On Vacation

I'm on vacation until mid-first week of August. See you then!

The Call of the Past

People leave. They move away, they retreat emotionally, they leave us, they die. It's part of life.

When someone leaves you, all you have left is what you remember. There are the happy memories, where life was liquid and lovely and you were unselfconsciously a part of things, where you did the right things. There are niggling memories where you were angry or frustrated but did the right thing anyway. There are the bad memories where there was nothing you could do but watch everything go wrong, and finally, the memories where you were at fault and there's no way to change it now.

I've been dreaming about my father. It's been 4 months since he died. I see him, sometimes, the way he was 25 years ago, hale and hearty, not yet humbled by disease and disgust with his body. But I dreamt about him dying again the other night and awakened in the midst of the loss and terror I felt at his dying. My heart was slamming in my chest. I was short of breath, tears in my eyes. Oh what a horrible nightm.... oh...

The dream was a surprise because I feel like I've been dealing with his departure rather well lately. I've been thinking of his life as a book: beautifully bound, lovely illustrations, gold-edged pages, exquisite typeface. I think of his sharp wit, great mind, sharper tongue and I laugh. I miss him. I see, over and over, the back cover of the book slowly closing. I think, then, that I will never be able to open that book again. I will see him only in my mind, only through the dim light of memory.

The past has been calling to me and I've answered...wandering through the houses we lived in, the talks we had, the effort I made to connect then and throughout my life with him. The tape of his last months plays in my head, a bittersweet loop of how I tried to help him and how he resigned himself to leaving.

The past can be a vacation from the present, a time before loss. As much time as I've been spending in it, I'll have to make sure I don't get caught there.

The Fish - Rupert Brooke

The Fish
by Rupert Brooke(1887-1915)

In a cool curving world he lies
And ripples with dark ecstasies.
The kind luxurious lapse and steal
Shapes all his universe to feel
And know and be;
the clinging stream
Closes his memory,
glooms his dream,
Who lips the roots o' the shore,
and glides
Superb on unreturning tides.
Those silent waters weave for him
A fluctuant mutable world and dim,
Where wavering masses bulge and gape
Mysterious, and shape to shape
Dies momently through whorl and hollow,
And form and line and solid follow
Solid and line and form to dream
Fantastic down the eternal stream;
An obscure world, a shifting world,
Bulbous, or pulled to thin, or curled,
Or serpentine, or driving arrows,
Or serene slidings, or March narrows.
There slipping wave and shore are one,
And weed and mud.
No ray of sun,
But glow to glow fades down the deep
(As dream to unknown dream in sleep);
Shaken translucency illumes
The hyaline of drifting glooms;
The strange soft-handed depth subdues
Drowned colour there, but black to hues,
As death to living, decomposes--
Red darkness of the heart of roses,
Blue brilliant from dead starless skies,
And gold that lies behind the eyes,
The unknown unnameable sightless white
That is the essential flame of night,
Lustreless purple, hooded green,
The myriad hues that lie between
Darkness and darkness!...
And all's one.
Gentle, embracing, quiet, dun,
The world he rests in, world he knows,
Perpetual curving.
Only grows
An eddy in that ordered falling,
A knowledge from the gloom, a calling
Weed in the wave, gleam in the mud--
The dark fire leaps along his blood;
Dateless and deathless, blind and still,
The intricate impulse works its will;
His woven world drops back; and he,
Sans providence, sans memory,
Unconscious and directly driven,
Fades to some dank sufficient heaven.
O world of lips, O world of laughter,
Where hope is fleet and thought flies after,
Of lights in the clear night, of cries
That drift along the wave and rise
Thin to the glittering stars above,
You know the hands, the eyes of love!
The strife of limbs, the sightless clinging,
The infinite distance, and the singing
Blown by the wind, a flame of sound,
The gleam, the flowers, and vast around
The horizon, and the heights above
You know the sigh, the song of love!
But there the night is close, and there
Darkness is cold and strange and bare,
And the secret deeps are whisperless;
And rhythm is all deliciousness;
And joy is in the throbbing tide,
Whose intricate fingers beat and glide
In felt bewildering harmonies
Of trembling touch; and music is
The exquisite knocking of the blood.
Space is no more, under the mud;
His bliss is older than the sun.
Silent and straight the waters run.
The lights, the cries, the willows dim,
And the dark tide are one with him.

I Think of You Always

Mom and Dad, always in my thoughts

The Universal In Total

This image is called The Universe In Total. I found it all over the Web.

It looks like a dandelion to me. At a glance it could be a petri dish, water under a microscope, a closeup view of sperm swimming around. It looks like a marble, looks like formica, or the inside of my eyelid sometimes. It's the night sky. It's all I can take in.

The older I get, the more I try to understand the universe. The more I try to understand, the more it all blends into one grand truth. Everything is part of everything else.

The Train Kept Going

It’s like we were on a train together
The doors and windows sealed
The train going faster and faster
No stops in sight
Except that last one

Nothing I did
Or ever could do
Would change it

I looked at you and
You looked at me
The train kept going

Nothing I did’
Or ever would do
Could change it

The train kept going

Endings

There's something about endings.
There's the quick stab, the crying out
But there's joy behind that
And release.

There's a twinkle of hope hidden there,
A fierce affirmation of self,
Of continuing.

There's hope that life will be better
After the emptiness,
Promise of reaching out, and finding
. . . just no promise of keeping.

You Were the Kite

You were a kite
About to fly away
I grabbed your tail
And begged you to stay

You were the kite
I was the string
And when you died
I lost everything

You were the kite
Beautiful and strong
You soared away
Wouldn’t take me along

You were the kite
Who disappeared in the sky
I lay awake at night
And ask myself why

A Slippery SeeSaw

What is it about an argument that is so painful? I tried to state my position. I tried to be clear and clean. I meant well but needed to stand up for myself. I pointed out where I was and what I was and wasn't willing to do. I took a chance. I thought it out.

I got flattened. I lighted a candle of conflict and got blasted with a nuclear missile.

I don't have those kinds of weapons to respond with. I'm not interested in annihilation.

Bless Your Heart

When I was younger I heard old ladies say, "Bless her heart," or "Bless his heart." I thought it was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. How dumb. Like saying something as corny as that could make a difference.

As I've gotten older I've actually started saying this! A friend tells me her grandpa is 97 years old. "Bless his heart," I say. A neighbor's mother has cancer. "Oh, bless her heart," says I.

I haven't come to believe that saying "bless your heart" will change anything. It's a comment made with hope and love and sincerity. Maybe it's exactly because I can't do anything else to fix these things.

So, dear reader, bless your heart, and thank you for stopping by.

Similar Recipe, Different Results

In searching for images of the Universe online, I found this. It calls itself "the early Universe." It's just like what I imagine the beginning-of-life-on-Earth soup to look like. Hmmmm.

Socks Are Like Potato Chips

I imagine myself living before the Industrial Revolution. I imagine myself choosing a profession (which, given the roles of women in those days brings this into the realm of true fantasy) and that profession would be sock knitter.

I knit socks for fun, to relax, to keep my hands busy, for the beauty and cleverness of them, and because I don't have to ask, "Does this make me look fat?" before wearing them.

Here is a photo of the first sock of this pair. I am going to give myself the benefit of the doubt and say that another sock just like it will appear in the next 4 or 5 days.

The Whole Shebang

Okay. The God thing. Let me state right here, lest the ideas to come lead you to think otherwise, that I mostly believe (most of the time) with absolutely no religious dogma or weighty books to back it up.

So some people believe and some people don't and an awful lot of people have died one way or the other. (I like the one where each person in a group goes on and on about what they believe in and then they get to the guy who says, "Me? I believe I'll have another beer.")

Take the stars...how can you look at them and think they came from nothing at all? (Oh, right. The Big Bang.) Bangers believe that the universe is in an endless cycle of expansion and contraction, (an endless orgasm of planets and galaxies,) with lots of complicated ideas about everything compacting down to nothing after having expanded out past some limit or other. (This leads to lots of mental gymnastics, trying to picture the edge of everything and imagining just one mote of dust floating around past that, etc.)

I've tried to go along with the Bangers. I have, but it's like evolution. They're as bad as the hard-core religious folks. They believe it, goddamn it, and you should, too, or you're a moron.

Evolution sounds good, doesn't it? There was nothing on earth. Just water and hills and rocks. Then there were plants. That's good. Plants are nice. Then jiggly things in the water bumped into each other and made eenty-beenty things that look weird under a microscope. (Uh-huh.) Those things somehow got together and made more of themselves. Then they kind of turned into eyeless fish, then fish with eyes, then fish with legs. They walked out of the water and turned into everything else.

WHAT??? Anyone believes this? Come on. Eyes are complicated. They are reeeally complicated. Legs? They just showed up? Sure. Believers say, "but it took millions and millions of years." Oh.

I find these ideas much harder to believe than my own version, which is this: the math says that there's a very, very small possibility that everything just happened by itself. I'm fine with the idea that some being that's too complicated for my limited, human mind to grasp gave the evolution of life some help from time to time...that it didn't accidentally turn into the complicated and achingly beautiful variety of life that exists on earth today.

Why do we have to insist we know, for certain, what happened? When did theories become fact? When I was in school everyone talked about theories, and said things like, "We think..." and "We believe..." Now everybody knows for sure -- until they don't.

There's Nothing Like A Collie

There's nothing like a collie. Robbie is the rough coated tri color, and Jazzy's our smooth coated collie. Both are smart, sweet, loyal, and great companions.

These dogs go to the dog park every day. I mean e-v-e-r-y day. Our dog park is larger than a football field, perfect for their far-ranging collie selves. They keep an eye on us while acting as greeters for all the new comers and, in Robbie's case, policeman for the entire park full of dogs. No fights or aggression allowed when he is there. He breaks up squabbles and keeps an eye on known offenders. He's a great, great dog.

Jazzy is gentle and sweet. We've only had her for 2 months now and so she is still blossoming.

While this may be mild info to others, these two are my good friends and contribute greatly to my happiness.