Just Put A (Red) Pencil In My Eye

OK, I’ve had it.  You know the newspapers that publish the names of the “Johns” in prostitution cases, with the idea of shaming them into some sort of decent behavior if not outright morality?  I’m going to start a variation of that, except I know it won’t do any good.  I know.  In fact, in a few years, people who still read at all will wonder what in the world I’m talking about.

Lots of people don’t read anymore.

Lots of people think they read, but they are so distracted and in such a hurry that they miss key words and thus the whole point of what they read.

Lots of people don’t listen, either.  See above for some of the reasons.

Because people* don’t read, don’t comprehend, and don’t listen, they (can’t bring myself to name them) come up with the following uttered or written words:

Isn’t there a statue of limitations? [Uh, no.]

He likes to be on the spotlight. [Must be damn hot after awhile.]

We worked feverously on the project.

He died of smoke insulation.

We need to prevent people to dogfight.

I did it on accident.  [What?  Sat on the spotlight?]

You have a beautiful rhododendrum!

There was a whift of smoke. [This one is not connected with the victim of smoke insulation.]

My mother makes an excellent tomato aspect.

What was you wanting?  [Where do I begin?]

Here’s one Tara had from a student recently: It was necessary to take gastric measures.  [Don’t think that’ll help.]

*All but two statements or questions came from the mouths or pens of college graduates, some with advanced degrees. 

I didn’t start writing down these little gems until a few years ago, after a cocktail party at an artist friend’s house in Mexico.  One of her quasi-boyfriends was an aged Hell’s Angel wannabe, and he sat rather glumly apart from the other people who were gathered on Janice’s veranda, drinking and talking about her art.  Boyfriend just drank quietly for awhile, and then he seemed to catch a word or two of conversation and roused himself long enough to address everyone: “I had an easel under the porch once, but the dogs ran it off.”  

If you recognize yourself here, at least you recognize yourself.  That’s a good thing.  And if you have your own favorites to add to the list, let me know!   I’ll be waiting with baited breath.  [Eeew].

Still Speaking

God spoke to me in the shower this morning, and not for the first time.  I hadn’t actually heard from Him for quite awhile, at least not actually speaking directly to me in the shower, so I was surprised when it happened today.

It all started a couple of years ago.  When I was working, I always hopped into the shower first thing, and I was often mulling over some hard part of  life, primarily the fact that I was working.  At least, that’s what I was specifically mulling the first time it happened.  Things had been so difficult at work that I was dreading the start of another week.  Then God said something to me.  The fact that He said anything at all was completely unexpected, never mind the fact that I knew immediately who it was.  It was just a brief sentence or two.  I can’t quote it exactly, but it had to do with setting down a heavy load that I’d been carrying, and it made perfect sense.  It wasn’t something I would have thought of on my own.

Since then, I’ve consciously used the shower as a place to pray, and a place to listen in case God ever wants to say something to me again.  Every once in awhile, He does, but He picks the occasions and they don’t come often.  Anne Lamott says there are three kinds of prayer:  “Thank you thank you thank you,” “Help me help me help me,” and “Wow.”  I say them all in pretty much equal measure.  God never says “You’re welcome,” or “OK, here’s what I’m gonna do for you,” or “Yeah, that was pretty neat, wasn’t it?”  I’ve prayed “help me help me help me” a lot lately, as in “Please give me strength.”  The only sound I could hear in response was the water hitting the bottom of the bathtub, and there was no comfort from the tiled walls.  But I’m here to say, I’ve been given strength.

God only talks to me, it seems, when I least expect it, and no use trying to pretend that I’m not expecting it, because He’s on to that and won’t say a word.   This morning, I was thinking about someone who very recently gave me some unsolicited advice that was so inappropriate and thoughtless it bordered on the bizarre.  I felt slapped with a dead fish, disappointed, hurt, and angry.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I was chewing bitterly on it in the shower. 

God suddenly said, “It’s hard to love people sometimes.”  I knew exactly what He was implying, but I’m not up for loving this person again right now.  Actually, I had decided something along the lines of a cold day in Hell.  “I have to go,” I told God.  “I have a dentist appointment.”  He didn’t answer.  He’s done for the moment.  But I’ve been thinking about it all day long.  And I know I haven’t heard the end of it.

Mothers

Every year for the past several, I have watched the peregrine falcons who nest on a downtown highrise.  There is a webcam setup there, and I take a look many times a day during nesting season.  It’s the most fascinating thing to watch the mother sitting on her eggs, and then the hatching and the feeding and the growing and the suspenseful leave-taking.  Twenty-five percent of the time, they say, it’s the father keeping watch, but let’s just stay with “mother” right now. Falcons, in case you’ve never had a good look at one, are heart-catch beautiful, and the babies are adorable fluffs of white feathers, sleepy eyes and wobbly legs at first. 

I’ve spent extra time watching the past few days.   The best time of the day is late afternoon, when the sun is lighting the nest well enough to see everything clearly, but not glaring on the camera lens and blurring the view.

Yesterday, the mother was watching over three white fluffs, with one egg yet to hatch.  There seemed to be something going on with that egg, though, and the mother was keeping a close eye on it and the chicks already born.  Sometimes she covers them up entirely with her body, but yesterday afternoon she was standing over them in an angelic pose, wings poised and at the ready should the babies need their extra protection. 

The mother falcon instinctively knows the right thing to do; the right move to make.  She knows so much more than I do, and yet so much less.  The future is not a concept that she understands or cares about.   She lives only in this moment.  (Non-human creatures are always trying to teach us this.)  Are her newborns safe this moment?  Is the unhatched egg safe and warm?  She may be living the words of an Olive Kitteridge character:  “If you can’t figure out something…don’t watch what you think, watch what you do.”

I watch, like praying, and I try to learn.

I’m Sharon, and I’m a Bookaholic

Please, someone, stop me before I buy/borrow more.  Ever since I retired at the end of October, a disease I thought was fairly well controlled has gotten out of hand. 

I’ve never waited until I ran out of things to read before going to a bookstore and/or the library.  But now, I’m a glazed-eyed addict on a rampage.  I actually already own enough books to keep me busy for the rest of my days, assuming some re-reading here and there.  Furthermore, this house is significantly under 1400 square feet, and all of the bookshelf room is taken.  On my bedside table, books obscure the clock radio, and hang over the edge of the shelf underneath.    Other tables and large baskets on the floor throughout the house groan with books and magazines.  We recently bought a small side table for the screened porch, and it was covered with reading material in minutes. 

We really don’t have this kind of money.  Will I have to resort, in my arthritic old age, to mugging old(er) ladies on the street and stealing their purses?  Cat burgling is completely out of the question at this stage of life.   And speaking of this stage of life, my eyes won’t  allow me to read for hours as in days of yore.  Nevertheless, I press on, trying fruitlessly to keep the car from turning into the Barnes & Noble parking lot when I’m on Broad Street.  Hell, the car will start up and drive to Barnes & Noble if we’re sitting in our own driveway.

Here are just a handful of the books lying about on the top surfaces around the house:

The Best of Adair Lara:  Award-winning columns from the San Francisco Chronicle.   Haven’t gotten to this yet.  I used to love reading her columns when I lived in California.

Given Sugar, Given Salt:  Poems, by Jane Hirshfield.  (This is a re-read.  I got the book off the shelf to find the title poem, which I want to send to a friend.  Then I decided to refresh my memory on the whole collection.)

Southern Living magazine, July issue.  I plan to make the lemonade iced tea with bourbon.  Woohoo.

Evensong, a novel by Gail Godwin.  This is a re-read.  My new status as a reaffirmed Episcopalian drew me back to the book, because the main character is a married woman who is an Episcopal priest.   Also, I’m very fond of Gail Godwin.  Haven’t gotten very far into it yet.  I note that there is a “reading group discussion guide” at the back of this book.  I hate those.  I don’t think I would do well in a book club.  It reminds me of book reports in grade school.  We always had to answer the question “What was the author’s purpose?”  When I taught junior high school English, I made sure never to ask that question. 

Coop, by Michael Perry, author of  Population:  485, which I read and loved.  Michael Perry is a guy who grew up on a farm and spent a number of years as a volunteer EMT in the rural area where he grew up.  Population:  485 is about that experience.  Coop was written after he married, moved to a ramshackle farmhouse on 37 ramshackle acres, and had children.  I can’t wait to read this.  I would not like living in rural Wisconsin at all,  or rural Anywhere, but Perry is such a wonderful and evocative writer that I savor every vicarious moment spent there with him.

Martha Stewart's Encyclopedia of Crafts.  I could make soap.  I could make candles.  I could make jewelry.  I could make 100 different things at least from this book, if only I could pick one to start.

A Homemade Life:  Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table, by Molly Wizenberg.  I’ve been reading Molly’s blog “Orangette,” for awhile now.  I’ve even made her roasted broccoli with shrimp twice lately.  So of course I had to buy the book.  I read cookbooks as story anyway, but Molly is right up there with MFK Fischer.  Dare I say better? 

We haven’t even gotten to the teetering stack on my bedside table.  And on the floor next to the bed, where I flang it last night before my eyes slammed shut, is Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout.  This book is so good, I’m putting up with the teeny tiny typeface.  An excellent writer links short stories together with a recurring character who is uncomfortably a lot like the part of me that I try to keep hidden. 

Oh, and Sheila reads, too, with an addiction only slightly more controlled than mine.  We didn’t even know that when we met up.  If either one of us hadn’t been a reader, our 23 years together wouldn’t exist.  Shudder to think. 

Alleluia!

If all commercials were this good, we wouldn't need the fast forward button on the remote.

Les nonnes

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Father’s Day

I have no one to buy a Father’s Day card for this year.   Last year, on the Saturday before Father’s Day, my dad went to the hospital and never came home again.  He died on August 26. 

My dad was not my natural father.  He married my mother when I was 10 years old, and adopted me when I was 15.  When I was younger, I always told him “I’m glad we married you.”  He loved me from day one.  He was the guy who taught me how to ride a bike, throw a ball, and play chess and checkers.  He found the special picnic spots on the river and brought the first dog home.  

When he moved to Virginia from California 5 years ago, when he was 84, I was terribly pleased but amazed that he would leave the State where he had been born and lived for over 80 years.  Then he got here, and I discovered that I did not really know the quiet man who had always been overshadowed, as was I, by my mother’s domineering personality.  He was almost a stranger to me.  It was hard to talk to him, and made even more difficult by his severe hearing loss.  He was good one-on-one and face to face, but the subtleties that we all depend on—the comments tossed over the shoulder and the quick one-twos, were lost on him.  When I picked him up for a visit to our house, our drives were silent.  That was his “bad” side; and the good side did not hear well at all. 

In his younger years, and even when he had just turned 80 and my mother was still alive, he was always the person who could fix anything and do anything.  At 80, he was still going up on their roof to sweep off the pine needles and clean out the gutters, and chopping wood.  It was hard to reconcile that person with the man who had given up his driver’s license before he moved out here and had trouble seeing to unlock his apartment door.  I was always tired from long days at work, and I was impatient with all kinds of things.  He was simply lonely, trying hard not to be a burden and not succeeding  in a number of small ways.  He complained a lot.  I didn’t smile very much.  We forged ahead, trying to be good to one another.  He tried harder than I did.  He blew up at me once; then called to apologize.

After his unexpectedly gangrenous, septic gallbladder was removed on Father’s Day weekend, he went into a decline that very quickly escalated into dementia.  We know now that it was caused by the overwhelming infection from which he never recovered.  Every night he was at an Air Force base or on the train to one.  “Which city are we in now?” he’d say.  “Maybe I’ll stay here  at this base for awhile.”  He dodged imaginary cars and other flying objects, and plucked imaginary bugs from his food tray.  His hospital roommate was trying to kill him.  The Hallmark channel on the TV was showing porn.  And yet he always knew my name and who I was.  “I’m sorry to be dying and leaving you behind,” he noted one day.  “You love me, and you’ve always loved me,” he said on another  It broke my heart.  And then, at the end of the summer, he died.

The other day, I saw the bus from the independent living apartment complex where he lived, parked outside my grocery store.  It was senior discount day.  When I went in the store, it was like I saw him in every other aisle.  “Did you know my father?” I wanted to ask an old man looking at soup.  He wore a baseball cap, like my dad always did.  What I really wanted was for that strange man to turn into my father, and I would throw my arms around his neck there in the canned soup aisle and sob and say that I was sorry for being so impatient and not spending more time with him and not being a much, much better daughter, and could I please have another chance?  Because now that it’s forever too late, of course I know exactly what to do. 

Driving home with the groceries, I thought about how I had wanted him to change:  to not be old, not be deaf, not be antisocial, not be slow, not be stubborn.  And it struck me hard that as far as I know, he had never wanted me to change in over half a century.  He said once about a not-so-bright dog that he had owned, “She did the best she could.”  He believed the same of me. He had only wanted me to be happy, always.  He was quite a dad.  I miss him so.

This Moment

I sometimes ponder the fact that animals mostly live in the present, unburdened by thoughts of mortality;  never mind dwindling bank balances, what to cook for dinner, or how much they weigh.  Would we be happier if we were unaware of our mortality? Would we still cherish life?  I tend to think the answer is “Not so much.”  The Pets chez nous certainly give every evidence of enjoying their lives, often with every cell in their little bodies.  But cherish?  Dream a dream beyond nailing that chipmunk in the bush over there or hoping Mom will throw a piece of steak my way?  I don’t think so.  Nevertheless, they do know how to live in the moments of their lives.

A few posts ago (see “Dust” in May) I talked about how our neighbor Catherine was dying, and she did die on May 29.  She left behind to mourn her beloved cat, Coco.  I’ve been taking care of Coco off and on since the beginning of April, and most of that time she has been all alone in the house where she has lived for ten years, since the day she walked in the back door as a stray kitten and told Catherine they belonged to each other.  I knew her when Catherine was alive, of course, but we’ve forged a special bond in these last few months, and I became determined to find my kitty friend a good home when the time came.

Fortunately, Catherine’s son was all too glad to relinquish that responsibility to me.  He’s not an animal person, and in fact he’s a rather unlikeable fellow except for one little unaccountably kind and loving thing he did for his mother.  The last two weeks his mother was alive,  he took Coco to visit her every day that he was in town, and she stayed on Catherine’s bed for hours at a time.  No one knows  for sure if Catherine was ever aware of Coco’s presence, but I like to think she was. 

Anyway.  After the funeral, Catherine’s son let me know that he was anxious to get rid of Coco and get on with his life and gave me permission to “find her a home” or “take her somewhere.”  With the help of a flyer, emails, calls, caring friends and caring strangers,  a home for Coco has been found, and it will be a wonderful one. A doctor from the hospital where I used to work will be taking Coco home with him.  I had never met him before now,  but he is a compassionate, tender, and funny man who will give this little lady cat a good life once again.  To make it all even better, Sheila and I took an instant liking to him, and I hope we will continue to know him and become real  friends.

Coco’s  new dad is waiting until Monday to pick her up, because he was visiting his own human father out of town this weekend, and didn’t want to leave her alone in a brand new place.  When I went next door to feed her this afternoon, I went through our usual cuddling ritual first, and I was holding her close to my chest and telling her all about how very soon she won’t be alone anymore, and she’ll have a new person to love who loves her back. 

I told her that just as we think we’ve had our last adventure, or the future is looking bleak, or we don’t believe we’ll ever love again, something wonderful like this happens, and we always have to remember that and believe it.  Coco listened, but she didn’t know what I was talking about.  She was living in the moment, snugged tight against my heart sounds, getting her eyebrows stroked and purring loudly.  Life doesn’t get any better, she might have said, than right now.