will be fine, eventually -- she's stronger than she had thought, and once she realizes that she hasn't been a complete fool, she'll rise up and expand to fit her enormous spirit. Richard will one day come to his senses, we hope in time to catch up with Linda, but if not even then he'll be okay. I look forward to having him back in the land of the laughing living. In the meantime, we all continue to cling to the bar of the roller coaster car and try not to puke.
The breast lump I am assuming is a bizarre kind of mastitis, attributable to the estrogen/progesterone imbalance I've been struggling with lately. It is tender to the touch, and I'm told that Bad Lumps don't hurt; it feels like the early stages of nursing, and that's really a strange sensation at my age. Since I don't have any health insurance, and am 8 months away from qualifying for Medicare, I am going to continue to work under that assumption, tweaking my supplements (I really kind of like my progesterone cream) as necessary, and work Reiki magic. If it isn't better in a week or so, I'll do something else.
I don't want to scare anybody, but I don't want to be in this alone either, so I blog (Blogito ergo sum?). Film at 11, dear friends.
Relatives of neighbors showed up last weekend to audition Beaux, and for 48 hours we all danced around (well, Beaux did most of the dancing, bless his little white socks), and in the end we sent him off to Colorado (yes, that's right -- Colorado, the land of the brindle-killers; they tell me that they will see to it that the brindle-killers will not have cause to come after Beaux; I keep my fingers crossed). We are all happy with this choice; Mary and I felt a clear resonance with the adopters, Beaux hopped in the car with his usual elan, not even looking back (except when they actually drove off -- that was a little rough on me), and the adopters seemed to me to be glad to have him. I understand that there's been a rocky adjustment in his new house, e.g., it turns out Beaux isn't housebroken, but then we crate-trained him and so we didn't KNOW that. Also, the adoptive family has found him to be a Project, though that's not really a surprise; they've had (and presently have) big dogs, and while it's been some time since the resident big dog has been an enthusiastic big puppy, it's all coming back to them. As we all know, you can't hate Beaux Eaux -- his sense of humor is just too apparent, and his basic sweetness always gleams through in the end. So it's fine; we miss him, but we are glad to have our lives back.
Well, I was glad to have my life back for less than a day after the departure of Beaux; these old friends each individually called me the next afternoon telling me that their marriage is probably over. It's not that I didn't expect it: it's been rocky and painful and dramatic for over a year now, and I've held the odds pretty much at 50-50 all along. It's not even that I think they should preserve their union at all costs (God knows I'm the last person to suggest that, being the ragged survivor of non-divorcing parents, and a contented multi-divorcee myself), it's just that we all thought -- hell, we all knew -- that these two are soulmates, and their connection has endured for 25 years (some kind of a record in the modern era). It gave us some hope for life-partnerships in a few golden cases.
Richard, the husband, has been wandering out in the ether with a classic midlife crisis, not really making sense, not really behaving like the Richard we all know and laugh with. Linda has been in turn hurt and frantic and frightened beyond measure, not to mention angry (angry being something she's never really been very good at or enjoyed at all). It's unfortunately a very familiar story, and I just wish it were not so. I would have thought that Richard would find a more creative, original way to express his mid-forties angst, and I grieve for that as much as I do for the collapse of the Empire. Linda will be fine, eventually -- she's stronger than she had thought, and once she realizes that she hasn't been a complete fool, she'll rise up and expand to fit her enormous spirit. Richard will one day come to his senses, we hope in time to catch up with Linda, but if not even then he'll be okay. I look forward to having him back in the land of the laughing living. In the meantime, we all continue to cling to the bar of the roller coaster car and try not to puke.
The breast lump I am assuming is a bizarre kind of mastitis, attributable to the estrogen/progesterone imbalance I've been struggling with lately. It is tender to the touch, and I'm told that Bad Lumps don't hurt; it feels like the early stages of nursing, and that's really a strange sensation at my age. Since I don't have any health insurance, and am 8 months away from qualifying for Medicare, I am going to continue to work under that assumption, tweaking my supplements (I really kind of like my progesterone cream) as necessary, and work Reiki magic. If it isn't better in a week or so, I'll do something else.
I don't want to scare anybody, but I don't want to be in this alone either, so I blog (Blogito ergo sum?). Film at 11, dear friends.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Love it and let it go
I don't know if men have a problem with loving and letting go. When I see the bumper sticker (usually on a pickup truck, right next to one that says, "No Fat Chicks"), "If you love something, set it free, and if it doesn't come back to you, hunt it down and shoot it," I wonder if that's one of those double-reverse-irony things, the roots of the stalking of an ex-wife or girlfriend, and, in its greatest extreme, of honor killing. Or maybe it's one of their feral tendencies that men need to be aware of in order to keep it under control, as cat-fights or infanticide are for women. I do know that loving and letting go is damned hard for ME, and I just don't know how to wiggle my way out of/around it.
Because here's the thing: Bozo is still with us. (Though now, at my son Billy's suggestion, we have re-wrought the name to Beaux Eaux, pronounced bo-ZO, meaning beautiful waters, and it's much more representative of the nature of this dog.) It seems I am not very good at marginalizing an animal that lives at my house. I really had thought that I'd be okay if we kept Beaux outside, in the garage at night, and crated when not being walked or trained or playing under supervision with the other dogs. He'd be extraneous to the core of the household, though we'd feed him and work with him, and prepare him for his real home, and we'd happily wave him off in the two or three weeks or so it would take to find The Right Beaux People. I wanted to make him a project, one of many I have around here (building the storage cabinets in the garage, installing new shower heads, pruning roses, stuff like that), and when the project was completed, I'd be perfectly fine with it. I'd Move On.
Well, not so much. I took my turn at taking Beaux to the adoption clinic in Albuquerque last Saturday, and I am lucky to have survived the experience. I still get weepy when I think of it. There lay all those scruffy, abandoned dogs: barking and wincing away from people and each other, and still trying their best to look appealing and helpful, to overcome for this one important moment whatever horrible abuse they'd already suffered, just trying to save their own lives and maybe find a family to love them if they should be extremely lucky. Beaux was right in the middle of all that frantic survival effort: whenever a car door would open, his tail would start banging furiously on the side of his wire crate. He'd stand up, and arch his neck, smile (really smile) and delicately lick any fingers pressed against the mesh. As Mary says, I never saw a dog try so hard to please, to appeal, to suppress the power of his body so as to seem as soft as his enormous heart.
And now, gentle readers, I find myself fallen in love with this animal. Before, I just worried that I was not doing right by him, that I was not taking good enough care of him, that he was at various times too cold, too sick, or too neglected, and that I wasn't living up to my responsibilities as fosterer of a dog. Since I was (or thought I was) keeping Beaux at arms' length emotionally, then my job was oddly more complicated: I had to figure out, to design, good care for him, against some vague SAT exam standard set by Professionals in the field of Dog Management.
I confess that that's how I tried to deal with life when my four children were small and seemingly hell-bent on killing themselves, each other and maybe me. It was a matter of management, I decided, with the eager concurrence of my middle-management husband and the father of these same little savages. While the father was not home (typically traveling four or five days a week), I had a regimen to follow, all laid out on a legal pad, and so I did, and did my damndest. Of course, when the father returned, there was the dreaded assessment of how well had I followed those instructions, and I usually came up short. In the business plan, he had neglected to accommodate the surprises that young, living mammals can spring on one, like contracting pneumonia, or finding themselves in the middle of a pin-worm epidemic, or splitting a scalp on the coffee table and bleeding like a stuck pig, or beating the living crap out of the next door neighbor kid and having the father of that kid show up in turn and beat the living crap out of our kid. People are messy, it turns out, and careful management of their lives and well-being is far more difficult than merely managing their widget-output over the course of an eight-hour workshift.
And what about making the distinction between catching hell for mismanagement, and suffering the self-inflicted, hard-wired, impossible-to-ignore, all-consuming love and caritas for these small and blinded, thrashing and weeping, shining and shit-covered creatures? I just didn't know what to DO with that. The father, having missed the drama of the week he had not been in residence, and having firmly in mind (and mind only) how delightful the children can be, would spend the weekend loving them, playing with them, being the perfect Dad, while I lay on my bed, cold-compressed, or giving in to the headcold I'd fought off all week, or just enfolded in misery at my incompetence and clearly apparent inability to love.
God knows what kind of scarring the kids sustained, not to mention my own. But that same God, knowing this, has given me AFOG -- Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth -- in the form of a huge, maddening, absolutely untrained, unmanaged child-dog. While the only drawbacks to Beaux Eaux are his unbridled enthusiasms and his sheer size, I am not so old nor so decrepit that I cannot in the end physically control him. We have honed our systems down now to where he is under control; we've child-proofed the house and yard, I've cut my fingernails as short as possible so as not to keep tearing them when I grab at his collar, we've accomplished the sit, the walk, the shut-up, the don't-climb-the-fence commands. What I never saw coming was how I would be struck dumb by the size of his heart, and the unquestioning love he has for me, no matter how I behave towards him. He just loves me; he is palpably grateful for my having saved his life, and for this he will do absolutely anything for me if I will just tell him what it is I expect.
And now I'm supposed to give him up??? Yes. We cannot keep him; he's not, after all, our dog. He has someplace he needs to be, and it is not here. We are sure of it, and we are sure that our job is to prepare him for that. If he were my child, it would be incumbent upon me to get him ready for college, for the world, for his real life, and then to release him to it. It's just like that -- this is my do-over, my unfinished lesson in love-and-let-go.
When I drove my youngest child to her first year of college, I cried for the entire two-and-a-half hour trip; I didn't just weep, understand -- this was sobbing, wrenching, heaving of the second chakra, and entirely uncharacteristic of what all of us, all along, had thought of as Me. My college-bound daughter must have (a) thought that my long-awaited derangement had finally occurred, and (b) worried for her physical safety on the California freeways. I don't know if she even remembers it, but I surely do, and I am terrified of the day when Beaux must leave here.
In the meantime, I'm trying really hard to learn that lesson; I do not want to have to go through this again. I paradoxically strain to relax and love Beaux Eaux, to enjoy his antics, to ignore the certain knowledge of his leaving, to stay present in the moment, and blah blah blah. I just hate this, and the more I think of how much I hate it, the more I know I have to do it.
Thank God I don't have to like it.
Because here's the thing: Bozo is still with us. (Though now, at my son Billy's suggestion, we have re-wrought the name to Beaux Eaux, pronounced bo-ZO, meaning beautiful waters, and it's much more representative of the nature of this dog.) It seems I am not very good at marginalizing an animal that lives at my house. I really had thought that I'd be okay if we kept Beaux outside, in the garage at night, and crated when not being walked or trained or playing under supervision with the other dogs. He'd be extraneous to the core of the household, though we'd feed him and work with him, and prepare him for his real home, and we'd happily wave him off in the two or three weeks or so it would take to find The Right Beaux People. I wanted to make him a project, one of many I have around here (building the storage cabinets in the garage, installing new shower heads, pruning roses, stuff like that), and when the project was completed, I'd be perfectly fine with it. I'd Move On.
Well, not so much. I took my turn at taking Beaux to the adoption clinic in Albuquerque last Saturday, and I am lucky to have survived the experience. I still get weepy when I think of it. There lay all those scruffy, abandoned dogs: barking and wincing away from people and each other, and still trying their best to look appealing and helpful, to overcome for this one important moment whatever horrible abuse they'd already suffered, just trying to save their own lives and maybe find a family to love them if they should be extremely lucky. Beaux was right in the middle of all that frantic survival effort: whenever a car door would open, his tail would start banging furiously on the side of his wire crate. He'd stand up, and arch his neck, smile (really smile) and delicately lick any fingers pressed against the mesh. As Mary says, I never saw a dog try so hard to please, to appeal, to suppress the power of his body so as to seem as soft as his enormous heart.
And now, gentle readers, I find myself fallen in love with this animal. Before, I just worried that I was not doing right by him, that I was not taking good enough care of him, that he was at various times too cold, too sick, or too neglected, and that I wasn't living up to my responsibilities as fosterer of a dog. Since I was (or thought I was) keeping Beaux at arms' length emotionally, then my job was oddly more complicated: I had to figure out, to design, good care for him, against some vague SAT exam standard set by Professionals in the field of Dog Management.
I confess that that's how I tried to deal with life when my four children were small and seemingly hell-bent on killing themselves, each other and maybe me. It was a matter of management, I decided, with the eager concurrence of my middle-management husband and the father of these same little savages. While the father was not home (typically traveling four or five days a week), I had a regimen to follow, all laid out on a legal pad, and so I did, and did my damndest. Of course, when the father returned, there was the dreaded assessment of how well had I followed those instructions, and I usually came up short. In the business plan, he had neglected to accommodate the surprises that young, living mammals can spring on one, like contracting pneumonia, or finding themselves in the middle of a pin-worm epidemic, or splitting a scalp on the coffee table and bleeding like a stuck pig, or beating the living crap out of the next door neighbor kid and having the father of that kid show up in turn and beat the living crap out of our kid. People are messy, it turns out, and careful management of their lives and well-being is far more difficult than merely managing their widget-output over the course of an eight-hour workshift.
And what about making the distinction between catching hell for mismanagement, and suffering the self-inflicted, hard-wired, impossible-to-ignore, all-consuming love and caritas for these small and blinded, thrashing and weeping, shining and shit-covered creatures? I just didn't know what to DO with that. The father, having missed the drama of the week he had not been in residence, and having firmly in mind (and mind only) how delightful the children can be, would spend the weekend loving them, playing with them, being the perfect Dad, while I lay on my bed, cold-compressed, or giving in to the headcold I'd fought off all week, or just enfolded in misery at my incompetence and clearly apparent inability to love.
God knows what kind of scarring the kids sustained, not to mention my own. But that same God, knowing this, has given me AFOG -- Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth -- in the form of a huge, maddening, absolutely untrained, unmanaged child-dog. While the only drawbacks to Beaux Eaux are his unbridled enthusiasms and his sheer size, I am not so old nor so decrepit that I cannot in the end physically control him. We have honed our systems down now to where he is under control; we've child-proofed the house and yard, I've cut my fingernails as short as possible so as not to keep tearing them when I grab at his collar, we've accomplished the sit, the walk, the shut-up, the don't-climb-the-fence commands. What I never saw coming was how I would be struck dumb by the size of his heart, and the unquestioning love he has for me, no matter how I behave towards him. He just loves me; he is palpably grateful for my having saved his life, and for this he will do absolutely anything for me if I will just tell him what it is I expect.
And now I'm supposed to give him up??? Yes. We cannot keep him; he's not, after all, our dog. He has someplace he needs to be, and it is not here. We are sure of it, and we are sure that our job is to prepare him for that. If he were my child, it would be incumbent upon me to get him ready for college, for the world, for his real life, and then to release him to it. It's just like that -- this is my do-over, my unfinished lesson in love-and-let-go.
When I drove my youngest child to her first year of college, I cried for the entire two-and-a-half hour trip; I didn't just weep, understand -- this was sobbing, wrenching, heaving of the second chakra, and entirely uncharacteristic of what all of us, all along, had thought of as Me. My college-bound daughter must have (a) thought that my long-awaited derangement had finally occurred, and (b) worried for her physical safety on the California freeways. I don't know if she even remembers it, but I surely do, and I am terrified of the day when Beaux must leave here.
In the meantime, I'm trying really hard to learn that lesson; I do not want to have to go through this again. I paradoxically strain to relax and love Beaux Eaux, to enjoy his antics, to ignore the certain knowledge of his leaving, to stay present in the moment, and blah blah blah. I just hate this, and the more I think of how much I hate it, the more I know I have to do it.
Thank God I don't have to like it.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
The Pits, or, What I Took On for Lent
Many of my friends know my feelings about Lent, but I'll give a Reader's Digest version here: I think at best Lent is a period of reflection, of meditation, a six-week study of whither and whence we go on our spiritual journey, etc. At worst it is an opportunity for people so disposed to indulge in a medieval celebration of the horror of Jesus' trials in the desert (a little irony for me there), and to take ghoulish delight in anticipation of the gore of his execution. Plenty of otherwise sensible and even fun-loving Episcopalians indulge in the mass clinical depression and self-abnegation of this season, and lacerate themselves with self-loathing and the denial of something that at other times of the year gives them great pleasure. I think that's not at all what Christ had in mind, and therefore some years ago I announced that I would be giving up Lent for Lent forever, and I've not once been sorry for it. Times are tough enough on this plane of existence without deliberately adding to it, just because the episcopate thinks I need a little discipline. Maybe I do, and maybe I don't, but I'm not the sort of person that indulges in mass ANYTHING, and I will never again be part of a mob of breast-beaters.
As clear as I have been in this manifesto, a couple of times I've been caught up short, finding that the universe has given me a Lenten Discipline after all. This year the assignment is to endure the fostering of a very large puppy (well over one hundred pounds), oversee the wholesale destruction of most of our backyard, and to keep at it until I've learned some lesson, the full nature of which has not yet been revealed to me.
There I was last Ash Wednesday, tootling up the main drag of my town, heading home from a trip to Santa Fe for swimming and errands, a normal Wednesday for me. Coming right at me on Hoochaneetsa Boulevard (said main drag, whose Indian name means "Main Drag") was a really big black dog; he did not veer from a collision course with my car, and he seemed large enough to do as much damage to the car as would a small deer, so I stopped. We almost never see unleashed dogs in this town, and when we do, we either notify their exasperated owners so they'll come and get them, or we recognize that they've been dumped and Take Steps. I Took Steps, and have had daily reasons to regret it ever since.
I gave him some water (which he desperately needed), loaded him into the back of the car, dragged him into my back yard, came into the house, and contemplated the Next Steps. I started with the logical moves, which was to call Mary and tell her the news of our latest burden, then call around to connect with the guy whose shelter in Placitas is no-kill, and who has never turned down a dog.
Days passed (and porch swing cushions were shredded) and the Placitas guy had to make Bozo (we'd first called the dog Jughead because that's what he was, but I thought it might fulfill itself to ever greater disaster) the first dog he'd had to decline to take. No room, he said, and neighborhood complaints, he said. He was sorry, he said. Fine, said we.
Frantic phone calls ensued, as we connected with all manner of people in the animal rescue biz -- and a big biz it is. We heard horror stories, most horrifying of which is the one about the Colorado laws which make it possible for the gendarmerie to go into people's homes and kill their dogs for no reason other than they have been found guilty of having pit bull lineage, or even just guilty of being brindle colored. Pit bulls can be brindle, and so can boxers, and greyhounds, and Great Danes, and English bulldogs, and... well you get the picture. These niceties apparently don't matter to the Colorado enforcement community. Bozo probably has some pit in him -- he's big enough, and has some brindle markings -- but he's mostly Lab, with the signifying meatheaddedness of that breed. Anyway, we couldn't take him to Colorado, which is apparently where most New Mexico dogs go to be adopted; it seems that, aside from the pit bull hysteria, Colorado has other laws and provisions for NOT killing unwanted animals, and incentives for people who might adopt them. I don't understand Colorado; John Denver has been dead a long time; I will NEVER live there.
Colorado has a gun thing, too, but I'll save that for another post.
Then our friend Sally offered to help. Sally has a lot of animals that she's adopted -- she's a bigger pushover even than I -- and she agreed to take Bozo to the regular Saturday adoption fair in Albuquerque. This event is sponsored by PACA (People Against Cruelty to Animals, I think). On Bozo's first Saturday PACA got to know him, tested his temperament (happy, curious, willing, anxious to please and, God knows, enthusiastic), and took him under their wing. They got him neutered (Sally says "tutored" because she doesn't want to upset the dogs -- THAT'S how Sally is), rabies-immunized and ID-chipped. They put him up on their website and then they sent him back to his foster home: our house. Gggggghhhhh.
Time passed, another Saturday at the adoption clinic came and went, Bozo got the rest of his immunizations, the canvas backing of the porch swing was eaten, as was a garbage bag of recyclable plastics in the garage, as were two leashes that we didn't get off of him in short order. We asked our friend Carol, a dog-trainer just as fond of the beasts as Sally but who takes a harder line (she used to train horses), to help us get Bozo under control. It seemed laughable at the time, but with her steady advice and assistance, the aid of a prong collar (which I used to think were cruel, but now know were designed specifically for meathead dogs, and besides, Cesar Millan uses them on HIS meathead dogs), we got Bozo to walk on lead, sit when not walking on lead, and be crated when we would be away from the house or when we just couldn't take it anymore.
We're thinking now, after the loss of two lawn chairs, two bird feeders, part of the deck railing, and the steady nibbling-away of the bird bath (our dining room looks like the guest parlor of a crack house; it's where we've been storing the detritus of the Reign of Bozo) that this might very well go on until Easter. And we'll learn the hard way -- does anybody learn anything the easy way? -- whatever lessons Bozo has for us. In time for our Paschal Rebirth, we'll re-learn the usual things we learn from dogs, most importantly No Grudges. I have been at times so angry, so frustrated, so baffled by this enormous dog that I've hauled off and smacked him. I haven't hit a dog in years, but I remember every time I did so, just as I remember every time I hit one of my kids, and each memory makes my stomach lurch, and I want to cry all over again. Bozo has never, NEVER, held that against me, thank God. He is happy to see me whenever I show up; he thrills to my presence, he craves my pats and is delighted to retrieve a ball or a Kong or whatever I want to throw for him, over and over and over again. When he's tired (or more likely, when I am), he loves to sit between my feet, lean back on me and gaze at the sunset along with me, panting and occasionally swinging his 50-pound head around to look at me adoringly. (Remember how, when you'd be tying a toddler's shoes while he sat on your lap, he'd throw his head back and catch the bridge of your nose with it? And how you'd see stars for a while? It's like that to be adored by Bozo.)
Another lesson I've identified so far: A happy demeanor can make everything right, and eases the process of forgiveness, no matter what the circumstance. One of my mother's favorite pieces of advice was to eschew (she used words like that) the German solution, i.e., "The situation is serious but not critical," in favor of the Viennese solution, "The situation is critical but it's not at all serious." It's saved me a number of times when I have the wit to remember it, but it's REALLY saved Bozo's life. He looks at me with his shit-eating grin, and I can just cool off and forgive him. The stuff that he has eaten or destroyed is just stuff, and its value does not even approach that of the presence of a cheerful dog. In fact, the presence of a cheerful dog makes it a little easier to forgive myself -- and it's high time I did so.
This is not to say that Bozo can live here forever -- he can't. He's too big, he's simply too damned much for a couple of nice ladies of a certain age to handle, and our resident dogs have just about had it with him. (Grreta has put him on the ground a couple of times just by the force of her alpha-ness, and Gabi screams "Rape!" whenever she's within 5 feet of Bozo's boundless joi de vivre.) I know, in that way that we KNOW things, that Bozo will find his perfect home, and in perfect time; having him here may not be a completely pleasant experience, but I also KNOW that it is serving some important purpose. It is, as I say, teaching us something we needed to learn (or remember), and it's civilizing Bozo; we've explained to him that if he doesn't become civilized, he will die, and he understands that. He wants to know if being civilized means he has to stop being funny and silly, and we reply that we really, REALLY hope not. It's what we hope for ourselves as well.
Lent doesn't civilize us, no matter what the church says. Love civilizes us, and makes plenty of room for joy. As my small friend Jack says, "Only teachers and clowns know everything," and Bozo is both.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Home
Our German shepherd/husky/whatever dog Grreta has been very happy in the last couple of months. Living as she does in the Southwest, she suffers heat beyond the imaginings of her double coat, and thunderstorms (which she has decided are in fact incoming mortars) all summer, and stickers and cactus quills in the desert. But, BUT, in the high desert here, sometimes there's snow. And when there's snow, Grreta's content; she will trample a nest for herself in it, and lie down with a huge sigh -- all the summer's anxieties are lifted with the comfort of her genetic home. She curls up in her burrow, drapes the tassel on the end of her tail over her nose to keep the warmth and moisture contained, and sleeps as solidly as I have ever seen her. Now that the snow layer is shrinking, Grreta's burrow is ever more circumscribed, and she clings to the last of the drift with grim determination. It will be a sad day for us all when the ground has returned to its dusty natural state.
In the meantime,in observing her quiet peace there, I have had cause to consider Home. It's a concept that I have never quite grasped, since I've never really dug into a place, only found convenient and affordable campsites every few years. (I calculate that this latest move to New Mexico in 2003 was something like my life's fifty-fifth complete household move.) There wasn't much choice in the matter when I was a child: the Marine Corps merrily yanked us around every year or two, and we learned the art of the fast settle-in: immediate social calls on the neighbors, find a school and here we go. I thought everybody lived like that; certainly most of the people I associated with did so, and when I found myself in a "civilian" school I adapted readily, took their damned placement tests (I was a master of the placement test, always a certifiable genius in the eyes of the new school because it would be the fourth or seventh time I'd taken the exact same test), and studied closely and quickly the new culture I found myself in. One or two fistfights with the local bullies, and I became seamlessly integrated. Then, as life became routine, even predictable (dare I say dull?), there would be another posting. Sometimes a move was wrenching, and as I grew toward adolescence it became harder and harder to leave friends and connections, but that, as Oprah says, is another show.
What was constant and comforting and familiar was my immediate family, our furnishings, our collective knapsack, asitwere. The place, the house, had very little to do with my sense of belonging, and as long as I could memorize my address and phone number in the first few days, I was really quite safe. (Of course at many postings there was a division of Marines, commanded by my father, on whom I could count to keep me safe. There aren't very many people who can match that for sheer physical security.) The dynamics within the home weren't very calm (we were a family of exuberant and frequent strife) but it was what I knew, and for the most part I lived benignly neglected -- the baby of the family, and therefore I was not a threat nor even very interesting -- and that was okay with me.
Over time, I have come to know people for whom the institution of Home is their very life blood, though they seem sometimes to think it's a mixed blessing, that years and years of living in the pockets of the same few dozen people can wear on one, stifle the mind, restrict the adventuresome spirit. Robert Frost's definition, "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in," reflects that ambivalence; there's some divine ordinance that we have to take in and live with even the most undesirable of our close relations. We open the door and there they are: the dirty and hungry, probably wet and ill-clothed, those undesirables -- the black sheep, I assume, or the ne'er-do-wells, the prodigals, the ones whose miscalculated adventures left them with no choice but to return to the place where they are taken in but overtly resented and despised. Doesn't sound very homey, for either party, but then Frost, it has been revealed, was not a homey kind of guy; a trial to his family, he was resentful and stubborn and cranky most of the time.
Anyway, there is a place where I am learning about Home. I have an old friend who has watched and wept with me in my most soul-wrenching times, and his house has become my Home. Several states away, it nevertheless is where I know I can go and be accepted, loved, even prized; I am well beyond tolerated -- my company is sought and dearly appreciated. They think I'm funny and smart, and they tell me so. They make me laugh, they want their children to know me. They feed me wonderful food that they've prepared themselves. They listen to my stories, they offer good advice when I ask for it, and don't when I don't.
The last time I visited I was a little chilly in my bed, and had no idea where to find extra blankets. After a few hours of shivering, just when I was close to despair and ready to get up and dress myself for mere warmth, I felt a quiet presence and turned to see the woman placing a down comforter over me, pulling it up over my shoulders. I could see her smile in the half-dark; she hummed something unimportant and went back to her bed.
Once I went there at the beginning of the worst cold I had had in decades. I was sneezing and blowing and dripping; I couldn't hear very well because the ear that ISN'T 40% deaf was blocked off from all nuanced conversation; I carried a Kleenex box around with me, and scattered the used tissues like sodden, greenish snowflakes; I was barely responsive; I had made them invite over to dinner OTHER local friends whom I hadn't seen in years, and I was simply too sick to do the minimal bridging required when throwing two sets of people together. In spite of, or because of, my distress, these people just took care of me throughout my time there. I was not a stranger, nor a guest, but like a child at Home.
Imagine that.
In the meantime,in observing her quiet peace there, I have had cause to consider Home. It's a concept that I have never quite grasped, since I've never really dug into a place, only found convenient and affordable campsites every few years. (I calculate that this latest move to New Mexico in 2003 was something like my life's fifty-fifth complete household move.) There wasn't much choice in the matter when I was a child: the Marine Corps merrily yanked us around every year or two, and we learned the art of the fast settle-in: immediate social calls on the neighbors, find a school and here we go. I thought everybody lived like that; certainly most of the people I associated with did so, and when I found myself in a "civilian" school I adapted readily, took their damned placement tests (I was a master of the placement test, always a certifiable genius in the eyes of the new school because it would be the fourth or seventh time I'd taken the exact same test), and studied closely and quickly the new culture I found myself in. One or two fistfights with the local bullies, and I became seamlessly integrated. Then, as life became routine, even predictable (dare I say dull?), there would be another posting. Sometimes a move was wrenching, and as I grew toward adolescence it became harder and harder to leave friends and connections, but that, as Oprah says, is another show.
What was constant and comforting and familiar was my immediate family, our furnishings, our collective knapsack, asitwere. The place, the house, had very little to do with my sense of belonging, and as long as I could memorize my address and phone number in the first few days, I was really quite safe. (Of course at many postings there was a division of Marines, commanded by my father, on whom I could count to keep me safe. There aren't very many people who can match that for sheer physical security.) The dynamics within the home weren't very calm (we were a family of exuberant and frequent strife) but it was what I knew, and for the most part I lived benignly neglected -- the baby of the family, and therefore I was not a threat nor even very interesting -- and that was okay with me.
Over time, I have come to know people for whom the institution of Home is their very life blood, though they seem sometimes to think it's a mixed blessing, that years and years of living in the pockets of the same few dozen people can wear on one, stifle the mind, restrict the adventuresome spirit. Robert Frost's definition, "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in," reflects that ambivalence; there's some divine ordinance that we have to take in and live with even the most undesirable of our close relations. We open the door and there they are: the dirty and hungry, probably wet and ill-clothed, those undesirables -- the black sheep, I assume, or the ne'er-do-wells, the prodigals, the ones whose miscalculated adventures left them with no choice but to return to the place where they are taken in but overtly resented and despised. Doesn't sound very homey, for either party, but then Frost, it has been revealed, was not a homey kind of guy; a trial to his family, he was resentful and stubborn and cranky most of the time.
Anyway, there is a place where I am learning about Home. I have an old friend who has watched and wept with me in my most soul-wrenching times, and his house has become my Home. Several states away, it nevertheless is where I know I can go and be accepted, loved, even prized; I am well beyond tolerated -- my company is sought and dearly appreciated. They think I'm funny and smart, and they tell me so. They make me laugh, they want their children to know me. They feed me wonderful food that they've prepared themselves. They listen to my stories, they offer good advice when I ask for it, and don't when I don't.
The last time I visited I was a little chilly in my bed, and had no idea where to find extra blankets. After a few hours of shivering, just when I was close to despair and ready to get up and dress myself for mere warmth, I felt a quiet presence and turned to see the woman placing a down comforter over me, pulling it up over my shoulders. I could see her smile in the half-dark; she hummed something unimportant and went back to her bed.
Once I went there at the beginning of the worst cold I had had in decades. I was sneezing and blowing and dripping; I couldn't hear very well because the ear that ISN'T 40% deaf was blocked off from all nuanced conversation; I carried a Kleenex box around with me, and scattered the used tissues like sodden, greenish snowflakes; I was barely responsive; I had made them invite over to dinner OTHER local friends whom I hadn't seen in years, and I was simply too sick to do the minimal bridging required when throwing two sets of people together. In spite of, or because of, my distress, these people just took care of me throughout my time there. I was not a stranger, nor a guest, but like a child at Home.
Imagine that.
Monday, January 22, 2007
The Whole Story
In yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Sarah Silverman said that Mr. Rogers said, "There's nobody you couldn't love if you knew their whole story." That just rang me like a bell, all the way to the (froze) toes and back up the stiffening spine.
In the first place, Fred Rogers was a latter day saint, in the absolute best sense of that phrase. There was an article on him years ago (November 1998, you should find it and read it) in Esquire by Tom Junod, one of that magazine's stable of smart (even smart ass), savvy, macho-yet-sensitive contributors. In his extended interview with Fred Rogers, Junod reports, he just about found God. I think his original intent was to do a number on Mr. Rogers, take the cheap and easy route, score some points on the scale of snide and superior; what actually happened was that Mr. Rogers did quite a number on Junod. He touched his heart, and Junod was man enough to say so, and say how it happened, and how he's never forgotten it. In fact, his present Esquire bio, 9 years later, remarks on that transforming encounter with Mr. Rogers.
For all the people who claim to serve on behalf of The Children, there was only one of them like Fred Rogers, and he did it with such force, intelligence and extraordinary compassion (hard to find those three attributes all in the same person, yes?), that he actually did a lot of people a lot of good in his time. For that, he should be beatified, knighted, given the goddamned Medal of Honor. THAT'S how I feel about Mr. Rogers.
The fact that Sarah Silverman picked up on this seminal statement of his makes me think a lot better of HER, even if she IS married or at least joined at the hip with Jimmy Kimmel. (Okay, I'll give him a break, too -- he's only a degree away from Mr. Rogers as it is. If I knew his whole story, I'd love him. Probably. Mr. Rogers was never wrong.)
I digress: the point is this Whole Story business. I'm not sure we can know ANYBODY'S whole story; if we should do so, we will have been blessed with a gift beyond measure. We can't even know the whole story of a rescued dog, for heaven's sake; how could we go on to that of a complicated human being? Or even that of a not-very-complicated, seemingly irredeemably simple, STUPID human being? I like to think that I pretty much give people the benefit of the doubt; at the same time I'm apt not to invite too many of them into my private sphere/self, to the extent that any of them could know me well enough to be able to find, much less step on, any of my pet corns. If they find them and step on them by accident, well, c'est la vie; damned if I'll let them KNOW that they have done so -- I'll just take a long hike and never have anything to do with them again.
That's pretty harsh. Yet MY whole story includes all of those corns, how I got them, what I'll do to protect them, the lengths to which I'll go in order to hide them, how cruel I can be in my own defense. This is a faith question, I think, and part of the issue of how and when to love, and with whom to start. If we can't really know anybody's whole story, if the best we can do is to learn and accept our OWN whole stories, pet corns and all, then we have to love, hard and well, our OWN Se'fs (as they say in Junod's Atlanta), and then progress to loving everybody else. EVERYBODY else.
Trust isn't an issue -- we can't trust anybody to be anything but themselves, and we can without any question whatsoever trust everyone to be himself, one hundred percent, and trust that they will do whatever they must do to protect against perceived threat.
We don't have to LIKE everybody; that's a completely different thing. There are plenty of people whose Se'fs are unpleasant, or violent, or hostile, etc., and we don't have to buy them a beer. We just have to love them, which is the same thing as to accept them, which is what anybody deserves, just by the fact of being alive and therefore having an effect upon the earth.
Surely, we our own Se'fs deserve the same kind of acceptance as the rescued dog, for example; the parts of our own story that we DO know and acknowledge are often rough, painful, more than enough to forgive if they were part of that dog's story. If he bites, or snarls over his food bowl, or cowers or runs away if someone approaches with a raised hand, we forgive -- we correct, and retrain, and rehabilitate if we possibly can, but first we forgive. When I am at my most self-deprecating, when I loathe myself with the greatest depth and conviction, I try really hard to think of myself as a fractious two-year-old child, or even as a pup whose history is not known but guessed to be abusive, and I can give myself a break.
Sometimes I'm so cross at myself that I can't even do that much, and I find the snapping and snubbing and tantrum-throwing not very comforting, and yet they're almost unstoppable. When I'm behaving so abominably, I pray fervently (if under my breath) for forgiveness from my closest friends and relations, and while I usually get the forgiveness, I don't FEEL it until I've comforted my own Se’f a little bit, till I've poured a little emotional honey over my own head, till I've curled up with my down blanket and hiccupped myself to sleep.
That's when I feel my mother's hand on my forehead, stroking my hair back from my face, her other hand pat-patting my back, her voice humming quietly.
My whole story includes that of my mother; it's one of the things that make me forgivable.
In the first place, Fred Rogers was a latter day saint, in the absolute best sense of that phrase. There was an article on him years ago (November 1998, you should find it and read it) in Esquire by Tom Junod, one of that magazine's stable of smart (even smart ass), savvy, macho-yet-sensitive contributors. In his extended interview with Fred Rogers, Junod reports, he just about found God. I think his original intent was to do a number on Mr. Rogers, take the cheap and easy route, score some points on the scale of snide and superior; what actually happened was that Mr. Rogers did quite a number on Junod. He touched his heart, and Junod was man enough to say so, and say how it happened, and how he's never forgotten it. In fact, his present Esquire bio, 9 years later, remarks on that transforming encounter with Mr. Rogers.
For all the people who claim to serve on behalf of The Children, there was only one of them like Fred Rogers, and he did it with such force, intelligence and extraordinary compassion (hard to find those three attributes all in the same person, yes?), that he actually did a lot of people a lot of good in his time. For that, he should be beatified, knighted, given the goddamned Medal of Honor. THAT'S how I feel about Mr. Rogers.
The fact that Sarah Silverman picked up on this seminal statement of his makes me think a lot better of HER, even if she IS married or at least joined at the hip with Jimmy Kimmel. (Okay, I'll give him a break, too -- he's only a degree away from Mr. Rogers as it is. If I knew his whole story, I'd love him. Probably. Mr. Rogers was never wrong.)
I digress: the point is this Whole Story business. I'm not sure we can know ANYBODY'S whole story; if we should do so, we will have been blessed with a gift beyond measure. We can't even know the whole story of a rescued dog, for heaven's sake; how could we go on to that of a complicated human being? Or even that of a not-very-complicated, seemingly irredeemably simple, STUPID human being? I like to think that I pretty much give people the benefit of the doubt; at the same time I'm apt not to invite too many of them into my private sphere/self, to the extent that any of them could know me well enough to be able to find, much less step on, any of my pet corns. If they find them and step on them by accident, well, c'est la vie; damned if I'll let them KNOW that they have done so -- I'll just take a long hike and never have anything to do with them again.
That's pretty harsh. Yet MY whole story includes all of those corns, how I got them, what I'll do to protect them, the lengths to which I'll go in order to hide them, how cruel I can be in my own defense. This is a faith question, I think, and part of the issue of how and when to love, and with whom to start. If we can't really know anybody's whole story, if the best we can do is to learn and accept our OWN whole stories, pet corns and all, then we have to love, hard and well, our OWN Se'fs (as they say in Junod's Atlanta), and then progress to loving everybody else. EVERYBODY else.
Trust isn't an issue -- we can't trust anybody to be anything but themselves, and we can without any question whatsoever trust everyone to be himself, one hundred percent, and trust that they will do whatever they must do to protect against perceived threat.
We don't have to LIKE everybody; that's a completely different thing. There are plenty of people whose Se'fs are unpleasant, or violent, or hostile, etc., and we don't have to buy them a beer. We just have to love them, which is the same thing as to accept them, which is what anybody deserves, just by the fact of being alive and therefore having an effect upon the earth.
Surely, we our own Se'fs deserve the same kind of acceptance as the rescued dog, for example; the parts of our own story that we DO know and acknowledge are often rough, painful, more than enough to forgive if they were part of that dog's story. If he bites, or snarls over his food bowl, or cowers or runs away if someone approaches with a raised hand, we forgive -- we correct, and retrain, and rehabilitate if we possibly can, but first we forgive. When I am at my most self-deprecating, when I loathe myself with the greatest depth and conviction, I try really hard to think of myself as a fractious two-year-old child, or even as a pup whose history is not known but guessed to be abusive, and I can give myself a break.
Sometimes I'm so cross at myself that I can't even do that much, and I find the snapping and snubbing and tantrum-throwing not very comforting, and yet they're almost unstoppable. When I'm behaving so abominably, I pray fervently (if under my breath) for forgiveness from my closest friends and relations, and while I usually get the forgiveness, I don't FEEL it until I've comforted my own Se’f a little bit, till I've poured a little emotional honey over my own head, till I've curled up with my down blanket and hiccupped myself to sleep.
That's when I feel my mother's hand on my forehead, stroking my hair back from my face, her other hand pat-patting my back, her voice humming quietly.
My whole story includes that of my mother; it's one of the things that make me forgivable.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
Alignment
For a couple of decades now Mary and I have been home-schooling ourselves in a course called Alignment, using as its framework the chakra system and the body/mind/spirit paradigm. It's been enormously helpful to us in getting through the rougher passages of a normal life, and in learning how to enjoy the smoother ones. One day I'll elaborate on it here -- could be that other people might find it useful, or maybe just interesting.
Now I've come across another kind of alignment, in a different discipline, that I'm thinking might be the way out of my having so many headaches. Enlightenment -> Alignment has been great for working through philosophical and psychological issues, but hasn't done much for my migraines; so far I've just waited for my hormonal system to shift, and tried very hard not to panic myself from a mere sinus attack into a full-on Screaming Yellow Headache. Mixed success, so far, and thank GOD there are last-resort drugs for it. (I hate to take them: they're expensive, and they're powerful and a little scary with the side-effects, but when a SYH threatens one truly will do anything to avert it.) In my Reiki study and practice, I have found that a surprising number of ailments -- organic as well as biomechanical -- can be alleviated, even reversed, with postural adjustment (no, I DON'T mean chiropractic, necessarily, nor do I mean that chiropractic doesn't have its place in the scheme of things). Yoga, at least the non-macho kind, is useful, but it's hard for me to get into and stay inside the Hindu mindset -- I'm an American, and impatient, and easily bored. And even an impatient American can tire of the typical workout regimen, you know -- the hut-hut-hut, feel-the-burn, make-little-yipping-noises kind.
I woke up this morning with yet another sinus headache, and the same stomach-dropping dread that it would morph into a migraine that always accompanies them. I got mad and told myself that enough was enough; there's GOT to be a way out of this. Less than an hour later a friend called to chat and mentioned a system of easy exercises that can eliminate just about any kind of pain. I Googled it, looked at the headache pain page, and VOILA -- there were two of MY kind of exercises, both requiring lying on my back with my feet up. The first was just to lie there and relax 5 to 20 minutes (oh, this is so ME); the second was, while still lying there, to clasp my hands above my chest, lock my elbows, and lower my arms back over my head. Twenty-five times. Big whoop.
I know that the major contributing factor to my migraines (and maybe to everybody's) is the fear of them. The first thing we do when panic hits is to stop breathing and then to hunch the shoulders; the worst reaction to a headache is to stop breathing and then to hunch the shoulders -- cutting off oxygen and blood flow, i.e., energy, to the affected area. This practically guarantees an SYH; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, a loop. If we were natural born Hindus we would reach for the yoga pill; if we were balls-out athletic types, we'd start jumping around and straining ligaments (thereby distracting ourselves from the migraine). Being neither, I reached for whatever form of sumatriptan I could beg, borrow or order from Thailand, and took my chances with the side-effects. Ah, fear makes hypocrites of us all, yes?
From my experience with Reiki, I can "see" each muscle that contributes to seizing a headache and wrassling one to the ground. I can see with this exercise that each muscle individually and all of the relevant ones, in concert, get unkinked, unwound -- ALIGNED -- so that the headache is left with only its original impetus (today it was blocked sinuses) which passes on in the normal course of things, since it lacks the muscle-grabs that usually follow it around.
Today, I tried the exercise, and the migraine didn't bloom. Not a double-blind study, but hell, I know enough of you with tweaky backs and creaky knees and hitchy hips that I'm inclined to pass this along. Here's the link to the exercise system. And here's to the possibility of an alternative to drugs and surgery for chronic pain. Let me know if you have any success with it.
And Happy New Year, my dear friends.
Now I've come across another kind of alignment, in a different discipline, that I'm thinking might be the way out of my having so many headaches. Enlightenment -> Alignment has been great for working through philosophical and psychological issues, but hasn't done much for my migraines; so far I've just waited for my hormonal system to shift, and tried very hard not to panic myself from a mere sinus attack into a full-on Screaming Yellow Headache. Mixed success, so far, and thank GOD there are last-resort drugs for it. (I hate to take them: they're expensive, and they're powerful and a little scary with the side-effects, but when a SYH threatens one truly will do anything to avert it.) In my Reiki study and practice, I have found that a surprising number of ailments -- organic as well as biomechanical -- can be alleviated, even reversed, with postural adjustment (no, I DON'T mean chiropractic, necessarily, nor do I mean that chiropractic doesn't have its place in the scheme of things). Yoga, at least the non-macho kind, is useful, but it's hard for me to get into and stay inside the Hindu mindset -- I'm an American, and impatient, and easily bored. And even an impatient American can tire of the typical workout regimen, you know -- the hut-hut-hut, feel-the-burn, make-little-yipping-noises kind.
I woke up this morning with yet another sinus headache, and the same stomach-dropping dread that it would morph into a migraine that always accompanies them. I got mad and told myself that enough was enough; there's GOT to be a way out of this. Less than an hour later a friend called to chat and mentioned a system of easy exercises that can eliminate just about any kind of pain. I Googled it, looked at the headache pain page, and VOILA -- there were two of MY kind of exercises, both requiring lying on my back with my feet up. The first was just to lie there and relax 5 to 20 minutes (oh, this is so ME); the second was, while still lying there, to clasp my hands above my chest, lock my elbows, and lower my arms back over my head. Twenty-five times. Big whoop.
I know that the major contributing factor to my migraines (and maybe to everybody's) is the fear of them. The first thing we do when panic hits is to stop breathing and then to hunch the shoulders; the worst reaction to a headache is to stop breathing and then to hunch the shoulders -- cutting off oxygen and blood flow, i.e., energy, to the affected area. This practically guarantees an SYH; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, a loop. If we were natural born Hindus we would reach for the yoga pill; if we were balls-out athletic types, we'd start jumping around and straining ligaments (thereby distracting ourselves from the migraine). Being neither, I reached for whatever form of sumatriptan I could beg, borrow or order from Thailand, and took my chances with the side-effects. Ah, fear makes hypocrites of us all, yes?
From my experience with Reiki, I can "see" each muscle that contributes to seizing a headache and wrassling one to the ground. I can see with this exercise that each muscle individually and all of the relevant ones, in concert, get unkinked, unwound -- ALIGNED -- so that the headache is left with only its original impetus (today it was blocked sinuses) which passes on in the normal course of things, since it lacks the muscle-grabs that usually follow it around.
Today, I tried the exercise, and the migraine didn't bloom. Not a double-blind study, but hell, I know enough of you with tweaky backs and creaky knees and hitchy hips that I'm inclined to pass this along. Here's the link to the exercise system. And here's to the possibility of an alternative to drugs and surgery for chronic pain. Let me know if you have any success with it.
And Happy New Year, my dear friends.
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