Magnetic Resonance Imaging

It looked like a flower a jewel a prism a kaleidoscope of pink and red and green a mustard yellow. So beautiful it brought tears to my eyes. This part here, The Neurologist said, should be like a bush and it's more like a fern. The language of plants. I stood behind him, peering over his shoulder. My daughter's brain a bloom on a screen, his finger (or was it a pen) brushing along its tendrils, a fern not a bush. Space, too. Too much space there and there. How do I write this or do I not write this? Of course I will write this, me with the words, the ease of them. Call a flower tree and a tree flower (so I thought, lying on my back in the green grass of childhood) and what if we were just God's dream (God, not god, back then) and this, that, was a sort of dream. Calling a brain bush and bush fern. Standing there looking over his shoulder, my daughter's brain a bloom on the screen. The word atrophy. The feathering of a fern where there should be bush. The word cerebellum. I felt sick to my stomach for a moment, standing there, the dots in front of my eyes. Or was it faint? I need to sit down, I said, stumbled around the wheelchair and sat on the couch. I closed my eyes when he spun around on his chair. He's a nice man, a smart man, an honest man. Interesting that it was the tears that flustered him, not the brain a bloom on a screen. That's the way they are. I closed my eyes, heard him rummaging and then leave the room. Back in, he handed me a stack of paper towels, the brown rough ones from the bathroom. I thought that was funny. I really did. I thought it was funny. I'll write it all down, I thought, and then out. I'll build some kind of tension here on the page to mimic that in the room in the brain a bloom on the screen. Atrophy of the cerebellum. We'll need to compare it to an earlier scan (that I'll have to find, to root out from the bowels of some other hospital). The language of medicine mixed up with the language of business the language of poetry.  And I a master of all of it nodding my head words blooms from my mouth. On the written report: indicative of epilepsy treatment. I always knew it. The word treatment. Just to be clear: Sophie's recent magnetic resonance imaging showed a couple of troublesome spots, including atrophy of the cerebellum. This could account for her gradual decline in motor abilities (walking, coordinating movement, balance, swallowing). The cause is uncertain -- too many drugs? long-term use of benzodiazepines? underlying metabolic disorder? genetic mutation? -- as always.

How do I write what comes next? I still have some tricks up my sleeve, The Neurologist said, and I laughed. I really did. I thought it was funny. Should they use phrases like this? Me with the chalked hands and the pirouette toes up on the high wire for decades. You as spectator your breath held.

Bloom, brain.

Pirouexiting IEPs

I want to tell ya'll about the day I had up on a bluff at Point Dume in Malibu, but first I want to tell you about the funniest question I was asked by one of Sophie's teachers yesterday. It was Monday morning, about 8:30, and I was doing the usual morning thing with Sophie at home which calls for a combination of the physical strength of an elephant, the body dexterity of a circus performer and the patience of a -- let's see -- praying mantis. I'm not going to give you anymore of a description than that, so let your imagination take flight, especially those of you who've been reading the exact same shit for the nearly nine years I've been writing the old blog.

Anyhoo.

The teacher* called me to ask why I wasn't at Sophie's "Exit IEP," and I said, What Exit IEP? and he said, Didn't you sign the paper letting you know the date of the Exit IEP was April the 3rd at 8:00 am? and I said, Um, no, I never received a notice about an Exit IEP and actually thought this would be the first year in two decades that I actually wouldn't have to perform my high-wire act at the IEP! (actually I didn't say that last part but I thought it with my tiny little mother mind™because you know -- really? an EXIT IEP?**) -- and he said, The form should have been in her backpack a couple of weeks ago, and I said, Well, I never received a form, and thought to myself with my tiny little mother mind™that it was weird they hadn't called me if they never received the signed form but remember I was busy with my own circus act at home which involved the elephants, the trapeze artist and the praying mantis, so I just said hmmm and nooo, and contemplated a pirouette (muscle memory every time I hear the acronym IEP), and then he said what is probably the greatest thing that I have ever heard uttered in the nineteen year history of the Sophie Girl IEP (and oh, lord, there have been some doozies), and perhaps the greatest thing ever uttered to my Caregiver Self and that was this:

Maybe one of your household staff removed it from her backpack?

Reader, need I say more?


I think not and will tell you about Point Dume and the whales and the flowers and the turquoise water and the television series being shot on the beach below which included airplane crash wreckage and actor/survivors and then later the Topanga Ranch Motel pictured above (which subs in for my "estate") at a later date.

*For the record, I love and admire Sophie's teacher, and he will be sorely missed when we are hurled off the cliff in May or shot out of the circus cannon and over the Pacific.

** For the record, I told him FOR THE FIRST TIME IN NINETEEN YEARS to just do what he had to do for the Exit IEP and send me the paper to sign. I have always wanted to check that box on the IEP notice that my household staff neglected to give me that says, "I am unable to be at the Individualized Education Meeting but hold the meeting without me anyway," because -- well -- really, what difference would it have made if I hadn't brought in those doughnuts every year, wore that pale rose-colored leotard and chalked my hands before doing the most perfect pirouettes on the wire above the earnest heads of the Powers That Be?

Three Ring Circus

Zelda Boden, Circus Performer 1910, via Pinterest

Killjoy! they said when I told them to stop throwing rocks at the grill. Sophie tried to wiggle out of the chair, out from under Henry's insistent arm laid over her lap. Can't I bring her inside? he asked. You hold her! he said to Oliver. Oliver crouched nearby, a pile of rocks at his feet. I circled my three children with the hose, trying not to overwater.

The Baker is Back

via Etsy

This morning I was up at 6:30 baking a cake. I've got two cake orders today, orders I took at the last minute because My Other Job has drawn to a close, and I need the work. I have a Blue Velvet Cake with Purple Frosting and a Luau Theme to make today and a Milk Chocolate Chocolate Cake tomorrow. I will, of course, post photos later.

If you know of anyone who needs to hire a baker, please let me know. I can also advocate for children with special healthcare needs, review grants, create caregiver manuals and train caregivers, write grants and pull my legs over my head.

Reader, what are you up to this weekend?

The whole feast

I woke this morning at around 6:30, and in lieu of entertaining too-early thoughts, I finished Toni Morrison's book Home, which like all of Morrison's books is quietly lyrical when it isn't shocking, and when I put it back down beside my bed, I lay back and fell asleep in the grey light and dreamed of a baby, nursing at my breast and then I woke to blue sky and an implacable sun. The weather today is, again, astonishing, warmer than usual and knowing I'll offend, I feel annoyed by the pressure to enjoy it when I actually would rather sit inside and start up another book. Oliver is playing with the dog in the hallway, making her bark, she's a circus dog, he says when Henry shouts Stop wrapping that belt around her! and I tell them both to go outside for god's sake! and Michael feeds sauteed apples and waffles to Sophie. We are a fortunate bunch, I'd wager, the sun perpetual if weary, the books stacked up no matter, the dog a prancer, the whole feast.

Now that my ladder's gone

William Blake

I rode down 5th Avenue at three in the morning in a taxi, new to the city and enraptured, already. Much was broken but much was beginning, and when the taxi came to a stop, I peered through the windshield from the dark back of the car and wondered aloud what was going on. The circus is in town, the driver said, in a thick accent, and just then I saw them, the animals, giraffes and elephants, some horses, a zebra, walking across 5th Avenue in an orderly line, making their way toward Madison Square Garden, horns honking, lights shining, eyes blinking, a fantastical mirage.

This morning, I'm thinking that we make art and beauty, literally, out of shit. That that is my impulse and, I imagine, many others'.

Here's a Yeats poem that I haven't thought about in a while.

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I.

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so. Maybe at last, being but a broken man, I must be satisfied with my heart, although Winter and summer till old age began My circus animals were all on show, Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what. II What can I but enumerate old themes, First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams, Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose, Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems, That might adorn old songs or courtly shows; But what cared I that set him on to ride, I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride. And then a counter-truth filled out its play, 'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it; She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away, But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it. I thought my dear must her own soul destroy So did fanaticism and hate enslave it, And this brought forth a dream and soon enough This dream itself had all my thought and love. And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea; Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of. III Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.  -- William Butler Yeats