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A Letter To Jivey

16 Wednesday Sep 2020

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Dear Jivey,

It’s been three days since you returned to the Hudson river valley.  I’ve been moping since, but today I find the courage to write aloud. 

I love you and miss you both.  You brought me blessings and laughter and happiness and treasure I won’t forget and thank you.

This morning the cicadae are shirring in the pine trees. (Remember the little guy shuffling off his former coil by my front door?)   The temperature is cool and the humidity is gone: you seem to have taken it away with you. I wanted bathtubfulls of rain to fall sideways or maybe a thunderstorm to impress you while you were here, but all we got was drips, sweat, and static electricity high in the clouds. Tomorrow night the rain will come, courtesy of a hurricane remnant. I feel like I owe you wild weather, Ms. Vine, that we could stand outside and ride and shout out the wonderful chaos. And also Krispy Kremes.

I made a grocery store run this morning and everything I wanted was not there: bagels, rye bread, white queso sauce for a nacho treat. There are little teardrops of grease on my turquoise tablecloth, remnants of the New York pizza you brought, and everything feels out of joint. I fall into the writer’s recollection of how food joins us, humans, in happiness and grief. 

Monday I expected Ms. Vine to come in to the room where I write and felt sad when I remembered.  Last night I felt parts of you still in my room. It was a long night with little sleep. 

Horseshoe crabs come to the beach to molt their exoskeletons so they can grow into their new lives as their ancestors have done for a million years.  We collect their skins and wonder at these ancient arthropods, some intact, some in pieces, but we rarely see them as they continue their journey in the waters. You brought one molt in and prepared it with everything that I love about you. I’m glad the Universe put it in your path. Jivey, may your journeys be as successful, contingent on rising with the tide.

Love always,
Mom. 

A Daughter Floats Away

03 Wednesday Oct 2018

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My eyes open in my dark room. Moon white through window blind slats illuminates the garnet underleaves of the prayer plant. Breathing the last dream I had.

A small girl wears great, wide, long sails of black velvet. Asian flower blooms edged in gold float on her capes that she wears on her tiny shoulders. She is to be my daughter soon. Everywhere we walk there is wind, no, strong breezes, the kind to fly kites in that won’t be pulled out of your hands. She spends all her time trimming and gathering her “sails” so her capes will flow out beautifully, so the flowers can all be seen and be pretty.

We are in a small room, antique, ornate, silent. The room is crammed with mirrored shelves with cups and plates on display, cups and plates edged in Asian flower blooms and gold. The room is difficult to walk in, there is little room to move about without bumping into a display, and there is a woman in here now. She is the girl’s cruel mother, and she won’t give her to me.

Driving With Dad*

13 Monday Nov 2017

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The neighbors are less suspicious now as I drive down the narrow street and turn into the graveyard. They see my black Jeep a lot nowadays, and once I had to tell the cops I’m just here to see my dad.  You know how it is with small town cops. I think they’ve gotten used to me now and I still don’t give a shit.

His grave is between the elementary school and the “middle” school. I can’t help reliving some of those days every time I drive past them to make the turn into the narrow street, or road because it’s small town.  There’s a large, green lawn and a big playground down back. My 18-year-old friends liked to play back there in the middle of the night, big kids having fun with their girlfriends, except that one night when he jumped down off the monkey-bars and his boot knife drove into his ankle. That was kind of messed up.  These are the woods I hid inside when I played hooky and maybe some other things. I relive those times every time I drive down this backstreet and turn onto a smaller street not meant for two cars passing, neighbors wondering who’s this kid in a tricked out Jeep hanging out in the graveyard?

I wouldn’t come back here for any reason except that you are here. I took my beatings in this neighborhood, not far from the cool place where the under-aged were served at the tavern. We don’t all need to be the king and queen of the prom, but it would’ve been nice not to get beaten because I was a minding-my-own-business Head and you were a Jock serving your term as eradicator of supposed filth.  I wouldn’t come back here for any reason, but this was the best place I could find for you, and I know you’d be okay with it.  I wouldn’t come back here for any reason except for you. The neighbors are less suspicious now when I pull in between the low and narrow chain link fence. I pull off the gravel road into the grass, my Jeep leans steeply but at least people can pass by if they need to, but they never do because no one comes here except me, day or night.

I’m not thrilled about the headstone the Army provided at no charge. I wish it could be more. I wish it gave me space to tell the world who you have been and who you are.

I come here when I want, no reason or rhyme. Sometimes I just sit and listen to Concrete Blonde and watch the night go by. Other times I get out of the Jeep and greet your stone.  I stand beside the dimple in the ground and I just start talking. I tell you everything. I tell you things I didn’t know I needed to say, words I can’t believe I’m saying. Sometimes it’s just the most random bullshit. I can hear what you’d probably say.  Or maybe you might surprise me, I don’t know, but this silent ground gives me a place to tell, instead of lifelong silence when I needed you most. Now I tell you all, a silent post.

Should I stay here so I can keep speaking with you, telling you my heart that I will never give another?  If I drive my Jeep into desert discomfort, will you still be with me and hear me?  I need to go, but I don’t know how to leave you, Dad.  How will I find your listening or not listening anywhere else?  I flick my cigarette out the window and drive on. Traffic is heavy like it never was before when we were kids. I light another cig and change the song on the machine. I’m looking for something to lift the ribs that crush my heart and help me breathe free.

*Thank you, Kevin, for letting me have this one.

Heal The Woman-wounds, Help The World

02 Sunday Apr 2017

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We were talking about everything under the sun as friends do when we haven’t talked in a while.  Her conservative views come across casually, and I appreciate her voice:  it helps keep me balanced. I was surprised when she said she thought of joining the Women’s March on Washington back in January, but in the end, she decided against it. She couldn’t see herself marching with a bunch of women who are showing solidarity one day then stabbing her in the back the next.  I hurt so much for her when she said that because I know where it came from.

Her mother threw my friend out of the house when she was a mid-teen. Her mother had been divorced for some time, and her religious views bordered on delusions and aberrant behavior.  My friend figured out how to survive, bouncing from house to house, only wanting to finish high school and move on with her life.  She had no rock, no foundation to stand steady on, only the one she made for herself.  She graduated high school. Went to college, earned her degree, got a job. She’s worked shit jobs just to make ends barely meet, lacking health insurance that she needed and dealt with things few of us ever encounter. She walked and hiked and cross-country skied taking photos, had good times with friends along the way.  She figured out how to survive and remain creative. Her life is better now by her own hand, and I’m so relieved that she has some relief.  She worked for everything she has instead of lying down and blaming the world. She never cried herself “victim” of a bad childhood, the economy, or sucky boyfriends. I am proud of her, and I wish more women could use her story as a lantern, a way to keep going.

But for all that, my friend is still woman-wounded. The first wound hasn’t healed. It’s hard to trust womankind when your first woman emotionally abuses you and throws you away.  She and I have stories in common of women who put up roadblocks or planted landmines on the job. Yeah, men do it too, and it all seems to come down to survival of the fittest.  I’ll not help you succeed (by answering a simple question) because your success will drown my own. Women have exchanged clans for cubicles, and it has to stop.  I’d like to see women help each other instead of grabbing for some dusty, low-hanging, genetic fruit, hoping to poison the other.

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying that “nurses eat their young?”  We worked with a woman who changed careers from a desk job to pediatric nursing, and oh, we have no doubt she’s going to bully everything in her path. It is her nature.  Some say bullying new nurses girds them for the oncoming stress of the job, but I ask, is cruelty the only way to teach competence and confidence?  Is bullying your child the best way to raise her, just as bullying a classmate will make her more socially viable? Do we secretly hope if they off themselves, we won’t have to carry their sorry asses anymore?  Is the risk of self-pride, self-sustenance, and the clan so great that a woman can’t stand up for another?  Are we certain that kindness and compassion will raise a society of black holes that destroy with no hope of a return?

How about all those times we used subtle words and gestures to hold a woman down, things like he’s not good enough for you (but he is for me), or that job’s out of your league (but not for me). How many times did we choose not to celebrate a woman’s success either in person or social media because it somehow dampens our own light? Are we that fragile?  Apparently so. Where are the stories of women who find ways to shed their fragile shields, allow themselves to receive a kind word without fear of retribution, allow themselves to give to another without fear of the knife?

Madeleine Albright suggests there is a special place in hell for women who do not help each other.  I don’t believe in hell, specifically, but I see the ashy pit that remains of our behavior. Ancestral knives in the back are hard to shake off, a broken trust that reverberates through centuries.  And here is my friend taking care of her ailing mother today.

Grown, Flown, Gone.

06 Monday Jun 2016

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My apartment complex is two squat rectangles, two floors a piece, painted pretty yellow and accented in teal, separated by two tall, beautiful pine trees in a courtyard.  When I first arrived I could see the beach if I put my head up against the bedroom window, or more easily if I walked out the front door. I like to check on the tide, see if there are whitecaps, is it foggy before I step outside for my morning walk.   The giant flagpole in the marina back there tells me which way the wind is going. When I first arrived it was cold and quiet. Mourning doves were in the trees, and I watched their behaviors, their cooings and comings and goings. I heard the wind when I first arrived, wind in the pines, there is no sound like it. Well.. maybe the sound of “I love you Mom” compares, but I’m not here to compare.

Over the last few days I’ve focused my gaze on the incessant squeaking cheeping chipping peeping chirping of the birds outside my west and east windows. (I keep the windows open constantly because the cross-breeze is required in this warmer clime, and I will not run the air conditioner until I melt, oh hell no.)   O god, for hours, the chirping doesn’t end, frantic chirping like their house is burning down or the world is ending.  They’ve usurped the gentle cooing of my doves.  Alongside this phenomena is the sound of a hydraulic nail gun, metal grinder, and wood sander, because the realtor decided to remove, vertical metal bar by vertical bar, the old handrail and replace it with fancy wooden lattice-looking things. They’re not even halfway done.  The birds begin chirping an hour before dawn, and the nail gun doesn’t stop until dinnertime. I am focusing on the wrong things.

On the east side of my apartment are two trees, trees that have filled out with leaves since winter, and I can no longer see the ocean. Back here is secluded and safe. How do I know this? Because it’s where the mourning doves used to come and land on the shed down below under tree cover, hunkering down and spread out their wings in the sun safe from the osprey who prowls the bay. I’d never seen any of this before.  Out my bedroom window I watched a robin with four of her juveniles conduct a peeping choir, teaching them to maneuver here and here and there in the trees. The male cardinal fascinates me most with his juvenile. He put a worm down in front of his offspring perched on the shed, and she had no idea what to do with it. She hunkered and shivered in front of him, peeping like the world was ending until he finally picked it up and put it in her beak. She hopped a few hops then hunkered down, still, like a fallen brown leaf and he flew away.

I wondered what that would be like, the moment the cardinal comes back with a grub and his juvenile is gone? She’d flown off on her own because there was a sight, a scent, a sound so fascinating she had to see it on her own.  He will fly down with a grub expecting to see his offspring but she will be gone.  And he will put it down and fly back to his nest.  I wish my Dad got to see my nest, this place that used to be quiet but now covered in wings and construction and incessant sunrises.  So this one’s for you Dad, wherever you are.  I’ll try and do my best not be a grumpy cow when the birds are noisy or when it’s bitter cold. I think of you coming out to see the lunar eclipse, as sick and tired as you were, we didn’t even ask, but you came, silent with your hood up. I will try to honor your stiff spine.

Is That All You Got?

04 Monday Jan 2016

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Did I actually brew some kind of mystical, magical, improbable, miracle of thing called “kid” inside me, one that fluttered every time I drank a vanilla shake, or rearranged the walls of my ribs?  Was I the master-keeper of the organs of life, nursing, nurturing, and winging it, clueless with a book and a prayer (and a whole lotta leaning on the neighbors downstairs?)  Oh yeah; got the scars to prove it, and a husband that might still be traumatized by the event.

Was that me on the bed that very first time, lying back in secluded daylight, fingertips teaching that place that only seemed to resonate when I scanned the acres of posters on my walls of a man with coffee eyes, long, bronze hair, thick hands grasping a microphone, quadriceps-bursting blue jeans, who air-raid alarmed me or growled esoteric poetry, expiring me with inhaled breaths I’d never breathed before?

Was that me holding your hand? Was I really there watching you work so hard to breathe such little breaths, fighting to keep life in your cold fingers, stone calves, your words and wants and needs unknown, then walking away from us and I never knew if you were afraid and if we did everything we should have, knowing I should have been there better for you, man with a weak voice but stubborn to the end?

Was that me, holding horse, flowing through the pain with fierce determination, refusal to fail, and a few laughs between the minutes on the clock face, knowing there would be no other outcome but 45 minutes of thigh-erupting shaking pain, breath, flow, and some joy in accomplishment at the conclusion of the clock, new sash in hand, and probably not as much respect we hoped to gain from the master, but it was more than we had when we first walked in?  Was that me, finally believing you, that the whole world wasn’t trying to hurt me?

Was that me, naked in New Jersey waves watching sunrise bleed through the layered veils of black sky, diamond stars having the sense to bow out and leave, unlike my heart that never knew why?  La Mar heard confessions and tears, prayers, supplications and said scornfully, “Is that all you got?” So I drove home, some kind of empty pen.  Was that me, I ask, every morning, again?

I am woman, therefore weak, because I’d been beaten, defeated.  Look at what remains.  Woman can be strong if she trains herself against the world, girds herself against weakness, builds walls and turns her back on happiness–it’s safer that way. She will survive and attain anything she wants as long as she is armored and angry and calls the shots.  But has she the tools to survive the onslaught of life, the harrowing, the sorrow, the fleeting joy (how can it last?)  because she is woman? Warrior, strong, because she is no tender reed who bends in the wind, but rooted like omnipotent, arm-stretching oak!  But what about all the rest who carried, who came, who held, who lost, who forget all the strength she had–and will have again–because she is woman who sheds and cries and loses and grieves and gives and receives? Who dares love? What prayer for her, what talisman, what happy ending could she ever write?

Goddess, creator, destroyer, survivor, call down your gales; I’m not afraid of your pantheon!  I do not know where I am going, and still do cry because I cannot undo all that I wrought, but with your help I will get there, one way and the other. I suppose I will never dehydrate for lack of tears to drink, but I will never lose because when I yield I cannot break.

Cycles part II

18 Sunday Oct 2015

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The moon is waxing now, a bright belly of silver growing thicker before the shadow beside it.  Perhaps it is race memory, one we can finally touch and see when we look at the moon and see the burgeoning belly of a mother she goes through her phases.  How lucky we are to be able to see this cycle, faithfully, consistently, every month, keeping us company in the dark as we walk the long driveway back home, opening the door to who knows what when we get there.

We’re familiar with the phrase and the warm feelings we have when we say “the miracle of life.”  Once in a while I see a gravid woman and I wonder what everyone else thinks when they see her belly.  Got some baby going on there, I say to myself and I remember my own baby-making days, those early times.  Then I turn away and get back to the business of the day which is usually selling auto parts, largely having forgotten the art of patience.  I am not a patient person by nature, and it shows in the way I raised my son and the way I handle myself and my customers… but I am quite patient with my co-workers for some reason. Maybe it’s because I need allies?  Do I have this same patience for my writing? No.  Perhaps I would write more if I did.

Today I ask, do we have that same awe-inspiring feeling when we see a person taking their last steps out of the living world? Do we give the same appreciation, respect, and awe for the “miracle of death?” No. I know we don’t. Because it’s a leave-taking, one we did not ask for and certainly did not give permission to receive.  Yesterday I began meditating on the miracle of death, watching over a human being–someone I love–struggling to stay in this world yet somehow knowing they have to move on into the next.  The nurse wondered if my father needed something for anxiety (ah, those magic pills) and we said no, he’s ok right now.  I’d like to ask the nurse for something to help me with my anger… but that’s too easy, isn’t it?

The moon will wane into darkness, just as she sets each night into the ocean waves. Each setting is a new beginning, a moonrise for someone else out there beyond the waves. I told someone that a long time ago, and I wonder if those words are remembered.  I suppose what’s more important is that I know it is true. Each breath has a beginning and end. Can I sit still long enough and appreciate?

Cycles

17 Saturday Oct 2015

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Writing now feels like I am beginning in the middle of things instead of the beginning.  As a woman who is mildly OCD, it’s important to start at the beginning, chapter one, with the first word, not leaping haphazardly around from thought to thought like a cricket on a hot skillet. Ever see a bead of mercury slide this way and that, it doesn’t know where it’s going but for the hands that are tilting the surface it sits upon?  That’s how I feel these days, and it doesn’t lend itself to much creativity.

Starting this story at the end makes no sense, but I have limited time to write and less mental energy to do so.  So here goes. My father is at the end of his life’s journey courtesy of cancer. My brother uprooted his whole life and moved back here to be with him as he goes through this, these last eight months. They lived in my house in the finished basement apartment and renewed their familial bonds. My brother is handling as much as he can because he’s not working a full time job as I am.  He is handling everything beautifully and we have full confidence in him.  I struggle with the guilt of getting to work on time and trying to be a good worker bee, making lots of mistakes because I’m a tad angry and preoccupied (tad=very) instead of being by their sides. In the meantime, I’ve closed the valves on creativity for now.

Today I’m applying for FMLA (family medical leave), and I hope they don’t give me too much garbage about it. But it needs to be done and they can just deal with it.   Just like the pile of laundry on the couch needs to be folded and two-day old dishes in the sink need to be washed.  There is coffee in my cup now and… I hope I won’t come home too tired to have a beer before bed as it has been for the last eleven days.

Create in a storm when the heart is breaking and the mind has no clue what it’s thinking? I suppose it will come back eventually.  It did once before.  Until then, I have a pile of clean socks to keep me company.