Day One 2021

 

Good morning! The picture above is from last night when Carl, Henry, Oliver and I went to Santa Monica and watched the sun go down on 2020. Sophie was at her father's place, so the evening wasn't perfectly perfect, but it was pretty close to perfect being with three men that I love on the beach that I love. When the sun dipped below the horizon, everyone cheered. We drove home and built a little fire in the fire-pit in our backyard, roasted marshmallows and played a game on our phones called Psych or something like that. We drank champagne and whiskey and beer together and laughed and argued but mostly laughed, and it was about the most perfect New Year's Eve I could ever imagine during a pandemic or otherwise, to tell you the truth. I wrote down a few of my current fears and burned them in the fire, and when I went to bed my clothes smelled like smoke. When I woke this morning just before sunrise, my hair still smelled smoky and the moon shone in a band through the back door blinds. I stood there in my mind in the moonlight the year behind us with many ways forward, the rest of it, life, seen through the eyes of the heart.

All Things Bookish

I read this today from Louise Erdrich's new novel The Night Watchman:

And Patrice thought another thing her mother said was definitely true -- you never really knew a man until you told him you didn't love him. That's when his true ugliness, submerged to charm you, might surface.

Oooh boy. 








On Friday night I joined a virtual silent reading that I heard about from my beloved friend, poet Heather McHugh. The thing originated at a hotel somewhere in Seattle and was a yearly affair where you basically showed up, I think, at the hotel bar, alone with a book. And then that was it. You sat at the bar or in the bar at the little tables and just read your book. Alone. For two hours. While a man played the piano. You could drink and eat little plates of food, but mostly you read and looked up and around at the other solo people reading and what they were reading. And then back down at your own book. So, this year given The Pandemic, the Silent Reading was virtual. I signed up, paid a small donation and joined the Zoom thing at 6:00 on Friday night with nearly 300 people. Reader, this is the kind of thing that makes me truly and perfectly happy. It's the ultimate reading dream. I made myself a plate of sheep's milk cheese, crackers, soppressata, french fries, olives and a glass of wine. I read The Night Watchman and I read from Sharon Olds' new collection titled Arias. I peered at the tiny thumbnail portraits of all the people sitting in their homes reading. I lay my head back on my chair and closed my eyes and listened to the piano music that poured out of this guy for the entire two hours. I saw Heather's smiling face in early evening light and the book she was reading, something by Borges and once again felt overwhelmed by her beauty and what she's brought to my life since I've met her. Understanding. Humor. Caregiving. Poetry. She's got a fabulous new website/podcast thing going in anticipation of her new book of poems, Muddy Matterhorn.  Check out her sound files here.





What else? I guess the usual -- vacillating between a strange ennui and ridiculous industriousness. Noticing everything that is ugly and stupid and false about our country in particular and so not anything like or ever has been shining on a hill even as the oak hydrangea flowers chartreuse, the acacia tree leafs out, the succulents thrust their onanistic blooms three feet in the air overnight and the hummingbirds clash with one another in irritation or ecstasy who knows but the bees are profuse and there's a Coopers hawk nesting in my neighbor's tree, the Orthodox family next door has five laughing screaming children and the Los Angeles sky is empty of planes. A loved one misunderstands who I am or confirms again that I am not known, digs around in an old place only just barely buried under dark dark earth. I worry for my sons, vacillating like me between ennui what's the point, confusion, and the delight of new recipes (a lemon-parmesan emulsion for pasta!) Their dark brown eyes. I imagine how the world might use two incredibly beautiful men with hearts as big as the sky. I dream of firemen not doctors.

Weird Empty Nestish Stuff (plus a poem)

The night before the Empty Nest, as photographed by Leonardo da Vinci 

It's official. Sophie and I have an empty nest. I drove Henry to the airport last Thursday, and he took a flight to Italy where he'll be spending the fall semester. Poor boy. Afterward I kept my shit together and taught my classes for the second day, but when I got home I had what I am now thinking, in retrospect, was a collapse. Honestly, I know I am dramatic at times and prone to hyperbole, but I tell you this, Reader. Having both boys gone flown the coop off to college off to Italy beginning new lives as young men you know the rest was obliterating. It's honestly felt, at times, like something ripped from me and that something is the whole of it. I feel slightly embarrassed writing this out because Henry and Oliver are strappingly healthy and alive and happy and hell, they profess their love for me so I have nothing absolutely to complain about but let's go back to the ripping sensation. Yeah. I imploded on Thursday night, I think, and if it weren't for the Bird Photographer (interesting and ironic and synchronous, no?) -- well -- thank you, Carl. I'll add that Sophie is with me, that we both have an empty nest. The atmosphere around these parts is mighty different, and we'll get used to it. Until the getting used to it, though, it's plain weird and takes my breath away. I ate a tomato sandwich tonight with spinach and mayo on some whole grain bread. I put on a pair of compression socks (my GOD!) and organized all the paperwork for my four classes of high school girls. I opened the dishwasher and it was EMPTY. There's toilet paper in the holder in the bathroom, and the towels are folded on the rack and dry. It's very, very quiet.


Here's a poem my friend Andrea sent me:


The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens

Super Nose

Guess what's in the bag?

My ex-husband once told me that he thought I was a super-taster or had a super-nose (he's a chef), but my kids always mock me when I ask, what's that smell? They think I'm prone to exaggeration in addition to being, possibly, the most annoying human on the planet. I don't want to make this post one of those kid-basher ones, filled with the cliches of teenagers and the insufferable arrogance of young adults (I am perfectly aware of my own insufferable young adulthood but shhhhhhh, don't tell my parents). I don't want to badmouth The Brothers because they are divine in many respects, but damn if they haven't been helpful or even supportive in the rat saga of this past week. Neither agreed to handle any trapped rats (my feminism comes to a screeching halt when it comes to dead rats in traps) and last Saturday, after the traps were set and lined up behind the stove and the microwave stand in the kitchen, and we all heard the most horrific clatter and then silence, no one stepped up to check it out. Well, Henry did actually come out of his room with a bat and Carl did shine his phone light behind the stove, but the only thing we saw was one of what we thought were five (this is a crucial hint) traps a little skewed. No rats, though, and everyone carried on their days and nights as if nothing was the matter, as if roof rats, flying through trees and into the attic and jumping from vents onto pot racks over stoves and nibbling beautiful pears and cherries and making their way into the dining room to feast on the bits and pieces of food that fall from the wheelchair and then making their way back to their home or nests in the Christmas decorations and vintage toys and suitcases and skittering all about were NO BIG DEAL, were a problem that would magically take care of itself because that's the way things went in their home with their mother lying about all day.










The days went by.












I think I smelled something a couple of days ago but was met with the usual derision and mockery. I don't smell anything, they said and then rolled their eyes or did what boys do when my back is turned. I'm annoying -- it's annoying -- when I twitch my nose and sniff.  Today was the day that The Rat Man was coming back to seal all the holes in the house where the rats were coming in and out. I planned my day around this event because The Brothers were busy. I imagine the gears in their adorable heads clicking, clicking, pondering. What does she do all day, anyway? Does she even exist outside of my supreme sphere? The Rat Man arrived on time, bless him, and began his work. He is a peculiar guy in the way that certain occupations command peculiar, but Reader, I love him. When I told him about the clattering episode and asked him to shine his light behind the stove, he complied and then I swear I saw his nose twitch and he said, I smell rat. I practically shouted, I SMELL SOMETHING, TOO! and then thought about jumping up and down in excitement (not about the rat but because having someone actually confirm my suspicions which means affirm my skills, my extremely honed intuitive senses, my super-nose, my infallibility, etc. etc. is everything in these late middle-aged times) but instead said nervously, Do you see that fifth trap a bit at a distance from the other four? And he got down on his knees and claimed that the smell was urine and then he said, no, it's rat, and where's the sixth tra -- and before he got out the p and just as I said, SIX? I thought there were only FIVE? he said, I got him! Do you have a plastic bag? and I ran and got him a plastic garbage bag and reverently shook it out and handed it to him and left the room.

We have one rat bagged and every little hole in this hundred year old house screened up and against them. I texted The Brothers and Carl the good news and included a bit of my own exultation over smelling something funny. No one has acknowledged this, of course, but Henry did text me back:

All My Chicks Are Home

Surround me, confound me
with your boundless love --

Parenting, No. 785

I went to visit Henry this afternoon at his new job. He's a server at a funky little place in Venice. Maybe I shouldn't use the word funky anymore since very recently, like yesterday, Oliver told me that it was embarrassing. Maybe he didn't use the word embarrassing, but he repeated the word funky in a voice that I guess is mine, at least the voice that both sons use when they imitate me, and while I imagine there's fondness in the teasing, it still takes me by surprise that I'm considered painfully uncool and old. Both brothers have jobs this summer (Oliver actually works nearly full-time all year round, recently opened a Charles Schwab trading account and has bought stocks -- no joke), and I'm very proud of them. It's been a long time since I've included them on the old blog, and just now I was looking for past posts in a kind of nostalgic way, and boy -- some of those posts were damn funny. I sat down at the bar of this little restaurant where Henry works, next to a younger woman who was drinking a glass of wine and eating a salad. Since I'm the chattiest person on the planet and the proudest, most embarrassing mother, I introduced myself to the woman and told her that Henry was my son. She told me that she had a four year old son, and that he was in a challenging stage. I told her that I remember well those challenging stages, but I found those times to be more physically challenging and the teenaged and young adult years more emotionally challenging. I didn't tell her this story, but Reader, I 'll tell you. Just the other night, we were sitting at the table eating dinner -- takeout Vietnamese because making dinner in the summer is just not my thing -- and the usual conversation between The Brothers began, and this entailed arguing about whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time and then something about the baseball player Mike Trout and Teslas and Elon Musk and then you're an idiot and you're an asshole and you don't know what you're talking about, and just when I was wishing that one day we would have a conversation about -- let's say -- the greatest living poet or how much better a film-maker Fellini is than Tarantino, Sophie had a large seizure that I just know was a result of the anger in the air and maybe even how boring her brothers' arguments can be (Sophie and I are the same about these things, I am certain, but she seizes instead of dying a little inside at the general clusterfuckery). I probably said as much, because now that they're 17 and nearly 20, I don't bite my tongue as often as I might have when they were younger. Enough is enough.

But here's the thing. Those boys jumped up and into action helping me to help Sophie, and I realized that I am, perhaps, the luckiest mother in the world.

Carried by Great Winds

There I am with what I called 2/3rds of the circus that I run. The work of my heart. Mother's Day came and went. The College Boy is home for the summer. The Brothers are back at it. Sophie had a rough weekend but is better today. I'm going through loads of paperwork and hustling for freelance jobs. I'm baking cakes. I'm answering calls and emails and appeals for help regarding medical cannabis. I'm working on an exciting caregiver project that I'll tell ya'll about soon. I'm reading novels and excited to start watching the Patrick Melrose mini-series. I read those brutal and beautiful books years ago and so look forward to seeing Benedict Cumberbatch playing the lead.

Here's a poem that my friend Noan sent me the day before Mother's Day. It's by Alison Luterman, and I think it's perfect:

Invisible Work

Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces fro dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.There is no other art. 

Allison Luterman



A long time ago one of my relatives, from whom I am now estranged, wrote a caustic comment on this blog, imploring me to get my head out of my ass and quit reciting poetry. Something like that. It stung then because there was a bit of truth in my head being up my ass. I felt a bit of the old shame and embarrassment at being bookish, having my head in the clouds, being book smart as opposed to street smart, pretentious instead of easy-going. 

Whatevs, as they say. The thing about being more than half a century old combined with living in the Trump era, is that you can shed all that shame and run for the hills with your poetry, bringing anyone willing along with you.

What else? I went to see an incredible interpretive theater thing called the theater is a blank page by Ann Hamilton and Siti Company at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus this past Saturday. I might as well have been raptured up right there, as it was a wild interactive theater performance of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, hands-down probably my favorite novel ever.* I don't even know how to describe the experience that my friend Tanya, Chris and I had attending this show, but it was restorative and mesmerizing, and we all left feeling -- again -- like we'd been raptured into a writer/reader/lover of words heaven. Check it out if it comes to your town. Here's a video that I found on the internets of part of the performance in another city:




Also, if you're not one of the more than 115 MILLION people who've already watched Childish Gambino's incredible performance piece This is America, you should. I've said it before, but in these messed-up, clusterfuckery times, art and corporeal politics can save us.













* My Top Ten Favorite Novels

1. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
2. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
4. Middlemarch by George Eliot
5. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
6. Beloved by Toni Morrison
7. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
8. Love in the Name of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. Machine Dreams by Jayne Ann Phillips
10. Possession by A.S. Byatt

Who am I kidding? I didn't even list the children's books that should rank up there. It's virtually impossible for me to narrow down my favorite novels to ten, but those are the ones that come immediately to mind. What are yours, Reader?

Benignity and Trickery

I'm going to tell you about what might happen to siblings of kids with complex medical needs. No matter how conscious you are about giving them equal time, things slip through the cracks, stuff is blown off, "little stuff" is overlooked. Oliver complained about pain in his finger for a year. I acknowledged it, but I also blew it off. I blamed it on diet or inflammation. You need to stop eating junk, I might have said. How bad could it be? Both Oliver and his brother Henry are strong in every way. They are strong and sensitive. They are honest and funny as hell. Like their sister, except they haven't gotten as much attention. It turned out that Oliver has an aneurysmal bone cyst. Benign but tricky. Today he had a second surgery to remove it as the one in December didn't work. The tumor came back, began eating into his bone. Hopefully, today's intervention will last. I sat by the bedside in the recovery room for hours, running my hand through his hair, watching my nearly grown boy sleep off the drugs they gave him. He made jokes in his sleep, smoothed all my rough edges worn thin by time in hospitals those weird hours ticking by. Precious child. Brave children.

I'll be catching shit for the "inflammation" and "too much sugar" talk -- but that's okay. We all need to be humbled and set straight.

Power to the siblings.

Take Away the Oceans and the Stars

Guadalupe Valley, Mexico
Bruma Winery

But let’s keep our sympathies where they belong — with the powerful and the armed. With those who feel threatened in the face of the most toothless efforts to hold back the bloodshed and those who believe scary monster stories about their guns being taken away. Let’s face it, it would be easier to take away the ocean or the stars.

from Please Don't Get Murdered at School Today, by Kimberly Harrington 

Yesterday, I engaged in a long and sometimes over-wrought yet reasonable discussion with a gun enthusiast that went to high school with me in the last century. He gave me the usual arguments -- the Second Amendment, his rights, his love of hunting, his responsible gun use, etc. etc. ad nauseum. Love of nature, the eradication of deer pests. He put words in my mouth (my tiny little mother mind mouth™), insisted that I didn't understand hunting because I was a coastal elite.  I thought hmmm in my coastal elite way and stayed polite with an edge of defensiveness. He ranted a bit about sanctuary cities, said he knew a family who had lost a relative to a murderous illegal immigrant. He digressed, as did I. He was sick to death of his rights being threatened. I pointed out that he was "winning," essentially -- that he had the backing of federal law, however loosely interpreted, as well as the efforts of the most powerful lobby the country has ever known. I asked him how many guns he'd need to hunt deer for food, keep deer contained (this being an example of the responsible use of guns) and to protect his family.

He answered, 11, for a family of five. Shotguns were in there, as were rifles, I think, and a couple of pistols. I questioned his fear. He said he feared very little and neither should you.

I felt sick to death the rest of the evening and deleted the conversation.






Today, when I expressed my horror at what happened in Florida, when I gave in and said, Fuck guns, melt them all down, get rid of them, I was told to go get sterilized by another person, someone whom I don't know. I clicked on his Facebook page and saw that he was an older white man, somewhat puffy, surrounded by children. God was mentioned several times on his public page, as were fostering children, and sobriety was a common theme. He frequently used the word pussy in a derogatory way.

Sigh.

Aside from the growing piles of dead children, what breaks my heart is my own children's cynicism regarding these school shootings. Perhaps it's a way to defuse their own emotions, to dissociate from their own terror and confusion that this is where we are as a country. Both of my sons state that it'll never change, that there's no point to any of it, that there will always be guns and always be shootings and death and blood and people who justify guns and shootings and death and blood as part of being free.

Today at a Florida high school

How to Parent, No. 659

A typical day in The Brother's bedroom

First of all, don't worry about it if things go awry.

Secondly, don't pat yourself on the back if your children are fantastic.

That's it. *

* You can very possibly bear two sons two and a half years apart who then live in the same bedroom their entire lives and are raised in pretty much the same way for nearly sixteen and nineteen years (obviously birth order is something to reckon with, but for our simple parenting advice purposes, don't worry about it), yet are so profoundly different from one another that you might question whether you did indeed bear them. One of them can be exquisitely neat and profoundly perceptive with an invisible antennae sprouting from his head,  yet drive you to distraction with questions and the pursuit of material objects, as well as constant existential anguish from the age of two onward. One of them can be a preternaturally confident and cheerful soul who charmed the ladies when he was literally two years old with his easygoing manner, yet drive you to distraction as an outrageous slob who has a floordrobe despite laundry baskets two steps away and as one of those men who leaves a cereal bowl with a film of congealed milk on his bedside table for weeks.

Here we go:

Don't let the neatness fool you. The person who maintains that level of clean has other issues, including a propensity as a young boy to say I hate everything and everybody.

Don't let the mess fool you. The person who maintains that level of slobbery is also one of the more relaxed and good-natured kids on the planet.

As a parent, my best advice is to not congratulate yourself for the good stuff or berate yourself for the bad.

It's out of your hands, and you have absolutely nothing to do with either.

You can marvel, though, that they both emerged from your aching, enormous body, bloody, stunned and screaming yet intensely beautiful (that'd be them and you).

I had some big baby boys

The Fall of America

I know most of you who visit here probably feel the same way about the cast of freaks that Drumpf is assembling as his Cabinet. I don't know about ya'll, but I fall hard to sleep each night after reading a bit more of a novel (reading is my only constant and even in times of extreme stress, I can read a damn novel), and when I wake up I'm generally in a positive mood (this, even though I am generally also wakened by Sophie having a seizure) as long as it's daylight. These days, though, since the Buffoon was elected by the Buffoonizens, it takes about one minute and sometimes less, for me to remember. At first it's a vague thread of something, what is it again, and then it's Oh, yeah and then it's confirmed by some godawful new story of dark-houred tweets with a hostile foreign country or a thin-skinned response to being mocked on a television show or the appointment of a confirmed racist as the chief lawyer or a climate change denier in charge of the environment or a creationist in charge of education. Throw in the bottle blondes and the Stepford wife and daughter, and then the nightmare that is the day begins, again.

Anyhoo.

Let's change the subject for a moment.





I've never been very good at building things or dealing with the spatial. I get lost, literally, every single time I park my car in a parking lot, and at least once or twice a day if I'm traveling anywhere other than, let's say, ten square miles.

When I took an aptitude test back in the dark ages of the last millennium, when I was still in my teens, I scored off the charts for a test called Ideaphoria, where you had to write as much as you could about anything in five or so minutes. Granted, I was probably doing something similar to here which is allowing my brain to just meander and wander and muse and peruse, my fingers quick at the keys. I am made of words, I guess. Back then, when I was asked to put together in my mind geometric figures using as guide these one-dimensional drawings with dotted lines for folds -- well -- I could not do even one. I stared at those things with my tiny little mother mind™ to be and just watched them, floating in the universe. What fresh hell was it?

I remember these things periodically, as well as how bad I am at sports, when I watch my sons. Where did these creatures come from? I think, more often than not. I used to call Henry the Lego Genius because of his uncanny ability to put together complex sets with only the most cursory check of the directions. Since Oliver is severely dyslexic, he never looks at signs or reads directions, much less books, yet is able to navigate his way through any city after being in it for half an hour. I'm not kidding. He's been doing this since he was about two years old. It'd be creepy if it weren't perfect for someone like me who turns left when I'm supposed to go right, every time. 
Anyhoo.

I saw one of those Christmas trees made from books the other day on the internets and decided that I wanted to do it. I thought it might cheer me up from the Drumpfian nightmare and at the very least distract me. I gathered about 100 books of various sizes and thicknesses and piled them on the dining room floor. Then I watched the video about five hundred times and made about three hundred attempts to construct even the first layer. I'm actually pretty patient, even when I get lost or become very confused.

HENRY and OLIVER! I screamed.

They were back in their room playing some godforsaken video game with incredible skill, I'm sure, but they obliged me and came into the dining room. After expressing incredulity and scorn for what I was doing, their general default, they decided to humor me. Henry got down on the floor and began building the tree without even looking at the internets, while his brother criticized him and cracked jokes.

Whenever I attempted to place a book on the growing tree, I was admonished for not doing it right. What is wrong with you? Oliver asked me, more than once, and I admonished him for being disrespectful of his old mama.

Save the pretty Penguins for the top! I cried at some point and directed Henry to place the beloved novels in front and the books about cars and magical places that I'll never visit to the back.

When Henry got to placing The Idiot on the pile, he expressed disbelief that this was really the title of a book. I expressed disbelief that he'd never heard of Dostoyevsky despite being in school for the last fifteen years, including a semester of Advanced Placement Literature. Not to mention that I carried him inside of my uterus for 42 weeks, after which he was pulled from me, nursed for fourteen weeks from my body and then was cared for every single day for the next eighteen years. He rolled his eyes at me and then said, Look, Oliver, it's a book about you.

Good thing he's so good-looking.

I might not be able to find my way to my car or even your house, and I'm also having a hard time figuring out how to navigate the fact that despite grabbing women's pussies (that might be the first time I've typed out that word) and mocking a disabled person, Drumpf is the leader of the free world. God, I've always hated that expression.

I sure have read a lot of books, though, and I remember every single one of them. I realize that that doesn't make one whit of difference in the world at this point except for in a tiny subset of the general population. It feels somewhat familiar as I can remember that being smart or intellectual was entirely uncool during middle school at the hoity toity prep school I attended in Atlanta, Georgia. It was much better to be pretty and rich than to have your crooked nose with rose-tinted glasses perched on them, buried in Great Expectations. If I close my eyes, I can be right back there, and now I don't even have to close my eyes. I'm pretty certain that most of those classmates, with the exception of a few, are thrilled to finally have a president who won't come for their guns or rip babies out of their wives' wombs. That we have a racist for Attorney General, a climate change denier for the environment, an orthopedic surgeon for Health and Human Services who hates the Affordable Care Act and loves the private insurance industry, a billionaire who doesn't give a shit about public schools for education and now, a neurosurgeon to handle housing and urban development -- well -- what more is there to say? If there's any human I distrust more than a neurosurgeon, it's an evangelical neurosurgeon. As I told my friend C who was lamenting the latest white cop getting off after shooting an unarmed black man in the back, it's not going to get better, and it's probably going to get worse. I suggested that the racist attorney general could instruct his law enforcement to sprinkle crack on felled dead black men, after which the evangelical neurosurgeon could remove their brains in some deserted housing project that he's emptied and give them to the orthopedic health and human services dude to run research on white exceptionalism for Drumpf and his chief strategist.

Shit. Where was I?

At one point, after checking my phone for news and feeling the lurch, again, of nightmare, I grabbed my yellowed old copy of Allen Ginsberg's The Fall of America before it got buried under the pretty Penguin classics. I made sure that Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass were front and center. Ginsberg went on the top. I can almost hear the cries of the death of Christmas, can't you?

Sunday Morning Poetry with the Night Before Last Sunset

Sunset, Henry and Oliver
Pelican Cove, Rancho Palos Verdes

The Bright Day

Earth, earth!
day, this bright day
again—once more
showers of dry spruce gold,
the poppy flopped broad open and delicate
from its pod—once more,
all this again: I've had many
days here with these stones and leaves:
like the sky I've taken on a color
and am still:
the grief of leaves,
summer worms, huge blackant
queens bulging
from weatherboarding, all that
will pass
away from me that I will pass into,
none of the grief
cuts less now than ever—only I
have learned the
sky, the day sky, the blue
obliteration of radiance:
the night sky,
pregnant, lively,
tumultuous, vast—the grief
again in a higher scale
of leaves and poppies:
space, space—
and a grief of things:
motion: standing still.

A.R. Ammons

Taking a Bullet

That's Sophie sitting in her wheelchair, gazing at trees. She's finally stopped moaning and humming. I'm not sure why she's been moaning and humming. Is it the impending full moon? Is she constipated? Is something hurting? Has she absorbed the extreme tension in the universe post-election? Has she absorbed the extreme tension in my family due to the election, via me? Is it moaning? Is it discomfort?

She is not having seizures, praise cannabis, and that would include THC. So, yeah, you obdurate fools who don't think THC is medicinal.

She is otherwise dramatically improved from a month ago. It seems hard to believe, yet I am determined to feel gratitude for this respite. That's why despair must not be indulged when things go wrong. Things never stay still. Still, the moaning and vocalizations are constant enough that they put my already extremely edgy self just at the tip of -- well -- falling off. I told the boys as I folded my laundry that when we lived in a tiny New York City apartment and she was a baby and screamed 3/4s of the day due to discomfort from the drugs that she was on, I would have to resort to putting her into her crib or in the middle of the bed, after which I would go into the shower, turn it on full blast and crouch there on the floor, my head in my hands, the tears swirling with the water down the drain. Oliver asked, If that was your life, why in the world did you have us? I told him that never, at any time, did I regret having a baby and that Sophie was a rock star even then and that he and Henry were the reason why I had them. The boys smiled as they ate the pizza that I'd ordered -- things are so hairy around here that I'm not even making lunch these days, much less dinner.

That paints a rosy portrait of two boys, their moaning sister and tense mother folding laundry while eating pizza. It was hardly that as our lunch discussion became a heated and argumentative one as we shared stories of racist incidents that we know about, that affect those we know and love, already, not even at the end of the first week of post-America. We live in one of the largest and most multi-cultural cities in the world. I've got teenaged sons whose best friends include bi-racial kids, black kids, Hispanic, Muslim and Asian kids. Their sister is disabled. They know what discrimination is (the people who use the word retard and then argue that it's just a word, the fact that disabled people were institutionalized in the past, that they face discrimination both subtle and overt everywhere in this country, etc. etc. etc.), but I don't think they have ever seen the kind of overt shit that's going on now, and it enrages and scares them. One of their cousins wept openly about an incident on a high school bus where white kids shouted at black kids to go to the back of the bus. A young black student at UCLA whom we know stopped her car to help a white bicyclist that had fallen off his bike, but he called her a nigger, told her that we don't need your help anymore. We have family members that we literally can't talk to right now, and that's so disturbing and stressful that I can't even write about it.

The boys' first impulse is to fight back, to use violence, and while I know this is talk that comes from teenage bravado and testosterone and feelings of helplessness (and the reason why, I'm sure, young males have been historically exploited to fight wars), I am doing here what I call parenting on the fly. We talk about being alert to increased violence and racism in our community and to being prepared should something arise. We talked about our white privilege. We talked about the importance of non-violence (O.K. I talked about it and they rolled their eyes), and I told them that if it comes down to it --- and they asked me this question -- I would take a bullet but not shoot one.

Yeah, lunch on a Sunday afternoon.

Never have I felt as galvanized or depressed.

I claim to be a master of equanimity, of the ability to hold two opposing or contradictory thoughts or feelings at once, but that's not happening right now. Or maybe it is as I balance fierceness, righteousness, anger and at least a desire to be compassionate.

For every the America we know is dead (usually said, written about or cried by a white person), there is a much more relevant there was never an America.

I'm not sure the rift in families can be repaired.

Tending My Three Chickens

The Unknown Level of Dante's Hell: The Neurology Clinic

I couldn't possibly not mark The Quarterly $475 Reflex Check with The Neurologist, could I, even though the one yesterday was generally pretty unremarkable? I took the requisite photo in the Conquest waiting area, where I get my usual chuckles. For new readers, I loathe the medical/war metaphor in all its forms, and the fact that big, generous financial donors get their name on the wall as latter day conquistadores just basically brings out the cynic in me.

Anyhoo.*

The big hair in the nest-like foreground of the photo above, where we stood in line to check in, is indeed Sophie's. She sat impatiently for quite some time, humming and shifting and drawing disapproving stares despite the fact that not many people hanging out at the Neurology Clinic at a major Los Angeles clinic are -- well -- free of all disease and affliction. I noted some quick look and look-aways, some look and look and look and look and looks (#don'tstarepaparazzi), some kind yet pitying looks and then, thank the abundant universe, a look and a smile and a hello! The Neurology Clinic is actually a pleasant place in that the people who work there are kind and efficient, and Sophie's Neurologist takes a whole lot of time with us and is sensitive to nearly all my needs and desires. Yesterday she even asked me if I had Caregiver Burnout, and as a response I spontaneously combusted leaving behind only the dark stain of my toes in the footbeds of my pale blue metallic Birkenstocks. That The Neurologist can't and hasn't ever really helped Sophie's seizures is just a matter for me to file away in the giant cabinet of my tiny little mother mind™ and try to remain sane in this, the twenty-second year of refractory epilepsy. Let's face it, though, hanging out for a couple of hours talking about seizures and The Mysterious Apocalyptic Friday Last Week, as well as the goddamn vagal nerve stimulator (always brought up by doc, always dismissed by me), the amount of rescue rectal valium we should try in the future, and a wait at the lab to get blood drawn, followed by an hour through Los Angeles traffic, is not an afternoon from which I can draw some jolly insight. Humor me if I sound resentful.

Here's what I'm grateful for: the fact that Sophie has recovered quite nicely from The Mysterious Apocalyptic Friday last week, and that when I get home I have my two very delightful teenaged boys with whom to laugh, converse and enjoy.

Here's something funny.

The Brothers have been extremely helpful to me the last couple of months. I bought a small gas grill at the hardware store, and they've both been terrific at preparing chicken or steak or peaches or zucchini on it, much to my delight because I hate grilling. What they're not so good at, though, is dinner conversation. There's generally a lot of bickering about who does what to whom, and I honestly don't remember even a minute or two in what seems like years that anything truly interesting or stimulating was shared. I know some of ya'll think I'm a saint, but some of you know my true colors, and I have had moments at the dinner table listening to them where I fantasize about pushing back my stool, standing up and announcing that I'm leaving. For good. That I can't take the idiocy any longer, that I need to discuss Russian literature, or The Wire, or the subtle sexism directed at Clinton. Even as I fantasize, though, Oliver comments upon the chicken that Henry has grilled that night:

My bicep would be easier to cut into than this chicken.

Henry answers:

You're an idiot.



Sophie hums, picks up her cup, drinks by herself and then flings it across the room, even as I'm on my way out the door.















*I despise colloquialisms like anyhoo but enjoying using them in jest. This is an approved message for new readers.

Accommodation and Picking Mushrooms at the Edge of Dread

A relentless southwest wind blows in the Laramie Range of Wyoming. It has blown for eons, scraping the mountains bare of soil, carving out the landscape. It causes trees to grow at an angle and lifts into the air things that ought to stay on the ground. It complicates all manner of human activity. People who live there successfully have reached an accommodation with the wind; some who couldn't, went insane.

Disability is a steady west wind in our lives. It permeates our existence, altering the topography of our days and causing our family and our life to grow at an angle. Without judging the wind as good or bad, we can observe the truth of it, acknowledge the force of it in our lives, and take the measure of our accommodation.

from Changed by a Child by Barbara Gill 

Someone I know who was angry with me about one thing or another said, You need to get your head out of your ass, spouting poetry. I know the person who said it to me, and it stung, but not for much longer than a moment.

Your head is just too much in the clouds. You should probably stop reading and go outside. There's validity to that.

I suppose.

I've always read to accommodate my thinking self to the world. Words -- particularly those strung together as poetry -- help accommodate my imagination to the world.

My boys are back from Switzerland and with them come buckets of chocolate and laundry, addiction to Pokemon Go, deep man voices and walls that can't contain the loudness. I'm not sure whether it's seeing them again or the circus-like atmosphere of the RNC and the swirl of clips and memes and Tweets, but I feel giddy. Like I can't stop.

I have to stop looking at videos and memes and visual things. I have to read. Words.

I take the measure of my accommodation.


What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows
                  uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but
                 don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light —
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

Adrienne Rich, from What Kind of Times Are These

Peace on Earth and Mercy Mild

I know that's a phrase for Christmas, and I used it on my Christmas cards for over fifteen years, my three children beautiful and pure looking out, but the word mercy strikes me this morning as missing from our consciousness. I lie on my bed in the blue light of dawn. My boys are 6000 miles away, far from the agonizing events of this week in our country yet closer to those in France and Turkey. My daughter lies curled up asleep on her bed across the hallway where I put her after picking her up off the floor.  A beetle flings itself around my room making more noise than its size suggests, initially scaring me out of bed to a position of vigilance. I've let it be.

Mercy.




#BlackLivesMatter



Courtney Martin wrote this on the inimitable OnBeing website as a guideline for how to talk to children about what's happening:

As a white child, you are afforded a range of privileges and protections that children of color are not afforded and it's important for you to recognize this and actively work to change it. This is deeply and historically rooted. This country was founded, yes on optimism and pluralism, but also on slave labor, exploitation, violence, dehumanization. Don't get bogged down in the guilt and shame of this history, but know it. Your story, our story, is a part of that.

The only way to "move on" from that reality is to never "move on," to understand that just as people of color have to spend a lifetime thinking about their own skin color and how it affects the way they are able to walk through the world, you are walking through the world, this country, this city, these streets, as a white person.

Make it a part of your daily consciousness even when it seems tiring and burdensome (this is not a choice for people of color, nor is it for you). Commit to interrogating the privileges that you inherit and constantly look for creative ways to subvert hierarchies, redistribute power, connect the unconnected. Understand that this isn't about being a "good white person." This is about being brave and convicted and imperfect and tireless and loving and devastated and sometimes feeling dumb about how to make change and taking it personally. You are not above bias and racism. Apologize when you say or do something racist. Shut up and ask questions.

Make real friends who will push you and hold you accountable. Push and hold other white people accountable. Push and hold other white people accountable. Push and hold other white people accountable. 

The Difference Between the Podiatrist and the Neurologist

Somewhere in Beverly Hills, CA

I texted a friend today from the foot doctor's office:

This ocean scene with sounds 
really makes the doc's office 
EXACTLY like being at the beach.

There's nothing wrong with my feet, and since I want to respect their privacy, and they are teenagers, and they are Teenaged Boys, and Teenaged Boys' feet are sort of horrifying (how many of you mothers out there took a look at your sons' feet one day, and they'd all of a sudden become terrifying as opposed to adorable?). The parenthetical happened to me between five and ten years ago, and it's a sad parenting day when you no longer have any desire to kiss that little foot but rather avoid under all circumstances even looking at that wart or those flakes or that ingrown toenail or the ridiculous length of that toenail, much less inquire how it happened. Hence, the foot doctor who does wonderful surgical techniques and cryo-freezing and dispensing of betadine and gauze pads and gives instructions to the person at the end of the hairy leg as opposed to the woman with her head ducked in the chair by the door busily texting. The foot doctor is one of those rare physicians (and men) that I trust implicitly, have literally nothing to say to beyond the usual pleasantries and secretly idolize because, frankly, I have no desire to tend to my teenaged sons' feet.

I did find the ocean scene television hilarious, though, and wondered how it'd go over in the pediatric neurology clinic right before you go in to your quarterly $575 Reflex and Drug Refill Check-up. I, for one, would have appreciated some kind of Matrix-type situation back in the days when I waited in the pediatric neurology clinic and would have gladly drowned myself in the television ocean. Sophie, of course, as a mermaid would have swum off to freedom. At the foot doctor, though, I am content to stare at the screen, the susurration of the lapping waves a perfect accompaniment to my silent hosannas to a doctor that can actually fix my kids.

Basketball Agita and a Punch to the Gut

So ya'll know that I am the world's least able athlete, have an antipathy toward football that rivals one toward Drumpf and am otherwise bored out of my mind by sports with two exceptions: when my sons play anything, I'm into it and I am a Tar Heel basketball lover of the nth degree.

So, yeah. Last night. I have a friend who can't watch the Heels play anymore because he's afraid he'll have a heart attack. I felt some serious agita last night, lying on my bed with Henry sprawled next to me and the laptop open to the final NCAA championship game. Oliver is on the east coast with my parents, but when Marcus Paige shot that 3-pointer to tie the game, I called him and before I could scream in exultation, The Big O screamed back at me that VILLANOVA WON, MOM! VILLANOVA WON! And Henry and I looked back down on the little screen which evidently was a second or two behind the regular broadcast and watched Villanova make that final shot and wow. Just wow. Or should I say holy shit. And then I just expired, as did Henry.

Anywho.

On another note, I was up most of the night with Sophie. We're going through another weird period, and I'm just barely keeping it together. So many of you help me to keep it together, and I am continually reminded of the grace that lives in this world. I'm frustrated and pained at what's going on -- not just in my literal world but in the world at large. Being able to channel that frustration and anguish into writing keeps me quite literally alive, and my post over at marijuana.com today was like a reverse sucker punch.  Please visit it, give it some love and share it if you feel like it. Here's the link:

The Literal Beating Heart

Dr. Viola Frymann, D.O. (1921-2016)

Dr. Frymann and Sophie, 1997

I learned today that the beloved osteopath who changed Sophie's and my family's life over twenty years ago died this week at the age of 95. All three of my children were patients of Dr. Frymann -- Sophie began treatments at ten months, when I'd fly to La Jolla for six week trips, living in a little motel by the sea. When I gave birth to both Henry and Oliver in Santa Monica, I traveled down to see Dr. Frymann when they were each less than ten days old so that she could give them a newborn treatment. She believed that treatment at birth and through infancy and childhood was of enormous benefit and freed the child from digestive issues, colic and the ailments that we've grown to expect and accept as we age (ear infections, "growing pains," back and neck pain, etc.). Over the next fifteen plus years, we made the trip down to San Diego multiple times a week and then month -- a drive that I never complained about because I knew what lay at the other end.

I credit her for setting Sophie on the path to true healing (something distinct from curing), and for ensuring the boys' vitality and ease (they were, quite simply, always jolly and rarely ill through childhood and neither ever on any antibiotic because of her treatments). I couldn't possibly describe this woman's impact on my own life and thinking. She is probably the only true healer that I will ever meet, the woman responsible for our move to California and for setting me on the path of integrative medicine and treatment. She guided me forward when I didn't know what to do. I believed Dr. Frymann when she told me about the body’s inherent ability to right itself, to heal itself, and that her work was to help the body find its optimal path. She never claimed to cure a person but to rather help that person reach his full potential. When she did speak of curing, it was in religious terms, an expression of her deep faith in Christianity and God’s power. Her work, though, was not religious, in the sense that she was a scientist who had studied and practiced osteopathic manipulation for over fifty years. If it weren't for Dr. Frymann, I have no doubt that Sophie would not be alive today nor she and her brothers in such good overall health.

She was your first ray of hope, my father emailed me this morning when I told him of her death.

Yes. She was my first ray of hope. She taught me nearly everything I know about healing and curing, about what it means to be human and whole. Her life not only affected ours but those of thousands of people around the world, and she worked and traveled and taught until her retirement at age 90, five years ago.

We will miss her and are grateful to have spent so much time, literally, under her powerful hands.

Here's an excerpt from a chapter in my book-in-progress about Dr. Frymann that gives you a small idea of her power and worth.



_________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Frymann believed in the inherent dignity of each child, no matter how “damaged.” She never used the word “damaged” at all, in fact. Every child is worthy and has potential. Every child can understand what is going on around him or her, able to sense the environment and whether it is positive or negative. Her beliefs resonated with me and with those who made such an effort to bring their children to her. The simplicity of those beliefs tapped into our most fervent hopes but also affirmed the things we already knew about our children.

I sat in the “quiet room” at Dr. Frymann’s office while Sophie got her treatments during my first few visits to California at the La Jolla office, flipping through old Reader’s Digests and prayer books. Sometimes, I closed my eyes and leaned my head back on the old chintz-covered armchair, my hands loose in my lap. I knew that outside the sun was shining and that the palm trees were swaying from the ocean breezes off of La Jolla Cove. I heard the faint sounds of piano music coming from the music therapist in the treatment room and the gentle opening and closing of the front gate. When I opened my eyes, I saw that a woman had walked into the office with a girl in her arms. The girl appeared to be made horizontally the way she lay flat on top of the mother’s bent arms. Her feet, twisted inward, stick-straight out, level with her head, a long black sheath of hair hanging down over the other bent arm. She made no sound and there was no way to tell, really, what her age might have been. I tried not to stare, smiled awkwardly, instead, and said hello to the woman. She sat down, still holding the horizontal child, murmuring to her. The girl didn’t move in her arms, lay straight like a board.

When Dr. Frymann came out with Sophie, she handed her to me and told me that she’d see us in two days. When I asked how Sophie “did,” she replied, “Fine. Her vitality is much better.” She then turned to the other mother and lifted the girl into her own bent arms. The transfer was effortless, and now it was Dr. Frymann who carefully balanced this child over her arms, walking back toward the treatment room. “You are an Indian princess, yes, aren’t you,” she crooned to the girl as she walked away.