I think I have written before about what I try to do every New Year's Eve, but what the heck. I will write about it again...
Last Year Is Done: Let Go of Missteps, Keep the Grace
I take a serious, long look at the year that is ending, reading the goals to move toward a more desirable path, and trying to honestly see how far along I have moved in that path and whether or not it remains a valid guide for what comes next. I also write down every single misstep I believe I have taken with somewhat brutal honesty at times.
Then I read those missteps aloud, pausing after each and I systematically tear up the list into as tiny pieces as I can and I throw them away. Sometimes I put the day's coffee grounds on top of them, just so that I feel I have thoroughly obliterated them.
Finally, I write what I feel I have accomplished on the left side of a piece of paper, as well as all the good things that I feel have happened TO me--the serendipitous gifts, or points of grace. Some years I have had a terrible time finding either, but more often I find that it's easier to list points of grace than accomplishments. I tend to minimize my role in anything good. I have noticed this in the last three years, most particularly; I had far less trouble finding my flawed acts than giving myself credit for anything.
Bit by bit, though, I got better at that. In 2010 I managed not to blame the house not selling on me. I gave myself credit for readying the house for market, for making some progress in some self-destructive obsessive behaviors, and for forgiving myself. Never before had I listed that as a positive accomplishment, but I finally saw that I would have appreciated this in other people--why not myself? But enough about 2010. It was a terrifying and painful and difficult year.
2011 began differently. The list of graces was enormous, but I saw that I felt I had accomplished a lot as well. I had returned to my blog, exceeding my target of 26 entries for the year. I had finished two more paintings and have five in the works. I let go of worrying about how much money I would have after paying off all my debts if the house sold. I changed the dynamic of a relationship that was truly codependent. I found the core and the structure for my book. I began to exercise again, if somewhat sporadically so far. All of my baby steps had added up to something.
Baby Steps Matter! From Broad Strokes to Filling In the Details...
I have overlooked the baby steps so often in my life, not recognizing that they added up to moving along a path I valued. The path? To live more creatively and closer to the bone of Jeannette. Who I am, rather than someone I think other people will approve of or like. Living my life out of loving rather than being loved. (That's a kicker, and I cannot say that I come close to living that way, but it's a pretty worthy goal I think.) That little girl who kept company with the mice in the traps, who talked to them and loved them who somehow got it that loving things was an answer to something scary ... she was only three and understood how to do that. In some ways, the path I wrote down to work toward in 2012 is hers. The path is the elementary school girl who wrote her first poems in free verse. The girl who saw a foster child with scanty clothing and asked her mother whether they could do something to help, and then helped her. My path is the same as the middle school girl who completed her first "real painting" of three faces of women, crying out for help in her art, crying out through the false smile, the anger, the scream--but no one heard. They saw the skill but ignored the voice. My path is to write and to paint my soul, to do my best to be felt and seen and heard--but to do it for the act of the doing.
Those were the broad strokes I wrote for moving forward. I do tend to find writing some specific steps helps me to get started in every year, though I don't label them resolutions. While I put the broad strokes as the start of the right side of my paper, I always follow it with specific actions. That's all I call them, rather than telling myself they are resolutions.
I recognize that taking care of my health issues must be included, or I won't be able to do a damned thing. I start with them because they are the least interesting to me--this year, just getting to the apartment gym once a week and to ride my own recumbent bike at least an hour a week are enough for someone who has been bedridden for so many hours a day.
I want to have at least 52 blog entries this year. I don't say once a week, since that would set me up for failure if there is a week I don't get to it. But this year I DID get ambitious, for once. I simply put WRITE THE BOOK, yes, in BIG lettering. I did not put write the finished product, nor publish it. I just have to write it now. (Bruce, you are so right. Most of it is written in my head or in my blog, but I have to put it in a compelling, readable form. The whole thing. Period.)
Finally, I wrote "start and complete at least three new paintings." That may not seem like many, but since I also put "Finish partly done paintings," that means I would wind up with ten completed paintings, at least. I keep finding partly done paintings that I had forgotten about entirely, from 2009 and early 2010. I had had to dismantle my studio early in 2010 because I was readying the place to sell. They remained packed up and hidden until I moved. When I put up my Christmas tree, I found another nest of them!
Age, Schmage (or Old, Schmold, if You Like)
I had begun this year's list with the intention of giving myself a schedule, but I cut to the chase instead. I may have the same list next year, or I may not. But in reading the list of accomplishments and graces of last year aloud, I realized that I felt like having myself shoot for the stars. Why dream little?
I will be sixty this year. I did not think of my parents as old at sixty. My mom hit that age when I was twenty-five, so it was not unreasonable for my friends to think it was old. What I saw in my parents, though, was that they both had minds like steel traps and, when she was sober, my mom had an insatiable curiosity about just about everything--except things that had to do with popular culture. Dad became Registrar of a university when he was sixty, after changing careers five years before. They were not over. When my health took such a terrifying turn in January of 2009, and so many dreams blew up in my face, I had started to let those thoughts of "getting old" and being "washed up" creep in through the cracks where my soul had been bleeding.
I allowed myself to start to believe that the best years of my life were behind me. Why? Because I was in acute pain? Because an old love had been used my heart then thrown it and me away, like garbage? Because I was poor? Because I had lost my career or any hope of regaining that particular career I'd built over ten years? Because I had to go through the humiliating process of applying for Disability? Because I knew I had to lose my home? Because my son had become increasingly withdrawn and depressed, and there was not a thing I could do? Well, yeah! Because of all those things.
Fine. I had reasons to be depressed, to be fearful, to be stuck. So what? I realized at the end of 2010 that none of those things had anything to do with being old, or being done. I have no idea what snapped me to attention, but I do know that something practical and tangible--winning my disability hearing and having the judge lambast the board that denied me turned me around. How crass, one might say. Well, when you are penniless and have to rely on a credit card and the kindness of your friends to put food on the table, having an independent income, no matter how meager, changes your life.
I got unstuck in 2011. I made reachable, small goals for myself last year. I met every single one of them, and have you any idea how good that made me feel last night?
Why Dream Little? My Mantra, Perhaps...
So I am dreaming BIG this year. And I actually yelled at a friend who talked about our being old and how we had to accept that from here on opportunity is for the young. It made me angry because I feel as if, once again, I am just getting started. I had to start from scratch when my husband took off when I was forty. I was on disability and had been for almost a decade. I had to start to build a career from almost NOTHING. I did it. And here I am, twenty years later, having to start from scratch in a different way, so I will do it.
It isn't about the poverty; it's about having a sense of purpose. I have that now, and I have some financial security for a couple of years, at least. Who could ask for more than that? I am a lucky woman; I keep writing that, I know. But I feel it all the way through, and I think it is a healthy way to feel. It's up to me not to squander this opportunity I have.
An old friend, told me that all he wanted for me was to be able to get up each day and choose whether I wanted to write or to paint, or whether I needed to simply rest because of my back. He said he wanted me to be able to choose how I lived my days without having to be so worried all the time. Well, his wish for me has come true, and I did not think it would.
I have an exciting year ahead to look forward to. I find the thought of being sixty kind of freeing. I am not sure why yet, but undoubtedly I'll babble about it at some point. My "other big sister," Nancy will be seventy. She's not old, either. She volunteers in two organizations, works part-time because she wants to, travels to marvelous places--in another year, she's going to go to the Polar Bear town in Alaska... My Aunt in Alaska's 97. Yes, she IS old, but I love listening to the wanderings of her mind when we talk.
She begins on one topic about a friend, then skips all over the place, but if I wait long enough, she always returns to the place she started... and it's always a marvelous ride along the way. Hmmm... I think that's the whole point to living creatively, perhaps. The ride's as important as the destination, maybe more so.
END of this ramble. Happy New Year! (I may revise this three or four times after I publish, but I just want to put it out there and start on my goals NOW.)
Accidental Spring
"Accidental Spring" This began as the background for painting other papers, but became something else!
Showing posts with label hope. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hope. Show all posts
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Friday, March 18, 2011
What now you may ask?
Water, water everwhere, nor any drop to drink.
Water, water everywhere, and MY how it doth stink!
Yes, dear readers, I have been wet vaccing in the basement, three times a day. Ah, the glamor of it all. But the song "Workin' in a Coal mine, goin' down down down" Keeps floating through my brain, which sort of takes the onus off.
And moving furniture to polish my wood floors and my kitchen floor. Climbing on stools, reaching above my head to get books off the shelves so that I could Murphy's oil then lemon oil all the wood. Hey. I mop n glo'ed with a TOOTH Brush to get around the wood of the banisters. Somewhere in the last two weeks, the nasty little demon in charge of turning perfectly sloppy women into anal housebodies who walk around with Swiffers singing, "Wake up your room!" (Sorry to you who are younger, it's a line from a simply horrid commercial from the sixties where a bedazzled housewife sang as she dusted, "Wake up your room, wake up your room, with natural wood-scent Pledge.)
Anyway, this disgusting demon told me that I must do the corners. That I must be on my knees getting that waxy build up from the floor, that nameless gray goop that accumulates. And I did.
AND rode my exercise bike.
I would sit at the computer to write and my mind quite simply went, "Duh? Arrr?" Think confused Scooby Doo. Then I had to tutor Adam about rhetorical devices in two essays, by Elie Weisel and Alexander Solzhenitzen. And then come home early from his house to wet vac the basement again.
My house is once again officially on the market. I look over the last year and realize that nothing has changed except me. My financial situation remains precarious, but the fight for social security is done. That brought me a peace I cannot measure. I go through weeks like the last two and continue to accomplish what should be impossible for my back to bear, but I do it... and my back cannot bear it so I pay dearly.
However, then I come out of the payback and there is humor. THAT is the change. I rediscovered my sense of the absurd and my sense of proportion and perspective. And somewhere or other, I've lost the ability to worry about it all. A loss for which I am grateful beyond words.
Truth be told, the last two weeks have been simply horrible. I could not walk yesterday more than about five steps at a time. When I say I could not walk, it is a literal comment. I had to hold onto things or I collapsed. The pain has been beyond my ability to cope at times. I could not stand up straight no matter HOW I tried.
I finally took this as a sign that perhaps it was time to lie down, although I did not read the sign until I'd been up stumbling around with a Swiffer and my can of Pledge for an hour. There is no twelve-step program for stupidity. Not really. I've been looking... obsessively of course.
All I wanted to do was write a little story about my travels to Red Bank. My part two of what could be a freaking novelette, probably. But those words do not come just now. Too much sludge and not enough metaphor just now.
Hey, but I DO remember the winter after my husband walked out. It was the only other time my basement flooded. Only then it was so bad that we had lovely little waterfalls falling out of the fireplace, glistening in the light. The water was deep enough so you could hear the splash. I had thought of turning the heat off altogether and perhaps having an indoor rink. I had a sign on my front door that said, "Welcome to Cliffwood Falls." (Cliffwood Drive is the street.)
I was determined to succeed, however. I had survived the hundred year old oak falling in the middle of the night three days after Mark left. I didn't ask for his help then. No. I was mighty. I would handle this on my own. A shop vac. I can just vacuum this stuff right up. I'll get me one of them.
Now, ya gotta understand that on those dumb tests where they determine what your aptitudes are, I was in the bottom twelfth percentile for mechanical ability. When I went off to college it took me FIFTEEN minutes of experimentation before I gave up and asked someone to show me how to use one o' them old-fashioned hand held silver can openers. To this day, it takes me two tries to use my nice slick Scandinavian black hand-held can opener to remember how it works.
So for me to go to Sears and buy myself a shop vac, come home and put it together all by myself? Please. Applaud. Bow before me. I did it. I READ the directions and laid out all the little pieces and put it together without a hitch. I broke for dinner, but had it done before the eleven o'clock news. And it WORKED. And I think I had to put together at least eighteen, maybe even TWENTY moving parts.
After the fourth day of using the thing three times a day, and hauling it out the garage to dump it, Mark happened to call and ask whether I could use some help that night. His mom had told him about the water. I was going to say "no" but for once in my life, realized that pride is just, plain, stupidity sometimes. He came over and went downstairs and did a long stint. I went down after an hour to ask if he wanted some supper, and he was busy swearing at the machine because he could not move it over its own wire.
I said, "Mark, it's super full and is sloshing out the top, you gotta be caref--"
He tipped over the sixty gallons and it flew all over the only parts of the carpet that had remained dry. Black, stinky water. It also got me in the face as well. I started to sing, "Old black water, keep on rollin'." And then I wailed, "Well keep on Shinin' your light, gonna make EVERYTHING, pretty mama, gonna make everything all right. And I ain't got no worries, cause I ain't in no hurry... at all!" (Doobie Brothers, some time in the early seventies)
Mark looked at me, silent, my giraffe of an ex husband, a hint of a smirk playing at the corners of his straight lips. "Well. My work here is done. I always have known JUST what to do to make things right. Care to throw the Hoover upright Beats as it Sweeps at my head again?"
The memory of my heaving that at his head, there in that very spot in the basement, when I got him to admit he was NOT considering staying but had been waiting to leave until the kids left... the memory of my having the strength to do it, the look of surprise on his face.
The laughter came, to the point where we sat on the steps and held one another until the tears came. At which point I got up and said, "NO MORE WATER!"
***
And these are the things that leap and cavort through my brain as I slog on through this business of "getting the house ready to show."
Well. Except, perhaps, a brain capable of coherent thought. I wrote tonight because I was sick of NOT writing. It's what I do, how I enter the world. And bad or good, specious or profound, I write what happens in my little teeny world. The sign that last year is behind me for real is the fact that I am willing to blither publicly, to share how I DO process this life.
Today I move through sludge. Tomorrow I fly. One day I throw a vacuum cleaner at my ex's head. Another I stick a fondu fork through my hand. One never knows.
***
That's what I loved about the Jersey shore. You could run into someone who looked like Burt Lancaster one day and sounded like a dockworker, and then be approached by someone who clearly was stuck in "Stayin' Alive," wearing speedos, gold chains that glistened here and there, lost in the fur blanket of his chest, with the short-sleeved shirt buttoned by one button, straining over the not-twenty-year-old belly ... the man who would walk the forty yards to where you had clearly removed yourself to draw and sit on the rocks, who huffed and puffed his way there to say, "Youse look like ya need company. I got a porsche wit cher name on it."
And I would think, "Why me? Am I wearing that sign again?"
I just wanted to write about my adventures, but nope. For now, my life is wet vaccs, mops, and chasing dust rhinos around my house.
Just wanted you all to know I am here and I Miss my blogging and others' blogging. Sometimes real life--SURREAL life will intrude.
Forgive this entry, if you can. Perhaps tomorrow I can write about the forking incident--although, perhaps I already have. I'll check.
If you celebrated St. Patrick's Day, I hope you had fun. If you did not, I hope the same. For now? I think Jeannette needs to sleep. Perhaps, in the night, the tooth fairy will, since she has no further business with me, find my brain and leave it under my pillow. One can hope.
Water, water everywhere, and MY how it doth stink!
Yes, dear readers, I have been wet vaccing in the basement, three times a day. Ah, the glamor of it all. But the song "Workin' in a Coal mine, goin' down down down" Keeps floating through my brain, which sort of takes the onus off.
And moving furniture to polish my wood floors and my kitchen floor. Climbing on stools, reaching above my head to get books off the shelves so that I could Murphy's oil then lemon oil all the wood. Hey. I mop n glo'ed with a TOOTH Brush to get around the wood of the banisters. Somewhere in the last two weeks, the nasty little demon in charge of turning perfectly sloppy women into anal housebodies who walk around with Swiffers singing, "Wake up your room!" (Sorry to you who are younger, it's a line from a simply horrid commercial from the sixties where a bedazzled housewife sang as she dusted, "Wake up your room, wake up your room, with natural wood-scent Pledge.)
Anyway, this disgusting demon told me that I must do the corners. That I must be on my knees getting that waxy build up from the floor, that nameless gray goop that accumulates. And I did.
AND rode my exercise bike.
I would sit at the computer to write and my mind quite simply went, "Duh? Arrr?" Think confused Scooby Doo. Then I had to tutor Adam about rhetorical devices in two essays, by Elie Weisel and Alexander Solzhenitzen. And then come home early from his house to wet vac the basement again.
My house is once again officially on the market. I look over the last year and realize that nothing has changed except me. My financial situation remains precarious, but the fight for social security is done. That brought me a peace I cannot measure. I go through weeks like the last two and continue to accomplish what should be impossible for my back to bear, but I do it... and my back cannot bear it so I pay dearly.
However, then I come out of the payback and there is humor. THAT is the change. I rediscovered my sense of the absurd and my sense of proportion and perspective. And somewhere or other, I've lost the ability to worry about it all. A loss for which I am grateful beyond words.
Truth be told, the last two weeks have been simply horrible. I could not walk yesterday more than about five steps at a time. When I say I could not walk, it is a literal comment. I had to hold onto things or I collapsed. The pain has been beyond my ability to cope at times. I could not stand up straight no matter HOW I tried.
I finally took this as a sign that perhaps it was time to lie down, although I did not read the sign until I'd been up stumbling around with a Swiffer and my can of Pledge for an hour. There is no twelve-step program for stupidity. Not really. I've been looking... obsessively of course.
All I wanted to do was write a little story about my travels to Red Bank. My part two of what could be a freaking novelette, probably. But those words do not come just now. Too much sludge and not enough metaphor just now.
Hey, but I DO remember the winter after my husband walked out. It was the only other time my basement flooded. Only then it was so bad that we had lovely little waterfalls falling out of the fireplace, glistening in the light. The water was deep enough so you could hear the splash. I had thought of turning the heat off altogether and perhaps having an indoor rink. I had a sign on my front door that said, "Welcome to Cliffwood Falls." (Cliffwood Drive is the street.)
I was determined to succeed, however. I had survived the hundred year old oak falling in the middle of the night three days after Mark left. I didn't ask for his help then. No. I was mighty. I would handle this on my own. A shop vac. I can just vacuum this stuff right up. I'll get me one of them.
Now, ya gotta understand that on those dumb tests where they determine what your aptitudes are, I was in the bottom twelfth percentile for mechanical ability. When I went off to college it took me FIFTEEN minutes of experimentation before I gave up and asked someone to show me how to use one o' them old-fashioned hand held silver can openers. To this day, it takes me two tries to use my nice slick Scandinavian black hand-held can opener to remember how it works.
So for me to go to Sears and buy myself a shop vac, come home and put it together all by myself? Please. Applaud. Bow before me. I did it. I READ the directions and laid out all the little pieces and put it together without a hitch. I broke for dinner, but had it done before the eleven o'clock news. And it WORKED. And I think I had to put together at least eighteen, maybe even TWENTY moving parts.
After the fourth day of using the thing three times a day, and hauling it out the garage to dump it, Mark happened to call and ask whether I could use some help that night. His mom had told him about the water. I was going to say "no" but for once in my life, realized that pride is just, plain, stupidity sometimes. He came over and went downstairs and did a long stint. I went down after an hour to ask if he wanted some supper, and he was busy swearing at the machine because he could not move it over its own wire.
I said, "Mark, it's super full and is sloshing out the top, you gotta be caref--"
He tipped over the sixty gallons and it flew all over the only parts of the carpet that had remained dry. Black, stinky water. It also got me in the face as well. I started to sing, "Old black water, keep on rollin'." And then I wailed, "Well keep on Shinin' your light, gonna make EVERYTHING, pretty mama, gonna make everything all right. And I ain't got no worries, cause I ain't in no hurry... at all!" (Doobie Brothers, some time in the early seventies)
Mark looked at me, silent, my giraffe of an ex husband, a hint of a smirk playing at the corners of his straight lips. "Well. My work here is done. I always have known JUST what to do to make things right. Care to throw the Hoover upright Beats as it Sweeps at my head again?"
The memory of my heaving that at his head, there in that very spot in the basement, when I got him to admit he was NOT considering staying but had been waiting to leave until the kids left... the memory of my having the strength to do it, the look of surprise on his face.
The laughter came, to the point where we sat on the steps and held one another until the tears came. At which point I got up and said, "NO MORE WATER!"
***
And these are the things that leap and cavort through my brain as I slog on through this business of "getting the house ready to show."
- It is not a tsunami in my basement. It's annoying yuck.
- I am alive, and my home is fine. And my back is better today, so I was able to pretend I was born to polish again today.
- I rode my bike for an hour and a half, singing rock and roll the whole time.
- I have money to pay my bills.
- In these times, in this country? I have everything I could possibly need.
Well. Except, perhaps, a brain capable of coherent thought. I wrote tonight because I was sick of NOT writing. It's what I do, how I enter the world. And bad or good, specious or profound, I write what happens in my little teeny world. The sign that last year is behind me for real is the fact that I am willing to blither publicly, to share how I DO process this life.
Today I move through sludge. Tomorrow I fly. One day I throw a vacuum cleaner at my ex's head. Another I stick a fondu fork through my hand. One never knows.
***
That's what I loved about the Jersey shore. You could run into someone who looked like Burt Lancaster one day and sounded like a dockworker, and then be approached by someone who clearly was stuck in "Stayin' Alive," wearing speedos, gold chains that glistened here and there, lost in the fur blanket of his chest, with the short-sleeved shirt buttoned by one button, straining over the not-twenty-year-old belly ... the man who would walk the forty yards to where you had clearly removed yourself to draw and sit on the rocks, who huffed and puffed his way there to say, "Youse look like ya need company. I got a porsche wit cher name on it."
And I would think, "Why me? Am I wearing that sign again?"
I just wanted to write about my adventures, but nope. For now, my life is wet vaccs, mops, and chasing dust rhinos around my house.
Just wanted you all to know I am here and I Miss my blogging and others' blogging. Sometimes real life--SURREAL life will intrude.
Forgive this entry, if you can. Perhaps tomorrow I can write about the forking incident--although, perhaps I already have. I'll check.
If you celebrated St. Patrick's Day, I hope you had fun. If you did not, I hope the same. For now? I think Jeannette needs to sleep. Perhaps, in the night, the tooth fairy will, since she has no further business with me, find my brain and leave it under my pillow. One can hope.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Update and my Christmas Tree
Thank you for the inquiries about my health. I have had some difficult news about the spinal issues and am simply working on learning to function in spite of them AND accommodating them as necessary. Sometimes this means finding the boundaries by crashing into them and then needing a few days to deal with the repercussions, but, well, that's the only way I know to learn my limitations.
I have to find them.
Super stores would appear to be my main downfall. I cannot make it through a super grocery store, so I will not go to them any more. I have had several dear friends suggest I use a motorized cart, but I think that this maybe shows most graphically how I feel I need to approach the challenges of new damage in both the thoracic and cervical spine.
I will not sit down unless there is no choice. There are other stores in which I can shop, and while they cost a bit more money, they allow me to stand, to walk, to complete my shopping, to get the items upstairs all on my own. THEN I can recuperate for a couple of hours. Psychologically, that choice to use the motorized chair is a symbol for me. I do not judge anyone for choosing the chair.
But for now? I need to keep my legs moving when and however I can.
My absence here is simply a reflection of my turning my attention to physical survival and adaptation. The pain is horrible, yes... but there are medications that help, and I am learning to use my yoga and breathing to control my own response to what pain remains because I choose NOT to have large doses of the meds.
I am decorating my tree. What used to be a two day process is a four-day one, but it is a beautiful process for me. Ninety per cent of the ornaments on my tree are gifts and/or symbols of people I love. David is a drummer... an old love who remains a dear, dear friend. I have a stained glass "present" ornament he gave me thirty years ago, and three drum sets friends have given me. Jim--the brother of whom I rarely write--played the trombone. I keep an ornament that reminds me of the best of him. He had a best and I choose to keep that nugget. My sister played the clarinet, Jack played the banjo. Jamie and R, the guitar. I have my two guitars and I choose to keep R. on my tree, despite the way he treated me. My tree represents the best of people I love, and when I look I try to focus on that. I have gifts from Gail, from Paige and Judy, Nancy, Sue, Martha... ornaments that were my parents', ornaments from both sets of grandparents' trees. There is the reindeer in her glitter dress, leaping... my tutu'd flamingo, Santa on a chicken, a glitter pig riding the moon, a rocking cow. I have blown glass holly and a hobby horse. I have glass icicles that will be the finishing garnish, replacing the lead tinsel of my youth. One hundred fifty of them will go on tonight, near lights. With a finishing touch of 100 tiny balls on the tips. They make the tree float at night.
My tree represents joy to me. I have modes of transportation, every musical instrument known, right down to an accordion. I have beautiful Santas and dopey ones, I have a castle and a house, tinkerbell and the tin man. Raggedy Andy. I gave Raggedy Ann to my counselor the Christmas after Jessie died, and she gave me a blown glass bell from Bermuda. I have a flute; Jessie played the flute. And a little boy playing soccer, the way Jay did. So many bits that make me think of them all...
And all of it is my mother and father.
My tree is love; the season is love to me. If anything can bring me out of the losses of the last few years, can help me believe that there will be joy in the years ahead, my tree will do it. The recollections of my family Christmases, of my beloved sister.
Fetching the stockings at the top of the stairs. Daddy's socks were long. We hung them by the chimney, but Santa put them at the top of the stairs. Jean Ellen got them, told the boys it was time, and the four of us piled on her big bed, to open the stockings, to laugh... to give my parents' an extra hour's rest on the craziest day of our year...
But that's for another week.
For now, thank you one and all, for the concern, and for making me feel that my writing offers gifts to more than myself. I have to go work on my tree some more. I cannot find just the right place for my hooker flamingo in her polka dotted dress. I mean, you can't put her just anywhere. And my glitter frog prince... I was given him as a reminder that maybe one day the amphibian would change.
Not so much, but I don't care. I JUST love that damned frog just fine.
Uh-oh... then there is the high heeled puce green boot with the red feather fur at its top... the problem with having the tree at the top of the stairs, is there is no longer any "back of the tree!" Elvis can be seen, even in toward the trunk. And this boot? OH. Wait. There's a spot just above Santa on a Chicken, three branches from the pig wrapped in a string of lights... never mind.
Later.
I have to find them.
Super stores would appear to be my main downfall. I cannot make it through a super grocery store, so I will not go to them any more. I have had several dear friends suggest I use a motorized cart, but I think that this maybe shows most graphically how I feel I need to approach the challenges of new damage in both the thoracic and cervical spine.
I will not sit down unless there is no choice. There are other stores in which I can shop, and while they cost a bit more money, they allow me to stand, to walk, to complete my shopping, to get the items upstairs all on my own. THEN I can recuperate for a couple of hours. Psychologically, that choice to use the motorized chair is a symbol for me. I do not judge anyone for choosing the chair.
But for now? I need to keep my legs moving when and however I can.
My absence here is simply a reflection of my turning my attention to physical survival and adaptation. The pain is horrible, yes... but there are medications that help, and I am learning to use my yoga and breathing to control my own response to what pain remains because I choose NOT to have large doses of the meds.
I am decorating my tree. What used to be a two day process is a four-day one, but it is a beautiful process for me. Ninety per cent of the ornaments on my tree are gifts and/or symbols of people I love. David is a drummer... an old love who remains a dear, dear friend. I have a stained glass "present" ornament he gave me thirty years ago, and three drum sets friends have given me. Jim--the brother of whom I rarely write--played the trombone. I keep an ornament that reminds me of the best of him. He had a best and I choose to keep that nugget. My sister played the clarinet, Jack played the banjo. Jamie and R, the guitar. I have my two guitars and I choose to keep R. on my tree, despite the way he treated me. My tree represents the best of people I love, and when I look I try to focus on that. I have gifts from Gail, from Paige and Judy, Nancy, Sue, Martha... ornaments that were my parents', ornaments from both sets of grandparents' trees. There is the reindeer in her glitter dress, leaping... my tutu'd flamingo, Santa on a chicken, a glitter pig riding the moon, a rocking cow. I have blown glass holly and a hobby horse. I have glass icicles that will be the finishing garnish, replacing the lead tinsel of my youth. One hundred fifty of them will go on tonight, near lights. With a finishing touch of 100 tiny balls on the tips. They make the tree float at night.
My tree represents joy to me. I have modes of transportation, every musical instrument known, right down to an accordion. I have beautiful Santas and dopey ones, I have a castle and a house, tinkerbell and the tin man. Raggedy Andy. I gave Raggedy Ann to my counselor the Christmas after Jessie died, and she gave me a blown glass bell from Bermuda. I have a flute; Jessie played the flute. And a little boy playing soccer, the way Jay did. So many bits that make me think of them all...
And all of it is my mother and father.
My tree is love; the season is love to me. If anything can bring me out of the losses of the last few years, can help me believe that there will be joy in the years ahead, my tree will do it. The recollections of my family Christmases, of my beloved sister.
Fetching the stockings at the top of the stairs. Daddy's socks were long. We hung them by the chimney, but Santa put them at the top of the stairs. Jean Ellen got them, told the boys it was time, and the four of us piled on her big bed, to open the stockings, to laugh... to give my parents' an extra hour's rest on the craziest day of our year...
But that's for another week.
For now, thank you one and all, for the concern, and for making me feel that my writing offers gifts to more than myself. I have to go work on my tree some more. I cannot find just the right place for my hooker flamingo in her polka dotted dress. I mean, you can't put her just anywhere. And my glitter frog prince... I was given him as a reminder that maybe one day the amphibian would change.
Not so much, but I don't care. I JUST love that damned frog just fine.
Uh-oh... then there is the high heeled puce green boot with the red feather fur at its top... the problem with having the tree at the top of the stairs, is there is no longer any "back of the tree!" Elvis can be seen, even in toward the trunk. And this boot? OH. Wait. There's a spot just above Santa on a Chicken, three branches from the pig wrapped in a string of lights... never mind.
Later.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Today is Better
Phoenix © 1992, 2009
No room for desperation in the ruins of my heart;
I must be strong.
I am strong from my core that holds my infinite flame;
I have a flame.
It holds passions beyond desire.
Beyond ruins of tortured body,
I am more beautiful than Hippolyta;
I have the Amazon soul.
No room for desperation in this soul where burns my flame;
Only love.
From love born in faith in beauty beyond mirrors;
I see only light.
My soul has no need for mirrors.
It spreads joy,
without begging for a feeding of the flame.
My soul is no stranger to waiting;
It can dance by itself.
I am the patience of mountains;
with my flame, from my soul, I can wait.
I have seen this soul; it is worth the wait.
From the ruins it rises, whole.
Born July 25, 1992, She rises again, today.
I wrote this the day after I confronted my ex-husband about the fact that I had figured out that he was leaving me, not thinking about it. He was busy running around fixing exterior lights. I had asked him to go to the Home Depot to get an indoors ladder the day before. He fought me about it, saying I would kill myself on it. I looked at him and half-smiled, saying, "You won't though."
He came home without one, saying, "They didn't have any." Our son was en route to Indiana, to go back to school. Jessie was still working, still home for another two weeks.
I went into the basement and saw him busy trying to fix something I'd asked him about for weeks--and replacing ALL the ceiling lights. "Fixing the lights will not keep me all safe and Fine when you leave. You ARE leaving, right?"
He turned and blanched. He began to shake. "Yes."
"You had no intention to stay, to work on things."
"No. But I'm moving into Jay's room down here, so you can get acclimated."
"ACCLIMATED?" I screamed. Next to me was the Hoover Upright, Beats as It Sweeps. Mind you, I was fresh out of the hospital for my tenth round of back crap. I picked it up with one hand, and then with both, I THREW It at him.
He looked so surprised when he caught it.
That was the one moment of laughter in two months of hell, but laugh we did.
And then I went straight to a friend's house, with the words, "Be sure you've figured out where you are going to live when I com back." Not a problem, since he'd already moved his girlfriend into her own apartment.
But I wrote this poem when I came home the next day. I turned some sort of a corner and was resolved. I felt I was stronger in my pinky finger, than he was in his whole being, and I started to plan. I enrolled in the classes I'd wanted, regardless of my circumstances. I took steps to make sure I'd be okay for a while. I was determined to succeed, to fly despite the SOB.
And I did... I flew.
Yesterday was difficult, beyond words. Primarily I felt afraid of where I may wind up. Of whether I will find financial solutions in time. Of whether or not my latest DOWN-tick with my back will level off for some years. Afraid that the beginnings of an awakening for this woman's heart (Dormant for ten years, hiding for far longer) would fizzle into nothing again. Oh, hell. Fear is fear is fear.,
I was simply stone-cold, paralyzed with fear. I am not going to make it pretty or worry about the sound of that. It was numbing and horrible.
But by midnight, so much was better. So much. Words from friends. Words from a couple of readers. And some strange resolve inside. I found the poem at 2:00 a.m. This poem from another time, another era. Yet it has been something I have returned to at other times, the losses of Jessie, my nephew, my brother, two of my dearest friends, and my sister. When I have once before thought I would lose everything and a friend gave me enough of a lifeline to be able to breathe, to think.
I return to the Phoenix and Hippolyta. Rising from ashes, whole... and the strength of a mighty woman. I never longed to be a sylph, even when our image of beauty was a model named Twiggy, all bone and eyes. Nope Not for me. I wanted to be STRONG. I wanted to stand tall, but be, most definitely, a woman.
I read this poem aloud, there in the dark, perhaps three times. Perhaps more. Don't know, don't care.
Today is better.
There are no answers today. All that has changed is me. Perhaps that's all that needs to change.
No room for desperation in the ruins of my heart;
I must be strong.
I am strong from my core that holds my infinite flame;
I have a flame.
It holds passions beyond desire.
Beyond ruins of tortured body,
I am more beautiful than Hippolyta;
I have the Amazon soul.
No room for desperation in this soul where burns my flame;
Only love.
From love born in faith in beauty beyond mirrors;
I see only light.
My soul has no need for mirrors.
It spreads joy,
without begging for a feeding of the flame.
My soul is no stranger to waiting;
It can dance by itself.
I am the patience of mountains;
with my flame, from my soul, I can wait.
I have seen this soul; it is worth the wait.
From the ruins it rises, whole.
Born July 25, 1992, She rises again, today.
I wrote this the day after I confronted my ex-husband about the fact that I had figured out that he was leaving me, not thinking about it. He was busy running around fixing exterior lights. I had asked him to go to the Home Depot to get an indoors ladder the day before. He fought me about it, saying I would kill myself on it. I looked at him and half-smiled, saying, "You won't though."
He came home without one, saying, "They didn't have any." Our son was en route to Indiana, to go back to school. Jessie was still working, still home for another two weeks.
I went into the basement and saw him busy trying to fix something I'd asked him about for weeks--and replacing ALL the ceiling lights. "Fixing the lights will not keep me all safe and Fine when you leave. You ARE leaving, right?"
He turned and blanched. He began to shake. "Yes."
"You had no intention to stay, to work on things."
"No. But I'm moving into Jay's room down here, so you can get acclimated."
"ACCLIMATED?" I screamed. Next to me was the Hoover Upright, Beats as It Sweeps. Mind you, I was fresh out of the hospital for my tenth round of back crap. I picked it up with one hand, and then with both, I THREW It at him.
He looked so surprised when he caught it.
That was the one moment of laughter in two months of hell, but laugh we did.
And then I went straight to a friend's house, with the words, "Be sure you've figured out where you are going to live when I com back." Not a problem, since he'd already moved his girlfriend into her own apartment.
But I wrote this poem when I came home the next day. I turned some sort of a corner and was resolved. I felt I was stronger in my pinky finger, than he was in his whole being, and I started to plan. I enrolled in the classes I'd wanted, regardless of my circumstances. I took steps to make sure I'd be okay for a while. I was determined to succeed, to fly despite the SOB.
And I did... I flew.
Yesterday was difficult, beyond words. Primarily I felt afraid of where I may wind up. Of whether I will find financial solutions in time. Of whether or not my latest DOWN-tick with my back will level off for some years. Afraid that the beginnings of an awakening for this woman's heart (Dormant for ten years, hiding for far longer) would fizzle into nothing again. Oh, hell. Fear is fear is fear.,
I was simply stone-cold, paralyzed with fear. I am not going to make it pretty or worry about the sound of that. It was numbing and horrible.
But by midnight, so much was better. So much. Words from friends. Words from a couple of readers. And some strange resolve inside. I found the poem at 2:00 a.m. This poem from another time, another era. Yet it has been something I have returned to at other times, the losses of Jessie, my nephew, my brother, two of my dearest friends, and my sister. When I have once before thought I would lose everything and a friend gave me enough of a lifeline to be able to breathe, to think.
I return to the Phoenix and Hippolyta. Rising from ashes, whole... and the strength of a mighty woman. I never longed to be a sylph, even when our image of beauty was a model named Twiggy, all bone and eyes. Nope Not for me. I wanted to be STRONG. I wanted to stand tall, but be, most definitely, a woman.
I read this poem aloud, there in the dark, perhaps three times. Perhaps more. Don't know, don't care.
Today is better.
There are no answers today. All that has changed is me. Perhaps that's all that needs to change.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Jeannette's Wild Life: Part 923.7
I was going to say that here and there life takes a new turn, but when I look at my life, that seems a tad absurd. For me? Here and there life moves straight forward...
I am inserting something here, so you realize that I DO love life. I have learned along the way... And I will continue to learn. Without writing, art, music, friends? Yeah, all this would be bleak, but this entry is about learning to write WHILE I process, not just afterward. And I hope that more than "Ain't it awful?" comes through. It IS awful, but life is hard sometimes. And what I want more than anything is to burst through, like a phoenix, on the other side.
Thank you so much to those of you who have written to say you missed my writing. When you read of what is going on for me, you may realize, I hope, just how grateful I am to know that my writing and my heart touch some people out there. That my style of expressing myself resonates.
I will write again that my blog is not so much about trying to gather a following as it about trying on my voice. My dream is to write my memoir. (Okay, so one of my 150 dreams, but who's counting!) My passions are writing for "myself" --the blog, poetry, and even working on some fiction again--and painting/drawing. And singing. I don't think I have mentioned that I sing. I was in three choruses at one point, and I also have always loved singing folk/folk rock/country rock... Oh, seventies stuff, basically. I am lucky that I love so many things, but sometimes it has felt that obstacles were overwhelming.
I'm sharing the story of my health here to simply talk about how things truly are. I am so tired of pretending I'm stronger than I am. Part of my story is who I am now, not just my past. There may be suggestions for work, for opportunities, or simple words of support, just as you have already given.
You all have been wonderful to me; my friends know my health and where it trips me up and where, now it has slammed me upside the head with a plank.
Indulge me, if you want. Feel free to stop half way through and run screaming into the night!
And just like that, the music I had was gone. I knew no one with whom I could sing the other stuff, but that's a different joy. Until the last few weeks, I thought that was the only one of my passions, however, at risk. And I had found a way to replace that loss with painting...
I have been on disability twice, and both times I worked my way off of it. I created a career from scratch when my husband left me in 1992, one month after a tenth procedure...
I learned to use a computer and was a computer graphics/layout artist for about eight years. I learned how to draw maps and convert CAD drawings. I did pen and ink thumbnail sketches for brochures and special tourist catalogs, would scan them ... and I had the opportunity to write FOR MONEY. Woo HOOOOOO! I wrote the history of the area in which I lived for a visitors' guide and did about seven or eight pen and ink illustrations for it. I was able to work partly at home, partly at an office and gradually found a way around a body that, basically functioned in one to one and a half hour "upright bites."
When I wrote or drew, I set an alarm at home for an hour, after which I would wrap up what I did, then literally lie down for forty-five minutes before I began again. That way I could put in an eight hour day over the course of twelve or fourteen hours. Mostly I worked no more than six hours that way. On the days I went into an office, I did my best to work four hours straight. It hurt. Once in a while I could do more. But it was okay because I could rest most of the next day. The trick was to command enough money per hour, eventually, so that I could earn a living without working full time.
It took me until 2002 to succeed fully. I was thrown off of Disability before then, but when I finally got to work for Stanford? When I got my first big contract from them, while I was still doing a bit of design work here and there, I felt as if the world was opening up for me. I was paid to go to California, to do consultant work. And I wrote. That wound up being all I did. I got the commitment because, in a crisis, I was able to dive in and take over the graphics component and do the layout for their print catalog, at a distance of 3000 miles. I was fine about just pitching in when their graphics artist took a vacation at a critical time. Stanford saw that I didn't think of them as a client--that I treated them as if I were part of a team, and I began to get huge contracts. Huge for me. At that moment, too, I realized that I was a writer who could design, rather than a designer who could write.
That's crucial. It tells you about who Jeannette is. I am a science geek. A groupie. To me, interviewing Donald Knuth, Bob Twiggs, Dan Boneh--giants in their fields of computer programming, aeronautics, and computer security--and writing about their work was like writing about rock stars. So I got to write about other people's passions, indulge my inner geek, AND get paid? Wow. I was living an old dream, earning my living as a writer. How proud my folks would have been, particularly my dad... the one who knew I was not destined for nine to five.
By 2004, though, my contracts fully supported me. And I was singing, which mitigated the pain. I felt something was missing, but I didn't know what, exactly... and then things turned. The shingles hit in March of 2004 and nothing was the same again. I had vertigo. I could not even hear a phone ring without setting off the facial nerve. Yet I continued to work, writing and writing for Stanford. I could not sing. I stopped my poetry. I could not listen to any music at all. My sister was getting stranger and sort of drifting off, but was pretending she was well. And I couldn't figure out why my legs would get shaky.
I wrote it off to stress. Ever notice how easily we can say, oh stress makes me nuts. I mean, it DOES. But sometimes we need to give ourselves some attention beyond that. I'm a good one for feeling that I am not tough enough. In 2005, the autumn I had three things happen at once. I like this in life. I believe if it's all going to hit the fan, hey, throw it all at once. Why lose the opportunity for the drama? I had chest pains, I started falling for no reason, and I had blood appearing in odd places.
Oh. And my sister had started staying in her room in the other half of her house, for days on end, speaking to no one, and coming out of it only to use the kitchen, or walk through my half to go to the store or to her friend's house to do laundry. (Had to get to the garage by going through my house.) We thought I had heart problems. My heart rate was out of control. Fortunately, my doctor thought to check my abdomen and we found that my gall bladder was shot. And I had the precursors to ulcers.
And my spinal canal problems had shockingly deteriorated in the three years between MRIs. And the problems of trigeminal neuralgia and the vertigo from the shingles? They never went away.
We fixed the gall bladder and I made changes for other digestive situations through that autumn and up until Two weeks before Christmas. I was in PT to go through my second round of training new nerves to move my right leg, to learn how to walk. This set of nerves really doesn't like it all that much, but it works enough.
And I realized that my sister had done nothing for Christmas. Just as I had when my dad was dying, I took over to make our traditions happen. And after Christmas my sister fell apart and was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
I had some more work from Stanford, some isolated illustrations, but I had a lot to look after and had to recover from the roller coaster that began with shingles. And I had had no time to truly understand the problem in my spine. I have bits of calcified scar tissue and disk fragments floating in the spinal canal. They move around and rest at horrible places. I had been in pain for decades, but nothing like this. And various parts of me will suddenly not function properly. I also got bitten IN THE HAND--left--by a dog and have some minor residual damage in that hand. And I have the pain in my face that can be set off even today by a backfiring car, the microwave, occasionally the phone. I had to figure out what to do.
Why the detail? I think it's to eliminate the notion that there is anything medical left to consider, to make it plain that what is happening now is the best that things physically will be. I must accept it, then find my ways around it.
You all know I created the studio. And I had planned out my wonderful art workshops, but the neighborhood blew that. THEN, miracle of miracles, Stanford called. They NEEDED me. Well, of COURSE I could do that. And I dove in, feeling I had been rescued. it was my lifeline, I thought.
In the past three weeks, I had to face the painful, terrifying truth that I cannot do this any more. That alarm clock? I really should not work at the computer for more than 25 minutes at a time now. Sitting or standing, it's the same from my back's point of view. I can stand for about a minute before the throbbing and swelling set in. If I have support I can go further and longer. When I walk on a hard surface, after about 100 steps, the foot begins to flop and I walke around swinging the leg, saying, "ARRR, maties." One day when I was "running" into Walgreen's to grab a few things, the leg didn't work and I realized I was singing, OUTLOUD from a sixties series, "They call her FLipper, Flipper, slower than honey..."
Yeah. Well. I think in television theme and seventies hippie songs, and that's life. Deal.
It never occurred to me that more than my legs were affected. But I found that pain set up a neurological haze through which I just could not focus for long... not and access the right brain. I found that because that alarm clock of pain for sitting was so compromised, I spent too much time resting, then had to catch up. I forced myself to focus those forty-five minutes at a clip and for the first three or four pieces, I was great. And I still had a talent for interviewing. People relax and, after about twenty minutes, the really cool stuff happens. They get off the PR line, their set ways of presenting themselves. But the toll was building. I try not to take my medication when I need to write, because there IS that half hour window when I am a touch loopy. It is best to be lying down, and to let it do what it is supposed to. After that, though I'm fine and I paint, I often do my best poetry and right brain work.
But for the work that has supported me, I found I could not organize the thoughts well. It took me a long time to get back INTO where I was going. And the pain was building. And suddenly, because of blasting and work that made my house literally vibrate, the calcified fragments moved. One day my right hand got tingly and went numb. I had trouble moving my two last fingers... Now, mind you, because of the dog bite on my left hand, every ten minutes or so, I will suddenly raise my left arm and shake my hand. The last three fingers get super tingly and when I do that, and flex them and such for no more than thirty seconds, then they are fine again... for ten minutes.
But it didn't work on my right hand. And the pain...
The fragments shifted again and now my arm is okay, but it took nine days for it to return to normal. The horrifying truth was that I no longer could be relied on to meet my deadlines. The problems in my spine are too unpredictable. the pain is too severe. I had to let go, yet again, of something that might have supported me.
There are no solutions for my back. I have beaten all the odds the doctors know. As the last one said, "I think you know your body better than any of us. You are a walking miracle and if any surgeon tells you he or she can fix this? RUN, limp, or CRAWL out. Don't let anyone open up that spine again, unless it is life and death. I am serious."
Why tell you all? Why not? If my blog is about writing from the heart, writing the truths of my life, well, why not do it? I haven't the objectivity to edit this all, yet, but so what? For once, right here, as I am today, I can share all of it with you. There is no shame, no guilt to this. There's nothing that I have to worry about saying because it is public.
Sometimes simply writing it down makes it real. To move into full-blown hope, first we have to understand our reality. I process all things by writing. This time I am experimenting by doing that with all of you. This time I am trying to fold it into what I already do.
I hope you will all hang with me on this blog. I still want to paint, to tutor and to write my memoir. A lot that has happened in my life has made me strong, has given me hope, has made me know that life is something onto which you grab and really hang on. It is a wild, roller coaster ride through a jungle, into space, under the sea, and around again. I wouldn't miss a moment.
Only just now? It sucks. There. How eloquent. How refined. It does. I need to find a way to support myself, but I also want to write my story. My mom's story. A story about a family that was big and loud and completely dysfuntional and overflowing with equally boisterous unconditional love, joy and magic. THAT is my life's work and I need to find a way to do it. My parents' story, our family seen through the eyes of Jetty. Jetty was my family's nickname for me, the baby.
I am all who is left.
The Blog, for ME
This blog is my way to bridge my life between the struggle and the dream. I usually try not to write about my crises while I am in them, but I could wait a long time before this one's done. And, while you will not see me writing much about this again, I can write about other things. I have perspective on my family, on my history in childhood. And I have not lost my love of... pluots? And all things visceral, messy, juicy, and joyous.
But I hurt. I hurt a lot. And I am afraid. Why wouldn't I be? To deny that it is scary to be without work, without new funds, to be facing possibly losing this home I love? Yeah. That's big stuff. I finally have a studio and may lose it within six months. Yet I have to focus elsewhere. I need to believe that the writer and the painter and the woman who loves life and all it brings will find answers.
But I will tenaciously cling to the hope that I can write my way out of the rest. Love my way. Paint my way. Tutor my way. ALL of them
Okay. this long ramble is done.
And I'll be running around looking at and commenting on your blogs soon. Bless you all for giving me your support, your concern. It means more than I know how to say. We are strangers to one another, yet we all speak through words or pictures or both, to one another in intimate, profound ways.
In the meantime I will do my version of prayer. I will still the cacophony in my head and I will breathe. I will ask only for the calm, and for the wide open heart, ears, and eyes to feel, hear, and/or see solutions as they are offered to me.
And I will see whether or not this first for me, helps... It's standing on the edges of things and opening my arms wide and trusting that I will not fall. Simply trusting.
I am inserting something here, so you realize that I DO love life. I have learned along the way... And I will continue to learn. Without writing, art, music, friends? Yeah, all this would be bleak, but this entry is about learning to write WHILE I process, not just afterward. And I hope that more than "Ain't it awful?" comes through. It IS awful, but life is hard sometimes. And what I want more than anything is to burst through, like a phoenix, on the other side.
Thank you so much to those of you who have written to say you missed my writing. When you read of what is going on for me, you may realize, I hope, just how grateful I am to know that my writing and my heart touch some people out there. That my style of expressing myself resonates.
I will write again that my blog is not so much about trying to gather a following as it about trying on my voice. My dream is to write my memoir. (Okay, so one of my 150 dreams, but who's counting!) My passions are writing for "myself" --the blog, poetry, and even working on some fiction again--and painting/drawing. And singing. I don't think I have mentioned that I sing. I was in three choruses at one point, and I also have always loved singing folk/folk rock/country rock... Oh, seventies stuff, basically. I am lucky that I love so many things, but sometimes it has felt that obstacles were overwhelming.
I'm sharing the story of my health here to simply talk about how things truly are. I am so tired of pretending I'm stronger than I am. Part of my story is who I am now, not just my past. There may be suggestions for work, for opportunities, or simple words of support, just as you have already given.
You all have been wonderful to me; my friends know my health and where it trips me up and where, now it has slammed me upside the head with a plank.
Indulge me, if you want. Feel free to stop half way through and run screaming into the night!
The Long Road Here – the lesser of ten evils
About five years ago I got the shingles on my auditory nerve, right where it touches the trigeminal nerve to my face. It set up a response that never went. Certain frequencies set up vibrations which overstimulate the trigeminal nerve in the right side of my face. I will get horrifyingly sharp pain in my face that makes it twitch and it looks to others, as if I am having a seizure or a stroke. Then my face goes numb and droops. When sopranos sing I run for cover. I cannot listen to live orchestra music. It ended the part of my life that had given me the most joy--becoming part of the greater whole, that ONLY being part of an ensemble brings. Blending in a chorus allows us to lose our sense of self and become something that simply soars.And just like that, the music I had was gone. I knew no one with whom I could sing the other stuff, but that's a different joy. Until the last few weeks, I thought that was the only one of my passions, however, at risk. And I had found a way to replace that loss with painting...
The Big Stuff
Then there is my back. I had eight back operations in four years, back between 1980 and 1984. I have spinal cord damage. I had scar tissue and disk fragments in the spinal canal. Once you need to actually intrude on the canal? It's all a crap shoot. I had one of the top five surgeons in the country do the last five operations. His replacement was in on the last operation, the ninth, in 1986, two and a half months before my dad died. I was told I'd likely be dead or wheelchair bound by forty. I am fifty-seven. I walk... kind of. I walk enough, let's just say. NO. I walk AT ALL. It is everything.I have been on disability twice, and both times I worked my way off of it. I created a career from scratch when my husband left me in 1992, one month after a tenth procedure...
I learned to use a computer and was a computer graphics/layout artist for about eight years. I learned how to draw maps and convert CAD drawings. I did pen and ink thumbnail sketches for brochures and special tourist catalogs, would scan them ... and I had the opportunity to write FOR MONEY. Woo HOOOOOO! I wrote the history of the area in which I lived for a visitors' guide and did about seven or eight pen and ink illustrations for it. I was able to work partly at home, partly at an office and gradually found a way around a body that, basically functioned in one to one and a half hour "upright bites."
When I wrote or drew, I set an alarm at home for an hour, after which I would wrap up what I did, then literally lie down for forty-five minutes before I began again. That way I could put in an eight hour day over the course of twelve or fourteen hours. Mostly I worked no more than six hours that way. On the days I went into an office, I did my best to work four hours straight. It hurt. Once in a while I could do more. But it was okay because I could rest most of the next day. The trick was to command enough money per hour, eventually, so that I could earn a living without working full time.
It took me until 2002 to succeed fully. I was thrown off of Disability before then, but when I finally got to work for Stanford? When I got my first big contract from them, while I was still doing a bit of design work here and there, I felt as if the world was opening up for me. I was paid to go to California, to do consultant work. And I wrote. That wound up being all I did. I got the commitment because, in a crisis, I was able to dive in and take over the graphics component and do the layout for their print catalog, at a distance of 3000 miles. I was fine about just pitching in when their graphics artist took a vacation at a critical time. Stanford saw that I didn't think of them as a client--that I treated them as if I were part of a team, and I began to get huge contracts. Huge for me. At that moment, too, I realized that I was a writer who could design, rather than a designer who could write.
That's crucial. It tells you about who Jeannette is. I am a science geek. A groupie. To me, interviewing Donald Knuth, Bob Twiggs, Dan Boneh--giants in their fields of computer programming, aeronautics, and computer security--and writing about their work was like writing about rock stars. So I got to write about other people's passions, indulge my inner geek, AND get paid? Wow. I was living an old dream, earning my living as a writer. How proud my folks would have been, particularly my dad... the one who knew I was not destined for nine to five.
Okay – Here it Is, the Unforeseen Toll
What I did not see? Through the years, inch by inch, that alarm clock had to go off sooner. It went from an hour and a half, to an hour, to forty-five minutes... When I stood for more than ten minutes, somehow or other I had to find a wall to lean against, a table to hold onto... When I grocery shopped, I would lean fully forward to support myself on the cart as I walked, and the stores seemed to get awfully large during just one shopping. The pain increased.By 2004, though, my contracts fully supported me. And I was singing, which mitigated the pain. I felt something was missing, but I didn't know what, exactly... and then things turned. The shingles hit in March of 2004 and nothing was the same again. I had vertigo. I could not even hear a phone ring without setting off the facial nerve. Yet I continued to work, writing and writing for Stanford. I could not sing. I stopped my poetry. I could not listen to any music at all. My sister was getting stranger and sort of drifting off, but was pretending she was well. And I couldn't figure out why my legs would get shaky.
I wrote it off to stress. Ever notice how easily we can say, oh stress makes me nuts. I mean, it DOES. But sometimes we need to give ourselves some attention beyond that. I'm a good one for feeling that I am not tough enough. In 2005, the autumn I had three things happen at once. I like this in life. I believe if it's all going to hit the fan, hey, throw it all at once. Why lose the opportunity for the drama? I had chest pains, I started falling for no reason, and I had blood appearing in odd places.
Oh. And my sister had started staying in her room in the other half of her house, for days on end, speaking to no one, and coming out of it only to use the kitchen, or walk through my half to go to the store or to her friend's house to do laundry. (Had to get to the garage by going through my house.) We thought I had heart problems. My heart rate was out of control. Fortunately, my doctor thought to check my abdomen and we found that my gall bladder was shot. And I had the precursors to ulcers.
And my spinal canal problems had shockingly deteriorated in the three years between MRIs. And the problems of trigeminal neuralgia and the vertigo from the shingles? They never went away.
We fixed the gall bladder and I made changes for other digestive situations through that autumn and up until Two weeks before Christmas. I was in PT to go through my second round of training new nerves to move my right leg, to learn how to walk. This set of nerves really doesn't like it all that much, but it works enough.
And I realized that my sister had done nothing for Christmas. Just as I had when my dad was dying, I took over to make our traditions happen. And after Christmas my sister fell apart and was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Okay, Your path is winding,
but where the bleep are you going here?
Why am I saying all this? I never was able to work regularly again. Sporadically, yes, but I had to put myself on medical then the kind of leave where you take care of a dying parent. My sister died on August 31, 2006. My son moved into her part of the house the following year. It took me nine months to clean up the mess. It was not her fault. Not even remotely. Her cancer had infected her brain and we'll leave that story for another time.but where the bleep are you going here?
I had some more work from Stanford, some isolated illustrations, but I had a lot to look after and had to recover from the roller coaster that began with shingles. And I had had no time to truly understand the problem in my spine. I have bits of calcified scar tissue and disk fragments floating in the spinal canal. They move around and rest at horrible places. I had been in pain for decades, but nothing like this. And various parts of me will suddenly not function properly. I also got bitten IN THE HAND--left--by a dog and have some minor residual damage in that hand. And I have the pain in my face that can be set off even today by a backfiring car, the microwave, occasionally the phone. I had to figure out what to do.
Why the detail? I think it's to eliminate the notion that there is anything medical left to consider, to make it plain that what is happening now is the best that things physically will be. I must accept it, then find my ways around it.
You all know I created the studio. And I had planned out my wonderful art workshops, but the neighborhood blew that. THEN, miracle of miracles, Stanford called. They NEEDED me. Well, of COURSE I could do that. And I dove in, feeling I had been rescued. it was my lifeline, I thought.
In the past three weeks, I had to face the painful, terrifying truth that I cannot do this any more. That alarm clock? I really should not work at the computer for more than 25 minutes at a time now. Sitting or standing, it's the same from my back's point of view. I can stand for about a minute before the throbbing and swelling set in. If I have support I can go further and longer. When I walk on a hard surface, after about 100 steps, the foot begins to flop and I walke around swinging the leg, saying, "ARRR, maties." One day when I was "running" into Walgreen's to grab a few things, the leg didn't work and I realized I was singing, OUTLOUD from a sixties series, "They call her FLipper, Flipper, slower than honey..."
Yeah. Well. I think in television theme and seventies hippie songs, and that's life. Deal.
It never occurred to me that more than my legs were affected. But I found that pain set up a neurological haze through which I just could not focus for long... not and access the right brain. I found that because that alarm clock of pain for sitting was so compromised, I spent too much time resting, then had to catch up. I forced myself to focus those forty-five minutes at a clip and for the first three or four pieces, I was great. And I still had a talent for interviewing. People relax and, after about twenty minutes, the really cool stuff happens. They get off the PR line, their set ways of presenting themselves. But the toll was building. I try not to take my medication when I need to write, because there IS that half hour window when I am a touch loopy. It is best to be lying down, and to let it do what it is supposed to. After that, though I'm fine and I paint, I often do my best poetry and right brain work.
But for the work that has supported me, I found I could not organize the thoughts well. It took me a long time to get back INTO where I was going. And the pain was building. And suddenly, because of blasting and work that made my house literally vibrate, the calcified fragments moved. One day my right hand got tingly and went numb. I had trouble moving my two last fingers... Now, mind you, because of the dog bite on my left hand, every ten minutes or so, I will suddenly raise my left arm and shake my hand. The last three fingers get super tingly and when I do that, and flex them and such for no more than thirty seconds, then they are fine again... for ten minutes.
But it didn't work on my right hand. And the pain...
The fragments shifted again and now my arm is okay, but it took nine days for it to return to normal. The horrifying truth was that I no longer could be relied on to meet my deadlines. The problems in my spine are too unpredictable. the pain is too severe. I had to let go, yet again, of something that might have supported me.
There are no solutions for my back. I have beaten all the odds the doctors know. As the last one said, "I think you know your body better than any of us. You are a walking miracle and if any surgeon tells you he or she can fix this? RUN, limp, or CRAWL out. Don't let anyone open up that spine again, unless it is life and death. I am serious."
What Now?
Haven't a Clue, Except I Have to Write
That's why I haven't written. For a few days I couldn't. Then I just did not know how to deal with it. I don't know how to, still. It is all too raw.Haven't a Clue, Except I Have to Write
Why tell you all? Why not? If my blog is about writing from the heart, writing the truths of my life, well, why not do it? I haven't the objectivity to edit this all, yet, but so what? For once, right here, as I am today, I can share all of it with you. There is no shame, no guilt to this. There's nothing that I have to worry about saying because it is public.
Sometimes simply writing it down makes it real. To move into full-blown hope, first we have to understand our reality. I process all things by writing. This time I am experimenting by doing that with all of you. This time I am trying to fold it into what I already do.
I hope you will all hang with me on this blog. I still want to paint, to tutor and to write my memoir. A lot that has happened in my life has made me strong, has given me hope, has made me know that life is something onto which you grab and really hang on. It is a wild, roller coaster ride through a jungle, into space, under the sea, and around again. I wouldn't miss a moment.
Only just now? It sucks. There. How eloquent. How refined. It does. I need to find a way to support myself, but I also want to write my story. My mom's story. A story about a family that was big and loud and completely dysfuntional and overflowing with equally boisterous unconditional love, joy and magic. THAT is my life's work and I need to find a way to do it. My parents' story, our family seen through the eyes of Jetty. Jetty was my family's nickname for me, the baby.
I am all who is left.
The Blog, for ME
This blog is my way to bridge my life between the struggle and the dream. I usually try not to write about my crises while I am in them, but I could wait a long time before this one's done. And, while you will not see me writing much about this again, I can write about other things. I have perspective on my family, on my history in childhood. And I have not lost my love of... pluots? And all things visceral, messy, juicy, and joyous.
But I hurt. I hurt a lot. And I am afraid. Why wouldn't I be? To deny that it is scary to be without work, without new funds, to be facing possibly losing this home I love? Yeah. That's big stuff. I finally have a studio and may lose it within six months. Yet I have to focus elsewhere. I need to believe that the writer and the painter and the woman who loves life and all it brings will find answers.
But I will tenaciously cling to the hope that I can write my way out of the rest. Love my way. Paint my way. Tutor my way. ALL of them
Okay. this long ramble is done.
And I'll be running around looking at and commenting on your blogs soon. Bless you all for giving me your support, your concern. It means more than I know how to say. We are strangers to one another, yet we all speak through words or pictures or both, to one another in intimate, profound ways.
In the meantime I will do my version of prayer. I will still the cacophony in my head and I will breathe. I will ask only for the calm, and for the wide open heart, ears, and eyes to feel, hear, and/or see solutions as they are offered to me.
And I will see whether or not this first for me, helps... It's standing on the edges of things and opening my arms wide and trusting that I will not fall. Simply trusting.
Small PS
One of my closest friends told me I should simply write from my heart and offer it here. He said that I just don't know what good will come of it. He is prejudiced, of course, but just because he loves me does not mean he is WRONG! Thank you. Already, just putting it out there, helps. You were right.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
A New Month, a Fresh Start and Writer's Block
I have the feeling a weight has been lifted. My friend who had the stroke continues to improve, albeit slowly. We do not know how far his recuperation will take him. He is six foot four and cannot use the left side of his body, and has impulse control issues.
There is hope, however. And for now, that is what we will hold onto.
Thank you to those who still check back. I suspect I'll be back to my more normal blogging every week or so, very soon.
A Silly Ramble for Today
Today, I'm thinking of writer's block. For real. I have been kidding around on Facebook about how one can USE distractions to let things percolate and foment. I know the gist of what I want to say, but the words will not come. I want to meet my self-imposed deadline of Pacific Time 9:00 a.m. Noon, my time. I will be up all night I think.
We sit our butts in the chair and try. I wrote about five paragraphs of drivel. Incomprehensible drivel. Yet somewhere in those 450 words, I found about twenty I really like. Twenty words on which I will, I think craft a small, inconsequential release. Yet, perhaps the key to writing for a living is that I NEVER believe any little piece is inconsequential. While I work on it, that one release, be it 300 words or 700, is my novel. It is make or break time. On my release rests the future of this Stanford program.
Do I know that's a crock? Of course. And yet, I know also that putting myself into the work as if my soul is at stake keeps Stanford coming back. I care. I couldn't do this if I were on staff. I'd have to crank it out. They count on me to care more than they do, ironic as that may sound. Their standards are lower for what I do than my own are, and that's a good thing.
Somehow, though, I need to learn to dial it back just one notch. I do not need to make myself crazy. I need to breathe and enjoy this crazy process. I don't need to be crazy. Strange thing, making a living as a writer. Would that it were from my poetry or fiction, but it's not. I write releases and spotlights for programs in engineering, business, science, and international security. It is not glamorous; but I meet extraordinary people. I have to promote their work and try to make others want to study with them, go to seminars conducted by them, take programs online presented by them. I need to make a potential student who is surfing, searching for a certain type of training or, more importantly, education come to Stanford Center for Professional Development.
I try to get engineers to fall in love.
It's not easy; it sure is fun. I forgot that today, that it is FUN to do my job.
I will put the coffee on and stay up until I have a rough draft. I will sleep a couple of hours, get up again and smooth it out. I know it will be fine, but...
What if I blow it? What if they find out I'm a fraud? What if it is not perfect? I may write the perfect party to which no one comes!
We writers are really silly. The conceit. The insecurity. They are bound together in this process -- on a blog, in an essay, published for money, published for free, with or without our byline. We write with the goal to simply knock others out with our wonderfulness. Reach in and touch a soul. Reach in a pocket so they'll take out their money... not glamorous. Even when we say we are writing just for ourselves, if we are putting it online, who are we kidding? We want to be read, and we want people to love what they've read. And there's nothing in the world wrong with that.
I care about lifelong learning. I market only what I think matters; it's how I can agree with myself to market. I learn while I do this. I learn to write better, and I learn about all sorts of wondrous things. I had to make that choice, to write to promote only what I thought was worth promoting. I just couldn't sell water heaters and cosmetics. It wasn't me. And perhaps I would have earned more. So much of life is compromise, learning where our boundaries lie. This is okay; THIS is over "the line." The danger is in judging other people's lines, and in not seeing our own inconsistencies in this writing for money, writing to spec.
So much of writing involves my ego and I can get lost in trying to make something about it far more noble than it is. In the romance of being the writer. Fade out in the garret. I sit in half-light, in my garret window seat, agonizing over one word, chewing on the tip of my quill.
oh. Wait. I have a computer.
So much for the romance of it all. I can wax on forever. I won't. What it boils down to is this: I have to get the thing done so I'd best get to it.
***
My mom called me her biggest project ever. And she kissed me on my nose when she said it. She also told me I was her greatest unfinished work.
I don't know about the greatest part, but unfinished? That part's still true.
Get the coffee, Jeannette, and get to work.
There is hope, however. And for now, that is what we will hold onto.
Thank you to those who still check back. I suspect I'll be back to my more normal blogging every week or so, very soon.
A Silly Ramble for Today
Today, I'm thinking of writer's block. For real. I have been kidding around on Facebook about how one can USE distractions to let things percolate and foment. I know the gist of what I want to say, but the words will not come. I want to meet my self-imposed deadline of Pacific Time 9:00 a.m. Noon, my time. I will be up all night I think.
We sit our butts in the chair and try. I wrote about five paragraphs of drivel. Incomprehensible drivel. Yet somewhere in those 450 words, I found about twenty I really like. Twenty words on which I will, I think craft a small, inconsequential release. Yet, perhaps the key to writing for a living is that I NEVER believe any little piece is inconsequential. While I work on it, that one release, be it 300 words or 700, is my novel. It is make or break time. On my release rests the future of this Stanford program.
Do I know that's a crock? Of course. And yet, I know also that putting myself into the work as if my soul is at stake keeps Stanford coming back. I care. I couldn't do this if I were on staff. I'd have to crank it out. They count on me to care more than they do, ironic as that may sound. Their standards are lower for what I do than my own are, and that's a good thing.
Somehow, though, I need to learn to dial it back just one notch. I do not need to make myself crazy. I need to breathe and enjoy this crazy process. I don't need to be crazy. Strange thing, making a living as a writer. Would that it were from my poetry or fiction, but it's not. I write releases and spotlights for programs in engineering, business, science, and international security. It is not glamorous; but I meet extraordinary people. I have to promote their work and try to make others want to study with them, go to seminars conducted by them, take programs online presented by them. I need to make a potential student who is surfing, searching for a certain type of training or, more importantly, education come to Stanford Center for Professional Development.
I try to get engineers to fall in love.
It's not easy; it sure is fun. I forgot that today, that it is FUN to do my job.
I will put the coffee on and stay up until I have a rough draft. I will sleep a couple of hours, get up again and smooth it out. I know it will be fine, but...
What if I blow it? What if they find out I'm a fraud? What if it is not perfect? I may write the perfect party to which no one comes!
We writers are really silly. The conceit. The insecurity. They are bound together in this process -- on a blog, in an essay, published for money, published for free, with or without our byline. We write with the goal to simply knock others out with our wonderfulness. Reach in and touch a soul. Reach in a pocket so they'll take out their money... not glamorous. Even when we say we are writing just for ourselves, if we are putting it online, who are we kidding? We want to be read, and we want people to love what they've read. And there's nothing in the world wrong with that.
I care about lifelong learning. I market only what I think matters; it's how I can agree with myself to market. I learn while I do this. I learn to write better, and I learn about all sorts of wondrous things. I had to make that choice, to write to promote only what I thought was worth promoting. I just couldn't sell water heaters and cosmetics. It wasn't me. And perhaps I would have earned more. So much of life is compromise, learning where our boundaries lie. This is okay; THIS is over "the line." The danger is in judging other people's lines, and in not seeing our own inconsistencies in this writing for money, writing to spec.
So much of writing involves my ego and I can get lost in trying to make something about it far more noble than it is. In the romance of being the writer. Fade out in the garret. I sit in half-light, in my garret window seat, agonizing over one word, chewing on the tip of my quill.
oh. Wait. I have a computer.
So much for the romance of it all. I can wax on forever. I won't. What it boils down to is this: I have to get the thing done so I'd best get to it.
***
My mom called me her biggest project ever. And she kissed me on my nose when she said it. She also told me I was her greatest unfinished work.
I don't know about the greatest part, but unfinished? That part's still true.
Get the coffee, Jeannette, and get to work.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Tiananmen Square: Reflections on My Long March
The Short March © June 6, 1989
Pre-dawn,
Beijing waiting,
Ancient streets mist-shrouded.
Four old men, more shadow than flesh,
Hobbled rigid, but bent, into death-quiet Square;
They looked long and pointed,
Shook heads and muttered,
But did not cry.
One tripped,
Slipping on slick stone.
The others helped him stand,
His once clean khaki, now stained, deepest red,
Wind-sounds through fog, but the air refused to move;
The oldest shivered,
Heard wordless curses
On this too-still wind.
One million voices,
Whispering in shocked fury
Raised the wind.
"Quiet!
Move quickly!"
His voice ripped the dawn,
And the old men retreated, clattering.
One soldier fired, but the People's Army killed him;
The Four scuttled safe
Through cracks in the Hall,
Like roaches.
"Imagine,"
Clucked a comrade
As he toed the dead offender,
"Mistaking heroes of the Long March
For Enemies of the People," but he stopped.
The People's Army shivered,
Stood frozen silent,
In un-named terror.
Roaring now,
The too-still wind
Struck down the day.
***
I was at a cookout at my friend's--more sister than friend, really. I was married then, as was she, and as was the third couple who had driven from NYC. My husband and I had been listening to NPR, as had the other couple. When we arrived at Gail's the t.v. was already on. We six watched in stunned and revolted silence. In inspired silence as well. All six cried, even my husband and Gail's. These were not men moved to tears, as a rule. We spoke of this throughout the evening, not feeling resentment that the big cookout was ruined, not caring about any of that. For once, the subject was far greater than the event.
We spoke of the Civil Rights Movement here. I remembered my mother making me watch the dogs and the hoses; she made me watch the children cry and the mothers hitting the ground and bruised and bloodied people hauled away. She forced my brother and me to sit on our seven-foot couch, eyes open wide, hunkered into opposite ends. I sobbed. Jack threw up. Lesson learned, but my mother was relentless.
"And that's how you feel just seeing it from across the room on t.v., safe. Imagine what it is for them? THIS is what we are doing. THIS must change. But we live in a country where it is shown to us on the national news, so we cannot be blind any more. And we must change it."
She could not march on Washington. There were children at home. She, however, like thousands across our country, could organize the sympathy marches and demonstrations, keep us by her to listen to the speeches. I do not remember where I heard what, but I remember that we were on the steps of the library. I remember I heard the speech with her and watched her cry. I learned.
She made us watch the coverage of the shooting of a President. She made us watch the news when the images of Viet Nam were vivid. She was proud of my brother Jack, when he went to D.C. She was proud again when he was prepared to file as a conscientious objector, at the depth of his commitment and his willingness to go to jail. Ultimately it was moot; his health kept him ironically safe. She did not fight my other brother when he joined the Marines, though he was likely to go to Nam. She understood that Jim was flailing in life, and that he felt it was his last chance to right himself. Ironically, it was pneumonia that nearly killed him; he never went to Nam. She respected his convictions as much as Jack's, though her sensibilities were with the pacifist. She taught us that you do not protest the soldiers, especially as a woman. We did not know the burden of the draft hanging over our heads, she pointed out. This lesson was one I took with me to college myself, and my friend Gail and I were always in the fight against the war, but not against the returning vets.
I was taught the danger of numbness, so when the Tiananmen Square events unfolded before us, I was blessedly alive. We all were. My husband began to speak more of the war and what it had done to him. We had been to the Viet Nam War Memorial two years before, and I had seen my husband ask to make one round alone, after I helped him find two of the four names he was driven to find. I stood and watched him grow smaller in the middle and larger as the Wall shrank. He took me by the hand and we made the second swing together; it was the closest we ever were, before or since, in our marriage.
The six of us spoke in hushed tones. We were bonded intensely for that one night; it did not last. I don't know how the others feel at this point. I have no idea. I wrote this poem two days later because I needed to have hope for these people, these courageous, peaceful soldiers of their own convictions. The man who stood before that tank SHOULD be emblazened worldwide on posters to the Heavens, for all of us to see.
I do not know who wrote about the Power of One to Change the world. That we must never doubt the power of one committed person to change the world, because that's all that ever does. It remains true; today reminds me of the power of hope as well. I can see the sadness in my husband's eyes. I feel my own pain today, as I did then, as I did as a child watching children fall from the force of water.
Many of those people in China were imprisoned or killed; others were not. Perhaps today their hope, partly through our remembrance, will burn brighter within--where no State can dim it. And my hope is that their hope and passion will bring them to the place where they, once again, rise up as a mighty wind and strike down their day of oppression.
And that we all, as ONE people, support them. I don't care if this is a dream of Utopia. I don't care if it is a trite or naive thought. Unless we dare to envision Utopia, nothing much will happen.
Pre-dawn,
Beijing waiting,
Ancient streets mist-shrouded.
Four old men, more shadow than flesh,
Hobbled rigid, but bent, into death-quiet Square;
They looked long and pointed,
Shook heads and muttered,
But did not cry.
One tripped,
Slipping on slick stone.
The others helped him stand,
His once clean khaki, now stained, deepest red,
Wind-sounds through fog, but the air refused to move;
The oldest shivered,
Heard wordless curses
On this too-still wind.
One million voices,
Whispering in shocked fury
Raised the wind.
"Quiet!
Move quickly!"
His voice ripped the dawn,
And the old men retreated, clattering.
One soldier fired, but the People's Army killed him;
The Four scuttled safe
Through cracks in the Hall,
Like roaches.
"Imagine,"
Clucked a comrade
As he toed the dead offender,
"Mistaking heroes of the Long March
For Enemies of the People," but he stopped.
The People's Army shivered,
Stood frozen silent,
In un-named terror.
Roaring now,
The too-still wind
Struck down the day.
***
I was at a cookout at my friend's--more sister than friend, really. I was married then, as was she, and as was the third couple who had driven from NYC. My husband and I had been listening to NPR, as had the other couple. When we arrived at Gail's the t.v. was already on. We six watched in stunned and revolted silence. In inspired silence as well. All six cried, even my husband and Gail's. These were not men moved to tears, as a rule. We spoke of this throughout the evening, not feeling resentment that the big cookout was ruined, not caring about any of that. For once, the subject was far greater than the event.
We spoke of the Civil Rights Movement here. I remembered my mother making me watch the dogs and the hoses; she made me watch the children cry and the mothers hitting the ground and bruised and bloodied people hauled away. She forced my brother and me to sit on our seven-foot couch, eyes open wide, hunkered into opposite ends. I sobbed. Jack threw up. Lesson learned, but my mother was relentless.
"And that's how you feel just seeing it from across the room on t.v., safe. Imagine what it is for them? THIS is what we are doing. THIS must change. But we live in a country where it is shown to us on the national news, so we cannot be blind any more. And we must change it."
She could not march on Washington. There were children at home. She, however, like thousands across our country, could organize the sympathy marches and demonstrations, keep us by her to listen to the speeches. I do not remember where I heard what, but I remember that we were on the steps of the library. I remember I heard the speech with her and watched her cry. I learned.
She made us watch the coverage of the shooting of a President. She made us watch the news when the images of Viet Nam were vivid. She was proud of my brother Jack, when he went to D.C. She was proud again when he was prepared to file as a conscientious objector, at the depth of his commitment and his willingness to go to jail. Ultimately it was moot; his health kept him ironically safe. She did not fight my other brother when he joined the Marines, though he was likely to go to Nam. She understood that Jim was flailing in life, and that he felt it was his last chance to right himself. Ironically, it was pneumonia that nearly killed him; he never went to Nam. She respected his convictions as much as Jack's, though her sensibilities were with the pacifist. She taught us that you do not protest the soldiers, especially as a woman. We did not know the burden of the draft hanging over our heads, she pointed out. This lesson was one I took with me to college myself, and my friend Gail and I were always in the fight against the war, but not against the returning vets.
I was taught the danger of numbness, so when the Tiananmen Square events unfolded before us, I was blessedly alive. We all were. My husband began to speak more of the war and what it had done to him. We had been to the Viet Nam War Memorial two years before, and I had seen my husband ask to make one round alone, after I helped him find two of the four names he was driven to find. I stood and watched him grow smaller in the middle and larger as the Wall shrank. He took me by the hand and we made the second swing together; it was the closest we ever were, before or since, in our marriage.
The six of us spoke in hushed tones. We were bonded intensely for that one night; it did not last. I don't know how the others feel at this point. I have no idea. I wrote this poem two days later because I needed to have hope for these people, these courageous, peaceful soldiers of their own convictions. The man who stood before that tank SHOULD be emblazened worldwide on posters to the Heavens, for all of us to see.
I do not know who wrote about the Power of One to Change the world. That we must never doubt the power of one committed person to change the world, because that's all that ever does. It remains true; today reminds me of the power of hope as well. I can see the sadness in my husband's eyes. I feel my own pain today, as I did then, as I did as a child watching children fall from the force of water.
Many of those people in China were imprisoned or killed; others were not. Perhaps today their hope, partly through our remembrance, will burn brighter within--where no State can dim it. And my hope is that their hope and passion will bring them to the place where they, once again, rise up as a mighty wind and strike down their day of oppression.
And that we all, as ONE people, support them. I don't care if this is a dream of Utopia. I don't care if it is a trite or naive thought. Unless we dare to envision Utopia, nothing much will happen.
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