Monthly Archives: August 2016

In Praise of Pain, Flying Things, and The Universe

28 Sunday Aug 2016

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“You didn’t know that? You of all people?”

“No,” I said, tempering further reply.

“Yellow jackets, like many organisms, when you alarm or kill one, give off a pheromone that calls others for help.”

“Okay, good to know.”

“Really surprised you didn’t know that.”

“Yes, well, as long as I stay out of their way all is right with the world. I’ve developed some good tactics for doing that, actually.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, wearing perfume at night instead of during the day, avoiding wearing yellow. Not drinking from soda cans outside, only containers with closable lids. Staying away from abandoned cars where they might have made a nest. Keeping windows and door ledges clean. I also try to avoid eating mustard or ketchupy foods outside but that can’t always be helped. And never returning to Lake Compounce amusement park.”

“Oh, so basically never going outside, then. Nice life.” His tone brought it all back, but I knew there’s little point discussing the strides I’ve made managing a phobia with someone who doesn’t have one.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of dining by the Hudson River with friends, which is a really fancy way of saying we was chowing down on finger-licking barbecue food and beer at the Ribworks. All was well until a yellow jacket wafted down onto my glass. Guess he wanted a little sip of salty margarita.  I stayed in my seat and watched it for a few seconds, then calmly lifted myself from my seat, said excuse me, moved back a few feet, then waited for it to fly away, which it had no intention of doing, so my chivalric gentlemen waved it off my glass. G looked at me and said, “Really?”  I nodded and smiled, knowing that at least in this stage of my life I didn’t turn the table over and run out into traffic. (Had I been a Marine,  I would have given away our position and my comrades would have shot me on the spot.)  I said, “Horror movie bad guys wielding axes? Machetes? Fine. Bring.it.on. I gotta problem with yellowjacks, however.”  He wondered about that, so I explained it had to do with falling on one as a child, getting stung multiple times for the first time on the back of my tender little leg while mom was a block away, and the time my son was in his baby sling, I stepped on a ground nest and received multiple stings. We discussed the differences between honey bee and wasp for a little while, then went back to our drinks and talking baseball.

I’m trying to cultivate a harmonious existence with bees, but it’s not so easy for the little girl of me to do when a yellow jacket appears. Her mind overstates the memory of the pain, the most horrific pain she’d ever experienced, the memory of walking home alone, all that way without comfort, the humiliation of taking wounds when she was in the wrong, not the bug.

I wish we could all accept each other’s irrational fears, heck, irrational anythings for that matter, have patience with the other when the panic comes. It’s not for us to understand and certainly not to judge their fear or pain.  How lucky I am to be able to think kindly of laced wing moths in the corner of the old apartment; luna moth on the convenient store door in the rain; fragile, steadfast honey bees dressed in fuzzy amber; curious, quick carpenter bees; bumble bees whose flight defies physics; salamanders and newts who mind their own business between roots; roly poly moist toads standing guard on basement steps in the moonlight; copperhead baby wriggling on the factory floor, mouse running for its life amid screaming women on their office chairs.  Helping Yaro find a cup to catch the mouse, watching the guys capture the baby copperhead wearing welding gloves and tossing it out beyond the retaining pond instead of killing it.  When will I give this same patience, this same understanding to the yellow jacket? I do not know. The little girl of me once believed that having babies, bullet wounds, tattoos, and getting hit by a bus was preferable to the experience of a yellow jacket sting. I can marvel at my progress, but it still needs work. This emotional wound needs healing in order to make peace with the yellow and black.  I am grateful to the Universe who brought this to me.

In The Chess Cafe

25 Thursday Aug 2016

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The chessboard sat getting cold between the players, but it was in no hurry. The frosted glass pieces could be counted on to stand and wait patiently. Some slept, others meditated, but many preferred to ponder the players so they could make good gossip later. Whoever told the best story about the players got to have their way with their choice of pawn when the board closed for the night.  (The pawns never spoke at all.)

While the man strategized, the woman stared at him most intently.  (The Queen began to wonder if she was going off her game. Well. She would not be surprised for he was most distracting.)  At length he reached for a piece and she took his hand before he could touch the board. He was startled but allowed it.  She lay his palm on hers and his hand covered hers entirely, fingers overhanging hers. His palm was rough and warm.  These were hands that held hammer, shovel, rope, yet his fingernails were trimmed back neatly, smooth and glistened like glass beneath the Tiffany light.  He had said his hands hurt sometimes, but his joints were well proportioned. She rubbed out whatever ache she believed might be hiding there, one by one, applying gentle pressure on the joints, harder on the long bones. These were the fingers that untied sneaker knots, necklace knots, and knotted the best bowlines in the business. She pressed her fingers into his palm for a while, then slid down to his thick wrist, stopping at his ulnar process.  She upturned his palm and rested two fingers on his pulse. Smooth, strong, unremarkable.  She rubbed his hand a little roughly, as if to rouse it from a trance then let it go. He opened his eyes, wondering at what point he closed them.

“Your move,” she said, and smiled. (The Queen was pleased, for her lady partner was most assuredly on her game.)

Omaha Graffiti

19 Friday Aug 2016

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I stand in your shadows when I write. I stand in your shadows when I read. I measure myself by those mental yardsticks and know I’ll never crash to the bottom in you, any of you. But you, sir, took it to the next level.

My words tend to be grainy and delayed, selling the promise of a poem and little more.  When I read your words I feel like a five course meal at a five star restaurant wearing sweatpants, sleeves dipped in red sauce. I feel like throwing in the towel. But I read them again and there comes a swelling dare, like swimming beyond the breakers, daring some thing to swim past my skin, brush my leg, make me wonder, but keep going, it’s out there!   Your words dare me to keep writing (but I’m still not gonna rob liquor stores with you, which is really the same thing, isn’t it?)

You say you’d forgotten that beach exists, the city obliterated water from your memory. I say the city can’t take nothing away that you didn’t want to let go.  You get to make your life as precise, blurry, fractious, secret and perfect as you want it to be, like the figures you sketch on train rides home.

Your PKDick mind never stops. I could hear words flurrying, flickering, battering, infernoing the whole way out to Omaha and back, so I would point past your nose and grunt things like, “Look! River! Mountain! Field! Mist!” I wanted you to stop. To see a land where the plates and the glacier said “You will not end here: You will fold and ridge and rise and landslide, you will be covered in greens and generations of deer and owl will fly from your sides. You will glisten red and wet in sunrise and bow down broken cold in gray winter knowing it will pass and you shall gleam again.”

I stood before a pine coffin in a far-flung section of the cemetery.  I came to help you say goodbye to a friend in Omaha. A hawk flew overhead. Bees played in the low, dry grass. Sweat trickled down our sides with our tears. I listened to a song and a prayer for the dead in a faith I’d only just learned about, Baha’i; the word is beautiful.  I like making graffiti on smooth, cool bathroom walls and how much I wanted to put my pen into the soft wood and write, “Rest In Peace, Friend” though I did not know him.  The pen grooves would have felt satisfying, and it was a hard urge to resist.  Maybe that’s all writing is to me, after all?

Final scattered notes:  Remember when exit 91 was closed?  The Arch.  “Yeah, well anything looks pretty when you stick a blue light on it,” she said, bitterly. Your magic box, world ending hot sauce, a final fresh vegetable meal I will make again and again.   I have notes on the couple sitting next to us in the museum café that I hope she never sees because it’s not flattering a’tall. You lost in a painting you didn’t particularly like. I may never drink coffee again due to world-ending heartburn, and I wonder what your 53 pages look like today. Have they multiplied, conjoined? Divided? Where do you go to write now?  I will never drive by a Starbucks without thinking of you.  Thank you for allowing me to be part of this journey.  I am blessed because of it all, and I will try to honor and continue the blessings.

The Animus* Project

03 Wednesday Aug 2016

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This is what it’s like being a science experiment when you’re both subject and scientist. It’s been voluntary and mandatory all these years, and my work is brought to you by the letters “U” for universe and U, and “M&D” for Mom and Dad.

I have journals that log my research. They are shoddy at best, filled with poor grammar. They drift off into polemics, occasional etymology, epistemology, the contemplation of poetry–language– as survival.  Most often my journals are dedicated to the weather, my pulse, barometric readings for the week, to-do lists, shopping lists, stuff i gotta remember not to forget, but then… I never go back and read my old entries.

I’m a study in chemistry, what I add and take away in what quantities, shaken, stirred, or left to evaporate.  Nutrition, what I feed this ambulatory shell and how it feels in the morning when it’s had a long, sweet night of rest under a night sky, white with stars after hiking just for a little while, bones and muscles melted but oh so happy.   What makes me dizzy? My heart race?  Can I do it on command, or is it all involuntary as my fear of the yellow jacket?  Why does my body respond to salt water but not icy crunching beneath my boots?  Why do I retch at the smell of banana but I’m learning to love avocado?

My journals chronicle hormones and what drives me now but not back then, and I wonder if my dreams–those dreams–are simply fueled by testosterone, or can I prove a hole in the soul makes the life force seep away?  Makes no sense, scientifically, of course.  But I knew a man who believed that dreams were real. I invite him to come to me tonight and tell me something I need to know. What will chi look like when I meet it on the street?

I take apart astronomy, astrology and I know my place between them, my flash in the pan carbon lifespan vs. the hands of a force that guides me unseen.  My studies are neither qualitative nor quantitative.  They are notes without equasional proof, for the journeys are impossible to map, coordinate, define, and corral into thesis or leather-bound tome that says this is wisdom for all time, heed it!

Perhaps I will prove seawater is home for the soul.  And poetry.  And you nanobes out there can suck it when I do!

*animus defined here as:   “the mind, in a great variety of meanings: the rational soul in man, intellect, consciousness, will, intention, courage, spirit, sensibility, feeling, 

Country, Mine.

03 Wednesday Aug 2016

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It would be a long drive, but that’s why I left.  That’s why I came.  Because I need to see it all.  I drove southwest across Virginia, and the farther west I went, the country opened itself up and out.  There became hills and windey roads. I stopped at an overlook to take in  the panorama; I looked down and didn’t spend too much time trying to decipher the bit of graffiti left on lover’s leap.  Country stores and local everything dotted the state route, but it was taking too long.  I headed for the interstate and put the hammer down.  There were rivers in Tennessee that were unmarked, and I so desperately wanted to know the place I was crossing–what was the name of that mountain on the other side? But there’s no time, I have to keep going.

I was woefully underdressed when I arrived at the hotel in Knoxville.  I greeted a wedding party in shorts and flip flops,  dumped my backpack at the front desk and waited to check in, then wished the groom congratulations in the elevator.  He seemed tired and tentative about everything around him, but he said it had been a good day. Knoxville was nice to pass through, but there were places I liked more.

And the drive continued, heading through Alabama on the interstate, I felt I needed to make better time this day.  Approaching Montgomery, I noticed the government buildings were beautiful, and it was hard for me to fathom that THIS is living history before me.  Names, places, events that had been black and white words in a textbook were right here, and right now, and what that means to me today.

On the drive home I felt very much the same way. I exclaimed I couldn’t swing a dead cat and not hit something historic.  He asked, “Oh? Where is that?”  I said, “It’s called the SOUTH.”  I’ll never forget the road that runs between Montgomery and Macon, lined with tallest pines. Georgia is filled with pines. And history.  I wanted to stop and visit the Tuskeegee Airmen’s museum, and later the Civil War Naval museum, but I had to keep going. I know what to see next time, maybe when the leaves are changing.  I was headed for Charleston, SC and by the time I reached my hotel at midnight it was 85 degrees and just about 100% humidity. The air felt positively nuclear.  On my way home from Charleston, I couldn’t take my eyes off the palmettos on state route 17, the dirt roads that come down to to meet the route, dotted with shacks and sheds where people sit and sell woven baskets.  In some places there were mansions and plantations fronted by brick or low iron gates, behind were enormous trees.  I was struck by the first names of slaves, people’s fingers touched these branches so long ago, and I’m just passing through history, making my way back to a little dot on the beach, whose history is only in teenagerhood. Full disclosure:  I did make a rest stop in Myrtle Beach and bought a gauzy little blouse-thing, melon-colored, that will be nice for sunset.

When I got home the first thing I did after dumping my gear was drink some homemade tea, so unsweetened and cold.  I put the air conditioning on to dry out the house and marveled at how much my plant seemed to have grown. He is unstoppable. I brought home a sweet potato vine, and I think she will keep everyone good company on the sill.  I missed my beach halfway through the visit and definitely in the middle of Georgia.  I took my drink down to the water and walked a long way in it, wondering what it would look like in the morning.

Someday I will write about Arizona, but it’s hard to find the right words that mean “breathtaking mountain that comes up from nowhere, surrounded by plains, dotted with cactus and humans who’ve grown so strong and hard as to survive here.”  Every time I stand on that mountain, or look down from that plane and watch geography shift, heave, and lie, I lose my words.