Spiritual Smart Aleck

The Ladies Who Do More Than Lunch

2012-01-01T19:59:00.000-08:00

Three mighty warriors gathered to go hunting. These were their names: She Who Argues; Makes Many Plans; and Straight Arrow, so called by the other two because she tended to drive the car straight through curves instead of around them.
They wanted to begin early in the morning, so they caught a ferry to Southworth a few minutes after noon and headed for the fabled hunting grounds of East Bremerton, where discarded belongings are put up for sale in the marketplaces known as Goodwill and Value Village.
Some things cannot be found in the used goods bazaars, however. One thing that must be bought new is underwear for mighty hunters, so the first stop the three made was at the market place known as Wally World.
She Who Argues overcame her many political, ethical, and moral objections to enter Wally World, which she knew was a notorious sink of corrupt consumerism, a den of vice as dangerous to the addicted shopper as an opium den is to the opium smoker, and as harmful to the general welfare of the people. She managed to quiet her misgivings because she realized that she, too, needed underwear.
Wally World is larger than many villages, and the trek from the parking lot to the underwear section was long and arduous. They lost their way and made wrong turns, but in the end found themselves among an array of bras, panties, and socks that was so large and so overwhelming that their senses were dulled and their thoughts confused. Such is the narcotizing effect of Wally World.
Once they had made their purchases and found their way back to the car it was decided that they all were hungry, and they decamped for a cafe located where the trail of Sedgewick meets the highway of Sixteen.
Now, She Who Argues was wearing that day a beautiful shawl of purples and blues, which she usually wore as a scarf, but once trapped in a booth with Makes Many Plans and Straight Arrow, who have a tendency to be rather silly, she found a need to pull the scarf up over her head to conceal her face. “You two behave like teenagers,” she said to her companions.
Once fed and watered, the three continued on their way. They went over the hills and around a great water, and soon were in the Wilderness of Strip Malls.
Here they came first to Goodwill. They split up so as to hunt more efficiently, and spent a good hour there before meeting again, and putting their bags into the trunk of the car. They pressed on to Value Village, and again split up, the better to seek their separate objects, and they each found many more treasures.
Then they were on their way home, well satisfied with the day's hunting and ready once more for island, home, and hearth.
They were early for the ferry at Southworth, and talked together as they waited on the dock.
Makes Many Plans, who grew up in the neighborhood of Madrona in Seattle, told the story of a time when she was a child. She had gone to see Santa Claus at Frederick and Nelson, and in her joy at the experience she told some of her friends, “Santa is everywhere!”
One of the little girls in the group begged to differ. “Santa is not everywhere,” she said in a superior tone. “Jesus is everywhere.”
“Well, Jesus isn't in the window at Frederick's,” Makes Many Plans replied.
Discussing theology can be so treacherous.
The boat came, and the three warriors returned home well satisfied. They agreed it had been a good day and a good hunt, and went their separate ways, promising to meet and hunt together again.

Sonya Makes Ginger Beer

2011-06-09T11:44:00.001-07:00

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Photo: Sonya, Mackedie, and Randy Norton in the back yard of the house on Shasta Avenue in San Jose, June 1974

My old friend Sonya is here this week. Our friendship goes back to the mid-1960s, when we were alternate lifestyle ladies together, sashaying around in our long skirts and thrift store glad rags.
In 1972 I rented a room from Sonya and her husband Randy. They lived with their infant daughter Mackedie in a house in San Jose just off the Alameda.
That summer Sonya, Mackedie, and I hit the thrift stores and nurseries and tofu factories of San Jose, and went to the Rosicrucian Museum, the Montalvo mansion, and the Winchester House. We took long drives on Skyline Boulevard where the San Francisco Bay area fell away to the east and the Monterey Bay area fell away to the west. The following winter I decided to move to Vashon, and that was the end of my time there.
Last night she told me the story of the time she made ginger beer.
Sometime after I moved up here, when Randy and Sonya were still living in the San Jose house, Sonya decided to make ginger ale. Verner's, “the notorious ginger ale from Detroit that actually has some real ginger in it,” was not strong enough for Sonya's taste. Did I mention that Sonya is addicted to ginger like some of us are addicted to chocolate? Well, she is. She decided she was going to make ginger ale strong enough to meet her standards.
Her husband, Randy, said, “If you're going to go to all that trouble, why don't you make ginger beer?”
She said okay, but a couple of days later, before she'd got around to the brewing, Randy was talking to an old-timer friend of his and came home to tell Sonya, “Mac says to drop a couple of raisins in each bottle.” Old timer ginger beer brewing wisdom, they thought.
Randy brought home two 24-bottle cases of long neck bottles and a bottle capper, and Sonya made the mash following a recipe she found in an old book with recipes for home made beers, wines, and cordials. When after a few days the frothing of the liquid stopped, she bottled up the liquid, dutifully putting two raisins in each bottle as advised by Randy's friend.
Randy then took the two cases of bottles down to the basement, putting them on a shelf on the other side of the washer and dryer.
You can guess what happened next, especially if you've ever bottled your own fizzy liquids. One night when Sonya was lying in bed she heard, she thought, a truck backfire nearby. Didn't give it much thought.
A couple of days later she heard two shots, bang, bang!
That sounded like it was right under the bedroom, she thought with alarm. Then she thought some more.
She went down the stairs to the basement. As she opened the door, BANG!
As she suspected, the ginger beer bottles were exploding.
For the next few weeks whenever Sonya wanted to do the laundry, she held up a metal garbage can lid as a shield in one hand, while carrying her bundle of laundry in the other. She and Randy were afraid to touch or move the bottles because they were so sensitive – opening the door would set off an explosion. Any jiggle or disturbance would set off a bottle or two, and bottles exploded randomly at other times. She said that eventually all but one of the bottles exploded, and they were afraid to touch that one.
Sonya swept up the glass, and decided the raisins had been a mistake. The raisins increased the fermentation to unprecedented heights. She declined to make ginger beer again, though, even without raisins. Being able to do the laundry safely was more important.
I've heard similar stories from other friends who have tried bottling their own fermented or carbonated beverages. Even without raisins it's a tricky business, and explosions often result. You probably shouldn't try it unless you have nerves, and a garbage can lid, of steel. They ought to list those two things in the recipes.

Waiting for the Test Results

2011-06-01T14:41:00.000-07:00

My birthday was last week, and a couple of people wished me “the happiest birthday ever.” Oddly enough, that is exactly what it was.
I had some biopsies done six days before my birthday and I was waiting for the results. Many of my friends and family members have had cancer, and I thought it might be my turn.
If you have waited for test results for a biopsy, you can testify that the waiting period is not fun. You imagine all kinds of things. You go from planning your funeral and writing letters to the kids telling them you love them, to thinking maybe you're fine and wondering, since all your friends and family are sweating out the wait for test results with you, “Will I feel embarrassed after all this fuss if I don't have cancer?”
Then you go back to thinking it probably is cancer. Or maybe not. But it probably is. But it might not be.
And so on.
As the days crawled by for me, I'd go for minutes without thinking about the tests and wondering what the results were, but then I'd remember with a thud. I took deep breaths and tried to relax. I used what I call “the power of positive denial.” I told myself that as long as I didn't know for sure, I could enjoy my ignorance. One morning I realized that having cancer is a lot like not having cancer – you're still alive, you're still you. That was good to know, even before the test results came back.
I sang, and wrote, did a few crosswords, watched a little TV, and laughed with friends. It all worked for a while, then I'd remember that I was waiting.
Finally, on my birthday, the call came.
“Are you sitting down?” the woman on the phone asked. It did not seem like an auspicious beginning to the conversation.
“Wait,” I said, and sat down, ready, I thought, for whatever it was.
She told me I didn't have cancer.
I have to tell you that when I heard the words, “You don't have cancer,” embarrassment was the last thing on my mind. I was more like, “Yay, wahoo, whoopee!”
My body relaxed like a rubber band that had been twisted tight, and for the rest of that day and part of the next I walked around feeling loopy. I had a silly grin on my face, even though I did hear the rest of the test results: the cells that were biopsied are indeed whipping up bad craziness. They are almost cancer, but haven't quite gone over to the dark side. They must be removed.
So my summer plans have been simplified: surgery, followed by recuperation from surgery. I'd rather fly to Maui,* but oh well.
The big hitch in the plan is that I don't have medical insurance. I lost that when my husband became ill and couldn't work full time anymore. I had a plan to stay healthy until I was old enough for Medicare, but that has not worked out so well. Before I get to see a doctor I'll be speaking to a financial counselor. Once I've been financially counseled, and fill out several reams of paperwork, I shall be treated. So they tell me.
Right now I'm happy to be alive, and kids, I do love you, even if I do have to send you a notice on Facebook to remind you when it's my birthday.
*Actually, I wouldn't rather fly to Maui, or anywhere. For over three decades I've had a severe fear of flying. But I've been thinking since this biopsy thing came up, what the heck. I might like Maui. So look for gratuitous mentions of flying to Maui in future columns. It's going to be my fallback fantasy this summer.

Don't Call Australia in the Morning

2011-05-21T15:29:00.000-07:00

As I am writing this, it is May 20, 2011. According to some people who have been getting a lot of press lately, the end of the world is supposed to occur tomorrow, May 21. If that is the case, it won't matter that I didn't get my column in before deadline today.
That's what I was thinking, and then I thought, wait. Do they mean May 21 American time, or May 21 Sydney, Australia, time?
We have friends who live on the east coast of Australia north of Sydney, and when ever I try to figure out what time it is there, I use the simple rule that they are eighteen hours ahead of us, or, as I sometimes like to think of it, six hours behind us, tomorrow. So if it's seven twenty-five in the evening on Vashon Island (and it is right now), then it's – um – wait – one twenty-five Saturday afternoon in Sydney. So it's already more than halfway through May 21 there. Maybe I should give them a call and see how they're doing. What if they don't answer?
That simple rule is simple because it's not accurate, by the way. Sometimes we're on Daylight Savings Time, sometimes we're off, and the same is true for Sydney, Australia. So sometimes we're seventeen hours behind them and sometimes we're nineteen hours behind them. Occasionally eighteen hours is correct, but I get confused trying to figure it out.
I made a chart after our friends moved to Australia. I listed all the hours of the day in the first column to show what time it was on Vashon Island. Then I did comparative columns of what time it was in Sydney on Daylight Savings Time (nineteen hours ahead), what time it was there off Daylight Savings Time (seventeen hours ahead), and what time it was there if Daylight Savings Time didn't matter, when we're both on it or off it, during overlapping weeks that sometimes occur (eighteen hours ahead). This chart was meant to keep me from making a friendly telephone call that woke them up at four in the morning, which I did once, and I could tell it was not appreciated. Friendship is all well and good, and a great thing, but there are boundaries.
I can tell you as a general rule that it is not a good idea to call Australia from the West Coast of the United States between our three in the morning and let's say our one or two in the afternoon. Observing these guidelines respects the sleep schedule of people living on Sydney time. If you live in some other time zone but the West Coast of the United States, you're on your own. It was hard enough to figure out this much.
Oops – just looked on Facebook, and our god daughter who lives in Cairo, Egypt, has observed that if the end of the world was occurring on Greenwich Mean Time, it's late. Maybe not May 21, after all.
I tend to think that when Jesus said, “no one shall know the hour or the day,” he knew what he was talking about. No one will see it coming. So straighten up and fly right, pal. You never know.
And don't call Australia in the morning.

Happy Birthday, Libbie!

2011-05-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

Our friend Libbie Anthony (that's her on the left in the picture) turns 70 today, May 10, 2011. She sent an email to many people reminding them of this fact and asking them to send her birthday greetings to make it a heck of a day.
She also mentioned that she had recently had a toe amputated. She ignored her diabetes for a few years, and regrets that now.
Lib & I used to sing together with Velvet Neifert as the trio Women, Women & Song. We sang our way up and down the West Coast all through the 1980s. It was a great ride, mostly, like all of life.
Two things I ask of my friends who read this: First, don't get all bent out of shape because I wrote a poem for Libbie's birthday and not for yours. If you want a poem, ask me, and I'll write one. Second, don't go chopping off any body parts in hopes that you'll inspire me. I mean, eew. Just email me or call and tell me what's been going on and I'll see what I can cook up for you. And remember, it takes time and effort to write even bad poetry.
Let's get to it. Here is Libbie's 70th Birthday poem:

In Memory of a Missing Toe
On the Occasion of the 70th Birthday
of Elizabeth Whitman Anthony

Oh late lamented toe!
That once with me did caper
With nail painted red
With graceful girlish taper

I took you as my due
The docs took you, you're gone
You've hit the finish line while all
The rest of me goes on

Ne'er again the other nine
To march with their comrade true
Ne'er again when I'm alert
Shall I be on my you

So thank you for the many years
The many miles you granted
I'll face the future without you
Albeit somewhat slanted.

Happy Birthday & Many Happy Returns
from Yr. Friend
Mary Litchfield Tuel


Grandma's Diary: Nine

2011-05-09T11:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Allysan,
When I started writing a column for the Vashon Loop nine years ago I wrote about you and titled the column, “Grandma's Diary.” You were my newborn grand daughter then, and the apple of my eye.
You gave me a lot of material to write about when you were small.
There was the time you threw the package of ramen noodles into the dishwasher when I wasn't looking and I didn't find out until after the load was done washing. Man, those noodles were clean.
Then there was the time I went to the bathroom, leaving my laptop computer out, and when I came back not three minutes later, you were busy writing on the computer screen with a black marker. When you saw me, you dropped the marker, said, “I done,” and ran away. I went to look at the computer and found you had colored almost the entire screen black.
Handy tip: acetone will remove black marker from a computer screen, but try not to inhale the fumes.
We had a lot of fun together back in the day. Once you and I traveled to California to visit my cousin Nancy, and coming home Nancy rode up the coast with us. The three of us went swimming in a motel pool in Crescent City. Like your dad and your uncle when they were little, you enjoyed riding on my back like a cow girl as I plunged through the water.
After a few years I decided not to write stories about you for the paper any more. I figured it was hard enough growing up in a small town, without having people know stories about you and come up to you in the store or at school and say, “You're the girl who...” whatever the story was. I made this decision after a woman came up to us at the supermarket one day, looked at you, and said, “Oh, you're that naughty little girl!” She was kidding around, but I figured you didn't need anyone saying anything like that to you, even kidding.
Now you are about to turn nine. You are half-way to eighteen, which is considered adult in many ways. I thought I was adult when I was eighteen. Now in my 60s I think people in their 40s are kids, so an eighteen-year-old is practically a baby. When you are eighteen, you will not think you are a baby.
When your father turned nine I remember the shock of realizing that he was halfway to adulthood and I hadn't done a fraction of the things I'd wanted to do with him. We never drove a van across the country to visit all the parks and monuments and historical sites I wanted to see and show to him. We didn't go live on the beach in Mexico for six months so we could all learn to speak Spanish. Stuff like that. We did once take a train trip across the country and back, visiting family in Ohio and New Mexico, and we drove to California to visit the grand parents several times, so we did some traveling. It's just that I had these ideas about what I wanted to do with my kids, that's all, and when your dad turned nine I realized that there was so much I'd never get done.
Now we're sitting here on the couch together and you're watching me write this letter about your turning nine, which you're going to do any minute now, and I find myself thinking of the things I wish I could do with you – train trips, road trips. I wish I could be like Auntie Mame (I'll explain who Auntie Mame was later) and take you to see the wonderful things this world has to offer, the places and people. But instead you have to stay here and finish second grade.
That's life. We dream about flying to Maui, but we have to stay home to finish second grade, and turn nine with our mom and dad and grandmas and grand dads and our friends around us to eat cake and give us presents and wish us well and try as much as possible to make right where we are the best place for a beloved child to grow up.
We grandparents know that at nine you will not be a child much longer. Adolescence will soon begin creeping in, and then you'll be a teenager, and the beautiful talented brilliant child you are will be gone forever. Instead you'll be a beautiful talented brilliant young woman, but you know what? I can wait for that. I can wait, and I can savor this brief time before you emerge from childhood.
In closing, I want to say: you rock, grand daughter, you rock now and you always will, and I am so blessed, so fortunate, so lucky that I get to know you. Happy Birthday. Love, Grandma

Doggerel and Other Invasive Species

2011-04-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

It's been a good week for doggerel here at Casa Tuel. It started out innocently enough. It began as I was digging out buttercups:
The buttercup, a pretty flower
Bright and cheerful in the yard
Once it's rooted in your garden
Getting rid of it is hard.

Hardly Shakespeare, but it amused me and led to other rhymes:
Morning glory climbs the fences
Choking out the plants you want
You can pull and pull and pull
But get rid of it you cahn't.

After that I was on a roll:
Blackberries grow arching canes
That will rip you with their thorns
You might think that you have killed them
But next spring, ta-da, reborn.

Dandelions dot the yard
Golden flowers, gossamer spheres
Blowing in the summer breeze
Multiplying every year

Quack grass frolics through the orchard
Sending rootlets underground
I believe there is one plant that's
Sprouting up the world around

Ivy, once put in on purpose
Chokes the land with vines and leaves
Housing raccoons, eating houses
Sucking life out of the trees

Scotch broom ate the horse's pasture
Now it's started on the lawn
Push it back with a bulldozer
And delude yourself it's gone

Finally, I was practicing the Irving Berlin song “Easter Bonnet” to sing for a gathering of elders, and found myself writing doggerel to that old tune:
Spring is being tardy at starting up the party
I look out my window and it's raining again
I'm so tired of waiting. The weeds are germinating
But I look out my window and it's raining again
In the front yard, my front yard
All the soil is soft mud
that's up to the knees
of my old dungarees
Oh, I could use some sunshine
To dry out would be so fine
But I look out my window and it's raining again

You can see how insidious the urge to write doggerel can become. I pass the bug along to you. Go ye forth and write bad rhymes! It's something to do while you wait for the rain to let up. Cheers.

In Memory of Megan

2011-04-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

Megan Belia died this week. We hoped she'd have a little longer, but nope.
So now we tell the stories.
A few years ago as we first got to know each other, Megan and I realized that we both knew Malvina Reynolds in the 1970s. Megan did the artwork for one of Malvina's album covers.
Megan and her family lived in Montana then, and gave Malvina a place to stay when she came up to Montana to perform.
The leader of the local John Birch Society where she was playing knew about Malvina's political beliefs. She was open about that. She was a socialist. Yup, a real one who had read all the books and grown up in what came to be known in this country as the Old Left. The John Birch guy was outraged that she was coming to sing her songs. Shot off his mouth about how awful she was to anyone who'd listen, apparently.
The night of the show this stalwart defender of capitalism showed up, and someone pointed him out to Malvina, who walked toward him with a smile and her hand extended in a friendly greeting.
“He jumped over two rows of chairs to get away from her,” Megan said. “He was terrified of her.” The power of a little old lady with white hair and a guitar is more than you'd imagine, apparently. Something to think about.
After her marriage ended Megan became a nurse practitioner whose specialty was obstetrics and gynecology. By the time she came to Vashon to be close to family a few years ago, she had retired on disability. She lived quietly in a small apartment with her service dog, Charlie. Charlie was a crested Chinese hairless that she had rescued, and Megan said that she and Charlie supported one another mutually. Having him with her enabled her to go out in public and be around people. Her doctor certified Charlie as a service dog.
Megan became involved at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit and did a lot of volunteer work, in the community, at the nursing home, and through the church. She became a lay pastoral counselor. No matter how crappy her own life or health was, she'd call you up and say, “How are you?” and really want to know.
She had Charlie with her one day when I went to meet another friend at a restaurant, which I shall not name. It's not even there anymore.
Megan and Charlie joined my friend and me at our table, and we were having a nice visit when the waiter came up and told Megan that she and her dog would have to leave. She explained that Charlie was a service dog, and she refused to leave.
Well, that's when the stuff hit the fan. The restaurant manager who was there had a fit and fell in it. He came to the table and spoke angrily to us, ordering us out. Megan tried to explain that service dogs were allowed to be in restaurants. I tried to explain that Charlie was legally the same as a seeing eye dog. He threatened that he would call the sheriff and have us arrested.
Megan said calmly, “Well, I guess today's the day I go to jail.”
No law enforcement officers ever arrived. If they were indeed called perhaps they understood better than the manager that Megan was right, and had the law on her side. Not only are service animals allowed in restaurants, all that restaurant personnel are legally allowed to ask is, “Is this a service animal?” If the answer is yes, they are legally obliged to bugger off and leave the animal and disabled person unmolested. They cannot ask for proof of the animal's status. They cannot throw the animal or its owner out. It's a law created to prevent the harassment of disabled people, the kind of harassment we experienced that day, or worse.
That was my great adventure with Megan. I wrote about it in the Loop at the time. I didn't use her name, but the people who knew her knew who I was talking about. The last time I saw her she told me it was one of the most traumatic events of her life.
That is why there is a law against harassing people with service animals. A disabled person who needs a service animal to function in the world has enough trouble, without being treated like a criminal.
She told me soon after going into hospice care, “Once in a while I'm angry with the cards I've been dealt. I have to say good-bye to people I love. That leaves the pain issue, and the breathing, which are being taken care of by medication here in the hospice. I'm not in pain. I'm not afraid to die.”
Which brought to mind one of Malvina Reynolds' songs. I went to the hospice and sang it for Megan and some of the other residents a couple of weeks ago:
“Baby, I ain't afraid to die, it's just that I hate to say good-bye
To this world, this world, this world.
This old world is mean and cruel. Still I love it like a fool,
This world, this world, this world.” - This World, © Malvina ReynoldsRest in peace, Megan.

Ralph and Minnie and Mr. P

2011-02-25T13:39:00.000-08:00

This story is a lie. It is a lie because I cannot remember the detailed true separate stories I am amalgamating here into one, untrue story. Got it? OK.
Once there was a couple, who, for the purposes of this untrue story, were named “Ralph” and “Minnie.” They had lived good hardworking lives, and retired comfortably on Ralph's pension and their savings.
Look, I told you this story wasn't true.
In retirement they settled in the pleasant land of northern California, on the outskirts of an old Spanish town. They found a house that suited them, with neighbors close enough that they did not feel isolated, and far enough away that they did not feel crowded.
A creek flowed along the rear of their property. Over the years animals would walk up from the creek into their yard, stray cats and raccoons, mostly.
One autumn a peacock came bobbing up out of the creek. It was a gorgeous creature, and Minnie loved it. She bought some corn to throw to it, and whether it was the food, or for some slightly more skewed reason, the peacock stayed.
Minnie called him Mr. P, and all that winter he graced their back yard. They asked around to see if anyone had lost a peacock, but no one claimed Mr. P.
Minnie was an artist, and Mr. P was a flamboyant model. She sketched him as she looked through the windows, and in the spring she set an easel up in the yard to do a painting of him.
Alas, in the spring a peacock's fancy turns to thoughts of love, and he fell for Minnie, hard. His tail would come up in a spectacular display of feathers when he saw her. This was fine until Mr. P tried to mount Minnie, which scared her.
Now Mr. P became her jailer. She couldn't go out into the backyard to tend plants, or hang clothes out to dry, or throw the compost away, or paint some other subject than the peacock for Mr. P would immediately force his attentions upon her. The situation was untenable.
Ralph and Minnie found no help for their problem. No one wanted Mr. P.
But he had to go. Finally they heard of a bird sanctuary a few hours' drive away. They figured they had their solution, but how to capture and transport the large amorous bird? I don't know who came up with a solution, but finally they had a plan, and they put it to work.
They soaked some feed corn in bourbon. It might have been vodka, but this is my lie, and I like bourbon, so hush.
The morning came when they were ready to move Mr. P out of their lives. They put the soaked corn out in a pie plate, and Mr. P obligingly came and gobbled it down. And seemed fine. Just their luck to get a peacock that could handle his liquor. They put out more corn, and the bird didn't mind if he did, and ate all that. At this point he began to stagger, and wobble, and passed out.
Ralph and Minnie sprang into action. They ran out to the unconscious bird and put a t-shirt on him in order to keep his wings subdued should he wake up. Minnie knotted the hem of the shirt to make sure he was tightly held, and they loaded him in the back of their station wagon and set off for the sanctuary.
All was well for the first hour or two of the trip, and then they heard Mr. P stirring in the back. As they drove on it became obvious that Mr. P was a surly drunk.
Finally they arrived at the sanctuary – only to find it was closed. Minnie nearly burst into tears. Now what?
Ralph told her he had a plan, and this was it: he would carry Mr. P to the high fence of the sanctuary and drop him over the top. Minnie's job would be to remove the t-shirt at the last second. Would the sanctuary people even notice one more peacock?
As Ralph hoisted Mr. P to the top of the fence the bird began to struggle violently. Minnie tried to get the t-shirt off in vain. Mr. P pulled free, tipped over the top of the fence, and fell with a thud to the ground. Ralph and Minnie were horrified. But Mr. P. began to struggle, trying to get up. Ralph and Minnie looked at each other and their two minds were of one accord. They dashed back to the station wagon and lit out of there.
That summer they would go out to their peacock-free patio in the cool of the evening, have glasses of wine, and speculate on what the sanctuary workers must have thought, encountering a hungover peacock in a t-shirt in their enclosure, but of course they would never know. They wished Mr. P all the best, and hoped he had met the peahen of his dreams, but they never went back to find out if he had. That would have been silly.

Island Legends: the Secret Ferry

2011-02-12T10:20:00.000-08:00

Drawing by Rick Tuel
Smart Aleck note: this column dates from 2003. Like everyone else on Vashon Island, I am sick and did not feel up to writing a new column this week, so here is a rerun that is a particular favorite of mine. Hope you enjoy it.

The story as I heard it went like this: a few years ago, one Sunday morning, a Big Important Business Man was having brunch at Sound Food. His cell phone rang. He answered it, and received a Very Important Business Call.
He needed to get to an Important Business Meeting off the island. He went up to the hostess and asked, “What's the quickest way to get off the island?” The hostess told him to head north on the road outside the restaurant until he came to the ferry dock, and then wait for the next ferry, and he should be able to get off the island in an hour or so.
The Big Important Business Man was distressed. An hour? That was much too long. He had Important Business and had to get to the mainland right away, and wasn't there a quicker way to get there than the ferry?
No, the hostess told him. The ferry was the only way off the island.
“OK,” he said. “I know how things work in places like this. Where is the secret ferry?”
“The what?” asked the hostess.
“The secret ferry,” he said, “the one only you islanders know about so you can get off the island any time you want to.”
The hostess was non-plussed. She explained that there is no secret ferry, only the public state ferries that come to the ferry docks.
The man refused to believe her. He insisted that there must be a secret ferry. She was concealing the information because we islanders were selfishly keeping it to ourselves and didn't want anyone else to know. He was too smart to be tricked, he said. He wasn't born yesterday, he said.
Finally, in exasperation, the hostess said, “OK, OK, you're right. I can't fool you. There is a secret ferry.”
He smiled in victory. “Where is it?”
So she told him how to drive down to Manzanita Beach.
He left, and did not return.
End of story.
A friend told me that story in the supermarket. She said she had heard it from the grand daughter of another friend. I called my friend, the grand mother, and asked her where she got the story. She said her son was working as a chef at Sound Food at the time of the incident, and he had told her the story.
Soon after that I ran into my friend's son and I asked him about the story. He confirmed that the story was true, although he wasn't sure if the hostess had sent the man to Manzanita or Point Robinson.
He said that for a while after that the staff at Sound Food joked about “bippies,” or “Big Important People.”
This island legend was fairly easy to track because I knew all the people in the chain of the story's telling. I wanted to track it down because when I heard it, it sounded like one of those urban legends, a fantastic story that is supposed to be true. These stories begin: “This is a true story! It happened to my cousin's step-brother's next door neighbor's dog trainer's niece...” and goes on from there.
Many of these stories circulate on the internet. I have learned to check with snopes.com before believing anything I read, because I hate to pass on rumors, libel, and outright lies.
Island legends are easier to trace than urban legends. For example, I believe it is true that the late Joe Chambers set a ferry dock to ferry dock land speed record of 9 minutes. His friends have confirmed this. He did it late at night and had his friends posted at intersections to make sure no one would turn onto the highway and get in the way. This was a few decades ago. It was a different time, the island was a different place, that place I moved to 40 years ago. It doesn't exist any more.

I'm Tired, I'm Tired, I'm Tired

2011-01-31T10:42:00.000-08:00

Photo: Southern Pacific publicity photo of a Daylight locomotive

There was a program on channel 9 the other night about the Daylight, the Southern Pacific passenger train that ran between Los Angeles and San Francisco between 1937 and 1971, when Amtrak took over passenger service. Trains still run, but not the Daylight.
The trains were striking in appearance, red and orange along the sides and black on top and bottom, with matching specially built steam engines, so the train was one matching design from beginning to end.
I grew up in Watsonville, California, which was on the main line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Everywhere in the Pajaro Valley you could hear the train whistles blow as trains came into the station. My father's sister Thelma and her husband Ray had a farm over on the Monterey County side of the Pajaro River and the trains ran along the edge of their fields. I remember how thrilling it was to see those red and orange trains go by, the engines puffing clouds of smoke. It was the beginning of train love for me.
This documentary came on, and I was completely caught up in memories of passenger trains. The show featured many clips of the Daylight chugging through the California landscape. In the background were the hills and valleys and seashore of California. These sights were so familiar to me, and brought up so many memories of my misspent youth and the beautiful places where I misspent it. The low round hills of the Pajaro Valley were the background of my childhood, surrounding me every day like the arms of God. Seeing them once again in the background of the train movies connected me to something inside that is deeper than words.
I spoke about that connection to my husband, Rick, and by email to his friend, Hutch. Rick and Hutch were both Army brats who lived all over the world growing up. They met in Germany when they were in high school, and they played and sang folk music together with a third member, Terry MacNeil, as The Balladiers. Yes, spelled with an “i.” Talking to Rick and Hutch about trains set off their memories.
Hutch wrote: “Sometimes, as a family, we would have a compartment, and other times, berths. Either way as a kid I always managed to get the upper. Can you imagine the intimacy of changing into pajamas, passing others in the narrow passageway to and from the bathroom? At least once a trip the train would lurch and you'd fall through the little blue curtain onto who ever's bunk you'd be passing.”
Rick wrote: “We must be the last generation to carry such fondness of memory for the era of passenger trains. I'm glad you took the boys back* so they can carry some memory of that time. I developed my love of the 'I'm tireds'** not from watching them pass through but from riding them.
“I never saw a more beautifully evolved choo-choo than the European zigzag trains with their passenger cars all fitted out like lovely wooden jewelry boxes with thousands of different doors and drawers.
“The diesel electrics were a real innovation but nothing said 'train' like the big, noisy, hissing steam locomotives.”
*In 1993, I took our sons on a train trip. We went from Seattle to Chicago on the Empire Builder, then from Chicago to Akron on another train. We visited with Rick's relatives in Ohio, then caught the train back to Chicago and from there caught the train to Los Angeles, stopping to visit my brother and sister-in-law in Raton, New Mexico, along the way. From LA we took what is now called the Starlight up the coast to Seattle. It was a grand trip that took about three weeks and we still talk about it.
**When Rick was a little boy in Ohio, his grandfather would put him to bed at night and tell him about the steam engines chugging along saying, “I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm tired...” Rick said it didn't take long for him to drop off, and ever since he has thought of steam engines as the “I'm tireds.”

The End of Blackadder Goes Forth

2011-01-20T18:45:00.000-08:00

Photo: the cast of Blackadder Goes Forth getting ready to go over the top
Today was a day for sorting through paper, throwing stuff away until my brain got too numb to go on, trying to get ready to do income taxes.
I had “Blackadder Goes Forth” running on Netflix on my computer, as company while I worked. This series is set in the trenches of World War I, and I've seen parts of it before. It first ran on the BBC in the United Kingdom in the autumn of 1989, and unlike the three previous Blackadder series it had an antiwar stance. In the last episode, all the fooling around and smart ass remarks are done and the characters go over the top into No Man's Land. And that's how the show and the series ended.
Blackadder's last line, after Baldrick says he has a cunning plan to escape, is: "Well, I am afraid it will have to wait. Whatever it was, I am sure it was better than my plan to get out of this by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman around here? Good luck, everyone."
World War I, or The Great War, as it was then, the "war to end all wars," truly was devastating to Britain, and the Blackadder series honored that at the end. I was seeing it twenty-one years after it first aired. This ending is famous, at least among some people, but I had never seen it before and it touched me deeply - and left me feeling deeply sad.
And I still feel that way.

Drying the Dog

2011-01-16T21:50:00.000-08:00

Photo by Laurie Shepherd Heath, photographer extraordinaire

Every time Jive the dog comes in these days he's sopping wet. He smells great, too. Well, he puts off a great smell.
There is a pile of old towels by the door, and a folding chair for me to sit in, and we have a few minutes of communion. I throw a towel over him from head to tail, and then commence rubbing him down and drying him off, and telling him what a good boy he is. This praise is most important when I get to his feet.
There may be dogs who like to have their feet messed with, but Jive is not one of those dogs. It is the foot drying that makes him start to walk away. He especially dislikes it when I run the towel between his toes, and try to get the mud loose from his claws. So I've learned to say, "Good boy, good boy," to him while I perform this delicate maneuver. That seems to calm him and get us through the tedious business.
Then when I'm done and he's only slightly damp and his paws don't leave little mud prints on the floor I sit back, and he stands there looking at me expectantly. Usually I'll throw another towel over his head and rub down his head and back again. We both enjoy that part.
Finally I say, "That's it," and we are done. He looks at me to make sure I really mean it, and walks off to whatever corner of the couch he has in mind.
When my husband dries Jive, he usually reminisces fondly about Sadie, our Doberman mix, who passed on a few years ago. When he was drying Sadie off, he would say, "Footy," and she would obligingly raise a paw for him to dry. She didn't like it, but she understood the necessity. Dobermans have reasoning powers.
Jive is a Lab mix, and is not burdened with reasoning powers.
While animals have always been a part of our family, we are not of the persuasion that animals are our babies or children. We had babies and children; animals are animals, with definite animal personalities and natures, and we love and respect them as such. Rick says now that after Jive goes, he would like to have no more dogs, or cats, or rabbits, or rats, or mice, or guinea pigs, or gold fish, all of which have lived with us over the years.
I understand his reasoning: you get so attached to them (except for some of those awful killer rabbits), and then they die. That's the main reason. Rick is tired of having his heart broken. Also there is maintenance and money. We're at an age and stage of life when we need to take care of ourselves, and animal companions take time and care. You have to train a dog, you have to clean the cat's litter box, and you have to pay for food and vet bills. Dogs chew things up, and dig up the yard, and run off and roll in disgusting rotten things and come home grinning. Cats leave disgusting things in the middle of your bed. Worst of all, you will probably have to make the decision to have an animal put down at the end of its life.
Sometimes as I'm toweling Jive down I'm thinking, he may be the last dog. It makes me a little sad, and it even makes getting the mud off his feet a sweet chore. It's a sad part of growing older, realizing that you are doing things for the last time, and that parts of your life are gone forever.
Then I think, I'll bet if I brought home a cat or a dog, Rick would fall in love with it and they'd hang out together. Maybe if as I presented it I said, "Good husband, good husband?" That might calm him down.
Don't tell him I'm thinking this, though. I want it to be a surprise.

How Did You Come to Vashon Island?

2010-12-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

I had dreams about the island and Mt. Rainier all that summer.

I love to hear people tell how they stumbled on this island, and ended up living here. Here, I'll get the conversational ball rolling:
When I was going to school at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California, back in the 60s, I was in a country-folk-rock band. The band consisted of Van, my sweetheart, on lead guitar, me as chick singer, Randy on rhythm guitar and dobro, Bruce as bass player, and a long line of drummers who came and went. That was when I learned that drummers as a rule are goofy, to put it mildly. I don't mean to impugn the whole class of percussionists, I'm just saying that rock drummers are predictably unpredictable.
Anyway – Randy met a married couple named Marc and Chrissie who were also old-timey musicians. Marc played wicked fiddle, Chrissie played banjo and guitar and autoharp and they both sang. We became friends and played music together, until Van and I moved to Los Angeles in 1969 to become rock stars.
Seriously. That was the plan.
After that Randy played gigs in San Luis Obispo with Marc and Chrissie. In 1971, just before I moved out of LA, I got a letter from Bruce the bass player. He said, "Bummer in the summer. Marc and Chrissie have moved to Seattle." Marc had apparently graduated from Cal Poly – who saw that coming? - and acquired a job up in Seattle.
Sometime around Christmas 1971 I received a letter from Marc. He and Chrissie had moved to an island, the letter said, and had met a couple of musicians who lived there. They were planning to build a concrete sailboat and sail around the world playing music, but they needed a singer. Marc invited me to visit. No one had ever literally invited me to sail off into the sunset before, so I quit my job, packed my '58 Chevy with a few necessary belongings, and drove up for a visit.
I arrived at the Fauntleroy ferry dock on April 16, 1972. Once on Vashon I followed the traffic up the highway, and it was right around the nursing home and the Episcopal Church that I knew: this is home.
I drove up to the main intersection, and using the pay phone there called my friends to let them know I had arrived. About 12 minutes later, up drove a VW beetle with a police car paint job - white doors, blue fenders, and eagle decals on the doors - with Chrissie waving at me over the shoulder of the young hippie driving. She jumped out of the car and introduced me to Rick Tuel. Yes, he was the very first person I met on the island, but we didn't get married until seven years later. Slow learners.
Now, there is quite a convoluted tale of that trip, but we'll skip that for now. I returned to California after a couple of weeks, but the island had taken hold in me. I had dreams about the island and Mt. Rainier all that summer.
In November of that year, I came back and decided I would move here. On January 4, 1973, I started driving north and arrived here on January 5 after driving all night through a snow storm. I had about $37 to my name. I moved into a house full of hippies, and stayed.
Interesting (to me) fact: my first son was born exactly nine years later on January 5, 1982, during a snow storm. Second interesting (to me) fact: my first boy friend on Vashon Island moved off the island after we broke up and went on to be Microsoft employee number 9.
A question I've never been able to answer is how Marc and Chrissie got here, because they soon got S-A-V-E-D and moved off the island to join a large evangelical church which later dissolved in lawsuits and acrimony. They got me here, though, and I never left.
So what's your island story?

Eventually This Gets to John Browne

2010-12-09T22:46:00.000-08:00

There was a column on my computer, almost ready to go. All I had to do was the final tweaking. I got up this morning, came in to finish the column, turned on the computer, and was greeted by a big red window telling me that my computer files were infected with a Trojan horse.
And that, my friends, was that. My computer was frozen solid. It would not work in my house, it would not work for the mouse. I did not like it.
I shut it down manually and unplugged all the peripherals. It's out in my car now, waiting to be transported to the computer hospital.
One of my first thoughts was, I haven't had this much trouble since I used Macs. I started out on Apple computers because I'd heard they were superior, more user-friendly, didn't get viruses, and didn't crash as often as PCs. Anti-virus sales people always tried to convince me to buy anti-virus programs for my Macs. I did that once. Put an anti-virus program on my Mac. The computer immediately crashed and had to be taken to the Apple computer hospital.
While Macs may be more immune to virus infections, what I found was that they “corrupted.” One little piece of data would mutate, and pretty soon the whole hard drive had a cascade of mutations and the computer would crash and have to be taken...well, you get the picture.
I know that Mac users are devoted to their computers and I'm not trying to argue with anyone. I'm only saying that my Macs crashed a lot more than my PCs. In eight years of using a PC, this is the first time one has contracted a virus. Apparently anti-virus software actually functions on PCs. Except this time. Oh well. Off to the computer hospital.
What am I writing this on? My Netbook, which runs on Linux, which is looking pretty good to me right now. Except all the games seem to involve penguins, for some reason.
Now, an explanatory note for those of you who do not live on the island and don't know what happened to John Browne: on November 22, there was a snow and wind storm that hit the island. A tree fell down across 111th Ave SW, down the hill from the home of John and Vicki Browne. John decided to go down the hill and clear the tree off of the road. He took his chainsaw and went to work. While he was working a driver came along, lost control, and hit the tree. The tree pushed the chainsaw handle into John's mid-section, damaging his small intestine, and bruising his liver, lungs and heart (so I heard - not too sure about injuries to those organs) and shattering his left elbow. He was taken to Tacoma General Hospital because the bridges from West Seattle to Seattle were closed that night with ice, and Coast Guard helicopters could not fly in the storm.
He had surgery to remove some of his small intestine and stitch it back together, and another surgery to put his elbow back together. He was in the ICU about a week then moved to another room, and I last heard that he was going to a recovery facility, or perhaps to one of his children's homes, or even home with Vicki. I don't know the whole straight story but the fact is that he's improving. Now he and Vicki need a little help.
There's a benefit for John Browne at the Red Bicycle on Saturday, December 18. Drop by and support John & Vicki. They have given the island the benefit of their good selves for many years; let's benefit them. Whether you come or not, you can send money to the fund for John Browne at US Bank, P O Box 428, Vashon WA 98070.
Factoid: the first time I met John Browne was when I picked him and another guy up hitch hiking at the intersection of Haight Street and Fillmore in 1966.
Final words for 2010: Merry Christmas, or Solstice, or Kwanzaa (Hannukah's already gone by), and stay warm with your loved ones, Islanders.

How I Write a Blog

2010-11-27T00:22:00.000-08:00

Photo: Blogger at work

A young friend who is a graduate student has asked me about the process of writing and posting a blog.
First: I need an idea. Sometimes ideas are handed to me, like “how I write a blog.” Thank you, Amelia.
Sometimes I am interested in something, and I do some research and write about that subject. Case in point: the recent series of columns on the pioneers who developed treatments for renal failure.
Those columns also tapped my personal experience. Personal experience is a rich source of material, and I've now lived long enough and done enough that I can tell stories until everyone in the room is asleep with their mouths open and drool running out.
Occasionally something will happen that catches my attention so vividly I write about it. Latest example: a few months ago President Obama was in town, and some poor guy in a private plane didn't know that the air space over Seattle was restricted during the President's visit. Two military jets scrambled from Portland and flew up here so fast that they caused a couple of sonic booms which (a) shook our whole house, and (b) scared the bewhatsis out of a lot of people in the Puget Sound, thereby causing the 911 system in Tacoma and other areas to crash from the call overload.
So, I get the idea and I start writing. My most used reference is my dictionary. That tells me if I'm using the exact word that conveys my meaning, and how it is spelled. Spell check can be helpful, but it will make suggestions like “collisions” when I really mean Colossians, a book of the Bible. Funny, but not helpful.
Online is my second go-to after the dictionary. I go to several different sites about any given subject because I've found they will say slightly different things and I'm looking for a consensus of information that will be as factual as I can make it.
The writing process is a combination of writing, tweaking what I've written, staring out the window without seeing anything, and looking things up.
I write a first draft that includes everything. Anne Lamott says, “Write a shitty first draft.” (Asterisks were supplied here in the printed version of this column in The Loop, in consideration of Loop readers' tender sensibilities) Anyway, Anne Lamott is right. I write a first draft, then I let that draft sit for an unspecified length of time, anywhere from long enough to eat breakfast to a couple of days. When I come back to it, the serious tweaking and cutting begin.
William F. Buckley said, “Be grateful for every word you cut.” I doubt if Bill and I agreed on much, but that is my number one rule as a writer.
So, I come back to the first draft with refreshed eyes, and cut, re-write, edit and proofread until I'm satisfied. That can take hours, or days.
Sometimes I'll write a whole piece, think about it, and throw it out. Oh well.
It is good to have a photo or illustration with a blog. I prefer to use a photo I have taken, or, if I'm lucky, a drawing my husband has done. Rick's cartoons always have humor, which can range from whimsical to perverse, and I have learned to trust his instincts for what a 'toon should be, even if I'm slightly horrified when he tells me what he's going to draw.
Now I'm going to go eat breakfast.
Okay, I'm back. When I think the piece is as succinct and clear as it is going to get, I post it. I go to my blog page, paste the copy in, upload images, and hit “Publish.” Then I read it and find the typos I couldn't see before. When I'm satisfied with the post, I send out a blog alert to an email list of people who might want to read it. Then I'm free for a while, until the need to write reasserts itself.
That's my process. The blog address is right here, if you're reading this. Thanks for asking.
Post Script: when this was published in The Loop, the caption of the photo said, "Bloger at work." I went back and checked my email from when I sent my column in, and I had typed "Blogger at work." So between my email and publication, the editor had dropped a "g" from the word "blogger." Now, if I had made the typo after writing about how I tried to catch all my typos, that would be ironic. If the editor of the paper, who is supposed to catch and correct mistakes, actually puts a mistake in, that's another kind of ironic, and completely out of my control. So it goes. Sigh.

Kidney Transplants: Not a Cure

2010-11-06T00:03:00.001-07:00

Rick Tuel: water worker, cartoonist, end stage renal disease patient, modern medical miracle. Photo by Mary

The first thing the Northwest Kidney Center tells you about having a kidney transplant is that it is not a cure; however, it is the most effective treatment for kidney failure we have at present.
The major obstacle to successful kidney transplants is the recipient's body's rejection of the new kidney as a foreign object. People who have kidney transplants must take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives. That is why a transplant is not a cure.
When transplant surgery was new, it was only done from living donors, and between close matches such as identical twins. The development of anti-rejection protocols made it possible for kidneys to be taken from cadavers for transplantation, so now transplanted kidneys come from both living and deceased donors.
Kidneys from living donors tend to last longer than kidneys from deceased donors, but how long a kidney will last is an unknown. Kidneys from cadavers tend to last 15 to 20 years; kidneys from living donors tend to last longer, and there are people who have been going with a transplanted kidney for thirty and forty-plus years, but some kidneys fail immediately, or within a few years. You never know.
Sometimes living donors donate in a “chain.” Say your best friend Ralph needs a kidney, and you'd like to donate, but your blood and tissue don't match Ralph's. So you donate your kidney to someone who is your match, and a friend or relative of theirs donates a kidney to someone else who is their match, and so on, until some friend or relative of a kidney recipient is a match for Ralph, who finally gets a kidney.
Experience seems to indicate that the majority of kidney donors do fine with only one kidney, and both donors and recipients are required to go through rigorous testing and screening. It costs donors money to donate, by the way. That doesn't seem fair, but there it is.
Potential kidney recipients can be turned down for a variety of reasons. From what we heard at the Kidney Center, you have to be in the pink of health, except of course for your non-functioning kidneys. The committees that decide who will get a transplant do not want to “waste” a kidney when there are so many more people who need kidneys than there are kidneys to transplant. Many people who get on the waiting list for a kidney wait for years. Some don't live long enough to get a kidney.
The immune suppressant drugs recipients must take cause problems of their own: infections because the drugs suppress the immune system; sepsis; a form of post-transplant lymphoma (cancer); and side effects such as unwanted hair growth OR loss; obesity; acne; type 2 diabetes; etc.
A major problem with the immune suppressant drugs is that they are expensive. Not having adequate insurance to pay for immune suppressant drugs is a reason for being turned down for a kidney transplant in the United States. This will not seem important to you until you or someone you love needs a kidney.
My husband was diagnosed with end stage renal disease on October 5, 2009. In the last year he has had multiple surgeries and continual tweaking of drugs to keep him going, and he is now on peritoneal dialysis. Because he had cancer last year, he will not be considered for a kidney transplant until he has been cancer-free for two or more years.
It has been a hard year, friends, but we have been carried through it by you and other people as we adjusted to the new normal. Rick is starting to work again, gradually, just a little bit. If you see him out there spraying paint on the road to mark the location of an underground utility, give him a smile and a wave. He and everyone living with kidney disease is a modern medical miracle.

The Holy Halloween Candle Story

2010-10-22T01:13:00.000-07:00

My cousin Charlotte called last night. She said she and Nancy were talking and she remembered the story of the holy Halloween candle, and the two of them decided that she should tell me. So she called, and here is the story, as close as I can make it to Charlotte's telling:
“I don't think you ever went to my house in Tracy. It's an ordinary three-bedroom one-story wood framed house, and it's on a tree-lined street. The whole street is lined with Modesto ash trees.
“Tracy was just a small town when I moved there back in 1977, only about twenty-five thousand people, but now it's grown so much, with condos and shopping malls. There are about 100,000 people there now.
“Around the corner from my house was the Parker Avenue Market, a little mom and pop store. When Nancy and I were kids visiting at Grandma's she'd give us each a nickel and we'd walk to a mom and pop store a couple of blocks from her house for a Popsicle, so we have good memories and we're so fond of mom and pop stores.
“The house had a small front porch, just the tiniest porch, and every Halloween I got the biggest pumpkin I could find and carved it and put it out on that porch where the kids came to trick or treat.
“Well, this one year I went and got this huge pumpkin and I got it all carved and put it out on the porch and then I went to get a candle, and I couldn't find one! So I went to the Parker Avenue Market for a candle.
Parker's Market had every little thing you might need – light bulbs and milk and everything else, but when I got there they only had one candle left, and you know what it was? It was a holy candle. One of the ones in the glass holder.
“Well, here I am, this Christian Baptist Catholic Pentecostal girl looking at this holy candle, and what am I going to do? This is the only candle Parker's has left. So I made the sign of the cross, and I said, “Oh, Lord, please forgive me for this sacrilege.” Then I bought the candle and went back home and put the holy candle inside the pumpkin.
“Pretty soon kids started coming for candy. The little ones came early with their parents, and then as time went on the older kids came. There were a lot of trick or treaters in those days. I think I had close to a hundred and fifty of them.
“It got later, after 8:30, and they weren't coming any more so I decided to turn off the porch light and close up shop. I was getting ready for bed when all of a sudden I remembered the candle.
“Now you know I'm very safety minded, and I was careful with candles because it was a wood frame house with a tree hanging over it, so I didn't want to leave that candle out. So I went out to get the candle to put it away, and it was gone! It had been stolen!
“I never figured out who stole it or why – was it kids being pranksters because it was Halloween? Did someone need a candle? Did they take it because they thought using it in the pumpkin was a sacrilege? Were they just thieves?”
Whatever the reason, that's the only candle that was ever stolen from one of Charlotte's Halloween pumpkins. We'll never know why.
So that, dear hearts, is the story of the holy Halloween candle. Wishing you all a good Halloween however you observe it, and a blessed All Saints' Day on November 1, when we remember all who have passed from us this year and in the years past.

Miracles Have Their Downsides

2010-10-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

Photo: Rick at his first dialysis session one year ago. That's Jean, the RN, reading dialysis educational material to him. Jean experienced acute renal failure and was on dialysis herself a few years ago. She recovered. Many of the people who work with dialysis patients have experienced renal disease themselves or in loved ones.

It is miraculous what medical, scientific, and engineering geniuses have been able to do for people with kidney failure. Millions of lives have been saved by dialysis.
But what is it like to be saved? Fact is, the only reason anyone would do dialysis is to stay alive.
Think about it: your kidneys work every minute of your life, waking and sleeping, filtering out toxins, removing excess fluid (urine) from your body, keeping your body in chemical balance. Dialysis tries to do all that in 12 hours a week – three sessions of four hours each. Your blood gets sucked into tubes, run through filters, treated with various additives. You are tested to monitor blood composition and chemical balances so that kidney techs can do by hand what your kidneys used to do without you having to give it a thought. You have endless medical appointments, exams, tests, and surgical procedures. The medical community is constantly tweaking you, trying to keep you in balance and alive. Fistulas develop aneurysms; you get headaches; you pass out from low blood pressure (the Aid Car is called to the Kidney Center almost every day for a crashing patient); infection is a constant threat; your diet consists of chicken and white bread and not much else.
My husband Rick would go in for dialysis three days a week, and spend the other four days of the week exhausted and recovering from dialysis. When he went on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, his favorite day of the week was Sunday. By then he was somewhat recovered from his Friday dialysis and he didn't have to go anywhere.
Like him, most people who are on dialysis are not able to work. Like him, most have to go on disability, or retire.
Sometimes the techs who hook you up to the dialysis machines don't hit your fistula on the first poke with the size 16 needles. Sometimes they get it wrong and cause an “infiltration” of blood into the tissues of your arm. This happened to Rick early in his dialysis experience, and his entire left forearm turned the color of a ripe plum. We have pictures.

Photo: Rick shows off his fistula

The dialysis techs work hard and have to move fast. They dismantle used tubing and filters after a dialysis session, clean the chair with antiseptic solution, and set up the new, clean, sterile filters, tubing, IV bags, iron and other supplements that are added to the patient's blood. They hook the patient up and monitor the patient – actually, they monitor several patients at a time - during dialysis. They are the foot troops in the battle against kidney failure. I read that they are paid on average $20 to 30 thousand dollars a year.
Have you tried to live on or raise a family on $20 to 30 thousand dollars a year lately? Granted it sounds like a lot of money to me right now, but that's from our perspective here in disability land. I'm saying that it's a shame that people who work so hard and are necessary for the survival of renal patients are paid so poorly. It's part of that inverse economic model we live in where the more important your work is, for example raising children, the less pay and respect you get.
Still, the techs do their jobs as quickly and efficiently as they can, while the patients sit in their individual worlds, reading, watching TV while wearing earphones, or sleeping, while time goes by in an eerie silence broken only by the alarms and beeps of the dialysis machines. Most patients are grateful to be alive. Patients are told that the more you dialyze, the longer you'll live. Dialysis is a miracle.
One day while Rick was waiting for his chair at the Kidney Center a frail lady in a wheel chair who had finished her dialysis was parked next to him. She reached a bony pale hand over and rested it on his arm. “How do you stand it?” she whispered to him. “How do you stand it?”
It's a valid question.
Maybe next time we'll talk about kidney transplants.

Peritoneal Dialysis

2010-09-30T18:39:00.000-07:00

Photo: our Ricky enjoys the overnight cycler. I was going to use this picture for the article in the newspaper, had it all cropped, formatted, and ready to go, then changed my mind because I spotted something in the picture that I didn't think we needed to put in the paper. See if you can spot what it is. Much more private posting the picture on the web, right?

Part three of a series on the treatment of renal failure. Why? Because a year ago my husband's kidneys blinked out like a couple of light bulbs, and renal failure has been the center of our lives since. Writers are always told to “write what you know,” so – renal failure. Part 3:
Peritoneal dialysis (PD) is a way of cleansing the renal patient's blood by putting dialysate, a fancy word for dextrose solution (sugar water), into the peritoneum of the renal patient, letting the solution sit there for a few hours (this is called the “dwell”) pulling toxins and extra fluid across the peritoneal membrane, and then draining the dialysate and putting in fresh dialysate and starting over. No bloodletting involved.
The peritoneum is the cavity in your torso where your vital organs and your intestines live. The cavity is lined by the peritoneal membrane, a sac that holds everything together and is rich in blood vessels.
The problem when PD was first used was that the abdomen had to be freshly punctured (this would be bloodletting) for each dialysis procedure, in effect putting the patient through surgery once or twice a week. Attempts to leave catheters in place were not successful because the site of the puncture or the peritoneum became infected.
PD was being used and improved during the same years as hemodialysis, starting before World War II, but was not used commonly until the 1980s. This was because Henry Tenckhoff designed a catheter that would not cause infection.
Dr. Henry Tenckhoff began working with Belding Scribner at the UW, that hotbed of dialysis research, in 1963. When Tenckhoff began working with PD patients, he had to go to their homes twice a week to perform the minor surgery of inserting a catheter into the patient's abdomen.
Dr. Tenckhoff observed that PD worked well and that PD patients did better in many ways than patients on hemodialysis. Eventually he developed what is now known as the Tenckhoff catheter, which could be placed into a patient's abdomen and left there, and with proper care would not become infected.
The Tenckhoff catheter is a piece of tubing which enters the patient's abdomen and has a coil inside the peritoneum. This inner bit has little holes in it, like drain field pipe on a much smaller scale. The holes facilitate the entry and exit of the dialysate. The outer bit of the catheter is a length of tubing with a connection on the end for attaching a tube to drain and fill the peritoneum.
Once patients have a Tenckhoff catheter placed in their abdomens and they have healed from the surgery, they are trained on how to do PD and then they do it at home, with frequent monitoring by a PD nurse. Testing is done frequently to monitor how the patient is doing and whether dialysis is working. Sterile dialysate is delivered to the patient's home about once a month.
There are two kinds of PD: manual, and machine assisted.
In the manual variety, the patient typically does four exchanges a day in which dialysate is drained from the peritoneum, and fresh dialysate is put in and left in – the “dwell” - for four hours or so, and then drained and replaced. An exchange takes 30 to 40 minutes.
In machine assisted PD, the patient hooks up to a cycler machine at night which does exchanges while the patient sleeps. Unfortunately the machines set off alarms if anything isn't quite right – not enough dialysate draining is the most frequent problem. So these patients might not get much sleep at night.
My husband started on manual PD, which turned out to be a full time job, but now he's on the overnight cycler machine. He feels and looks better than he has since he became ill over a year ago. We like PD, alarms and all.
Not everyone can do PD, but it's an excellent way to go if you can.
Next time: Kidney transplants

Hemodialysis Gets Serious

2010-09-20T12:01:00.000-07:00

Photos, left to right: Dr. Belding Scribner, inventor of the shunt; Wayne Quinton, who built the first shunt; Dr. James Cimino, Dr.Kenneth Appell, and Dr. Michael Brescia, who pioneered the AV fistula which is used for hemodialysis today.

Dr. Willem Kolff built the first dialysis machines, but they were made practical for treating end stage renal failure by Dr. Belding Scribner at the UW.
Scribner grew up in Chicago, got his medical degree at Stanford and did his post-grad work at the Mayo Clinic. He joined the faculty of the School of Medicine at the UW in 1951. Like Dr. Kolff, he was deeply affected by the deaths of renal patients.
Dr. Kolff's dialysis machines could get acute renal failure patients through a crisis until their kidneys began to function again, but patients with end-stage renal disease could not be saved. Surgery to open up access to veins and arteries damaged blood vessels so that after a few treatments it became impossible for doctors to access a patient's blood.
Scribner said that one night in 1959 he woke up with the idea for a shunt in the patient's arm, using plastic tubes, one inserted into an artery and one into a vein, with the tubes connected by a piece of tubing in between dialysis sessions. He brought his idea for the shunt to Wayne Quinton.
Wayne Quinton was a medical engineer at the UW in charge of building, maintaining, and inventing medical instruments for the Medical School. Quinton figured out how to build the shunt Scribner had envisioned. Suddenly it was possible for people to have long-term dialysis, and end stage renal disease went from fatal to treatable.
Right: the Quinton-Scribner shunt

There were only six dialysis machines in Seattle, though, and there were more renal patients than could be treated. Scribner decided that he would not make the decision of who would get dialysis. A committee was formed to review cases and decide who would receive treatment. The formation of this committee is recognized as the beginning of bioethics. Such committees decide who will and will not receive organ transplants, for example.
Dr. Scribner worked with the King County Medical Society to found the Seattle Artificial Kidney Center, which became the Northwest Kidney Centers, in January, 1962. It was the first out-patient dialysis center, and was the model for how hemodialysis is done today. Currently any patient who needs dialysis gets dialysis.
Scribner and Quentin had revolutionized hemodialysis, but the shunt had problems – clots tended to form in the tubing, for example.
Comes now Dr. Kenneth Appell, who grew up in Queens, New York. After serving in the Navy in the South Pacific during World War II, he returned to New York to complete his medical and surgical training.
Dr. Appell installed many of the Scribner shunts, but was not happy with the problems they had, chiefly clotting in the tubing. He came to believe that it would be possible to create an arteriovenus (AV) fistula in a renal patient's arm. This means that an artery would be stitched together with a vein, with a hole (fistula) in between that would allow arterial blood to flow directly into the vein, thereby avoiding the problems of the shunts. Arterial pressure on the vein causes it to enlarge. It takes weeks to months for a fistula to “mature,” but then two needles can be inserted into the vein regularly to remove blood for dialysis and put the filtered blood back into the patient's body. This is the “gold standard” for hemodialysis today.
Two of Appel's interns, Drs. James Cimino and Michael Brescia, began doing Dr. Appell's AV fistula surgery in 1966.
Right: a drawing showing how an AV fistula is constructed within the arm

Since the 1960s, millions of lives have been saved by hemodialysis and the techniques developed by Drs. Scribner, Appell, Cimino, and Brescia and their teams.
As for Wayne Quinton – in 1959 he quit his job at the UW and started a business called Quinton Instruments to market his inventions which the UW declined to develop. Most famous of these were the Scribner shunt, and a treadmill he invented for cardiac stress tests. Every treadmill you see today can trace its history to the self-winding mind of Wayne Quinton.
Right: A drawing Rick made of his "wristula" in December, 2009, when he was healing from the surgery

Rick, Meet Dr. Kolff

2010-08-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

Photo: Dr. Willem Kolff, center, with two colleagues and an early dialysis machine

Last October my husband, Rick, was diagnosed with “end stage renal disease.” That diagnosis is every bit as serious as it sounds.
There are levels of renal (kidney) failure. There is “acute renal failure,” in which your kidneys may recover enough function to carry on. Rick had that in 1997, which left him with partial kidney function for 13 years.
“End stage renal disease” means that your kidneys are done. Period. When Rick was diagnosed, what had been our normal life came to a halt, and we began living a “new normal.”
You learn a lot when the earth moves under your feet in a bad way. One of the first things you learn is how gracious and generous people can be when they see a need, and people have supported us in every way since last October. There has been so much kindness, there have been so many prayers, and people forwarded money that helped us pay the bills. It is a cliché to say that if I tried to thank everybody by name, I would no doubt leave someone out, which would be a pity. Like most cliches this is true, so I will simply say: Thank you. You saved us. Yes, you. Please take our gratitude to heart.
Last October 5, when Rick received this diagnosis, we had no idea what was going to happen to him, and where it was leading. Where it led was to home dialysis. I could do a lecture on dialysis. In fact, I think I will.
There are two kinds of dialysis: hemodialysis, and peritoneal dialysis. Hemodialysis is the cleansing and filtering of blood. The idea was around for centuries, but the process as we know it was pioneered by Dr. Wilhelm Kolff in Holland during World War II.
Kolff was born on February 14, 1911, in Leiden, Netherlands. He became an MD in 1938, and one of his early cases was a 22-year-old man who died of renal failure. Dr. Kolff thought there ought to be a way to save such patients, and he put his considerable mind to the task. In his research he found an article by John Abel, a pharmacologist from John Hopkins University, who wrote in 1913 about experiments with dialysis in animals.
After the Nazis invaded Holland in 1940, Kolff persisted in figuring out hemodialysis despite the Nazi occupation. He and his family, friends, and colleagues risked their lives to invent a dialysis machine using what materials they had at hand, including cellophane sausage casings, a cooling system from an old Ford, parts from a crashed German fighter plane, and washing machine tubs. Kolff's original idea was to give compromised kidneys a break so they could rest and resume functioning, then dialysis would be discontinued.
The first dialysis machine was completed early in the war, but the first successful treatment of a renal patient by hemodialysis was not until 1945. This patient was a woman in a renal coma. She had been a Nazi collaborator, hated by the people in the town where Kolff lived. He believed he was a doctor, not a judge, and treated her. She awoke from her coma, said, “I am going to divorce my husband,” and lived another six years.
After that it was a process of refining and improving hemodialysis machines. He sent five of his hemodialysis machines to countries around the world, including the United States. The machines evolved from helping people in acute renal failure through a crisis into also keeping people with end stage renal disease alive.
In 1950 Dr. Kolff immigrated to the United States, and in 1956 he became an American citizen. In 1957 he went to the University of Utah and started a Division of Artificial Organs and spent the rest of his life researching and developing artificial organs, including the artificial heart. Robert Jarvik, one of Kolff's graduate students, was the project manager for the development of an artificial heart, and the Jarvik 7 heart currently is used in terminal cardiac patients as a bridge to heart transplantation.
Dr. Willem Kolff died last year, February 11, 2009, four days before his 98th birthday. All hemodialysis patients alive today, including my husband Rick, and patients with many other terminal conditions owe their continued existence to Dr. Kolff and his insatiable drive to invent and improve machines that saved lives.
Dialysis machines gradually were refined and improved, but one of the main problems – how do you get a person's blood out, cleansed, and then back into the person's body? - remained a challenge. This brings us to University of Washington professor Dr. Belding Scribner.

Next time: Dr. Belding Scribner, the fistula, and modern hemodialysis

Boom! I say Boom!

2010-08-21T00:35:00.000-07:00

Big excitement here last Tuesday - Obama came to town. That had all the news anchors twittering, but the real excitement was that some poor bozo who'd been away for a long weekend at Lake Chelan with his girl friend was flying back to Seattle and crossed temporarily restricted air space. Fighter jets scrambled out of Portland, Oregon, and about quarter to two it sounded like the whole world was exploding here: BOOM BOOM! The house shook, everything rattled - I couldn't imagine what it was - went to the kitchen door and again: BOOM BOOM! and again the house shook and everything rattled.
Very upsetting - we didn't know what was going on, and were looking for any sign of smoke, an explosion? Rick thought a neighbor was removing a stump. JD was in his room and thought a branch had fallen on the house. I didn't know what it was.
I drove up to town to pick up mail and looked for any sign of anything - nothing.
When Drew came home from work he solved the mystery for us: sonic booms, Obama in town, someone violated no fly space. Lordy. The guy in the float plane didn't know what was going on, landed at Lake Union and pulled in to Kenmore Air, the float plane base in Seattle, and he and his girl friend were in their car starting to drive away when someone stopped them and told him, Dude, you are in deep, deep kim chi.
The five o'clock news featured a video taken through a Kenmore office window of the guy (attired in a tank top, shorts, and sandals) having an extremely serious conversation with a Secret Service spook in dark suit & dark glasses. I'm told that Secret Service spooks have absolutely no sense of humor.
The girl friend was babbling to the TV interviewer: "We were clueless. We thought it was a quiet flight. We had no idea. I'm a hairdresser with a salon in Normandy Park!"
Just trying to distance herself from any ties to Al Qaeda, I imagine.
Meanwhile - the sonic booms scared the crap out of people all over Puget Sound, and crashed the 911 system in Tacoma. Among other things.
I guess Obama had a nice lunch at a bakery in Pioneer Square, and appeared at a fund raiser for Patty Murray, by the way. He was in town for four hours, and that was supposed to be the lead story on the five o'clock news, but the sonic booms came first.
I'll bet that pilot never makes that mistake again.

Letting My Freak Flag Fly

2010-08-10T23:52:00.000-07:00

My goodness, it has been a long time since I've visited this space.
My friend, Susan, is recovering from her heart attack. She says she "died a little bit" that day. Scared the holy living crap out of everyone, too. But by the grace of God, rapid medical care, and a large dose of clot buster, she came back to the land of the living and I'm so grateful, as is her family, as are her friends. She is celebrating by doing more paintings (see above, "My First Self Portrait," which I really like)and by starting a new novel, which I wish she'd write more of so I could find out what happens to Martha, the protagonist.
So that's good news of a major kind.
The other major news, which you know if you read Rick's blog, is that Rick is now using the overnight cycler machine for dialysis. Yay! But - there's always a "but," isn't there? A qualified yay - the machine is finicky, persnickety, and a fussbudget. Rick has to watch it like a hawk to make sure it primes properly, and then if his first drain isn't large enough to suit the machine it starts giving alarms, and he ends up making phone calls to tech support, and to his PD nurse, Angela, who is a saint, really, at all hours of the night as the machine beeps and boops away. So he's still napping a lot during the day time to make up for the sleep he misses at night, and all is not bliss and happily-ever-after. Actually, when you have end stage renal disease, happily ever after is a pretty slim option, but damn it, you do the best you can, and the machine is both deliverance and pestilence at this point. More deliverance, so Rick is soldiering manfully onward as he and Angela and Baxter, the machine company, try to find the path where this method works best. It all takes time. It still beats going to Seattle three days a week for dialysis.
And it's kind of cool to see Rick walking around looking a little bemused because suddenly he doesn't have to go to Seattle, OR do manual exchanges during the day. Although he did do one today. Like I said, it's a time of tweaking the process.
People keep asking me how I am, how am I doing, what am I doing for ME. Um. Well. I'm somewhere between OK and ready to pop my cork. I could be either of those things, or both, at any given minute. Rick does not need physical care from me; he's fully functional. I hang around the house, do a little laundry, the dishes, sweep a floor occasionally, go out and pull a weed, and occasionally do paperwork like, oh, paying the bills. There are things I do not understand, like why his medical insurance through work paid for everything, and Medicare does not.
Also it seems that even though Swedish Hospital scans his medical insurance cards when he comes in for surgery, the information does not get passed along to the anesthetist or the radiologist, who send bills to his former insurance, which does not pay, and then we get these whopping bills in the mail and Mary starts to hyperventilate until I realize what's going on.
I still do not have medical insurance. I thought maybe I could get some once my Social Security started, but it started this month and I do not have enough money to get medical insurance. I am burning up brain cells, as usual, trying to think of ways to earn money. We'd like to do a Log of the Oatus book, and a Collected Spiritual Smart Aleck book, but these things never get much beyond the idea stage. Still thinking, still burning brain cells. We are going to declare bankruptcy, but, ironically, we haven't been able to afford it. Interesting.
One success: my hair is still growing. A pretty small thing, which requires very little effort on my part, but after two years it's getting long and it feels like an accomplishment. Ask anyone who has let their hair grow out - the accomplishment is getting through the middle stages. Originally I planned to let it get long enough to cut off and donate, but now that it is long, I'm not quite willing to let it go yet. Oh well. The longer I put off cutting it, the more there will be to donate, right?
And how pleasant it is to fuss about something as trivial as the length of my hair when there is so much to think about that is not trivial.
On that trivial note, I think I'll turn in. Blessings to you all. Thank you for all your prayers, good wishes, and material support. You have pulled us through so far, and we love you for it. Pleasant dreams.

My Friend Had a Heart Attack

2010-06-13T01:09:00.000-07:00

My friend Susan Bardwell, the painter of the picture in the previous post, had a heart attack today.
I've never met her in person. She lives down near Houston, Texas, and is a funny writer/journalist as well as a talented artist. David and Jane Shepherd introduced us, via email, and we've had a daily correspondence for the last two (three?) years. Like me, she's a smart aleck; has two adult sons roughly the same age as our sons who live with her and her husband; and has a grandson who lives with them because his father (her older son) has custody, so she ends up being mommy most of the time. Our grand daughter lived with us for almost three years, age almost 2 to almost 5, so I got to be mommy again for a while, also. We relate.
She and her husband produce what she calls a "paperless," The Angleton Journal,an electronic web newspaper they put out every Monday, and she writes a humor column for it. I haven't written a humor column since Rick got sick, but know what it's like and commiserate with her on the misery of deadlines.
My favorite quote on deadlines, and I can't remember who said it, is: "I love deadlines. I love the wooshing sound they make as they go by."
Susan is NOT like me in that she is a pretty good judge of character. I tend to think that everyone's great, unless I take an immediate dislike to someone, and I've often been wrong in my first takes, mostly about that thinking everyone's great. Susan worked for years as a crime reporter for the Houston Chronicle. She certainly got well acquainted with the less attractive side of human character there, and minces no words when she expresses her opinion of same.
She's a fierce mama lion for her family, and loves her whole overextended family in a prodigal fashion.
We came up with the acronym FASTOB, which stands for, "fat, average, sarcastic, tough old broad." Our sisterhood.
Oh, carp, she's just a real great buddy, and I hate it that she had a heart attack. I know she had one, at least, before, in her early 40s, and had some stents put in, so I guess it's not totally out of the blue, but it stinks. It sounds like the EMTs and the local hospital got the clot buster (or whatever) into her before she was airlifted so the obstruction was removed - washed away - I don't know – soon, and by the time the helicopter has taken her to the big hospital in Houston (Herrmann, I think) she was feeling better.
Her husband said she was scared, but by the time they left her at the hospital in Houston this evening she was joking with them. She'll be in the hospital a couple of days at least.
I'm still praying, for her health, and in thanks for EMTs, techs, doctors, nurses, and hospitals. We've spent so much time in the precincts of these people the last year and a half, and have acquired such respect and appreciation for them.
I am hoping she continues recovering well, and after she's home I'm going to try giving her a call. We've never actually spoken to each other. I think it's time.

My Friend Paints; and Watch Out for That Tree

2010-06-02T18:27:00.001-07:00

Greetings, Dear Hearts and Gentle People ~
Above you see a painting of a scene down at Tramp Harbor here on Vashon Island. You can see the mainland and a few pale peaks of the Cascades in the distance, off to the east. What's extraordinary about this painting to me is that it was painted by Susan Bardwell, my writer friend down in Texas, who has never been to Vashon Island, as far as I know. A couple of weeks ago when my friend Sonya was here to take care of me (us) when I had surgery, we went down to Tramp Harbor one day to commune with the water and the shore, and Sonya said, "Take some pictures to send to Susan to paint." So I did. I didn't know she'd paint something right away, but she did, and sent me the digital file, which you see here.
I really like it. A lot. Susan has started painting in the last few months, kind of to her own surprise. To hear her tell it she woke up one morning and decided it was time to do something different that was for her and for fun, and painting was it. She's been sharing some of her efforts since then.
In the foreground, the bottom left corner as you look at the painting, you can see the gabion cages, which are hefty wire netting that hold large rocks together to protect the beach and the road from erosion. That's one of the details of this painting that blows my mind. And one of the things you might look at and say, "What IS that?"
It's exciting to me. I am not a visual artist, but I love visual arts. When I try to draw, I can do okay, sorta - my best subjects have been sleeping dogs and cats, and chickens - but I've never been able to bring color into the mix. It is foreign territory. I'm a pencil and ink sketcher, and only every third or fourth year or so.
So watching Susan learn to use space and color and perspective the way she does - Rick says, "I wish I could paint like her. She's fearless!" - is an honor and a great pleasure.
And I'm hoping if I praise this painting highly enough she might send it to me for Christmas.

Watch out for that tree: It's a windy afternoon here on the island. I went out into the yard to whack a few weeds, and then sat in one of the old plastic Adirondack chairs that ornament our yard, and watched the tall trees that surround our house tossing in the gusts as they came and went. I like to sit out in the yard; it's peaceful, and because we are surrounded by trees and there is a circle of sky overhead, I can lay my head back and look at the clouds whizzing by and think about not much of anything.
That's what I was doing until I heard a crack. It was the crack of something in a tree breaking, some part of a large limb or trunk. When a tree goes down, or a big part of a tree, it starts with such a crack and then proceeds to make a lot of cracks which gather and multiply and crescendo until it sounds, I am told, like a barrage of small arms fire, and the noise goes on until the piece that is struggling lets go and falls free, plowing through the undergrowth with a sigh and a whoosh, taking a lot of smaller trees and bushes down with it.
In that undergrowth is exactly where you don't want to be when a tree lets go. Now, I am as foolish as the next person. I sometimes plan what I would do if I heard a tree begin to fall in my vicinity. My plan is to get to my feet and head for the house as fast as possible, on the assumption, perhaps mistaken, that the house would shelter me from the force of the blow. Unfortunately I have lived long enough to know that what I'd probably do is sit there frozen and hope that tree didn't fall on me. A tree went down about twenty feet from our bedroom during a night storm some years ago, and as I heard it go I did not move, just froze there in bed and waited for it to be over. It fell the other way, into the ravine. Lucky.
That is why when I heard that crack I decided to come inside. So I did. And that brings us up to date.

Good News Today

2010-05-24T18:45:00.000-07:00

It is Monday, May 24, 2010, and today I went to see the surgeon who did my lumpectomy last week and got the news: NO CANCER.
Then Alice brought me home and we watched "Death at a Funeral" (British version).
It has been a very good day.

I Am No Longer Unemployed

2010-05-14T22:57:00.000-07:00

Today was a milestone: I have been unemployed since the summer of 2007, but today that changed. Today I retired.
It wasn't as easy as they'd like to make you think when you go to the Social Security website. They have videos featuring Patty Duke and Chubby Checkers – talkin' about my g-g-generation – telling us how quick and easy it is to retire online. Do it now! It's easy!
It's easy if you aren't as easily confused as I am. I tried to retire last March, because I'd been told to apply a couple of months before I turned 62. Being the good girl I am, I went online and began the easy process.
It was easy right up until they asked, “Are you able to get a job?” I said, “No.”
Big mistake: suddenly I was off the mainline to Retirement City, and shunted onto the sidetrack of the 7% incline of applying for disability.
Why I said I was unable to get a job: first and foremost I have a full time job doing paperwork to make things happen for my husband.
Second, okay, so I can't walk or stand for long because of various accidents that have left me bunged up and arthritic, but I'm not entirely sure that counts because there are plenty of people who can't walk who are employed. In my present condition I admire them quite a lot for making the effort, because I now have an idea of what it takes, but my mind and my fingers still work – sporadically most days, but that's not uncommon at all at any age – and that's enough to work in this society. Except...
Third, I'm over 60. I'm not the employee most places want. It's hard to find a job at any age for most people right now, but more so for what my husband calls the nouveau elderly, and if you doubt me take a random poll of people over 60 looking for work.
So I didn't want to apply for disability, but suddenly I found I had. I screwed up, and I didn't fix it, because I didn't understand how badly I had screwed up. I might be able to get disability because I am kind of disabled, but it would mean more of the kind of paperwork I've been swamped with for the last six months, and I'm tired, and we're broke. I simply wish to retire.
Then, this morning I remembered that I had the number of the man at Social Security who processed my husband's disability claim (my husband qualified easily, and all I can tell you about that is that if you can qualify for disability easily, your life sucks and blows).
I tried calling that number, and the man answered, and I told him what I wanted to do, and he was kind and humorous and helpful and fifteen minutes later, I was retired.
My head's been spinning the rest of the day. My friend Sonya is here visiting and she's heard me say, “I'm not unemployed anymore! I'm retired!” so many times to so many people that I expect her to say, “Enough already!” but she's been a really good sport about it and says she's happy for me.
So if you're thinking of retirement and the Social Security website lures you in with their red, white and blue promises of how easy it is, go ahead and retire online, but be vewy, vewy careful (Elmer Fudd was big for my generation, also).
Be prepared, also: if you watch the cute Patty Duke video telling you how easy it is to retire, you might be walking around the next few months singing in your head, “Because they're cousins, identical cousins just the same...” And if you don't remember that, you might not be part of my g-g-generation.

The Grinding Wheel Grinds Slow But Small

2010-05-12T22:45:00.000-07:00

Every year it seems that life has become so much more complicated that it couldn't possibly - watch out!
Know what I mean?
I learned today that I do not qualify for Medicaid because I am not blind, or 65, or disabled. Not being able to walk very well or to be able to stand up for long or to do much is not the same thing as being officially disabled. And even if I am, in fact, disabled, I still have trouble with the label, although I really appreciate my handicapped parking sticker on the days I really need it.
So I'm still uninsured, and I'm having surgery next Wednesday to remove the lump that probably isn't cancer but no one wants to take any chances. The good news: well, it probably isn't cancer, that's the good news. The other good news is that Swedish has a charity program that will take care of the costs of my surgery. So I'm told. This knowledge leaves me free to worry about the surgery itself, not paying for it.
It's enough to worry about.
I did qualify for a little food stamp credit, and that was good news, too.
We're reaching that point now, when most of our assets have been exhausted. The months of attrition are having their effect. Tomorrow I plan to cut off the cable and the land phone line. I will cling to internet a while longer, because I spend so much of my life on the internet, reading or answering emails, researching the odd questions that arise daily, looking up information which I have to save and print and pass along to other people - it is my connection to the outside world.
I was told to rest up before my surgery, so I would react to it better. I laughed. Rest up - yeah, that's a great idea. I must try that.
Seriously, I suppose I must. It won't be a great big surgery, but really, is there such a thing as "minor surgery?" Isn't having the body cut open and having a piece of it removed, doesn't that sound sort of "major?"
I am blessed in that my friend Sonya has agreed to drive me in to the hospital and back on the day. That was my biggest worry, truth to tell. I've done it so many times for Rick, but he's not healthy enough to do it for me - and he might have to do dialysis that day. So.
As a reward, Sonya will get to spend time with me after I have been given painkillers. I have been told I am quite amusing when stoned. Although I do tend to order things online and forget so I'm completely surprised when packages arrive. Oh well. That sort of mistake required credit. Remember credit?
Rick and I lay on the bed together tonight, holding hands, and talking about how strange it is that we cannot do everything for ourselves anymore. For so many years we took it for granted that what needed doing, we could do. No more. Suddenly we are, if not old, then unable. Disabled. Odious word, odious condition.
My beloved and beautiful cousin Nancy had her second round of chemo today. She said tonight she was tired. Some time soon, this summer or next, we'll go to the ocean together, and talk about our family, and how great life is, and how beautiful the ocean is, and how fortunate we have been to have one another.
How fortunate we all are to have one another. There, that's my profound statement du jour. Stick around. It's got to get better.

The Moon Is Bigger in New Mexico

2010-04-30T10:52:00.000-07:00

My brother and sister-in-law, Allen and Barbara, have lived in New Mexico for many years. I've been there to visit twice, once back in 1993, when I took our sons, JD and Drew, on a train trip across the country to visit Rick's relatives in Ohio and to visit Allen and Barbara on the way home. It's very convenient to go by train, because the train stops in their town, Raton.
The second time, which I must have blocked from my memory when I first wrote this post, was three weeks before my mother's death, when she was staying with Allen and Barbara, in 2001. But that is a story for another time.
Their home is on a hill on the northwest side of town, where they have a view of the mesas in the distance where the interstate trails off to the south, to Las Vegas, and Pecos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque. But from their house you see "miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles," sky and mesa and the land stretching out before you.
As perhaps you can see here.
My brother took this picture the other evening, and sent it out "with apologies to Ansel Adams." I told him that no apologies were necessary, and asked if I could share the image with people, and he said please do.
So here it is, Moonrise Over the Mesa, by my brother, Allen Litchfield.

Thank You for Listening to Me Bitch

2010-04-25T16:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a catch phrase catches on:
"You might be a redneck..."
"Here's your sign,"
"Would you believe?"
"Where's the beef?"
"Did I do that?"
And so on.
I have decided that my new catch phrase is, "Thank you for listening to me bitch." Last night I was talking to Rick, and every once in a while I would realize I was complaining or ranting about something, and I would say, "Thank you for listening to me bitch." He says it's OK, I do the same for him, and that's true.
It's not written into the wedding ceremony, or at least any ceremonies I've seen, but part of being married is listening to each other complain, gripe, whine, bitch - whatever you're calling it in your relationship. It's a loving thing we do for each other.
Some people will abuse the privilege. Our older son, JD, tends to rant, and as he rants he builds up a head of steam and starts pacing around the room, and after ranting and pacing for quite a while he paces right out the door, ranting over his shoulder as he goes, and you're left sitting there in the silence wondering what that was all about.
It was about bitching. I wish he'd learn to say, "Thank you for listening to me bitch." I'd feel better.
You know how it is - you marry someone, you figure you made a choice. While you may have chosen to give birth, you were only the passive container of these little aliens who became your children, and their personalities often have traits that if you'd had a choice, you'd have said, "No, thanks."
If they're 28 and living with you again and subjecting you to traits you wouldn't have chosen, like marathon pacing rants, you might wish for a little acknowledgment on the kid's part that you're doing something for him while he sputters, pops, whines, and disgorges his discontent.
Well, he doesn't acknowledge that we've done anything for him, but it's made me think that when I'm ranting about something I owe my listener a thanks, at least, and if it's my husband, I owe years of thanks for listening to me. So the least I can do is say it.
Thank you for listening to me bitch.

Setback

2010-04-22T15:18:00.000-07:00

My husband has had a setback in his dialysis progress, which you can read about on the other blog.
I am just tired. Today has been spent digging through papers, sorting, tossing, making phone calls, answering phone calls, doing over the phone an application I already did on paper wrong, so it had to be done over.
Rick and I are both feeling a little down over how things have gone. We felt he was so close to getting onto the overnight cycler machine, which, for him, meant he was close to going back to work. Now that hope is dashed, at least for the time being.
My own struggle is with paperwork. There is so much of it. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

My Special Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches

2010-04-12T12:28:00.001-07:00

Picture by Nancy Reeder

My cousin Nancy sent a nice big Easter package with gifts and games for our grand daughter, and there was also a sealed brown paper lunch sack for me. When I opened it, out came a mini-jar of jam and a single serving container of peanut butter, and a copy of this story:

My Special Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches
As a young girl I took many family trips. I have many fond memories of these trips. But it is my own special little trips close to home that I cherish and remember the most.
There were days when I just couldn't deal with things and would want to "run away from home."
My beautiful loving mom would sense the need for me to follow through with my plans. I am sure she realized it was my way of coping with what ever was on my mind that day. I would say to her, "I think I'm going to run away today, Mom." With her sparkling green eyes and loving smile, she would reply, "I can help you pack if you want me to. Would you like me to make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?"
Together we would pack a brown paper sack with some clothes as well as make that peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Mom would give me a big hug and kiss, then say, "I love you," and "You are always welcome to come home."
You have probably figured out by now that I only went to the end of the front porch. She was a very wise woman.
I am 62 years old and dealing with cancer. Yes, I feel like running away, but I think I will have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead.

*
You can stop reading this right there if that's enough for you.

I sent this story to several friends with this added message:
My cousin Nancy is fighting colon cancer now, and she knows that my husband and I are going through our own hard times, and she wanted to cheer us up by sending us this story and the peanut butter and jelly. She did.
Her wise, beautiful, mother was my father's sister, my aunt Vivian, whom everyone called Chick. Chick had multiple sclerosis and passed away at the age of 43. Chick was in a wheelchair all of Nancy's childhood, and I can see why Nancy might have wanted to run away sometimes.
As I thought about this, I thought, you know, this reminds me of the emails that come around on the internet, and, just for the fun of it, I'm going to put this out there, and ask the people to whom I send it to pass it on to people who might enjoy it, and then see how long it takes for it to come back to me from a complete stranger who has read it and been cheered by it. Then I can say to Nancy, "Look, your story has been cheering people up around the world." And that might cheer her up.
Probably won't hurt peanut butter and jelly sales, either.
Are you game? Two requests: send me an email saying "thank you, Nancy" at:
shipoftuels@hotmail.com,
and I'll forward it to her, and then please pass it along. The thank yous will tell her what an important person she is, and passing it along - well, we'll see what that does! Thank you!
blessings, love, hugs
Mary
*
Well, I sent that out last night, and as of this morning I've had over 30 replies from people saying thank you to Nancy for this story. I started to forward them to Nancy, and then realized that I would be clogging up her email inbox, so I started copying and pasting replies into a word doc. Then I copied all of them (so far) and pasted them into one email to Nancy.
My cousin Nancy is an extraordinary person whom I have loved, admired, respected, and looked up to my whole life. She has tackled life with good humor against great odds and adversity, and she still keeps plugging away – even when she'd rather run away.
As I read people's replies to Nancy's story, I found myself tearing up. That's not unusual these days; my husband is ill and the challenges of getting along are sometimes dire. But the way people pull together to provide encouragement, inspiration, and love to one another in the hard times – man, that's almost enough to make me revise my occasional conclusion that people are no damn good.
Thank you, Nancy, thank you, everyone who is being touched by Nancy. Sometimes when you're somewhere past the end of your rope all it takes is one person to love you, understand how you feel, and make you realize you're not facing your troubles alone, to help you regain your grip.
So thank you.

The Constancy Waltz

2010-02-26T00:07:00.000-08:00

Life is not offering much in the way of fun and encouragement these days, so the thing to do is sing. So here's one of my songs.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, someone said to me, "I'm making a list of people who I want to be in the nursing home with me, and you're on it." I thought this was a high compliment, and in the spirit of that compliment, I wrote this song.
It's as much about friendship as romantic love - it's about marriage, and other challenging relationships.
I made a video last night that I am replacing with a new one. In this one I remember all the words! Yay!

A brief word about my hair: this is how it looks right after I wash it these days. It has taken two years to get it this long. I had the idea that I could be this aging hippie woman with long flying frizzy gray locks. So far, so good. Then I thought I could let it get long, and then cut off the length and donate it to one of those organizations that make wigs for people who have lost their hair for medical reasons. It seemed like the most effortless way of doing good. What could be easier or cheaper than letting your hair grow? Well, for whatever reason, it's long and some days, like this morning, I want to grab hold of it and whack it off, but I haven't yet. One of the cool things about it - people don't recognize me with long hair. Kinda fun to walk through a small town where you've lived for decades and not be recognized.
Song: The Constancy Waltz, copyright 1987, 2010, Mary Litchfield Tuel. All rights reserved.

Why Don't I Get a Job?

2010-02-23T13:03:00.000-08:00

This question has been directed to me so many times lately that I thought I would address it.
Yes, we are in dire straits financially. Rick, my husband, who was our sole support, has been unable to work since last October 5. We have lived since then on the incredible kindness and generosity of friends and family, and what savings we had. It is truly mind-blowing, to use the idiom of my youth, how kind and generous people have been. Some have gone so far as to contribute more than once, which at this time, when we are in the gap between our resources and Rick's disability payments and my Social Security, means more than ever.
People who are not in a position to give money have given from their hearts – time and love and art and chocolate, gifts both tangible and intangible, which have carried us through.
The obvious question that occurs to many well-meaning (and perhaps some not so well-meaning, I'm not naming any names here) people, is, why don't I get a job?
The first time I was on the receiving end of this rather sharp question, I was flabbergasted. I muttered about how I couldn't work because of various physical disabilities – my crappy knee, my broken back, nerve damage, chronic fatigue, etc., none of which cut any ice with my interrogator. I should get a job sitting down. I should type envelopes at home.
“There, I fixed it.”
Now that I've been hit with the question a couple more times, I'm starting to get my smart ass together: “Oh, I dunno. I guess I'm just a slacker.”
Another answer might be to slap my head and say, “Why didn't I think of that? A job! Of course!”
Maybe as I get it more together I'll be able to put together a written response which I can print up and hand to people. This is a start on that response.
One friend suggested that I reply thus: “OK, you come over to my house and take over what I do. Fill out and copy and organize the paperwork for Social Security, DSHS, the Kidney Program, the hospital, the IRS, various doctors and utilities and whoever else is standing in line with a hand out for our identity, income, and intentions. Figure out how to pay the bills and balance the check book and buy the groceries on what money we have. Buy the groceries - make sure there's coffee and cheerios and toilet paper and paper towels - and the prescription drugs and other requirements of Rick's illness. Drive Rick to his various appointments, procedures, and surgeries. Wait while he's there, or run errands that need to be done. Cook meals, wash some dishes, keep laundry moving, sweep and vacuum floors now and then, pick up the mail, pay the taxes, licensing fees, insurance premiums, etc. Keep track of the paperwork and dates regarding the lawsuit that has been laid on us by the woman who fell off our porch and wants lots of money. Come on over and do this and whatever else that comes up – cleaning out the perennially clogged storm drain, feeding the dog, making copies and typing dictation for Rick – do all that for me, and by golly, I will go look for a job.”
Of course I am fat and 61 and half crippled and don't have a degree and don't know all the computer programs that are mentioned in the job advertisements, but what the hell, I can get some shit-paying clerical work I suppose. Maybe. I hear it's hard to find a job these days, but it's usually easier to find a shit job.
If all I had to do was go to work and come home, it would be a nice break. Unfortunately, if I had a job, I'd still have to do all that other stuff, and I'm already pretty tired.
So that's pretty much why I don't get a job.

How Can I Keep From Singing?

2010-01-18T13:24:00.000-08:00

Women, Women & Song used to sing this song, in three-part harmony. We started our first concert with it, and we ended our last concert with it.
You might say the song resonated with me. I first heard it sung by Pete Seeger, long, long ago, and then by a lot of people, including me. I sang it during labor with my second son; I sang it in the ambulance on the way to the hospital after my car accident ten years ago. The singing seemed to ease the pain.
It's a great song, and I know that I am only one of many who love it.

Happy Birthday, JD

2010-01-05T00:00:00.001-08:00

Photos: John Devon at age 6 days, January 11, 1982, and John Devon and his baby, Allysan, last March.
Our older son, John Devon, or JD as he goes, was born 28 years ago tomorrow morning. A friend told me the other day that she had found a 1982 journal which she never used, and hey, guess what? 1982 and 2010 are the same! So she's using her 1982 journal this year.
So it was on a rainy Monday night 28 years ago I was lying on the couch watching a PBS version of “The Elephant Man.” It was a play, I think – it was not the movie of the same name which starred John Hurt and was a big hit at the time. So I was lying on the couch when I felt a “woosh” of water coming out of me.
Oh great, I thought. I've finally lost complete control of my bladder.
So I went to empty out what was left in my bladder, I thought, and was most intrigued to see little white specks of something floating around in the urine. I called my midwife, Susan Anemone, to report this strange turn of events, and she said, “Oh! Your water's broken! You're going to go into labor!” She was very chipper about it. I was stunned.
You'd think that nine months would be enough to prepare for giving birth. That's what nature gives you, more or less, in the usual order of things. I had wallowed in being pregnant. Loved to go around telling people how much I was enjoying pregnancy, I felt great, and that was true. When I was pregnant, my migraines went away, for one thing, and that was like being let out of prison. So I loved it. I read books and waddled around with a big grin and generally acted and felt like I was the only woman who had ever conceived a child. So, hurray, pregnancy.
Of course there was that point about half way through when I sat down and sobbed because of the lonely truth that there was only one way that baby was coming out, and it wasn't going to feel good. I was scared of labor. I was even more scared of how my life would be after the baby came. I would never have a private moment again. My days of puttering around the quiet house with classical music playing in the background were going to be over. These are the fears of a person who had never had much to do with children. I was right about that loss of privacy and solitude, but oh well.
There was a huge storm that night of January 4-5. We were swamped with snow. Down in California the rains were torrential. Mudslides in the Santa Cruz Mountains killed people that night, and elsewhere Highway 101 was closed by slides. I've heard since that many babies are born on stormy nights. Something about the drop in the barometric pressure, or something, sets off labor.
We were snowed in and all the plumbing frozen for days after John Devon was born. I finally begged, nagged, and entreated Rick to make it possible for me to take a bath. He took pity and thawed out the plumbing. I showered and was so happy.
But that night, that snowy stormy night, there I was about to be a mother and not believing it. Could this really be happening? Proof was soon to strike in the form of labor.
The first contraction hit about ten to midnight, and hit is the right word. Holy gazoly. There was no gradual build-up in intensity, it was just bang, hard labor, right now. Contractions that knocked me down and took my wallet.
Rick timed the contractions and breathed with me, and after a while we thought we should call Susan and ask her to come. She lived two or three miles up the Westside Highway from us. She was one of the founders of the Seattle Midwifery School, and the plan was for one of her partners to catch a ferry and come over when I went into labor. Well, it was two in the morning and there was a raging blizzard. She realized that she was going to have to improvise.
Susan woke up her husband, Barry, bundled up their nine-week-old son, Gabriel, and they traveled the two or three miles to our house in the snow. It took them about 45 minutes.
By this time I was completely lost in labor. My leg muscles were quivering like jelly and I really didn't see how I was going to make it through, but somewhere in there I decided that since I'd made it this far, I might as well carry on. Nice when reason decides to defer to reality.
Susan put Gabriel to bed in the crib that was waiting for our baby, and she and Barry and Rick were my team, coaching me, encouraging me, telling me what a good job I was doing. About five in the morning she said I was ready to push, and I did, for about forty minutes, and then, at ten to six in the morning of January 5, 1982, almost exactly six hours after the first contraction, our baby boy came out to meet the outer world.
He was, of course, the most beautiful thing we'd ever seen. We were instantly in love, absolutely mad with adoration for this child. Barry and Rick pulled the labor sheets off the bed, and removed the plastic sheeting that had kept a set of sheets underneath clean, and baby John Devon and I crawled in to have a well-deserved rest, after first calling the relatives, of course. Susan and Barry took Gabriel (who had slept through the whole thing) home.
The world outside was a snowy wonderland, and the world inside was the world of baby love. We were well and truly besotted, as most new parents are, and so taken with this tiny miracle.
Another midwife had given me the lowdown on children when I was pregnant: “This kid is going to give you some knocks.” I'm not sure why she said it; maybe I was so naive that she felt the need to slap me around with a little reality. I was a little shocked, and a little hurt. My baby was an angel, my baby...
Well, 28 years on I'd say she had a good point, but I'm not sure I needed to hear it mid-pregnancy. The dashing of parental dreams happens in its own time, naturally. Babies turn out to be children, and children become teenagers, and teenagers become adults, and by that time a parent's innocent dreams of long ago are a dim memory. I know I had them. They have been overwritten by 28 years of days.
JD, it was a good day when you were born. We were so happy. We had never loved anybody like we loved you, and that memory is not dim at all. It is bright and I can feel that love all over again thinking about that time.
Happy 28th Birthday, kid.

Precious Lord

2009-12-30T12:14:00.000-08:00

I meant to get this up last Saturday, for Alice's birthday. A belated happy birthday, Alice.
Today's selection is "Precious Lord," composed by Thomas Andrew Dorsey(born July 1, 1899, Villa Rica, Ga., U.S. — died Jan. 23, 1993, Chicago, Ill.) He was a songwriter, singer, and pianist, known as the "father of gospel music." Born the son of a revivalist preacher, Dorsey was influenced by blues pianists in the Atlanta area. After moving to Chicago in 1916, he appeared under the name of "Georgia Tom," became a pianist with Ma Rainey, and composed secular "hokum" songs (those peppered with risqué double entendres). In 1916 he moved to Chicago, where he attended the College of Composition and Arranging. In the 1920s he toured with Ma Rainey and his own bands, often featuring the slide guitarist Tampa Red.
He wrote his first gospel song in 1919. In 1931, Dorsey experienced great personal tragedy. The death in childbirth of both his wife and newborn son devastated him. As he related in the documentary "Say Amen Somebody," "People tried to tell me things that were soothing to me … none of which have ever been soothing from that day to this." Out of that tragedy he wrote "Precious Lord," the song for which he is best known.
In 1932 he abandoned the blues completely and founded the Pilgrim Baptist Church in Chicago. His more than 1,000 gospel songs include "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," "Peace in the Valley," and "If We Ever Needed the Lord Before." He recorded extensively in the early 1930s. Many of his songs were introduced by Mahalia Jackson. He founded and directed the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses.
Credits : Frank Driggs Collection/© Archive Photos; Brittanica.com]

Mary Sings the Rose of Tralee

2009-12-17T19:27:00.000-08:00

Well, dear hearts, this is an experiment.
I'm not writing much of my own these days - too busy running around to all the appointments and other obligations which life has so rudely imposed upon us. So I thought I might start recording some songs here on the blog.
This is my first effort - recorded with the headphone mic, so it's a little over-driven.
Aside from the technical roughness, this old song is a favorite of mine (and Rick's). I learned it to sing at the funeral of Alex Brannon. She asked me years ago to sing it at her funeral - it was her father's favorite song, she said, or at least one of his favorite songs, and that's what she wanted. When someone asks you to sing at their funeral you answer, "Of course! Yes! You bet I will!"
But that was years ago, and you can imagine my astonishment and consternation when Alex died last winter and I was called and told I needed to sing this song for her funeral. I had not learned it, alas.
But I learned it then, and sang it for the funeral, and have sung it a lot since. Once this tune wends its way into your head, you're hooked. It is charming, that's all I can say, and I hope you enjoy it.
And please get back to me with whether you think posting song videos is a good idea, and any suggestions. I'm on track to do it. I don't think I can do any material that is not my own, or public domain, and that's OK because I'm not getting any younger and when I go so will my songs. Except of course for The Way of Sex, which seems to have got up and flown around the world. Not that I get any credit for it, but it's nice to know I was the channel for a song so many people can relate to, and laugh with. Maybe that's the one I'll do next, if this works.
If I can't get it up on the blog, I may have to go to YouTube, but we'll see.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T12:34:00.000-08:00

Greetings from the Northwest Kidney Center in West Seattle. We are celebrating Thanksgiving with a round of dialysis for Rick. We're feeling good because the urologist found no new cancer yesterday (yay).
I would have to say that this is the strangest or at least more out-of-character Thanksgiving I've ever experienced. Instead of working all day Wednesday and Thursday to put up a meal with all the trimmings, we spent Wednesday going to the urologist, trying to go to Costco but giving up because the parking lot was crammed full and it didn't seem worth the effort, a stop at Daniel Smith's artist supplies to get Rick some non-photo blue pencils and some pencil water colors. He told me that the last time he got some of those was in Germany, almost 50 years ago.
Then we stopped by Staples to get him some pencil-top erasers, because the non-photo blue pencils are eraser-less, and Target so I could get some naproxen sodium, and then we headed to the ferry after our full day in town.
And this morning we got up and caught a ferry back to town so Rick could do dialysis. I have been waiting to talk to someone about scheduling. Yesterday while we were gone we got a call from the scheduler here at the Kidney Center informing us that Rick would change to a Tues-Thurs-Sat schedule next week. Unfortunately, he is already scheduled for surgery next Thursday, so that's a conflict.
His surgery is to have an arterial-venous fistula put in. This is a procedure that ties an artery into a vain in the arm so the vein is made larger by the increased volume of blood, and then the vein is used for plugging in dialysis needles. Aren't you glad you asked?
Sooo...we need to work this out. Rick said yesterday that the hardest part of renal failure may turn out to be scheduling conflicts.
Yeah. That and the fear of DEATH.
It's almost one o'clock and Rick is about halfway through his dialysis. Roy & Becky invited me over to Roy's Aunt Margaret's, so I need to get moving here. I have not been able to get the attention of the charge nurse to talk about the scheduling problem. I need to do that, as well.
More later, as always.

FASTOB

2009-11-07T23:38:00.000-08:00

I have been blessed with the friendship of another writer, Susan Bardwell, who lives down in Angleton, Texas, which is south of Houston. We were introduced by David and Jane Shepherd, who thought we might hit it off. We did.
Once in an email to Susan, I remarked that I always wanted to be thin, tall, and elegant, and instead I turned out to be fat, average, and sarcastic. She replied that we fat, average, sarcastic women are much more prevalent than thin, tall, elegant, women, and we should embrace ourselves as we are, and have a fat, average, sarcastic women club. After that we occasionally joked about being fat, average, sarcastic women.
Then one day Susan remarked that we are “tough old broads.” Yup, we're that, too, and after that we would talk about being tough old broads occasionally, and would buck each other up as we go through our rather complex lives by reminding each other of our tough old broadness.
Until one day I decided to combine the two and make them into an acronym. Fat average sarcastic tough old broads: FASTOB, for short.
So that's what a FASTOB is. Many of my best friends are FASTOBs. I'm a FASTOB. Are you a FASTOB? Welcome to the world of the FASTOB.

You can read Susan Bardwell's weekly column in the Angleton Journal, an online "paperless" that she and her husband produce. Check it out:
http://weeklyjournal.net/

What's Happening with Us

2009-10-22T16:00:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here typing in my netbook while Rick has his first dialysis.
First I must thank everyone for all the love, support, prayers, and good wishes sent our way the last few weeks. We have felt upheld and loved, and we appreciate all of that.
Thank you.
It would be difficult to write about anything other than what we're going through now. It's as if someone has slammed us both between the eyes with a two by four. Wham! Life as you knew it is over, and renal failure is what is important to you now. You cannot argue with this.
You may wonder why Rick's kidneys have failed. If you think you know, tell his doctors, because so far they haven't been able to pin down a cause.
We think it's life. Life can cause of kidney failure.
It's a shock to have everything stop suddenly and realize that your life is in danger, or your spouse's life. Really gets your attention. At the same time, you start hanging around people and places that make you realize that you are not special – there are a lot of people fighting for their lives at any given time, which is a humbling realization. It's a part of life that is usually out of the public eye.
Watching medical shows on TV is not going to tell you anything about what it's like to have a medical crisis. Those people are actors, those situations are scripted, and as Rick's nephrologist says, those shows are phony.
A nephrologist, by the way, is a kidney doctor, and nephrology has nothing to do either with Egypt or having sex with dead people. I know how you people think.
I observed the difference between reality and TV the first night Rick went in to the ER. He was given a blood pressure medicine which may have worked a little too well, and every time he made a rash move like, say, raising his head slightly, his blood pressure would plummet down to, oh, 49 over 29.
If you watch “House” you know that at least once in every show, someone cries out, “He's crashing!” and then three or four doctors are running around the bed like a Chinese fire drill, yelling at each other to do this, do that, and then someone delivers a shot of epinephrine, or shocks the person back to life with paddles, and then the show goes on with the temporarily dead person revived to suffer more camera-friendly, viewer-manipulating drama.
That is not how it happens. The spouse (me in this case) notes the patient is looking punky, goes out in the hall and grabs Jeff, the nurse, and says, “He's not looking good,” and then Jeff calls for help and a contingent of nurses, aides, and one (count him, one) doctor come in and they move swiftly, quietly, intensely, professionally, and efficiently, to take care of the problem, because, guess what, this has happened before and they have a protocol.
So they pulled Rick's blood pressure out of the basement a couple of times, and by the next morning the drug he'd been given had cleared his system, and they went to a less drastic blood pressure medication.
That was the first and only time I'd ever seen a nurse wrap a blood pressure cuff around an IV bag and pump up the cuff so the fluid would flow faster. I wish I'd taken a picture to send to the “There, I fixed it” website, but I didn't. Still, if you want that IV to drip faster, there's your methodology.
Rick made it through a week in the hospital with the doctors and nurses keeping him alive and watching him for signs that his kidneys would kick back in, but alas, his kidneys are done. Renal function has left the building.
So here we are at the Northwest Kidney Center, with Rick starting dialysis. This is what we'll be doing for three days a week for the foreseeable future.
We are walking a well-worn path. Many before us, many with us, and many after us will be dealing with this particular medical crisis. We are hanging in there together, with the support of friends and family, taking one step at a time, one day and sometimes one minute at a time. One of the paradoxes is that there is nothing like having mortality stare you right in the eye and breathe on you with breath more fetid than that of a 12-year-old black Lab to let you know you are fully, completely alive.
Funny, that.
We're still here, still fully, completely alive, still cracking wise and thanking God. Stay tuned for further developments.
Photo: that's Rick in the dialysis chair, with his nurse, Jean, looking on. Rick says he's getting pretty fed up with pictures of himself laid out in bed. Don't blame him. You can send him a get well card at: Rick Tuel, P O Box 238, Vashon WA 98070.

William DeWolf Hopper, actor

2009-10-17T14:46:00.000-07:00

I had planned to pay bills this afternoon, but the bill-paying desk is in the living room, and Rick is in there watching “20 Million Miles from Earth,” a cheesy space-monster-from-Venus flick made in 1957. Rick says that all the questions posed by this movie have one answer: it was made in 1957. The stop-motion Venusian starts out as a peace-loving vegetarian, but is driven to rage by the dumb people who corner it, poke it, hit it, stab it, and shoot it. After a few minutes of that treatment the Venusian gets pissed off. I found myself rooting for this beleaguered alien, then I realized I wasn't going to get the bills paid and left the room.
Monster movies aren't really my thing.
The big dumb handsome lead is played by big handsome William Hopper. I don't think the man himself was dumb. His parents were an actor named DeWolf Hopper, and Hedda Hopper, the gossip columnist, whose maiden name was “Elda Furry.” Wow.
He was in many movies in the 1930s, served with distinction in World War II, sold cars in LA after the war until he took a role in “The High and the Mighty” in 1954, and after that worked regularly as an actor, and is probably best known for playing Paul Drake, a private investigator on the Perry Mason Show, from 1957 to 1966.
He died young, in 1970 at the age of 55, of pneumonia following a stroke, and is buried in Whittier, California.
William Hopper, ladies and gentlemen.

A Short Essay on How It Is

2009-10-12T13:16:00.001-07:00

Monday Morning October 12 2009

This date used to be Columbus Day. We used to get a day off from school, I believe, although memory does not serve as well on that score as I'd like.
Rick and I are celebrating momentous things this morning: he's home from the hospital, and he's alive. Yay.
Although, as Rick says, this thing is not over by a long shot.
He went into the hospital a week ago today, in acute renal failure. His kidneys were shutting down.
This has happened before. Back in 1997 he ended up in renal failure when he thought he would “work through” prostate cancer as if it was a cramped muscle. The kidney problem landed him in the hospital, which is where they discovered the prostate cancer.
This time he got bladder cancer first, and then renal failure.
The docs are mystified. They don't know why he went into renal failure, or why he got better, which they said they did not expect. I of course have opinions about both: I think that the cancer surgeries, cancer treatments, and stress from overwork, which he did because he was stressed about money, all accumulated until his weak points – his damaged kidneys – caved in. I think he got better because he has hundreds of people praying for him all over the world, and because he finally got some rest in the hospital.
Sit. Stay.
Rick says, yeah, sure, all of that, but the docs are looking for something “more sinister.” His blood was taken twice a day while he was in the hospital, and they ruled out a blockage, and they sent blood away for some in-depth lab tests, the results of which we're still awaiting. He was released with instructions to have blood work every other day, to monitor his electrolyte levels, and he'll be going in to see Dr. Oliver, the nephrologist, on Wednesday. He's still in renal failure - “underlying kidney disease which has been exacerbated” by something unknown – but he's feeling better and doing better. Except for the cold he caught from our grand daughter, but that will pass, also.
Meanwhile, I've pulled out the Renal Cookbook that I bought the first time we went through this. We have to get religious about his diet now – no fooling. It's a whole new world. The renal diet tends to be in many ways exactly the opposite of what I am told to eat. It's OK for him to eat sugar and white flour, for example.
It is too overwhelming to think about everything right now. We're on the one-day-at-a-time plan at the moment. Rick rests a lot, which is good. I'm trying to get through that “hit between the eyes by a two by four” feeling.
Rick is feeling very happy about quitting smoking this morning. He had cut back to almost nothing before this hospital stay, and of course could not smoke while hospitalized. This morning he is feeling downright sassy about being able to chug up to the paper box and back without huffing and puffing.
We are OK, or as OK as we can be with Rick, as he says, “functionally dead.”
Like it says in the old talking blues about hard luck, I'm just waiting around to see what happens next.
More later, of course.

Tourist

2009-09-28T10:33:00.000-07:00

It has been a big week at Casa Tuel. My friend Sonya came to visit, and as often happens when someone who doesn't live here comes to visit, I went to see some of the sights and places I only visit when I'm showing out-of-towners around.
First, we had Big Box Monday: we went to Ikea, and we went to Costco. Normally a trip to either one of these stores would be enough for one day, but I was trying to comparison-shop cheap mattresses.
Recently a friend told me about an internet show called “Ikea Heights,” a mystery/comedy/soap opera that is filmed in the Burbank, California, Ikea, using the store's displays as sets, without the permission or knowledge of the store's management. The show is extremely silly. You have to assume that the Ikea management knows what's going on by now, but fans can hope that Ikea sees the show as free advertising and will not put a stop to filming. David Seger, the man behind the series, says there will be a new episode toward the end of this month. You can see the show at www.ikeaheights.com
Back to our tourism. Sonya and I found the Ikea mattress department, and along with a few other customers tried out mattresses. One or two were okay. Most were for people much younger and more fit than someone our age.
We headed off to the Southcenter Costco, which, like Ikea, is a huge place, but unlike Ikea, with its winding layout that intentionally disorients you, is wide open so you can see how big it is. We learned that there were no mattresses at Costco that day, which was a disappointment. The Christmas decorations were in, but that was just depressing. We walked out without buying a thing.
That shot our energy for the day and we wandered home.
Tuesday we shopped Vashon – Granny's Attic, of course, and various collectible shops. In a bit of shameless booster-ism I will say that shopping on Vashon is much more fun than shopping ashore. Takes less time and energy, you get to see your friends, and you don't have to get in line for a ferry to go home.
Wednesday we went to Seattle because I had a cardiologist appointment. Don't panic. It was just a check up to see how I'm doing, and I'm doing well, thank you. After that we went to Kerry Park up on Queen Anne Hill to have a picnic lunch Sonya had prepared, and soak in the view. The view has changed since I first saw it in 1972 – many tall buildings have grown up in downtown – but it remains breathtaking, looking out over the city and Elliott Bay. It was a warm and hazy day and Mt. Rainier was not visible. You'd think something that big would be a lot harder to hide.
After our scenic picnic I took Sonya to a bead store up on Stone Way. Sonya loves beads, and makes jewelry, so this stop was a hit.
After the bead store I took Sonya to see the troll under the bridge in Fremont, and down the hill to see the statue of Lenin, and then circled around to go by “Waiting for the Interurban,” then across the Fremont Bridge and around Queen Anne on Westlake, pointing in the general direction of the “Sleepless in Seattle” house which can't be seen whizzing by on the road, and from there back to the ferry.
Thursday we hit Granny's one last time. Sonya loves Granny's. Then I took Sonya to the ferry and wished her a good trip home on the train.
It was fun being a tourist with Sonya for a few days. Fun, and exhausting. Now I'm ready to go back to unpacking moving boxes. We'll get moved in again some day. One box at a time, friends, one box at a time, with occasional breaks for tourism.

Health Care Reform: Now Is a Good Time

2009-09-11T23:31:00.000-07:00

President Obama is trying to pass health care reform. To many of us, this seems like a no-brainer. Why doesn't America take care of its people at least as well as Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cuba, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Seychelles, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and The United Kingdom?
People in this country are suffering medically, financially, and emotionally, because we do not as a nation take care of our own. I have heard people screaming about socialism because national health care is being proposed. I beg to differ.
Socialism, like Christianity, is an ideal to which many have aspired but few have put into practice. I believe that people are not afraid of socialism. They don't have the first idea what socialism is. They are afraid of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is an idea that has been put into practice many times, frequently by people who have claimed to be socialists, and we have seen that we do not like it.
Threatening people with socialism is an old bleat, and for some reason, to some people, still an effective one. People toss the word “socialism” around like PETA members throw red paint.
Speaking of red, when did Republicans become red? To an older person like me, who remembers when being accused of being red was a vile slander that could ruin a person's business and life, this whole “red is conservative” thing is confusing. However, I do feel a certain perverse joy in thinking of someone as one of them Republican pinkos.
But I digress.
I have heard people saying that if this socialized medicine scheme goes through we will not be able to choose our own doctors. This is an empty threat to me – we had to stop going to our doctor because my husband got health insurance at work and our doctor did not have a contract with that company. The doctor I go to now is a great doctor and the nurse practitioners in his office are great, and it is more than great to have health insurance, but it would have been nice to keep seeing the doctor with whom we had a history and whom we trusted.
If we were rich we could. We could buy health insurance from some one who contracted with our doctor, or we could pay medical expenses out of pocket. There are always options for the rich.
Are you rich? If the answer is “yes,” then, hey, no worries. For the rest of us – worries.
I wish President Obama well with health care reform. It's a long time coming. As a country we are heartless bastards about our poor, our hungry, our widows and orphans, our handicapped, our elderly, our veterans, our children. We pay great lip service to ideals of respecting and caring for the weak, the heroic, the young, and the indigent, but in fact we allow people to languish in poverty, to starve, go homeless, and die without giving them a thought.
See, it's like taking care of your teeth. Say you go through life expecting your teeth to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and take care of themselves. You never brush, you never floss, you never go to the dentist. If you're lucky, your teeth survive. It is more likely that your teeth will go bad. You'll end up with a sick, stinky mouth and a few dingy, ugly teeth that can no longer do for you what teeth are supposed to do. The health of your entire body will suffer.
That's what I'm saying here. The country that does not take care of its own is not a healthy country, and has cultural bad breath.
Support health care reform. It's a no-brainer. Even if you don't care about yourself, you might have children or grand children you care about. Do it for them.
And now I feel an urge to brush my teeth.

Montana, Parts 1 and 2

2009-07-08T16:27:00.001-07:00

Montana, Part 1

Greetings from Kalispell, Montana, where the sun is shining, the wind is blowing, and a local resident can give you much better directions than Mapquest. My cousins Nancy and Charlotte and I are on the road again.
Before setting out I made a list of what I needed, and yesterday morning the three of us were dancing around each other, packing (“I'm ready!”), and unpacking (“On second thought, I don't need this, or that, or those”), and doing last minute laundry. Then we packed the car (“We're ready!”) and then we re-packed it (“Wait – this will fit in here”).
Finally we were off, heading east on I-90, bound for adventure, old friends, and relatives unseen for forty years who live in Montana.
We stopped in Idaho to see the Old Mission east of Coeur d'Alene, “the oldest building in Idaho.” The oldest structure partially built by white people in the four-walls-and-a-roof style, that is. It is a Catholic Church that was built between 1850 and 1853 by the Coeur d'Alene Indians, and the Jesuits who came to settle there.
The Old Mission is a state park now, and the church building is almost empty inside, with a few sparse exhibits. The altar is there, as are two side altars with iconographic paintings and decorations. The hand-hewn floorboards are shiny with age and care, and behind the altar you can see the mud and straw construction that is covered by wood elsewhere. There are two pews up front facing the altar, and one kneeler. Engravings of the Stations of the Cross were hung around the walls of the church, as is customary in a Catholic church, and there were a few iconic paintings of saints.
One painting is of a happy priest or brother and a happy nun, with joyful saints fluttering above them in heaven and tormented souls capering in the flames of hell below. This one bothered me because I have problems with “scare the hell out of them” theology. Just my opinion.
At several places both inside the church and scattered around the property were stations where you could push a button and hear recordings of Coeur d'Alene storytellers. Charlotte and I listened to one tale of going up the mountain with grandmother to gather huckleberries and make jam over the campfire. Inside the church an endless loop played liturgical music and Indian prayer and song.
The Mission has a public restroom which turned out to be an outhouse. Clean, well constructed, well maintained, and if you sit down, a nice cooling updraft. The first, but not the last, of this type of facility encountered on the trip.
We kept going east from the Old Mission and stopped for a late lunch in St. Regis, Montana, where we discovered we had cell phone reception for the first time since leaving Coeur d'Alene, and like E.T., we called home. We also discovered in St. Regis that we had crossed into the Mountain Time zone. I had not thought about this happening. Suddenly it was one hour later. Cousin Charlotte assured me that I would get the hour back on the way home. Good. I'm getting older fast enough without dropping odd hours here and there. Another thing I did not know was that cellphones KNOW what time zone you're in and adjust their clocks to local time. This gave me a little bit of a heeby-jeeby.
From St. Regis we headed north up the Clark River, and then up the west side of Flathead Lake. Flathead Lake is a large body of water with miles of shoreline, waterfront cottages, little marinas filled with boats, and scenic roadside lookouts. To the east beyond the lake stand the Rocky Mountains.
At the north end of the lake sits the city of Kalispell, in a broad grassy valley with the Rockies on the east side and the Bitterroot Mountains on the west. I would say it is beautiful there, and it is, but beautiful seems such a worn-out, overused, and inadequate word to describe the area. This was a problem I would continue to have in Montana. Words can't describe the scope, the magnitude, the sheer drop-dead gorgeousness of the land. We went when the weather was sunny and fine and not too hot, so that may have enhanced the impression of heaven on earth.
We stayed in Kalispell for a couple of days, catching up with friends and family, and then we went to Glacier Park.
Next time: Glacier Park and heading home.

Montana, Part 2: Glacier Park*

When last seen, our intrepid spiritual smart aleck, amateur tourist, was in Kalispell, Montana. Here we pick up the narrative:
On Wednesday we loaded Charlotte's Camry and pulled out of Kalispell on Highway 2 headed for Glacier Park.
Kalispell is located in the grassy Flathead Valley. As you are driving on the valley floor heading east, the Rockies are in front of you, and there is an abrupt change from flat land to mountains. There is no gradual ascension into the mountains. There are no foothills. You just drive east and bam! Suddenly you're in the Rockies.
Soon Charlotte announced that we had just crossed the continental divide, and she pulled into a rest stop there so we could contemplate this fact. I've never crossed the continental divide in a car, only in trains and airplanes, so this was new for me, but I have to tell you, the divide itself is not more picturesque than the surrounding mountains. I took pictures anyway.
We drove on a while longer and suddenly we came around a turn and bam! There were the Great Plains! I was shocked. It only takes a couple of hours including a rest stop to drive through the Rockies? I was raised on tales of the brave pioneers crossing the Plains and then crossing the Rockies, and I always thought that the Rockies were a pretty substantial physical barrier, but if you cross on Highway 2 from Kalispell, not so much.
At East Glacier we headed north on Highway 49 to Highway 89. By this time we were on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. They were called Blackfeet because they wore dark moccasins, I learned. I always wondered about that.
We came to where a forest fire has left untold acres of dead burned trees on both sides of the road for miles. Finally we passed through the burn and came to unburned landscape and then to St. Mary, a little settlement from which you can enter Glacier Park on the Going to the Sun Road. We entered the Park, and headed west.
Now, many people over the years have raved to me about the beauty of Glacier Park, but now I've seen it and realize that there are no adjectives that adequately convey the beauty, the wonder, the awesomeness, the steepness and wetness and snowiness that is Glacier Park. So now I'm raving about the beauty of Glacier Park. You must go see it, and soon, because the glaciers are melting fast.
The Going to the Sun road was completed in 1932. It is just under 50 miles long, and is currently being re-built, one section a year for the next 8 to 10 years. It is two lanes of narrow, sometimes twisty, sometimes hair-raising road clinging to the sides of sharp peaks above deep valleys, taking you past the falls and vistas and flora, and the deer, bear, and bighorn sheep, and road construction, of the Park. If you're afraid to drive this road, there are park shuttle buses and antique red tour buses. It took us about three hours to wander from east to west.
The only wildlife we saw was one deer, a young buck grazing near a rest room near Lake MacDonald. We saw none of the grizzly bears which Park literature, rangers, and signs warn you about repeatedly.
We returned to Flathead Valley at the end of our day, and stopped for the night in Bigfork. The next morning we got up and went to Kehoe's Agate Shop, where we saw more gem and silver jewelry than you can imagine is possible, and where we also realized for the first time that Montana has no sales tax.
Then we had lunch at the Hot Diggity Dog hot dog stand in Bigfork, and headed for home, and the Pacific Time Zone, and at least one casino where Nancy won some money, as she always does. At the end of the trip we parted sadly, saying, “Next year, the Grand Canyon!”
I can hardly wait.
*Note: Officially it is Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park because it straddles the border with Canada.

Treasure: My Father's Letters

2009-06-19T17:40:00.000-07:00

My mother passed on in 2001, and my brother and sister-in-law have had eight boxes of miscellaneous stuff stored in their garage since. The idea was that I would go down to New Mexico to sort through the boxes with my brother, but I never got around to it. They are moving house now, and are sending me boxes.
Yesterday I opened a box that contained all the letters my father wrote to my mother during World War II. My mother kept them meticulously, numbered in the order they arrived, with the date she received each one written on the envelope in her careful book keeper's handwriting. There are 247 letters.
In April, 1942, right after his thirtieth birthday, my dad enlisted in the Army in San Francisco. His first message, a postcard, has a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge on it. He wrote:
“Dear Nita: It's now 8:45 A.M. & we'll be leaving at 9:00. I guess we'll go thru town about noon. You'll address me as pvt. until further notice. Your private, John” The post card is canceled with a postmark that says: “San Francisco, Calif. Apr 27 5:30 PM 1942.” They must have been traveling by train. The main line does pass through Watsonville.
His second letter is dated May 1, 1942, from Camp Sutton, North Carolina. “Dear Nita: Well, here I am in camp, and is it a dirty dusty hole. We had a good trip across the continent...We came in Pullmans, three in a section. I was lucky to get a pair of brothers as partners and they wanted to sleep in the lower together. So I had the upper all to myself all the way.
“This outfit seems to be a swell bunch of guys, but they're having a little trouble getting used to the army, so you hear quite a bit of grousing. I really don't know what to write you as I haven't seen much of this deal yet. But, anyhow, maybe I'll have more to tell. Until then, All my Love, John”
On May 2, he writes: “Dearest Nita: I just came in from my first day of drill, & what a mess...My writing is kind of shaky but we have no desks & I have to write in my lap. This camp wasn't even here a month ago & it shows it. All the comforts of hell.”
Reading that one I pictured my father writing on this piece of paper in his lap. I've done a little lap writing in my time, and am amazed at how that image made me feel connected to him as I held in my hand the letter he wrote in his lap in May, 1942.
He says he doesn't know how long he'll be at Camp Sutton or where he'll go after. “They don't tell us anything and when they do, they change it.” He says they are spending a lot of time making sidewalks with gravel, using large rocks for borders. In letter #3 he writes, “We live six in a tent, and I happened to get a swell bunch. They're all common working scrubs, like me. There are quite a few fancy pants city guys in this outfit, but I steered clear of them.”
On May 12 he wrote two letters. The first one begins: “My Dear Wife: I got three letters today. They were all very nice. You mentioned hearing Kate Smith singing 'Rose of No Man's Land.' I was listening to her at the same time I guess, from the Charlotte station. They must be on the same network...I was on Regimental guard duty along with about 40 other men from H.Q. Co. from 1 P.M. yesterday to 1 P.M. today...I volunteer on almost everything once, just to learn the ropes. But I haven't had any K.P. or extra duty, on acct. of I'm too good-? Some change. I volunteered in this mess tho, so I have no one to blame, so I might as well do it right.”
Postmarked the same day is a second letter: “Dear Nita: I just wrote you a letter, but I forgot to ask for a few things I should have. I'd like to have my slippers. All of my medium weight dress socks like I wore away. Maybe you'd better send all but the lightest ones including which work socks are good, then I can throw away what I don't want. Also I want the soap box out of that other kit. That's about all I can think of. So goodbye again. All my Love, John. P.S. G.I. Socks are strictly N.G. Love, John”
That's a sampling of letters 1 through 6. They give me a look at my father and a first hand report on what it was like for him during the war. I'm grateful that my mother kept these letters, these treasures. Stay tuned for more!

Drew is 24 Today

2009-06-14T13:46:00.001-07:00

Hang the flags! It's Drew's birthday! It's also Flag Day, but it's always been nice to see the flags up on Drew's birthday.
Drew was born on a warm beautiful day 24 years ago, at Swedish Hospital. His brother was born at home, delivered by midwife Susan Anemone. Drew was delivered at Swedish, caught by a nurse-midwife who was called in to do the honors because the doctor had decided I had an hour to go before delivery and he went off to make phone calls and run errands, or something. We don't know where he went or what he did. We just know he was gone, and that we had to pay him for delivering Drew even though he didn't.
I had to go to the hospital for Drew because I developed gestational diabetes when I was pregnant with him, and no one would deliver him at home.
He had what was called a “precipitous birth,” meaning that he came out fast. The doc looked at me, said I was at 9 centimeters and it would be about an hour, and walked out. And then my body started pushing the baby out. My conscious brain had no control of my muscles – the nurse yelled at me not to push! Hah. Dream on, protocol girl. It was about two minutes from the time he crowned until he was born. This is not usual, I guess. Babies are supposed to come down the birth canal slowly, being squeezed into life. The process fires up the respiratory system, I've heard. Drew didn't get that.
He didn't breathe well at first. The attending nurse (protocol girl, not the one who caught him) slapped the soles of his feet to wake him up and get him crying so he'd start inhaling and exhaling. After those first few dicy moments, he was okay.
We headed for home that evening and missed the ferry we were trying to catch. “Well, Drew,” we said, “a great start to island life. You've missed your first ferry.”
Drew was a sweet kid. He had ear infections his first year that affected his speech development. He prefers to speak with his guitar these days, but I gotta tell you that when Drew talks, I listen, because he has good things to say, and some of the driest, smartest wit I've ever encountered.
I could tell you more: how school sucked for him (for both our sons), how music saved him. What a pleasure he has always been to have around. How he went and aced the GED exams when he was 18. How he's been employed since he was 16 or 17, currently at the Bone Factory, but he lives for playing guitar.
You can see him play on YouTube. Search for paperboy128, and have a listen. Happy Birthday, our Drew. Love you.

Dick and Jane's Spot in Ellensburg

2009-06-11T15:11:00.001-07:00

Sometime back in the mid-1980s there was a feature in the Seattle Times' Sunday magazine that mentioned, and pictured, Dick and Jane's Spot, a one-of-a-kind art happening located in Ellensburg. Soon after I read about it, the trio played a gig in Ellensburg, and I insisted that we go find this place.
That was the first of many visits to Dick and Jane's Spot for me. Every few years I'd go back to see how things had changed – what was different, what was the same.
The Spot was the house and yard of Richard Elliot and his wife Jane Orleman, both artists, and friends of artists. They began in 1978 to make their home and yard an ongoing, ever changing art gallery for their own work and the works of others. It was meant to be fun, and it certainly is.
Jane is a painter, mostly, still. Over the years Richard became interested in making geometric works of art with reflectors, and patented a process for protecting the reflectors once he had them in place. He did several public art installations of his reflectors, which can be seen at their web page, http://www.reflectorart.com/index.html.
Dick and Jane enjoyed how much people enjoyed looking at their house and yard, but had signs up saying that it was a private home, and to please respect their privacy, so all the public got to see was the front yard, the exterior walls of the house and garage, and the fences that circled the place. The first time the trio dropped by, the north side of the house featured a painting (of Native Americans, as I recall, but my recall is shaky), and you had to walk around in a dirt parking lot to get a view. Now the City of Ellensburg has set aside a strip of land on the north side of the house so that you can walk along looking at the reflectors there without walking into traffic. The public art extended from the house to a series of “totem poles” on the north edge of that strip.
On a trip to the mysterious east about a month ago I went by Dick and Jane's Spot to see what was new and take some photos, and sign the guest book at the front corner of the property. It had been a while since I'd been there, and when I got to the guest book I was sad to learn that Dick passed away last November 19, after a fourteen month fight with pancreatic cancer.
After arriving home from that trip, I went to the web site to learn more about Dick and Jane, and was rewarded with rich images and the stories of two interesting human beings, who happened to be artists.
Jane chronicled her process of recovering from childhood sexual trauma through her paintings and writings. That's something you'll never learn from looking at the Spot, but it's there on the website, and her sharing is a great gift to others who walk a similar road.
So – here are my pictures from my last stop at the Spot. It's still there, and if you're in the neighborhood of Ellensburg, it's well worth dropping by. The Spot is located at 101 N. Pearl Street. Going east on I-90 you take the 106 exit and head north on Main until you get to 1st Street. Turn right, and you'll see the house on your left at the end of the block. Going west on I-90, take the 109 exit, and follow the same directions from there up Main. Enjoy!

Singing at 61

2009-06-10T12:23:00.000-07:00

There was a time when singing and my voice were my identity, my reason for being. It mattered a lot that people knew I sang, and sang well. Then the songwriting started, and that became important, too, but perhaps never quite as important as singing.
So I sang. I sang solo; I sang in choirs (secular and church); I sang with my husband; I sang in the trio, Women, Women and Song. I kept singing. I'd walk on a stage and look out at an audience and say to myself, “I was born to do this!” Then I'd sing.
Singing for fun is a joy. Singing professionally is hard work, and I never got it all together. Singing professionally is as much about bookkeeping, touring, photographs, bios, trying to book gigs, and keeping yourself mentally psyched up to handle all the rejection and poverty, as it is about singing. It's a heavy burden to lay on a talent, assuming you have talent. There are plenty of people who have the business side together and do fine with musical careers with very little talent. You know it's true.
I have a little talent, a God-given voice that is pleasant to listen to when I'm singing to please. I never was as talented as I wanted to be. I wanted to be Joan Sutherland. The position was taken, so I had to settle for being Mary Litchfield, and that was a process of acceptance. I used to be mystified that people liked my voice. I didn't think it was all that great, because I wanted it to be so much better, by which I mean I wanted to have four good octaves and be a coloratura soprano diva. I had to settle for about two and a half octaves, the middle of which were good. Turns out that's what a lot of people enjoy listening to.
One thing I had going for me was that I had pretty good pitch. I sang on-key most of the time, and I've learned that singing that is on-key is relaxing for people to listen to. Singing on-key makes sense. Your body goes ah, I'm safe here. Even if you are not a singer and don't have a great ear, I believe you enjoy someone singing on key a lot more than someone singing off-key. On the American Idol show contestants are often told that something they sang was, “pitchy,” meaning, off-key.
I have a tendency to go flat, especially when I'm tired, and have come to appreciate accompanists and other musicians who tell me I'm off, so I can get the pitch up where it belongs.
There have been people who told me that I was obligated to sing, because my singing and songs had meaning for people. I believed that – I wrote a song: “Give yourself to your gift, bring your gift to the world.”Singing as obligation. Sigh.
From the 90s on I sang mostly in the church choir. When I became ill with mononucleosis and a few other pesky diseases in the fall of 2007, everything stopped for me. Even singing in the church choir. I was shocked. I still am. I thought I was supposed to sing there every Sunday forever. But I had to stop everything, and the choir went on without me, and so did the church, and so, to the best of my knowledge, did God. How 'bout that. Turns out I'm not indispensable. Which was OK by me, because I was so tired.
For the last year or so the only singing I've done has been at the nursing home. Every couple of months I go in and sing songs I learned from my mom. The residents and I have a great time together. We like each other. They sing along, and some of them are pretty darn good, so it's a real give and take.
I sang there yesterday, and realized that my voice is pretty rusty. That's understandable when I only take it out every two months. Then I considered that maybe it's more than rustiness. Maybe it's that I'm 61 and time is taking its toll on my vocal chords same as on the rest of my body.
That's true, I'm sure, but the rustiness is real, also, so this morning I set the timer for an hour and sat down at the piano to do some vocal exercises. I would like to apologize to any neighbors who happened to hear that. Limbering up my voice is not a pretty process. Never has been. I sound like a loud strangling chicken. I hit a high C this morning, and I don't think the high C will recover. I was pleasantly surprised that I could squeak it out at all, but stayed a good five whole steps below that for the rest of the workout.
My voice is developing the gargliness of old age – or the old lady whoops, I've heard them called. A vibrato that would knock a squirrel off the bird feeder. I'm not quite there yet, but I can hear it coming. It doesn't bother me as much as I thought it would. It's kind of a relief, to tell you the truth. Now maybe people will get off my back about how I owe it to them to get out and sing.
So I did my scales and jumps, and agonized through a soprano version of Gershwin's “Summertime,” which was originally sung by a soprano who sounded like she never got much below high C. I decided I would do it to stretch the chords a little. Definitely not something I would do for public consumption.
After a while I got out the guitar and played a few standards (“Sweet Georgia Brown”), and then worked on some of my originals. I was embarrassed to realize I had forgotten the words to one. I considered again that when I go, those songs will no longer be sung.
Oh well. “Somebody else will take my place, some other hands, some other face...” That's from Malvina Reynolds' song, “This World.”
For now it feels good to have sung this morning, and to plan to sing again tomorrow morning. I'd like to see what's left of my voice after some of the rust is polished off. I'd like to sing those songs a while longer. Maybe go out and sing them in public, as my retirement hobby, if I don't sound too bad. We'll see.

The Farmer's Daughter Gets Back to Her Roots

2009-06-05T15:09:00.000-07:00

Many people are planting vegetables this year, some of whom have never gardened before. I gardened with great passion and little skill before I had children. We had a near-sunless, sodden little yard, but I planted in faith. There were squash: zucchini, yellow crookneck, and patty pans, my favorites. The squash did well, and covered the yard with their odd splintery leaves. I also tried to grow lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and corn.
One year I planted two rows of corn. At harvest each stalk had one perfect luscious ear. That small crop was worth all the effort – there is nothing in the world, that compares to sweet corn on the cob fresh from the garden.
I heard that horse radish was easy to grow, and mail ordered a root. Probably the less said of that experience, the better. Horse radish isn't easy to grow – it's impossible to stop. My husband hunted it down and killed it with a shovel after a year or two, muttering about clogged drain fields and warning me sternly that I'd better not plant any more of that damn stuff.
The lettuce and other greens were clear cut by the slugs, so I put in marigolds to repel the slugs and the slugs ate the marigolds, too. Then I tried putting cups of beer out, and the slugs obligingly crawled in and drowned, but then I had to dispose of the slug-slimed beer, clean the cups, and refill them with fresh beer. I began to feel like the dead slugs were having a lot more fun than I was, and I resented having to pay for all that beer. One organic gardening book advised going out in the morning or evening and picking the slugs up and putting them into a container and then...what? Dispose of them, somehow. One morning I went berserk and starting impaling slugs on a paring knife. “Die, die, you slimy sonsabitches!” I caroled as I wreaked my havoc. Within minutes I was sick to my stomach and sick at heart. I just don't have what it takes to wage a successful war, I guess. It was soon after that I gave up on vegetables. I realized that I enjoyed communing with flowers in my yard a lot more than the losing battle that was vegetables, and decided to buy my produce at the store and grow flowers.
After the babies came I gave up gardening. I would read magazines in which strong young women were pictured, working in their beautifully tilled gardens, smiling broadly, with sturdy compliant infants bundled into packs on their backs. I envied those women, and hated them. I wished I had that kind of energy and organization and will, and that kind of cheery easy child, but I didn't, so I'd sit on the rug on the living room floor with the boys and stack blocks with them and try to keep them from killing each other, and left the yard on its own.
I still had the longing, so I would buy plant starts. I developed a method which I have learned is quite common among gardeners: you bring home a plant, you put it into the yard or pot, you water it and if you really like it you give it a shot of fish emulsion now and then. You say, “OK, pal, you're on your own,” and then you wait to see if it makes it. If not – well, it had its chance, and you've had your learning experience.
This spring I decided to grow some vegetables again, but on a scale I could handle. I bought four wide, shallow pots, filled them with soil, and planted lettuce, spinach, green onions, and radishes. I also got two seed-starter trays in which I tried to start tomatoes. Their little cotyledons came up, their first leaves began to sprout, and then – something ate them. So much for tomatoes.
The lettuce, spinach, and green onions are coming along. Today for lunch I went out and thinned a few sprouts to throw into my turkey wrap. Not bad. I felt the warm glow of the farmer enjoying the fruits, or in this case vegetables, of her labors.
I've got my eye on the first radish that is plumping up in the radish pot. It will be ready soon, and I'm watching closely because I don't want to miss the peak of its perfection. Which is odd, because I've never really liked radishes.

Two Things

2009-06-02T23:43:00.000-07:00

Grammar
This morning I decided to start the day by reading scripture: Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. This slender little book is holy writ to editors and writers, and I read it like a born again Christian reading the gospel: “Oh yes! Oh, sweet Jesus, yes!” My grammar is far from perfect, but I love reading the rules and the examples of perfection. I was pleased to note that in a series of words, “red, white, and blue,” for example, there needs to be a comma before the and, but in the name of a business or partnership, like, say, “Women, Women and Song,” the comma is not used. That's the kind of thing I worry about, and I was relieved to see that the authority on punctuation said that the way I always wrote the trio's name was acceptable usage.
Of course, I have also come to believe that punctuation is an art as much as a science. How you punctuate is the way you apply your verbal brush strokes. I still believe that periods, commas, question marks, and exclamation points go inside quotation marks, not outside, although I'm aware that that is subject to personal and cultural opinion. My personal opinion is “outside,” and that's how I'm going to do it.

Heat
There are few things so pleasant as a cool evening after a hot day. We open the windows and let the refreshing breeze soothe us awake from the torpor of the mid-day heat. I have always regretted that the price for such a delicious evening is to live through the blazing day. But there it is, summer again, with its rewards and punishments.
Today was hot and I felt like I'd run a marathon even though what I really did was sit on the couch with ice on my bad knee, folding laundry and watching the last two episodes of season 2 of “Breaking Bad.” This series is not an upper, but it is so well done.
Then when Rick came home we watched the 1974 movie, The Taking of Pelham 123. A remake of this movie is opening in theaters right now, with Denzel Washington in the Walter Matthau part, I believe. It was fun to see several actors as their younger selves: Matthau, Jerry Stiller, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo. It was also fun to see 1974 again – the clothes, the hair cuts, the cars.
Having turned in almost four hours of television watching, I didn't really think I should feel worn out, but I did. Then the sun went down, we opened the windows, and now, at almost midnight, with a cool breeze passing through and frogs and crickets whooping it up out in the night, I feel downright alert and energetic. Just in time to go to bed.

Making History

2009-05-30T12:59:00.000-07:00

Greetings from a bright summer Saturday on Vashon Island, or as the natives think of it, “another shitty day in paradise.” OK, the natives don't think of it that way. I saw that on a t-shirt a guy was wearing in a documentary about the South Pacific Islands a few years ago.
It was warm yesterday and is on track to be warm today and tomorrow. Rick is recovering from yesterday's BCG treatment, and at the moment is playing Go Fish with our grand daughter Allysan.
Our older son JD is at WORK! Yay! The kid has a job! He's going to spend the summer with a shift running the register at the Chevron station up in town. His friend and music collaborator Charlie has the same job at Mom's, the 76 station south of town, so they figure they will be the convenience store kings of Vashon and will have plenty of grist for the rap lyric mill from their experiences.
Drew is still asleep. It's what he does during the day.
We had a busy week. Friend Sonya (you can see her above, getting prepared to drive back home on Thursday) came up on Monday and we had a good week together, hitting Granny's and the Lost and Found store, celebrating my birthday and Rick's, and visiting friends Alice and Becky, both of whom were under the weather (surgery, and pneumonia, respectively). And we talked of old times and old friends.
It is a great thing to talk with someone you've known for over 40 years, remembering our youth and the people we both knew then, telling each other more current news about the ones we've each kept in touch with. Some of them are gone now, including Sonya's ex-husband, Randy.
Randy was a storyteller, a punner, a bluegrass musician, and a welding major at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, when I met him back in 1967. In that arid place and time, he ended up playing rhythm guitar and dobro in the rock band I was in. Thanks to Randy we were playing country rock before it had been recognized as a genre.
It was a little strange, especially considering that Van Webster, the leader of the band, had announced that he wanted to form a blues band. I was in it to imitate Janis Joplin as much as possible without the drinking and drugs. Bruce Willard was the bass player, “as loveable as a speckled pup,” as Randy said. Drummers came and went, as drummers do. It was in college that I began to suspect that all drummers were crazy. Crazy or not, there's something different about them.
We played at a coffeehouse in Cayucos every weekend for the first year or so, and finally gelled as a band. In 1968 we started playing for dances, private parties, restaurants, and bars, for which I had to put on make up and pretend to be 21, as well as appearing at Poly Royal, Cal Poly's annual “country fair on a college campus.”
One month I made $100 from singing with the band, and felt like I was on the road to prosperity. Turned out to be a really short road. All you musicians know what I'm saying.
Sonya was Randy's on again, off again, sweetheart in those days. She occasionally came down from Santa Clara to visit him, and that's how I met her. We became friends. Sonya took me on my first trip to a Salvation Army, the beginning of a lifetime of second handing.
My mother was mortified.
There may have been women at Cal Poly with whom I could have made friends. I guess I never met them. I wasn't interested, at the time, in meeting girls who were there to get their “MRS degree.” It wasn't that I didn't want to get married myself; I thought there was more to life than that, that's all.
Randy and Sonya married in 1970, I believe, down at Montaño del Oro State Park. We ate the chili which Sonya had prepared, tossing in clove after clove of garlic. The cloves all disappeared in the chili, which was a mystery to me. Where did they go? How could a whole clove of garlic just melt? I guess if you apply enough heat and time, that's how.
In 1972 I rented a room from them in their house in Santa Clara, where they lived with their infant daughter Mackedie. During the months I lived there Sonya and I hit the thrift stores, the tofu factory (deep fried tofu cakes...mmm), and the store that sold Deaf Smith peanut butter (heroin in a jar). We got into my '58 Chevy and drove up to Skyline Boulevard to enjoy the forests and fields and views up there. We went to see Funny Girl at a drive-in. “The shoes are all wrong for that period,” Sonya said. We went to the Montalvo mansion in Saratoga, which is now the Montalvo arts center. We went to the Winchester Mystery House and took the tour. We went to Cost Plus Imports and looked at the goods, and I bought a red enameled silver ring which is long gone.
We went and saw Dave Van Ronk in concert up at the winery on top of the hill overlooking Los Gatos. When Mackedie began to cry at one quiet point, Dave Van Ronk growled, “Broil that child.” Big laugh from the audience. “Fuck you,” Sonya said. This was an appropriate use of profanity, in my opinion.
Good times.
I was supporting myself by working for a temp agency, so it is amazing to me that we did so much in the few months, less than a year, that I lived with Randy, Sonya, and Mackedie, but we were young and having a good time. Friends came over to their house and we played music and ate great food and laughed a lot. I'm not sure why I moved out and came up to Washington to live, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time. I came up here and met Rick, and the rest, as they say, is history.
It's all history now, but it's great to sit down with Sonya to relive a little of the past, and to go out with her and hit a thrift store again, and make more history.
Oh my gosh - got all the way through that and forgot to tell you what that other picture is: that is Dick and Jane's Spot, the house and yard that is art over in Ellensburg. That is a whole 'nother blog. We'll get to it in time.

Contingency Plan

2009-05-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

It was on an episode of 30 Rock that Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) turned to Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) and said, “What is your contingency plan for a crap storm of this magnitude?”
Or words to that effect.
Most people become aware that life is full of surprises. You know the famous quotes: “Life is what happens while we're making plans.” “When we make plans, God laughs.”
It isn't that setting goals or making plans is wrong. It's just that we never have sufficient information in advance to know what to plan, or whether a goal will be attainable.
Lovers leave, toddlers throw up, cars break down, someone we love becomes physically ill, or mentally ill, or dies. Our house turns out to have rats, or burns down (well, at least that takes care of the rat problem). Many of us have life histories of which we hope our children will never learn the whole truth, and our children grow up to have lives of which they hope we will never learn the whole truth. A drug dealer moves in next door, or maybe we end up becoming the drug dealer. None of us talked about that career track with the guidance counselor, did we? How many of us planned to get fat, or become addicted, or disabled, or to love someone who turned out to be unfaithful?
Sometimes we make plans and they do come to fruition and we realize, hey, this isn't what I want. Then some wise ass will come along and say, “Be careful what you wish for.” Then we have to resist the urge to whack said wise ass a good one up the side of the head.
So life is not perfect; in fact it is quite challenging at times. We get used to that. We learn to live life as it comes at us, and we try to acquit ourselves with grace and integrity. Most of us. We still make plans, but life happens, and we have to change our plans.
The peculiar thing about hardship and adversity is that it can lead us to faith in something greater than ourselves. How many times have you heard people say something along the lines of, “I never would have asked for this to happen, but it has made such a positive difference in my life?”
It's true. There's nothing like a really horrible turn of events to open your eyes to how you are surrounded by love, how noble people can be, and how precious life is. Your priorities get shuffled, and you realize that what you thought was important was getting in the way of what is important. What's important? Your relationship with the infinite; the love of friends and family; the joy in your heart when you wake up and think, “Wow, I'm still here.”
It might seem like a stupid idea, having to suffer to appreciate what is important and real. I bicker with God about this: “OK, I learned a lot, but couldn't I have learned it from a less painful experience?”
Apparently not. Life is a harsh but effective teacher.
So make your plans. Set your goals. Just don't get too attached to them. Be prepared to become educated. Have a contingency plan for crap storms. My number one contingency plan is to close my eyes, bow my head, breathe deeply, and pray: “Help.”
I've read organize-your-life gurus who seriously ask, “Where do you want to be in five years?” and I can only seriously answer, “I have no idea.” I have vague ideas. I'd like to be alive, and at least as healthy as I am now, and able to enjoy a slice of marionberry pie, a good read, a good laugh, and the love and companionship of my friends and family. Not necessarily in that order.
I can get along without the marionberry pie. I just don't plan to.

PLEASE NOTE: I am assuming that the photo of Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin is an NBC publicity shot. I found it on the Chicago Tribune site. If anyone wants me to take it off, please let me know and I will. FYI, I am not making any money off the blog or the use of this photo.

Allysan is 7

2009-05-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

Today is our grand daughter's seventh birthday. We will be going down to Dockton Park where her mom and other grandmother are throwing a party for her this afternoon. It's a beautiful day, so the various adults and kids who show up will be able to enjoy the park, which has picnic tables, a little playground, public bathrooms, a swimming dock, and public slips where weekend sailors come out and tie up. There are also a few liveaboards anchored there.
I tried to sing Las Mananitas to her this morning, but couldn't remember all the words.
"How lovely is the morning, as we sing hello to you
God's early morning blessing, we're pleased to bring to you
On the day that you were born, the flowers came into bloom
On the day of your baptism, the saints rejoiced with song
The morning sun is rising and...mmm...mmm...through
Rise early this bright morning as we sing hello to you"
Yup, I need to look those words up.
I am remembering the night she was born. She came into the world about 11:30 at night on May 16, 2002. When the moment came she almost literally flew out - when I said this to her uncle Drew later, he said with amazement, "The baby caught air?"
Well, sort of. And the doctor caught the baby.
And here she is.

The Practice of Forgiveness

2009-05-12T19:16:00.000-07:00

I saw an old boyfriend of mine yesterday. He was smiling and raising his arms to the sky and talking about what a beautiful spring day it was. Maybe a little irony there, as it had poured rain all day. I smiled and exchanged a bit of small talk in passing, and we went our ways.
Afterwards I thought about how differently I perceive things now than I did all those years ago. I was in my 20s then, and I was madly in love for a few months, and then he dumped me. I grieved the loss deeply and went around cursing men in general and him in particular for the next year or so. Gradually I moved on to other disasters, and I got over it.
When I saw him yesterday I smiled at his upbeat goofiness, which was always one of his most endearing qualities. Then I remembered his deep depressions. Almost 40 years on I felt compassion for his suffering, and whispered a prayer for his ease of mind, and marveled at how easy it is to forgive now.
What seemed like the end of the world 40 years ago is now the understandable passion of a young person who was subject to the whims of loneliness and hormones and insecurity. I was afraid no one would ever love me. I was afraid I'd never marry, or have children, or experience the fullness of family life.
I got over that, too. Forty years down the road the marriage, the children, and the fullness have all come to pass. Wow. Especially the fullness. Many people are experiencing this unexpected fullness of family life in these hard times, but that's another story.
The thing is, I worked hard on forgiveness over the years. I worked at learning how to forgive and let go of old hurts and resentments. The first time I was able to say I had forgiven someone who had scarred me in childhood, I felt such a lightness of spirit and joy, and thought, boy, if people knew what a selfish act forgiveness is, they'd do it a lot more.
What I had not understood is that in forgiving you are not letting someone off the hook for their sins; you're letting yourself off the hook of carrying your resentment for their sins. I've learned that you can't forgive out of hand, immediately or because the preacher says you have to forgive. It's a mistake to try to forgive without dealing with your feelings about what you're forgiving. Forgiveness is not an intellectual choice. It's a shift in the gravity of the heart.
It gets easier with practice, and with time. The hormones and loneliness and insecurity lose some of their power to whack you around. When you're an adult most people are hesitant to be abusive to you, but when it happens you're more likely to realize that it's about them, not you. It still hurts, because you're human and you have feelings, but you know it's not your fault.
I'm not saying you never do anything wrong – don't go down that road. You and I and all the world will be screwing up until the day we die. That's another thing I've learned in 60 years. When I screw up, I try to make amends, except for the times when I really don't give a rat's patootie. Not giving a rat's patootie is another gift of age, by the way. At long last I do not have to be responsible for everyone and everything. Ah.
It's always a good day to stop carrying around something that's weighing you down. Start small. Forgive someone for getting in your way in the grocery store. Not out loud – that would attract attention you don't want. Work your way up to old lovers and abusive family members. It won't undo anything, it won't erase the scars, it won't make life easy, but it will make your heart lighter and your life a little happier.
And that's worth a whole lot more than a rat's patootie.

A Few More Quilts, a Few Thoughts

2009-05-10T18:09:00.000-07:00

Here are some more of the quilts that were in the show last weekend. I took a lot of pictures, and it is a pleasure to share them.
We've had a quiet weekend. Our grand daughter was here, with a cold. Our older son was part of "The Mother of All Shows" on Saturday night, a variety show at the "O" performing arts space here on the island. The building is a former manufacturing building, and feels pretty much like a warehouse. This event went from 6 p.m. to midnight last night. JD and his partner Charlie Kimmel performed their set a little after 7 p.m. They do hip hop, I guess is the label, and they sounded pretty good, although they kind of puzzled the predominantly older crowd of hippies, artists, and activists. It is confusing to be confronted with a couple of white kids who grew up on this comfy island practicing an art that grew out of black urban experience.
I've been puzzling, too, but about angry right wingers, and how I always feel I must please them, and how impossible it is to please them. For me it's all about my mom, whose right wing politics were fairly irrational and often hysterical, and whom I could not please no matter how hard or what I tried.
The yapping, slavering dogs of the lunatic right have been in a frothing frenzy over the recent political events and a former shipmate of my husband's sent a lengthy screed about how Obama wanted military personnel to pay for their medical treatment for war wounds.
Now I read about this proposal when it came up recently, and thought, what a boner. How could the Obama posse get this so profoundly, disastrously wrong? The notion was quickly denounced by everyone on both sides of the political aisle, and it was retracted, and some one called it "a rookie mistake." A stupid, heartless, rookie mistake.
I remembered that veterans of the first Gulf War had to sue the Bush administration for their benefits - the benefits that were part of the contract they had with the country when they enlisted, but which the Bush posse tried to cut - and I shook my head at a government that asks people to die for their country but doesn't want to live up to the government's side of the bargain. I felt just as angry at the Obama proposition - hey, let's have our wounded soldiers pay for their care through their private medical insurance! Yeah! That'll save the government money!
It argues for a broader perception of "equality," doesn't it? Human beings are equally greedy, thoughtless, and hasty to benefit at the expense of other human beings. We knew that, right?
Which reminds me - a friend was telling me how disappointed she is with Obama. He has not lived up to his campaign promises. I told her that I didn't feel that way, and she said I was an optimist, but she was a pessimist.
I told her that I was probably more cynical than optimistic. I did not expect miracles when Obama took office. I did not have high hopes. I expected that a guy crazy enough to want to be president of the United States would assume the job and then run into the inertia of government. He's only human, and he's only one human. The Bush posse had been together literally for decades, making their plans since Dick Nixon resigned. Obama's posse is a crew of politicians of varying talents, values, and aims, who are being called in to work for the Obama administration's goals. They share that Democratic failing of not being a cohesive, focused group. As Dave Barry put it some years ago, Democrats have the administrative skills of celery.
So the new guys in DC have done some spectacularly stupid things, like commission airplanes to fly low over New York City and terrify the populace, and propose that wounded soldiers pay for their own medical care. They get in trouble for these stupid things, and some lose their jobs.
When Dick Cheney shot his friend in the face while they were out hunting, we laughed. He didn't lose his job for doing something so boneheaded, and he didn't apologize. As I recall, the guy he shot apologized for getting in the way of the Vice President's shotgun.
Oh yeah. Good times.
People screw up. I am pleasantly surprised when government does anything that I perceive as "good." I believe that is cynicism, not optimism. What I do like about the new administration is that it is not ruling by fear so much as the previous administration. That is something I perceive as "good."
Anyway, I got this email screaming about Obama's hatred of the military, and you know what I did? I wrote the guy, asked him where his outrage was when the Gulf War vets had to sue for their benefits, and told him to leave us alone and stop sending us hate mail. I know that his outrage has little to do with the rights of the military, but I had to try to talk to him. I knew I'd regret it. He wrote back that I was using pretty hateful speech for a confirmed liberal. This from a Swiftboater who once cussed me out for not hating John Kerry, and who swore to have nothing to do with us, but has persisted in sending us hysterical emails over the years. So I marked his email as junk.
I thought about it a lot. Why do I keep feeling like I have to try to get irrational people to see reason when I know it's impossible? I think it goes back to my mother, I really do, and it occurred to me that it would be nice if I could mark the old hate messages from her as junk, and not have to think of them or listen to them anymore. If only it was as easy to block that internal chatter as it is to block email from an angry man who can't handle black presidents or uppity women. It is such a disadvantage to try to be respectful and reasonable to someone who is neither.
These are some of the things I think about in the middle of the night when I'm not thinking about my husband's illness or how we're going to pay our bills or where we're going to be living in a couple of months. I'm feeling assaulted by life these days, and am wanting to be more careful about how I use what little energy I have.
I take my peace in the flowers blooming in the yard, and the beauty of these quilts, and the small graces that come to me, like my son who argued with me yesterday cooking dinner today for Mother's Day, and the sincere love of my grand daughter, and my husband thanking me for doing some small ordinary household chore. I am loving spring, and my family, and my friends. Thank you all. I appreciate you so much.

Shopping for a Computer

2009-05-08T20:37:00.000-07:00

I went shopping for a computer at Fry's down in Renton today. I told myself that I was "just looking," but my old computer died a couple of weeks ago and I missed having a computer terribly, so going to Fry's "just looking" is kind of like going to the animal shelter and "just looking." Odds are you won't come home alone.
I did not come home alone. I came home with what I am thinking of as my Mother's Day present from me to me, a cute little Lenovo desktop PC with a dual core processor, 6 GB of memory and a 640 GB hard drive. It cost about $550, which was acceptable to me, and at least a thousand dollars less than the ones I was looking at online.
Of course it has all the latest bells and whistles, including the Vista operating system, which has had mixed to bad reviews, but I couldn't wait. Know what I mean?
I like that it has memory card slots, and can play and burn CDs, and has lots of USB ports. I like that I can connect it to my printer. I also like that it has the Microsoft Office Premium software.
I did look at the Macs, in what I think of as the "Apple Chapel" section of Fry's. They are beautiful, indeed, and I was tempted, but there was the price issue, and the fact that I've been using a PC for several years now and have liked it. I may have to get a Mac just so I have one. I started on Macs and I miss them, and there are things I could do...
For straight out writing, though, I'm good with a PC and MS Word. And for mobility I have my Acer netbook, which has Linux OS.
Ah, life is so damn good.

More Quilts, Etc.

2009-05-05T12:25:00.000-07:00

OK, here are a few more quilt photos. In order they are:
Six blocks of the sock monkey quilt.
The Community Quilt, which will be won in a raffle at 4 p.m. on Sunday of Strawberry Festival. Standing in front of the quilt are Catholine Tribble, on the left in the quilted vest, and Annie Miksch, on the right. Annie is also a gifted quilter, but none of her stuff was on display because she gives it all away. If you know Annie, you know that makes perfect sense. Annie does not do good; Annie does EXCELLENT. It's just who she is.
Next, a detail of the quilt that had the gingko-leaf shaped quilting. If you look closely you can see it.
Then, a close up of a square from the crazy frog quilt. I'm not sure why frogs would be wearing clothes or be flying through the air with the clothes flying off, but there it is. The person who made it said she had the fabric for a long time before the design came together for her. I apologize for not getting her name. I apologize for not getting anyone's name – mea culpa. I was so dazzled by the quilts I did not note the names of the quilters. Sigh. I'll make a note of that for two years from now.
Finally, the photo I attached to yesterday's email alerting people to the new blog posting, the one with my friend Becky, my unrelated twin, down in the lower left hand corner.
In other news, it is raining steadily here today. It varies from light steady to torrential, but it's all rain, all the time. At the moment it is torrential.
Rick went to work for a few hours this morning, then came home and went to bed, which is where he is now.
Woke up to a note from our son JD in the tabletop diary:
May 5, '09
WOKE UP AROUND 1 AND JIVE WAS KNOCKING ON THE BACK DOOR, COMPLETELY DRENCHED AND THE COFFEE POT WAS ON ALL NIGHT. NOT COMPLAINING, JUST SOMETHING TO BE MORE AWARE OF FOR EVERYONE'S SAFETY, INCLUDING THE DOG.
J.D.
Rick and I took notice. Rick said, “Well, he was the safety officer at his last job.” I said, “It's amazing to me that the kid who gave us the most grief is now the one who tells us how to behave.” My friend Becky told me for years that JD would end up being a bank president, or something like that. At this point I really see what she was talking about.
The dog – well, he always wants to go out when I get up to go to bed, and he did that last night, and when I went to the door to whistle him in a few minutes later, he didn't come. As Rick says, you don't feel like standing there whistling, clapping, and calling for 15 minutes in the pouring rain in the middle of the night. I thought, oh well, I'm going to bed, I'll hear him when he scratches on the door. Instead I went to sleep and did not hear him.
It was nasty out there last night. I could tell because there is a dog a few houses up the hill who starts barking every time I whistle for our dog, or call him, or toss a ball, or walk out the back door, or sneeze. I whistled and called for quite a while and all was silence. So even the neighborhood sentry couldn't be bothered to come out and do his stuff. I can't imagine where Jive was that he didn't come into the nice warm dry house. And he ain't talking.
I am re-reading a good book: The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey. It was originally published in 1951, the year before Tey died at the age of 55 or 56 – her birth year is listed as “1896 or 97.” If you have read her books you understand why her readers mourn her early passing and the loss of her potential for writing more books. Here is a list of her published novels: Brat Farrar; The Daughter of Time; The Franchise Affair; The Man in the Queue; Miss Pym Disposes; A Shilling for Candles; The Singing Sands; To Love and Be Wise.
They are considered mysteries, but more than mysteries. I am not sure if I've read them all; I'm thinking as I start this one again that maybe I'll just read all of Josephine Tey again. I will not betray here a word of plot; I merely invite you to read, or re-read, Josephine Tey, and if she strikes your fancy, you are in for some good reading.

Island Quilters Feed the Soul

2009-05-04T10:24:00.000-07:00

Becky and I went down to Camp Burton last Saturday to see the quilt show. It happens every two years, and it is always worth the wait. The intricate patterns and passionate colors lift you up and make you feel glad to be alive in a world where quilts happen.
Patchwork quilts are one of the original recycling projects – using bits of worn out and used up items, as well as things like patterned flour sacks, to make new and beautiful covers for beds in a time before central heating and electric blankets, or electric anything. Many quilts were stitched by candlelight during winter evenings, I imagine.
Quilts now are not so much recycled material as new cloth that has been carefully chosen and coordinated to make stunning original works of art.
This show included quilts that the guild had done as a group – the “mystery quilts” and the “block of the month” quilts were the ones I noticed.
The mystery quilt is a project whose instructions are given out monthly over a year, and the quilters have to follow the instructions and use their imaginations and fabrics to put the whole thing together. The results are several quilts with the same pieces cut out, recognizable as all the same, but radically different from one another.
The block of the month quilts are made by quilters who receive instructions for one square a month for a year. They make the squares and at the end of the year they put them together and finish them in their own original borders. These quilts are not so recognizable as being part of the same project, because they vary so widely in their colors, composition, and borders.
Then there are theme quilts and the one-of-a-kind quilts: florals, orientals, children's; appliqué quilts; embroidered quilts. I loved some of the whimsical quilts – one quilt was made of fabric with sock monkeys, and another featured frogs flying through the air.
You have to look close to see the actual quilting, the patterned stitching which holds the quilt together. Patterns are varied and beautiful, done by machine or by hand. One of my favorites was a gingko leaf pattern.
Catholine Tribble was there with the Community Quilt which will be auctioned off at this year's Strawberry Festival. Catholine is featured in a square on this year's quilt.
I have a warm spot in my heart for Catholine. Last year she made an appliquéd and embroidered hand-quilted work of art, about the size of a pot holder, and on one side is a representation of Women, Women & Song in 1988, Then, and on the other side Women, Women & Song in 2008, Now, based on publicity photos of the trio. It was in a show at the Blue Heron Art Gallery last year.
The quilt show was as always breathtaking in its beauty. I am always blown away by the skill and artistry of these quilters, their eye for pattern and color, their patience and craft. I'll never be a quilter myself, but boy do I enjoy the works of the people who are. Hats off, ladies. “Beautiful” barely begins to say it. Only two years to go until the next show.

Not the Photos

2009-04-28T18:11:00.000-07:00

I meant to post some trip photos. I miss my computer, which died last week. Now I'm using my mini-netbook, which gets most of the job done with email, but is not a full computer. Earlier today it was willing to post photos to this blog, but then I went off to find the photos, and now it won't post them. I click on the "add image" icon and nothing happens. Gripe gripe gripe. Maybe tomorrow.

By the Sea, By the Sea

2009-04-23T07:12:00.001-07:00

My cousin Nancy and I decided to celebrate Earth Day by taking a road trip. This sounds counterintuitive, and it is, but sometimes it does the heart good to get outta town and see a different part of the world. It turned out that the only day we both could get away was Earth Day.
We are seeing the Oregon coast. It is a favorite destination for us. We practice the “staring at the waves” asana, and feel calm.
We both grew up with the ocean, down on the Central Coast of California. Living on Vashon Island keeps us close to salt water and tides, but on Puget Sound the only times the waves are up are when there's a strong wind, or when a large ship sails by leaving a wake which breaks on the shore about 10 minutes after the ship passes. These waves are not the same as the steady rolling of the breakers on a sandy coastal beach.
So it is a coming home to sit here at the edge of a sandy beach and watch the waves roll in.
It is strange the things you miss when you leave a place you've lived all your life. When I left California and came to the Island, I found I missed the sounds of trains, which had always been part of the background where I lived in California. In fact, my freshman dorm in college was located across the street from the main coast line and my first night there I awoke to what sounded and felt like a train coming down the hall outside my door. I got used to that, I guess, but the first night was startling.
Skunks. I was astonished to realize after I'd been on the Island for a while that there are no skunks here. They were a part of life on the farm in California. Occasionally someone would hit a skunk on the road, and you'd see that pile of black and white fur and blood and you'd prepare to pass through a cloud of skunk miasma – whewie. When I visit California and smell that old familiar reek I feel surprisingly nostalgic.
As I write the sun has been coming up, changing the sky from nighttime gray to daytime blue with fluffy white clouds. A few hearty early risers walk on the beach. What shall today bring?
We may do a little beach walking. I may go back to bed. Hard to say. We have stepped out of reality for a couple of days, and we're rolling with the waves.

Asparagus and Other Metaphors

2009-04-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

I had asparagus for breakfast this morning. I didn’t plan to have asparagus for breakfast. It was supposed to be part of dinner last night, but I forgot to cook it, and this morning there it was. I rinsed it and cooked it. That and a handful of almonds, and I was set for the day.
It’s a miracle that I like asparagus. My mother used to boil asparagus until it was practically gray. The result was slimy, mucilaginous spears that came apart when disturbed by a fork, except for the woody ends. My reaction as a child was: yuck. I only ate it for the mayonnaise.
After I left home I learned that you could cook asparagus lightly, and have tasty, crisp spears with a little field crunch left in them. You could pick one up in your fingers and eat it without mayo or anything else. Mmm…yummy.
I also learned that in preparing asparagus, you were supposed to pick up a raw spear by the ends and bend it until it broke, and throw away the segment of the spear below the break and cook the segment above the break. That lower piece was the woody part of the spear. It is called woody because trying to eat it is like trying to eat a stick of wood.
When I finally got around to asking my mother why she boiled asparagus for so long, she said, “To get the whole spear soft.” She did not break or trim asparagus; she rinsed it off and cooked it whole, and she cooked the edible part to paste in an effort to get the woody part soft enough to eat.
I understand this. Asparagus is not cheap. Everything in the heart, soul, and mind of a depression kid would rebel at the thought of spending so much money on a vegetable, then throwing away half of what you bought.
Of course there was a generational taste preference involved, also. There seemed to be a cultural belief in the 50s that vegetables were meant to be boiled into submission. The first time my husband and I served my mother stir-fried vegetables she took a bite and exclaimed, “They’re raw!” Rick and I looked at each other and said, “Uh-oh.”
We have come again into hard times. Hard times are relative, of course. An American hard time would be considered pretty deluxe by many of our fellow earthlings, who live in a poverty that we cannot imagine.
But that is not my point. My point is that when times get tough we indulge in economies, and some economies are false economies, such as boiling the whole asparagus spear until it is no longer good to eat in any part, assuming you can afford asparagus in the first place.
So my sermon for today is this: seize the day and don’t boil the asparagus too long. If you don’t have as much as you did, enjoy what you have. That’s all.

I’m Not a Vegetarian But…

2009-04-12T16:59:00.000-07:00

Once in a blue moon I buy a little piece of round steak to slice up and throw into a stir fry. So the other day I was browsing the meat section, and noticed on a package of beef the claim that, “our cows are 100% vegetarian!”
It stopped me cold. Wait a minute. Aren’t all cows vegetarian? All the ones I knew back when I grew up on the farm certainly were.
Then I remembered mad cow disease (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or BSE). The main way it spreads is by feeding cows to other cows. No, a cow doesn’t step up to a steak dinner and think, “Elsie, is that you?” What happens is that sick cows, sheep, and chickens are butchered, ground up, and mixed into cattle feed.
Aside from my gut reaction, “What a stupid idea,” my curiosity was piqued, and I did a little reading, and learned about the warble fly, and prions, among other things.
Turns out that a couple of decades ago the British government required cattle owners to use an aggressive organophosphate to kill off the warble fly (hypoderma bovis). OK, this is where it gets really creepy: the warble fly lays its eggs on the front legs of the cow. The cow licks its legs, ingesting the eggs. Once the eggs are inside the cow they hatch into larva which then tunnel through the cow’s body until they are just under the cow’s skin, where they cause bumps, or warbles. When the warble flies are mature they break through the cow’s skin and fly away. Argh. Didn’t I see that story on Twilight Zone back in the 60s?
Anyway – the tunnels made by the larva fill with something called butcher’s jelly, making the meat unsaleable, and the holes left in the skin by the warble flies breaking through render the hide unusable. So the British government decreed that all cows should be treated to kill warble flies, using an organophosphate (poison) that was put on the cow’s back and went through the cow’s skin and spread through the cow’s whole system. Voila, no more warble flies, or other parasites. The meat and hides are fine. Everyone’s happy.
But wait. Now the prions in the cow’s body have been weakened by the organophosphate poison. What’s a prion (pree-on)? One definition I found says, “the theoretical unit of infection.” So, theoretically, a prion is a tiny little protein thing that is like a virus, but not a virus, and unlike a virus, it is not alive. This is where the research loses me. How can a tiny little part of a living body not be alive? OK, I’ll leave it for now. This is thick enough without following that particular garden path.
Suffice it to say that damaged prions are proteins that are folded wrong, making them infectious agents. Infection leads to the formation of amyloid plaques, which cause deterioration of the brain. That’s the short version.
Because prions are not alive they cannot be killed, or cured. They just go about their amoral business for amoral reasons of their own – and they aren’t talking – and when a cow or sheep that has these misfolded prions is ground up and fed to other cows, the prions are spread around and carry on with their plaque-making. When infected cows are butchered and fed to humans, the humans then have prions misfolding proteins in their bodies and plaques begin to form in their brains. The condition is untreatable and always fatal.
Whew. Suddenly I’m thinking that a 100% vegetarian cow is a good idea, and I’m wondering if the systemic flea poison I apply to my dog’s back is a bad idea. So I read up on that. Turns out that the active ingredient in that poison is imidacloprid, a “chlorinated analog of nicotine.” “Imidacloprid is notable for its relatively low toxicity to most animals other than insects,” according to Wikipedia. So, not an organophosphate, and much easier than getting fleas to actually smoke and die from that, although I’m sure that there is a strong contingent of people who would be happy to explain why you should never use imidacloprid.
So that’s our lesson for today, kids. Oh yeah, I also learned that there is a British punk/folk/rock band named Warble Fly. Maybe “The Brain Rotting Prions” was already taken.

April Fools (That’s Tuels)

2009-04-01T23:45:00.000-07:00

Well, dear hearts, I haven’t had much to say the last week or two. I’ve been in a funk, it’s true, and when I’m in a funk I don’t like to talk to anyone, or write, apparently.
Tonight I caught up on the blogs I follow, because I haven’t been reading, either. Gosh, I know some good writers, great storytellers, deep thinkers. I am grateful for them, and for the internet, which allows me to read their stories and thoughts, any time, day or night, without bothering them.
I think of these down times I have as bouts of emotional flu. The correct name is depression, probably, and yes, I do take an antidepressant, but sometimes the old clouds move in anyway. No, I don’t want to take any more pills to cheer myself up. I know now that the mood will pass pretty soon and I’ll get moving again, but I do take these time outs from life.
There is an ad on TV for one of those pills to cheer you up. It asks, “Where does depression hurt?” “Everywhere!” I said back to the television. “Everywhere,” said the announcer’s voice. They got that right.
It hurts everywhere.

Black Eye Fading

2009-03-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

Well, dear hearts, it's almost gone. This photo was taken almost a week ago, and I'm looking close to normal again now. I admit that Natasha Richardson falling on her head and dying stopped me cold from writing more about the hilarious adventures of falling on your head. Suddenly it didn't seem one bit funny.
Meanwhile, spring arrived with only a few snow flurries, and while we're still having hard frosts (when the bird bath is frozen solid, I call that a hard frost)many mornings, the hyacinths and daffodils are coming up and blooming. The daffodils I finally planted a few weeks ago are not up and may not be. They didn't seem to have many likely looking growth points by the time I planted them, so perhaps I'll say I gave them a burial, not a planting. We'll see.
Hope spring is springing where you are.

2009-03-17T18:14:00.000-07:00

Today is March 17, St. Patrick's Day. It has been 33 years since Malvina Reynolds died. And today the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last newspaper.
The P-I is supposed to live on, on the Internet, but no longer will it be printed and delivered. The print edition was going too far into the hole financially, and had done so for a long time. Suddenly there are hundreds of employees out of work, and Seattle is a one-newspaper town. The Seattle Times carries on, but word is in the wind that it may cease publication also. Then Seattle would be a no-newspaper town. Oh, there are the tabloids, the Seattle Weekly and the Stranger, but they are more about politics and culture in the city.
Newspapers are dying. It is amazing to live to see the day. People are getting their news on the Internet, and on TV, I hear, but the fact is that ubiquitous as computers, cell phones, PDAs, netbooks, and whatever other online devices exist, a large proportion of the population is not computer-literate or planning to become so. I think the death of newspapers is premature.
In a sense it's one more reminder that the older you are, the less you count. To that I say: harrumph.

Oh, and the black eye is progressing. Seven days and continuing to move down, but not on, yet.

Monday Morning Mouse Report

2009-03-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

Wow, it gets better and better. Rick was saying last night that it looked kind of fetching, in a Mata Hari, exotica kinda way. I don't have any eye shadow dark enough to make up the other eye to match, but it crossed my mind to try.
Monday morning here (as stated above) and JD and I have begun wrangling about how to clean the house out. He of course could put a dumpster in the yard and throw everything in; I of course have things I'd like to keep. Pictures of the kids when they were little and family photographs going back to before 1900, for example. History! For me the hard part will be sorting History! From @#$%*&@ Clutter! I spoke about getting taller bookcases, and he said: Nothing you have to climb for. He is thinking “safety.” He knows that if anyone could have a book case disaster it would be me. The face plant I took in the driveway is making his point for him.
So – how do we balance safety and history? One piece of stuff at a time, I suppose.
I'll get back to you on this.

The Mouse's Progress. Ish.

2009-03-15T12:15:00.000-07:00

I am fascinated by how the black eye creeps down. Yesterday it was just under my eyebrow; today it is in my eyelid. I'm not sure how much farther down the blood can go now – I suppose I'll end up with some under my eye. Stay tuned.
Snow this morning! The Ides of March, and SNOW. Hey, weather, wise up – it's almost spring!
Went to sleep at seven or eight last evening, knowing I'd be sorry later. Woke up midnight-ish, and finished the mystery novel I was reading (Ann Perry's “Buckingham Palace Gardens”). Then I checked email, then I had some granola, then folded towels and got hooked watching “The Madness of King George” - marvelous British actors – and by then it was 5:30 or so and Rick got up to go to work. He is on call this weekend.
Went back to sleep six-ish, woke up nine-ish, meant to go to church but the atmosphere was 'way too snow-ish. So here I am, taking webcam shots of my black eye and thinking about lunch.
The fun never stops!

A Little Color in My Life

2009-03-13T19:05:00.001-07:00

Two days after the little fall in the driveway, the black eye has shown up. I noticed it this morning in the bathroom mirror. So much for thinking I got away without looking beat up. Fortunately, my hair and my glasses cover most of the damage.
It's a beautiful evening in the neighborhood. The dog and I are enjoying a little outdoor time on the back deck – first time since last fall. I am enjoying the use of my netbook, a not-quite-laptop that I got recently for mobile writing. It is running on the battery, which is cool. It's only about nine inches wide, which makes it easy to move around. It also has a webcam, which is what I used to take the photo. It seems to have extremely sensitive controls, so I end up stopping frequently to bring it back to where I want it after I brush something I shouldn't and the cursor leaps half a page away. I'm getting used to it. It requires a certain mindfulness, as does most of my life these days.
The cool is setting in now, so I'm going inside. As always, more later! Blessings.

Accident

2009-03-12T11:14:00.000-07:00

Accident (ak′si dent) n. 1. an undesirable or unfortunate happening that occurs unintentionally and usu. results in injury, damage, or loss.
A few years ago I heard or read that “old age is the accumulated effect of accidents.” Sometimes I think I’m trying to prove that.
Yesterday afternoon I had some errands to run. I went out to my car, and my purse tipped somehow and my cell phone fell out and bounced underneath the car. It was far enough under that I could have started the car, backed up, and then got out and picked up the cell phone. But no. I could not take a chance on running over the phone.
I got my cane, something I use when I’m feeling the effects of previous accidents, and bent over to try to hook the phone out from under the car.
Our driveway slants downhill, so picture me bending over almost double, leaning downhill, trying to swipe the phone closer with my cane. See, in retrospect I know I should have turned around and faced uphill. Yes. I know that now.
OK, so there I was, trying to get that phone, and not having much success, when suddenly I felt gravity grab me in its evil clutches, and brothers and sisters, I went down, face first, onto the cement driveway.
Ow.
The first thing I thought about was people who get slammed around on TV, then get up and walk away and appear to be fine. Television lies. Those are actors and stuntmen and women who get paid to appear to be hurt. That’s not how it really works. The body does not take a slam and then walk away feeling groovy. Trust me.
I rolled onto my back and put my hands up to the sides of my face. I wondered if any neighbors or passersby had seen me go down, but all was silent so I assumed no one had. It was a sunny day and the sun felt warm shining on me. It felt good, and I was pleased that this tenacious winter is being forced to loosen its grip. I was feeling comfortable, lying there on the cement in the sunshine, holding my face, and doing a mental check in with body parts. Legs? Aye aye, Cap’n. Arms? Check. Torso? Seems to be fine. I thought I was OK to go, and began to move.
My left hand came away from my face wet, and I looked at it, and it was covered with blood. Oh boy. I’ve always heard that head wounds are bloody. It’s true.
I got up. I found my glasses (permanently scratched). I picked up my purse, I pulled the phone out from under the car in one firm stroke of the cane – I was facing uphill now – and I headed back into the house.
My older son was gathering recycling just inside the front door. When I walked in he looked up at me and said, “OH MY GOD MOM WHAT HAPPENED?” He told me later that he thought someone had mugged me and he was ready to go out and get the guy – this is what comes of living three years on the mainland – but I explained that I fell down.
When I got to the bathroom I could see his point. Blood covered most of the left side of my face, running down to my chin. I looked like one of the people you see in news photographs that have captions that say, “Protesters struggled with police…”
I drenched a wash rag in cold water and cleaned myself up, and then I went back to the family room to sit down with a nice ice pack on my beat up face. We called the doctor’s office to ask about signs of concussion, and were reassured that I was probably not concussed. My husband came home from work and after the first alarms he asked me to be sure to let people know he had not done this to me. Understandable male nervousness, but I reassured him: no, I will let people know I did this to myself.
This morning I feel exactly like I’ve had a good whap up the side of my head – my face is swollen and scraped, but I don’t have the black eye I was expecting. It feels good to hold an ice pack on the swelling. I’ll be fine in a few days.
So, there, that’s the biography of an accident. I’ve told a few people about it, and have been humbled by the stories they tell me of falls they’ve taken. This was not a big fall.
Now, I know that some of you think there are no accidents, but wait until you have one. The laws of physics will get you faster than karma. Please excuse me while I go do a little more ice therapy.

Ads on the Blog...or Not

2009-03-10T19:31:00.001-07:00

Google says it will run ads on my blog page, for which I will be paid. This sounds great to me, but so far I have been unable to implement the change in the page's source code that would make the ads appear. Everything works fine right up until I'm supposed to paste the code in. Then nothing happens. I don't know why. But I'll be working on it. I have hope of success, if not success yet.

Mamatus (mammatus) clouds

2009-03-04T10:15:00.001-08:00

I was driving home from town last night when I looked up and saw these amazing clouds. Went home and got my camera, and they had changed and looked slightly less apocalyptic by the time I took the picture, but perhaps you get the idea. I emailed Clff Mass, Weather Guy, at the UW to ask what they were, and he said, “Mamatus clouds. Rare here, but we get them.”
You can see a more impressive photo by going to Google images and doing a search on mamatus clouds. It is sometimes spelled mammatus, but same clouds.
My photos were taken just south of Burton, looking east toward the mainland.

The Rose of Tralee

2009-03-03T13:21:00.000-08:00

My day had a plan, and I even had a first line for a new blog: “My hair looks like this because I read the Bible.” If you could see my hair, and if you read the Bible, you’d know what I mean.
So there I was, pouring granola onto my yogurt, when the phone rang. It was Deb, the secretary up at church, calling to tell me that they were going through Alex’s papers.
Alex is - well, was - Alexandrina Brannon, right wing warrior, raiser of birds, former employee of Walt Disney (she once told me that she commuted to work with Roy, the “mooseketeer” because they were neighbors), and bereaved mother of her son Kerry, who died in 1994.
She was a tiny and fiercely opinionated woman, hell on wheels, really, and we all loved her. For the last ten years or so she seemed right on the brink of death as one catastrophe after another hit her: falls, pneumonia, and so on. She survived so many close calls that I was kidding myself that she was immortal, but on Ash Wednesday evening, she finally passed.
What Deb called to tell me was that Alex had specified in her funeral directions that I sing, “The Rose of Tralee.” Also, I’m supposed to do a duet of “Danny Boy” with Wally Fletcher, another church member.
I have one week to get this act together. The service is next Monday, at 4 p.m., at the Church of the Holy Spirit. I abandoned my plan for the day and went to my friend the internet where I immediately found not only the lyrics for The Rose of Tralee, but a midi of the melody. Whew. I’m saved.
It is a beautiful Irish melody, and I’m learning it. I got out my guitar to learn the chords, which are pretty simple, but the midi version is in A flat, and then modulates to B flat. By the grace of God and a capo, I figured it out.
So now I have seven days to learn it well enough to sing it confidently for Alex. I have hope.
Now I’m going to call Wally and talk to him about “Danny Boy.”

Don’t Panic: Wash Your Hands

2009-02-28T10:54:00.001-08:00

You have probably seen the headlines, or heard the scary stories, about MRSA: methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus. This is a “super bug” that we have created by taking penicillin and penicillin-based antibiotics.
You can’t blame anyone for this development, really. Penicillin was the miracle drug which was first used extensively on wounded soldiers during World War II. Why wouldn’t we use something that saved people from blood poisoning and sped healing? When I was a child in the 50s, I can’t remember how many times I was treated with a shot of penicillin. We all were. It was a miracle.
But staphylococci that survived a course of penicillin fell back and regrouped, developed resistance to penicillin, and produced new bacteria that would laugh at penicillin and all its derivative forms. So now we have MRSA. It is in hospitals, but it is also in the community. It is here on Vashon. Don’t doubt it.
MRSA and other bacteria and viruses are all opportunists. Like the boll weevil they are just lookin’ for a home. They have no morality that we know of; their single imperative is to live and reproduce. Hey, look, here’s a cut in the skin! Hey, blood! Wahoo! We’re in!
Neither do they consider the morality or worth of the host organism. They will infect the just and the unjust alike.
MRSA can – eventually – be cured, but it’s not a ride you want to take if you can help it. It is painful, and makes you sick, and in extreme cases can kill you, so don’t wait if you suspect you have it. Think you have a bad spider bite? Got an ugly boil or abscess? Get you to a doctor and ask to be tested for MRSA.
Prevention is the most important thing you can do. What is the best prevention?
Wash your hands. Wash your hands. Wash your hands. Concentrate especially on your nails, cuticles, and between your fingers.
When you’re done washing your hands, use a clean towel – and then put the towel into the laundry. In a public restroom, get a towel in your hand to turn off the water, assuming you’re in a public restroom that has towels and hand-turned faucets. This is where those electric eye faucets on the ferries come in handy. Oh, you’ll want a good lotion to put on your hands so all that washing doesn’t crack your skin – and let the MRSA in.
Never use anyone else’s towel or washrag.
If MRSA enters your home, launder clothing, sheets, and towels in hot water, preferably with a little bleach, and dry everything in a hot dryer. You will want to clean surfaces regularly with bleach water (1 teaspoon bleach to 1 quart of tepid water). Be careful with bleach – it is dangerous. No kidding. Read the directions.
Or spray everything with hydrogen peroxide: toilet seats and flush levers or buttons, faucet handles, sinks and counter tops. Clean and disinfect any surface where bacteria might lurk. Wash dishes either in the dishwasher or with anti-bacterial dish soap. There are disinfectant wipes you can get, if you prefer not mixing your own disinfectants.
Taking all these cleaning measures and a course or two of sulfa or some other non-penicillin drug may see you through the MRSA plague, but you won’t be able to go to work or school as long as you are a carrier. You have to have your nose swabbed and wait a couple of days for the culture results to get an “all clear.” Until then you won’t want to go out in public, and, trust me, the public will not want you out mingling with them. MRSA is rightfully seen as a plague.
Why am I writing this public health column? Guess. Right. MRSA has invaded my family. I was lucky – I did not get it, but two family members did, and there ensued a few weeks of cleaning, disinfecting, laundering, washing, and constant hand washing, plus spending most of the food money on co-pays and drugs.
Has anything good come of this experience? (1) I have discovered the beauty of splashless bleach. Man, what a great idea. (2) I have learned that being close to MRSA does not mean you will get it. (3) I have warned you that MRSA is here on the island, and it’s not somebody else’s problem.
Don’t panic; wash your hands!

Ash Wednesday

2009-02-25T18:48:00.000-08:00

Went up to church this afternoon for the imposition of ashes. The mid-day service pulled quite a crowd, for a mid-day service. It is the beginning of Lent, the 40 days of fasting, prayer, and meditation that Christians are asked to do every year, with an emphasis on self-examination, repentance, and renewal.
I was thinking during the service how hard it is for people afflicted with depression to hear the Biblical words exhorting us to serve others, and think less of ourselves. It is too easy to slip into the swamps of low self-esteem, and believe that that is where Jesus wants us to be. It is too easy to believe that trying to help and fix others is more important than taking care of ourselves.
I beg to differ with that take on scripture. In my experience the true end of Christ’s teaching is that we become the best version of the selves we were created to be. Christianity is supposed to be transformative, not narcotic. I just wanted to mention that.
I’m not doing well with Lenten meditation and fasting. Last night I made pancakes for supper for Rick and me, in observation of Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday). This evening he said he really enjoyed those pancakes last night and I said yeah, we’ll have to do that again sometime.
“How about tonight?” he said.
Well, the poor guy has been sick and is craving carbs, so I heated up the griddle and went to work. Of course there were more pancakes than he could eat alone, so I had a couple, with maple syrup and boysenberry syrup. They were delicious. So not doing too well on the fasting. My skinless, boneless chicken breasts prepared a la diabetic recipe are simmering away, and I’ll have one of them and some green beans I suppose. I don’t know if that penance will make up for the pancakes.
They really were good.

Pre-Lenten Reverie on Grief

2009-02-18T12:31:00.000-08:00

Lent begins next Wednesday, and my church is going to have a Lenten Meditation Book this year. The book is a compilation of writings and images contributed by church members. Most are original works, and some are not. Each person was assigned one or more days in Lent, and given the scripture readings for that day, and was asked to write or draw or quote something relevant to the readings. I was assigned two days. My friend Megan Belia got everyone signed up, gathered in the submissions, and forwarded them to me, and I scanned or typed and formatted everything and placed it into one file, the master for the book.
There were stragglers. The deadline was February 8, and as of the 18th, there were two days left unfilled, one of which was Good Friday. Megan and I decided we would each do something to fill these blanks, and I took Good Friday – but then Megan called back a while later and said that the person doing Good Friday absolutely promised she would get her stuff in today. So I didn’t need write anything.
Too late. When I looked at the Good Friday scriptures, and noted the date of Good Friday this year, April 10, a reverie on grief began to pour out. It won’t be in the Lenten Meditation book, but I submit it here, a Good Friday meditation, for your consideration as we begin the 40-day journey from winter to spring, from death to resurrection. Here goes:
April 10, Good Friday
Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 22; I Peter 1:10-20; John 13:36-38
My father was born on April 10, 1912. “The day the Titanic sailed from Southampton,” I tell people. He died on March 13, 1975, less than a month shy of his 63rd birthday.
For about a year after his passing I was caught in deep grief. It seemed so unfair to me that he died so young. I would look at elderly people and think, “They got to live into their 70s and 80s – why not my dad?”
About three months after he died my mother moved. My parents had been renting my grandfather’s house, the house where my dad grew up, from my grandfather’s widow, and when my dad died the widow doubled my mother’s rent. My mother read this accurately as an eviction notice. There was never any love lost between my mother and my grandfather’s last wife, but that’s a story for another time.
I went down to California to pick up all the belongings I’d left there, plus whatever else my mother could stuff into my father’s old Ford Ranchero. My mother had a job, and one day when I was in the house alone, I was searching for something and for some reason I opened a drawer of my father’s dresser – and there were his socks, all neatly folded and clean, stacked in the drawer, waiting for him.
I went to pieces. I staggered into the living room and sat on the couch, where I wept, gut-deep sobbing. My father was dead. He’d never walk through the door again.
Ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour; I wept until I was exhausted and there were no more tears. As the tears finally abated, I felt drained. In that moment, though I did not realize it then, I began to accept the fact of my father’s death.
When I saw the date of Good Friday this year, April 10, it took me back to the days of my father’s passing, and how that felt, and I wondered how Jesus’ family and friends and followers felt on the day he died. Did they go through the motions of taking his body down from the cross and dressing it for burial and placing it in the tomb with the numb energy we have as we lay the dead to rest? I imagine those who loved Jesus were stunned by his death. They had no consolation. They didn’t know that Easter would come. They couldn’t believe he was dead.
And that’s the thing about this Jesus guy. It takes a while to believe that he died. It takes a while to believe that he rose again. It takes a while for the truth to break you to pieces, drain you, and leave you empty and exhausted. In that moment, in that darkness, Easter light begins to tinge the sky.
In that moment you begin the journey from unbelief to belief. Not now, but sometime later, you will see it. For now it is enough to walk through the grief one step at a time and see where the journey leads.

The Ant and the Grasshopper

2009-02-14T22:31:00.000-08:00

We have all heard the story of the ant and the grasshopper. It’s a beautiful summer day, and the ant works hard taking grains of wheat, or kernels of corn, depending on who tells the story, to the anthill to store up for winter. The grasshopper plays his fiddle, and tells the ant she should relax and not worry – there is plenty of food.
A few months later it is winter, and the grasshopper is cold and hungry, while the ants are snug in the hill eating the supplies they set by in the summer.
The grasshopper sees the error of his ways, now that he’s cold and hungry. In some versions of the story the ant says, “Neener neener neener,” to the grasshopper, but in others the grasshopper is left to deplore his thoughtless ways in solitude.
The moral of this story is: it is wise to think about tomorrow today.
This story is attributed to Aesop. It is one of the animal fables that were told to teach lessons about life and the world. I was thinking about this fable last night as I listened to the radio. People were talking about how they had saved money all their lives, and had pensions invested in the market, and now – gone. A young man said he hesitated to save money now, because he knows there is no guarantee that his savings will be there when he retires.
So many industrious ants are finding they’ll be out in the cold with the grasshoppers, was my first thought. But then I realized that Aesop created these fables centuries before the stock market as we know it existed. The ant was putting away food, not making contributions to her Roth IRA.
The Greek historian Herodotus tells us that Aesop lived during the sixth century BC and was probably a slave on the island of Samos. Though no historical information on Aesop is available, he was probably a real person.
Phaedrus was a Roman slave born in Macedonia. He lived from around 15 BC to around 50 AD, during the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius. He put together books of fables, including Aesop’s, in Latin. Phaedrus' treatment of the fables influenced later writers.
So the story of the ant and the grasshopper comes from a time when people lived on agriculture, livestock, and the maritime trade in the Mediterranean. The stock market was where you bought a chicken or a goat or some other farm creature.
You could say that we all still depend on those things globally today, and we do, but most of us are a few layers removed from the farm, the ranch, or the boat with a cargo of amphorae of olive oil. Whether we eat or stay warm depends on how much money we have more than whether we gathered the crops in sufficiently and stored them wisely last summer.
So our savings are financial. The IRA, the 401k, the mutual fund, stocks, are all tied to the ups and downs of the market.
You may have been an ant all your life, but now you’re sitting around having a beer with the grasshopper wondering how the heck this happened to a nice hard-working ant like you. The grasshopper sympathizes; he has nothing, either, but fortunately he can still play that fiddle, so the evenings can be merry.
We are being stripped of our illusions of what security is. It ain’t money. This might be a good year to consider what security is.

Snow Day

2009-02-10T14:50:00.001-08:00

It is snowing today. Looked innocent enough this morning when I left to sing at the nursing home: a flake here, a flake there. You had to watch closely to see that it was snow.
“Oh, it’s not going to stick,” I told Sonya. We got in the car and took off.
Sang at the nursing home for an hour – long enough to wear through my voice and my energy. Ended with “You Are My Sunshine,” and “Good Night, Ladies.” Looking out the windows, I could see the snow coming down quite visibly now.
I visited Christine Tokar Weil for a few minutes, giving her some photos I had printed up of the Australian branch of the Blakemore family. By that time the snow was coming down steadily, but not sticking.
We drove across the street to my church to use the facilities and of course stop and chat with people coming out of the weekly silent listening group. When we left there it was snowing heavily, but, still, not sticking.
Stopped off at Reva’s for a while and when we left there, the snow was starting to produce a white sheen on the pavement and sticking a little on the grass.
Went to Vashon Market to pick up a few necessities, and when we came out of there, there was a thick slush on the ground, and the snow was still coming down hard and definitely sticking. We beat it for home.
Which is where we are now, listening to YoYo Ma playing “The Cello Suites” “inspired by Bach.” Huh. I thought the cello suites were written by Bach. Live and learn. Cello music goes well with falling snow, I think.
The air is sweet with the fragrance of the onions and bits of ham Sonya is sautéing in preparation of a pea soup dinner. Pea soup goes good with falling snow, at least when you’re inside a warm house looking out at the snow. When it’s about done, we’ll bake some corn bread, and put together a salad of some sort. That’s dinner tonight.
We had intended to go up town to see “Milk” at the Vashon Theater this evening, but it’s snowing, and we live at the top of perhaps the worst hill on the island to go up or down in slick conditions. A veritable ski jump of a hill. So the movie is probably not going to happen.
The snow is wet and sloppy; sticking, yes, but also melting underneath, so that it doesn’t get deeper than an inch or two. Ropes of rotten snow drape off the back of the outdoor chairs and fall to the deck. Finches and juncos continue to forage on the deck where we feed them, not regarding the snow.
It’s mid-afternoon, so even though it is snowing the sky is bright and so is the world. It’s almost mid-February, and all the bulbs have pushed up outside, so I know spring is on the way and it can’t be stopped. In a few weeks, ah, the snow will be last winter’s memories and the daffodils will be in bloom. Not my daffodils; mine are still in the mesh bag I bought them in, unplanted. Oh well.
All in all, though, conditions are perfect for an afternoon snowfall. Guess I’ll finally get all those clean towels folded.

By the Numbers, or, Do We Buy These Numbers?

2009-02-03T17:36:00.000-08:00

January is gone, and I'm beginning to come out of hibernation. It's good to be back. Here is the latest Smart Aleck essay:

Dire numbers tick by us these days – Boeing lays off employees, and Starbucks lays off employees and closes stores. Other employers lay off their workers by the tens of thousands. On the bright side, the US economy declined only 3.8% in the last quarter of 2008. Whoopee.
Tough times, and getting tougher. Something former Senator Daniel J. Evans said in an interview back in the 1970s keeps running through my memory.
Evans managed the affairs of Washington State as Governor from 1965 to 1977, and later served in the Senate, following Henry “Scoop” Jackson. Slade Gorton followed Evans into the Senate, but I only mention that so I can mention that we used to call Slade Gorton “Skeletor.” He earned this sobriquet by bearing a surprising likeness to the Masters of the Universe®™ villain of that name.
Getting back to Dan Evans: the Boeing Bust occurred during Evans’ terms as governor. In those pre-Microsoft, pre-Starbucks, pre-“let’s move the corporate offices to Chicago” times, Boeing employed more people than anyone else in Washington. When Boeing stumbled, Washington stumbled. In those days a famous sign along I-5 read, “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights?”
I arrived on these beloved moldy shores in 1972 and missed the lowest days of the Boeing Bust. The local economy still ailed in 1972, but improved incrementally over time. Somewhere around mid-decade someone interviewed Dan Evans about unemployment. The interviewer asked, “Are you worried about the 12% unemployment rate?” Evans replied, “Well, it depends on whether you’re looking at it on the way up or on the way down.” He pointed out that Washington was coming back from an 18% unemployment rate.
Those who lost their jobs were forced to find new paths in life. For example, Hammond Ashley, former Boeing employee, became one of the premier string bass builders in the world. I knew about Hammond Ashley because I took a cracked dulcimer to his shop for repair around 1974. His shop lay under the flight path at the south end of the SeaTac runway. When you walked from the green and gray suburban surroundings of Des Moines into his shop and saw the ranks of glowing instruments along the walls, you knew you were in a world of wonder, created from wood and glue and loving care. Although many people left the state seeking opportunities elsewhere, others, like Hammond Ashley, started a new profession, and a new life, right here.
The numbers I heard on the radio last week stated that unemployment is at 8%. Of course, if you lost your job, you experienced 100% unemployment, and the numbers (ONLY 8% unemployment; ONLY a 3.8% decrease in the economy the last quarter) comfort ye not.
We hear all these numbers, but what do they really mean? The numbers that count are: how many numbers do we have in the checking account? How many numbers do we need to keep this roof over our heads? Do we have enough numbers to buy groceries this week? Do we have jobs so we can get more numbers?
It turns out that our ability to control numbers was exaggerated. So what do we do now? All the usual remedies: we share; we cut back; we make do. We plant gardens, mend what is broken, put on a sweater, and drive less. Do these measures wound your pride?
Pride takes a lot of numbers. Pride and his brother shame may have to be two of the things we cut back in these tough times. I’m about 50% sure of that, up from 35% last quarter.

Joy Gets a New Hip; Mary Gets Lost in YouTube

2009-01-14T19:30:00.000-08:00

My friend Joy Goldstein had a hip replaced Tuesday morning, and the word in the inbox is that it all went well. Let us all say healing prayers – or whatever you do to wish people well – for Joy.
I’ve been a little spaced out since the wedding, and am working on a larger piece which has involved a lot of “research,” which means I’ve been getting stuck watching videos on YouTube.
Of course when you’re looking up one subject, YouTube will dish up a selection of related or similar subjects, so I started listening to Odetta singing, and ended up watching videos of the second to last Johnny Carson show. It started out innocently enough: Odetta sang a song with Harry Belafonte, then Harry Belafonte had a drum battle with Animal on the Muppets Show, which brought up Buddy Rich and Animal having a drum battle, which led to Buddy Rich and Eddie Shaughnessy having a drum battle on the Johnny Carson show…and there I was, far, far away from Odetta, which is who I’m supposed to be learning about.
I’ll tell you another incredible eater of time: Facebook. I got hooked in by young friends, and now – yoicks. I can spend an hour there easily.
So it’s getting harder to get off dead center these days. But I’m working on it. And I hope that all my friends on Facebook who have been sick this week are feeling better.

Starting Out, Still Here

2009-01-04T17:53:00.000-08:00

We have all heard that “May you live in interesting times” is an old Chinese curse. If that is true, we are all cursed these days.
Of course in my universe we are also all blessed. For example – I put a plea for a flower girl dress, size 6-8, on Vashon Freecycle yesterday. Several women replied with offers of a dress. These are my sisters, most of whom I have not met, but when I put that request out there, they responded warmly and generously. Thank you, thank you all.
So our granddaughter will be the flower girl, dressed in flower girl style, at our goddaughter’s wedding this Saturday.
It’s an interesting time to start married life, when the market’s down and the cost of living is up, but what better time to be young and enthusiastic and ready to take on the task of making your way in the world?
Here at the other end of life, I was deeply worried about how my husband and I would be able to retire in a few years, but for some reason when the market crashed my spirits picked up – apparently I love a challenge, because that’s how I’m seeing it now. A lot of us will be facing this challenge together.
Here at the other end of life, we have experienced many losses. People we loved: parents, siblings, spouses, children, friends – gone. Our health and mobility: chipped away by inches in accidents and arthritis or chronic illness, or all at once in a diagnosis of cancer or some other life-threatening illness. Bam! Your world is now completely different from what you expected.
The money goes, the good health, the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound. We are betrayed, and we betray others, both of which take a toll on our hearts. The dance of sexuality goes on, but some of us, with gratitude, say, OK, I’m sitting this one out.
Eventually all the striving and hoping and fighting and despairing and loving and hating runs down. Eventually our own mortality cannot be ignored any more. That’s if we’ve been fortunate enough to live so long – some people die before they’ve had time to ponder the fact of their own death.
So you reach this point and look around, and son of a gun, you’re still here. Read it out loud: “I’m still here!” Say it again: “I’m still here.” If you can say that, if you can think that, the party isn’t over, and the music is still playing.
I’m planning to rise to the challenges of these interesting times with the relish of anticipation. Oh boy – another puzzle to solve, another dilemma to work through.
For now I am rising to the challenge of seeing our goddaughter married. This is as close as I’ve come to planning a wedding. When my husband and I married, the priest said, “Getting married is a lot of trouble.” Boy, he said a mouthful.
As challenges go, this is definitely one of the happy ones. Right now, two days before the big day, things are pretty frantic. In about 48 hours, the frenzy will stop, the ceremony will begin, and all details that haven’t been covered will fall away, as the bride’s cousin plays the processional on ukulele and her father escorts her down the aisle of the Burton Church.
Blessings to you, Mr. and Mrs. Baskin. May you live long and happily, may you grow in love and wisdom, may sorrow not linger at your door. May you rise together to the challenges of all your interesting times. Amen.

Unemployed: Artist

2008-12-21T22:12:00.000-08:00

I went to the bank the other day to open a savings account, a few decades too late. I’ve always joked that we would have enough when we retired to have lunch and then commit suicide, but it’s not so funny anymore. I mean, we might be able to have lunch, but we won’t be able to have dessert, much less afford to kill ourselves. There used to be the “put the old folks on an ice floe and let them float off to die” alternative, but with global warming, that’s out.
But – getting back to the bank.
The efficient young woman filling out the paperwork asked me what my occupation is, and I told her I didn’t have a job, and that I’m a singer, songwriter, and writer. She wrote in the blank: “Unemployed: artist.”
Ouch. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to justify my existence to myself, and in two words the edifice of my self-worth trembled, and all the dark fears that my parents were right billowed around me. Remember, I grew up on a farm, and came from conservative hard-working people. I remember well their attitude toward artists.
Artists, actors, musicians, dancers, writers, god help us poets and their ilk did not really work. They had fun during the day and stayed out late having fun at night – not like the workers of the world who were early to bed, early to rise, and none of that damned arts nonsense. All musicians were hopheads. All dancers were queer. All painters were dreamy lay-abouts who couldn’t even make a picture that looked like anything. All artists were parasites living off the pissed-off people who had to get up and go to a job every day.
If that is what you believe, there is nothing I could tell you that would teach you what hard work it takes to create art. To create something wonderful out of what you can do with your body, your mind, and your willingness to be a channel for something greater than yourself is something you achieve by years of hard work and practice, all of which you do for no money. In fact, you might have to pay people to teach you technique – voice lessons, drawing lessons, acting lessons, dancing lessons, instrument lessons. Talent is also helpful.
Meanwhile, while studying and practicing, you wait tables, you type, you clean houses or paint houses or build houses, you do something to support your art habit, and you take a lot of criticism, both artistic and personal.
You will be told more than once not to quit your day job, because you just don’t have what it takes.
When you fill out forms that say, “Occupation – check one,” they will never have a box for what you do.
Artistic success tends to be temporary – a painting sold, a few paying gigs. If you get to be the member of a dance or opera company – well, do you realize how many people are competing for those spots, and how good they are? Do you have any idea how many failed auditions every single dancer, actor, and musician lives through?
Oh yeah, it’s a real walk in the park, the life artistic. That’s why most people do it as a hobby. Going to a job is much easier than being an artist. So why do people do it? They have to. It’s who they are.
That’s why it says on my savings account form, “Unemployed: artist.” I’ll go on struggling with the self-worth thing. Why stop now?
You could help by buying one or two CDs. Why didn’t I think of saying that ‘way before Christmas? Oh well. The music’s been good for over 20 years, and it will still be good in January. Email me at: mary.litchfieldtuel@gmail.com, and we’ll talk.

Snowed In

2008-12-20T12:16:00.000-08:00

Dear Hearts and Gentle People ~
It’s a cold Saturday in Puget Sound, and according to the Weather Channel it’s a cold day in a lot of the US of A, except down in southern Texas, where my friend Susan advises me they have the air conditioning on.
I have revised my cold weather getaway plan. I won’t go to California. I’ll pass through California on the way to Houston.
My Brave Knight (that would be Rick) departed for town a few minutes ago, in a pickup truck with chains. He was carrying library books and a grocery list. He qualifies for the Brave Knight rating today because the snow is deep and more is expected. I was going to go with him, but he said that my holey old athletic shoes are not adequate for the snow, and I don’t have any more substantial shoes. So I made the list and sent him off. There was a time I might have argued to go, but that was when I had good knees.
Our road was graded and sanded yesterday, but we haven’t had mail or a paper for two days. I haven’t left the house since last Tuesday.
Being snowed in is not such a big deal when you’ve got cable and internet, but a wind storm is predicted for this evening, so we could be in the dark soon. On the upside of that, we don’t have to worry about losing food in the freezer. We can store it outside and it will keep fine. As long as the raccoons don’t get it. But we’ll deal with that problem when it arises.
So I’m sitting here listening to the Kingston Trio Christmas album, “The Last Month of the Year.” My grand daughter is gluing together a Santa Claus and a snow man my cousin Nancy sent her. After raising two boys I am always amazed that this little girl will sit down with a project and follow the directions and get it done. Wow. As a process person, I appreciate goal-oriented people. They are mysterious and miraculous to me.
Meanwhile I sit here in the middle of a zillion uncompleted projects, with the Kingston Trio singing me through the season.
“One for the little bitty baby who was born, born, born in Bethlehem!”
Stay warm, friends.

Living the Boring Life

2008-12-13T19:59:00.000-08:00

Winter weather makes me a little nervous. This house I’m living in has no wood stove, so if the electricity goes off, it will get cold, and stay that way. When I asked the owner of the house what she did when the power was out, she told me that her kind neighbors took her in for a day or two, and after that she flew to California.
I am considering whether I shall follow her sensible course of action if the electricity goes off for an extended period of time. I haven’t been to California for a while.
California is where I was born and where I grew up until my early 20s, when I moved to Vashon Island. I was born in a little town called Watsonville, a farming community on the southern end of Santa Cruz County.
Today at the store I stood in front of a large Martinelli’s Sparkling Cider display, picking up bottles and looking at the pictures from Martinelli’s history on the labels, trying to see if I could recognize anything in them.
The Martinelli’s plant was across the street from my high school. I remember sitting in Mr. Plummer’s freshman English class in the basement of the old high school building (built in 1903, now long gone), staring out the ground level windows at Martinelli’s on the other side of Beach Street. I was waiting for life to begin, waiting to be free from school, and bells, and petty tyrants, of which there seemed to be so many, both adult and student.
One day a man who looked like Gabby Hayes, or a prospector straight out of the Gold Rush, came walking down Beach Street leading a donkey that was carrying a pack. This would have been in 1962 or so. I was curious, but I never found out who he was or why he and his donkey walked by the high school. He was a character, no doubt, one of the people at whom we rolled our eyes and twirled our fingers around our ears to indicate, “crazy.” In 1962 there weren’t many characters. Characters came in a few years later when we all decided to let our hair grow.
I wish I could say that I saw other interesting things while gazing out the windows of my high school classes, but that was pretty much it, just that one guy and his donkey. Other than that it was four years of boredom.
Growing up in California in the fifties and sixties felt pretty boring. I know now that I was living a comfortable life in a place where the temperature stayed between 50 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit all year ‘round. I guess that being safe and comfortable can seem boring to a kid.
My cousin and I are planning a road trip to California next spring. We’ll drive out to Green Valley to see the ranches, both my grandfather’s and my father’s. My father’s apple trees are gone, replaced by dwarf varieties that produce more apples. Also gone are the peach, apricot, fig, and lemon trees that we had for our personal use. Once the place was sold and became a part of agribusiness, no longer a family farm, those oddities had to go. Too bad. I remember how happy my dad looked when he sat down to a bowl of fresh peach slices drenched in cream.
Now when I go up to the top of the hill and look at the views I so loved as a child, I am trespassing on someone else’s land. But I go, anyway, so I can look at the flat orchard-covered floor of Green Valley to the north, and the long vista over the Pajaro Valley and off to Fremont Peak in the hazy distance to the south, and drink the view in.
I must be getting old, to mourn times and people that are no more. Makes me wonder why we want long life, when the older we get, the more losses we carry. Still, you know I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
I wish you all a warm and wonderful Christmas, or whatever the heck you celebrate. May it be safe, and comfortable, and boring. You know: enough to eat, clothes to wear, a roof over your head, family and friends, no sickness or death or other catastrophes. Boring. Let’s hear it for boring.

Superwoman No More

2008-12-03T17:11:00.000-08:00

In a conversation with some other women who have had significant health challenges, I heard myself saying, “It is so hard to wrap your consciousness around the fact that your body is not the same.”
They agreed: “No one prepared us for this.”
“This” could be one or more of any events or illnesses: cancer, car wrecks, chronic illness of any kind, falls, breaks, loss of hearing, sight, smell, taste, or cognitive ability; and whatever else I have forgotten or don’t know about that belongs on this list.
For me it has been various accidents, with mononucleosis piled on top. I cannot rely on my body to do what I once took for granted.
For example, move all these boxes of stuff so I can put up the Christmas tree? At one time that was the work of a moment. Not any more, brothers and sisters. Now it’s a matter of figuring out if I can catch my sons or my husband long enough to do the heavy lifting and shifting. If not, the thing does not get moved, and the little project does not get done.
When I do manage to get something done, I have to rest up afterwards. Crap. Insult added to injury, and then I’m too tired to sustain the insult, and need a nap.
Actually, the naps are great, but there was a time when I would not stop for anything, especially not a nap, which appears to be “doing nothing,” and horrors, we can’t have that, superwoman doing nothing.
Superwoman is beginning to realize that her high flyin’ days are over. They got left behind somewhere – for me, in that car wreck, in various falls and broken bones, and in the mononucleosis that left me with no energy.
It wasn’t until today, when I was talking about how when things happen to your body it takes forever for your conscious mind to catch up, that I realized that my mind still hasn’t caught up. I’m not sure if my mind has even started to admit that there’s anything different than it used to be.
It’s pretty frustrating to stand and look at work you used to do easily and confront the new reality that you can’t do it. It bodes well for anyone who plans on coming to the garage sale I’m going to have one of these days, though. I’m leaning in a lot of ways, but mainly I’m leaning towards getting rid of anything that’s in my way, and that’s practically everything.
Superwoman needs a nap now.

Joan Baez in Concert

2008-11-25T11:50:00.000-08:00

My friend Becky and I went to see Joan Baez in concert last night. She was at the Moore Theater in Seattle.
We wanted to park close to the Moore because of my bad knee. I can’t do too much walking these days. So we caught a 4:30 boat and headed in to Seattle.
After trolling around the one-way streets of downtown for a while, we found the parking lot directly across the street from the Moore – location, location, location – and then the next thing on the agenda was to find a place to eat dinner, preferably a restaurant with bathroom facilities.
The closest restaurant, across the street from the Moore on Virginia Street, was the Buenos Aires Grill. They had the bill of fare posted outside the front door, and we stood there perusing it for a good five minutes. It looked good, but there were no prices listed. To my mind, when the prices are not listed on a menu, it means, “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
Suddenly Becky stopped reading and said, “If it’s good enough for her, it’s good enough for us,” and then said to me sotto voce, “Look to your right.”
To my right, through the window, was a table with three people seated. Two were men and one was Joan Baez.
We walked in and a cheerful young man seated us at the table right next to Joan Baez and, as it turned out, her two band members.
Now Joan Baez is a cultural icon, so Becky and I tried to be good. We did not wish to disturb the folk goddess’s dinner. Inside, though, I was jiggling with excitement and thinking, this is so cool.
A lady who came in soon afterwards was not constrained in her behavior. She rushed to Baez’ table and gushed, “I’ve been following you for 40 years! In college I was you! I let my hair grow and carried a guitar around!” And so on. Joan Baez was quite gracious to her, but after the fan went off to her own table we noticed that Baez and her band mates switched seats so that she was sitting with her back to the room, which put her about three feet away from me.
This is so cool.
When Baez got up to leave, she graciously took the hand of the gushing fan and said a few words, and as she passed us I could no longer restrain myself and said, “Have a wonderful concert. We’ll be in the audience.” She kind of smiled and kept walking.
Now I am not famous, but I have been a singer/songwriter and have experienced people coming up to talk to me after concerts. Most of them, bless their hearts, wanted to say how much they enjoyed the music, and double bless them, buy a CD. Sometimes, though, people came up with a peculiar intensity that could be a little scary. There is a thin line between “rabid fan” and “stalker.” So I can understand the wish of a famous person to protect herself from being loved to death.
Becky and I had our dinners. The food was GREAT. The Buenos Aires Grill, as you might imagine from its name, specializes in good beef, well prepared, so not for vegetarians, but for those of us who are still omnivores, it was a treat.
I also called my husband on my cell phone, and said, “Guess who I had dinner with!” Yes, I was so excited I ended a sentence with a preposition. He was suitably impressed, and after I hung up I said out loud, “This is so cool!” Becky laughed. We both laughed.
One young man was still sitting at the Baez table, and I finally turned to him and said, “I’m trying to be good, but…are you a band member?” He smiled sweetly and said yes. He had a British accent. We talked a little. He said that it was great touring with her, and, “…especially chatting with her. We’ve had some good chats.” Becky and I agreed that Joan Baez must have a lot to say that is of interest. Later, at the concert, I would learn that this young man’s name was John Doyle, and he was the music director of the group, and he played guitar left handed.
The concert was great. She performed with three musicians, one of whom was John Doyle, and she also did some solo songs. She opened with, “Flora, the lily of the west,” and did most if not all of the songs from her latest album, my favorite of which was a tune by that album’s producer, Steve Earle, titled, “God Is God.” Good song.
There was a young woman who came out on stage to switch guitars so Baez could play in different tunings. She switched guitars, she unplugged and plugged in sound cords, she moved music stands. The young woman was eventually introduced as, “Stephanie, my assistant.” Man, I thought, I want a Stephanie.
Joan Baez sang from 8 p.m. until almost 10, without intermission, and did an encore of two songs, and in the last song of the last concert of a month-long tour, you could tell that everyone on stage was relaxing and letting down, having a ball.
Then the band walked off stage and Joan Baez sang “Amazing Grace” a cappella, and the audience joined in, and we sang the verses with her, and broke into harmonies, until the whole audience that filled the Moore Theater to the rafters was one vast gospel choir. As the last note faded, she thanked us all and said good night.
I floated down the ramp to the main floor, where I waited while Becky bought the latest CD, then we went outside and noticed a group of people standing around the tour bus. Becky decided to wait, but my knee was done for the night, so I headed off to the car to await her. When she came, she had her CD autographed by Joan Baez, and a photo on her digital camera of herself and Joan Baez standing side by side. “She was very gracious,” Becky said.
Yes, she was. It was so cool.

Glasses and Canes

2008-11-23T23:45:00.000-08:00

My vision started to go when I was about 43. There were a few things I noticed that sent me to the optometrist. One: I was standing in church singing a hymn when I noticed that the letters seemed to be weaving around on the hymnal page like teeny tiny synchronized polliwogs. Two: I was driving on the freeway at night and noticed that all the tail lights of the cars in front of me were blurry, and had little star rays radiating. Three: I looked up at the stars in the sky, and they, like the tail lights, were blurry and had rays.
So I went to see Grant Lindskog, the local eye guy, who gave me an exam and informed me that I had presbyopia – my eyes were getting old. He cheerfully told me that it was people like me who sent his children to college, and he wrote a prescription for low magnitude reading glasses.
Rest in peace, Grant. We miss you.
After that I discovered cheap reading glasses, and started buying those. I got them in different styles, and gradually got stronger ones as my near vision deteriorated. They broke, and lenses fell out of them, so I bought more. I lost them frequently so I bought more and left them all over the house so that at any given time I could find a pair easily.
After about 15 years I started wearing prescription glasses all the time and stopped buying reading glasses, so I don’t have them stashed all over the house anymore.
I noticed the other day that now I’m starting to leave canes around the house.
I got my first cane about the time I got my first glasses, come to think about it – I had a bone spur in my left heel, and walked with a cane until the spur was surgically removed. Then I didn’t need a cane until my car wreck in 2000. After that I wore a back brace for six months, and used a cane for some of the time. I was in bed a lot the first few months, and used that time to tied string around a cane I picked up at the local thrift store. It was an adjustable metal cane, until I did the whole thing in sailor’s knots and varnished it.
Then my knees started to go, and periodically I needed to use a cane again, and I went to the thrift store and bought a few more canes over time. I think I had this idea that I was going to sand them down and paint them in colorful styles, but I don’t know why I thought that. I am not a craftsperson or an artist. Just another one of those darned bright ideas I tend to get, and forget.
Last week I took a fall that did something to my left knee that feels bad. Today I realized that I was leaving canes planted in various spots around the house so I’m close to one when I need it. I’m hoping my knees don’t go the way of the eyes, getting worse and worse. I have an appointment with an orthopedist in early December, and I think there may be some surgery in the near future for my knees. I will go quietly. I miss being able to walk. Maybe while I’m recovering from surgery I’ll have time to put sailor’s knots on some of my other canes. It’s a nice look.

Counting My Thankfuls*

2008-11-18T16:05:00.000-08:00

Who misses those nasty campaign ads? Only the ad agencies that were paid to put them together and the television stations that collected the ad revenue for broadcasting them, that’s my guess. So that’s one thing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving: thank God the election is over.
Many rejoice that Obama was elected; it’s a new world, and a fresh start, and boy, we could all use a fresh start in this season of economic crashes. I really could not bring myself to believe beforehand that this amazing thing could happen. It felt like a miracle, a growing up in this country, and I am thankful for that, as are many people.
A conservative friend told me that she wore black and no jewelry the day after the election; I know that conservatives are mourning their loss, as I mourned when Bush became president, both times. I felt hopeless for the future of this country, and the world. Perhaps that is what conservatives are feeling now.
I know and love a lot of conservative people; I grew up in a conservative family, and don’t know why I turned out to be the only liberal, or progressive, I guess I’m supposed to call myself now. Maybe it was the inspiration of the civil rights movement and the ugliness of racism, or the siren song of rock and roll, or the yearning for peace while seeing the country torn apart by division over Vietnam.
Maybe it was the hypocrisy of people saying one thing and doing another. Many of the conservatives who now hoot about patriotism made darn sure that they did not go to Vietnam back in the day. That double standard is alive and well, from those American chicken hawks to Osama bin Laden, who was (and is?) willing that other people should commit suicide for his cause, but took (takes?) tender care for his own well-being.
What I sense is that progressives and conservatives want many of the same things: a living wage, a safe place to live, a healthy family, education for our children, the right to worship as we choose, enough food, a decent place to live. We want to be free to go about our business without the threat of terrorist attacks; we want our children to come home from war unscathed, or not to go to war at all. We all want these things. We disagree deeply about how to go about getting them.
We have lived with one way for many years, and now we’re about to try other ways. Changing how a government, how a country, is run must be akin to persuading a volcano to erupt in some other direction. Some things, when in progress, are almost impossible to change.
So everybody take a deep breath and get ready to work, because no matter who won that election, we had a lot of work ahead of us. It’s time to think about what you’re thankful for these days, and let go of what you cannot change. I’m thankful that we’re all still here to be in this mess.
I’m thankful for my family and friends, no matter what their politics. I’m thankful for the pleasures of the mind, and that I can still walk, if not very well some days. I’m thankful that my husband is still glad to see me and I’m glad to see him at the end of the day, after more than 30 years together, and that we still enjoy talking to each other. I’m thankful for the saving grace of faith in my life, and the laughter of my adult sons.
I’m thankful that I can still learn things about me that make me try to make my personal volcano erupt in a different direction, although now I sometimes say, heck, I’m sixty years old. I don’t want to take the time or energy to try to change (whatever it is) about me now. This is it.
I’m thankful for that, too. What are your thankfuls this Thanksgiving?
*Thanks and a tip o’ the hat to Julian for the word “thankful” as a noun.

This piece was written to appear in the November 20 issue of the Vashon Loop. Alas, Troy, the publisher, is in the hospital with gall stones, so there will not be a November 20 Loop.

Enough Sleep

2008-11-14T14:46:00.000-08:00

The cardio doc prescribed a new pill for me the other day. It’s supposed to keep the angina away, but, she said, “You might experience some sleepiness.”
Well, the angina is indeed gone now, but that sleepiness I might experience has also come to pass. Two nights this week I have passed out on the couch at 7:30 in the evening, awakened in the wee hours, gone to bed, and then slept until nine in the morning.
Having had that much sleep, I am feeling rested. Rested is an unusual thing to feel. I have not slept well since somewhere in the middle of my first pregnancy. I suppose this much sleep is too much sleep. I’ll call my cardio doc to ask about a lower dosage or some other alternative, but for the time being I am really enjoying the rare feeling of having had enough sleep

Susan Bardwell on Writin'

2008-11-11T00:15:00.001-08:00

Just a quick connection to a column by my writer friend, Susan Bardwell:
http://www.weeklyjournal.net/content/6/plumbing-the-depths-of-th.shtml
You'll probably have to copy and paste. This piece is a writer's delight. Enjoy.

Beyond the Celebration, I Continue to Carp

2008-11-07T16:09:00.000-08:00

It has been quite a week. Barrack Obama was elected president; our older son announced he is going to college; and that rain that was predicted with low confidence showed up.
Of the three, the first two were surprising to me. I am overly cynical, I know. I really didn’t believe this country was grown up enough to elect a black man, but when you come down to it, we didn’t elect a black man. We elected a man who seemed like a leader we could trust; the extraordinary thing is that as it turns out, that man is black. I thought racism would prevail. That it did not has left my heart lighter.
Oh, I know that some people are howling like the Wicked Witch when Dorothy threw the water on her – “What a world! What a world!” Perhaps they are stunned at this turn of events. Since 1980, when Reagan was elected, it’s been the same old Republican gang running the show, except for that eight years when Clinton was president, and he was sandbagged by a Republican congress and a witch hunt. Oh, I’m not saying Clinton is an angel. Clearly he is not, but he did clean up a little of the high-livin’ excesses of the 80s, when the bloodhounds and the Congress backed off enough to let him govern.
The night that Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, I felt the clammy hand of fear clutching my chest. See, I was in California when he was governor, and I knew what a mess he and his corporate buddies had made there. I moved up here in 1973 and missed out on the rest of what happened to California, but I was familiar with Reagan’s cheerful attitude that if you just put the homeless and crazy people out on the street, they’d go away. In fact, I heard him say that once – in California he had cut off all the welfare-cheating bums, and they had just gone away. In his social mathematics, “homeless and/or crazy = welfare-cheating bum.” I am not even addressing the institutional racism that was also bundled into that equation.
This is one of the reasons why when I hear people talking about what a great president Reagan was, I shake my head to clear it. Which Reagan? President of which country? The Reagan I remember who was President of the United States was a good enough actor to play a president, but he never impressed me as having the smarts or presidential cojones necessary for the job. He wasn’t a leader so much as good casting. His governments, both state and federal, were disasters.
I hate to be critical, but someone’s got to say, excuse me, Reagan was not a great president. He wasn’t. He – was – not. He was cute and nice and read his lines well. That is not governing.
So I am sorry for those who grieve now at the election of an Obama. If you wish to continue going to hell in a hand basket, don’t let me stop you, but for the first time in a long time I have hope that this country is not going with you.
And that’s about all I have to say right now.

Weather Report - night before the election

2008-11-03T22:50:00.000-08:00

My computer has been making thunderclap noises. I don't know why. I thought maybe it was my Weather Channel desktop page, telling me that the weather is not so great, which I already knew.
So I checked the Weather Channel window and it says they're not sure, but they're pretty sure, it's going to rain, really hard, Thursday through Sunday, especially Thursday to Friday, with some breaks, and there might be some flooding in the Olympics and the Cascades but their confidence in flooding is low right now (really, that's what it said - their confidence is low) and they think this is going to happen and we ought to know but they're not really sure because, golly, everything is changing so fast. So prepare for lots of rain but don't be surprised if it doesn't happen because WE JUST DON'T KNOW.
That's my kind of weather report - insecure and honest.
Haven't heard any thunderclaps for a few minutes now - maybe it was my game page, Pogo.com, that was rumbling at me, but I don't know why.
Tomorrow's the big day, at last. Rick and I can't wait for the madness to be over. No more negative ads. No more recorded phone messages. Michelle Obama called the other day, and she wasn't much of a conversationalist. It all went one way.
I'll be surprised if Obama is our next president. But like the rest of you, I'll just have to wait and see.

Ayn-ally Retentive

2008-10-31T13:19:00.000-07:00

Alan Greenspan is not having much fun these days. Three years into retirement he’s taking a fall for the way things are going now. He’s saying things like, “Gee, maybe I wasn’t right about everything.”
If Greenspan made decisions that affected a lot people, a lot of people went along with those decisions, so I think that if there’s going to be blame, it doesn’t all belong to him, but then I am of the belief that blame is not a helpful thing. I’m talking about the kind where you demonize someone else and don’t hold yourself accountable for your own actions.
I was not aware that Greenspan was a follower of Ayn Rand, but that is one of the things I’ve learned in recent days. He was part of a group that met in her apartment in New York City, where the tenets of Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, were hammered out. Rand said in the appendix to the 1957 edition of Atlas Shrugged, "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."
She was born on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia, as Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum. Her family moved to the Crimea at the time of the Russian Revolution, and she came to the United States at the age of 21, changed her name to Ayn Rand, and went to Hollywood to write screenplays. There she met and married her husband, Frank O’Connor. She became a naturalized citizen in 1931. She and O’Connor later moved to New York City, where they lived the rest of their lives.
I read Rand’s novels, Atlas Shrugged, and The Fountainhead, when I was in high school. The scenes I remember most vividly from her novels were the violent sexual encounters, with the woman being brutally taken by the sweaty superior male and loving it, and him. I thought then, and I think now, “Eee-ew.”
Then there was the scene in which Rand gleefully killed off a whole trainload of liberals by asphyxiation. She described with evident pleasure the gasping demise of these poo-poo head do-gooders, one by one.
Also, she had a striking hostility toward soy beans. I’m not sure what that was all about.
A lot of people admired her philosophy and became her followers and disciples. You can see the attraction – the belief that you are superior to everyone else? The assumption that the superior being (you) should lead and triumph? That selfishness was the supreme good and that living selfishly can make you rich, and that’s good for everyone? Hey, sign me up!
Ayn Rand went to her final reward on March 6, 1982. That news may have been buried beneath the news of the death of John Belushi, who was a more popular public figure at the time, on March 5.
Her books still sell. People still buy into her Objectivist philosophy, and occasionally you still see a bumper sticker that says, “Who is John Galt?”
Apparently Alan Greenspan is having second thoughts, though. Ayn Rand was brilliant, no doubt, and she worshipped the rational, but it turns out that the rest of the world, with all its inferiority and irrationality, does not live up to her tenets. Darn.
So perhaps now we’ll try a new philosophy. You thought philosophy was a dusty old subject that had no meaning to the real world, but we have all been had by the teachings of a dead philosopher. It’s a cruel truth, but bad philosophy happens.

Choosing a Church

2008-10-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

A friend remarked to me the other day that she was thinking it was about time to start going to church, “You know, just in case it’s true.” “Ah,” I said, “Fire insurance church.”
There are a lot of reasons for going to church. Fire insurance is a big reason for a lot of people. Some parents want their children to have some sort of moral and spiritual training outside the home. Some people want to spend time in a community of like-minded souls. Some feel called to become closer to God and church seems like the place to do that. Some people want an hour’s break from their kids on Sunday morning, and some like the coffee and baked goods after the service. God doesn’t care how or why you show up.
Whatever the reason, how do you find your spiritual home?
First, look at your history. Were you raised in a faith tradition? An outcome that takes some parents by surprise is that the children they raised to be good agnostics or atheists turn to religion with a passion in adulthood, and conversely, children raised as devout something or other turn out to be atheists and agnostics. What I’m saying here is that you can make choices about faith for yourself, but not for anyone else.
So, was your childhood experience with religion good? You might want to start there with your adult search. Pick up where you left off, and see where it takes you. Spirit being Spirit, you can have a great faith experience even if you are running away from the past. We all experience grace whether we believe in it or not. This annoys people who think you have to do something or prove something to receive grace. Fortunately those people are not in control of the dispensation of grace. Whew.
Was your childhood experience with religion bad, or horrible? Church may have been completely poisoned for you, and I can’t tell you that you’ll ever get over it. I would advise counseling for you, to make sense of what made no sense. All abuse is toxic, and abuse within a church is more so because we have this idea that you should be able to trust people in church. Unfortunately, people are still people and some of them will use church as a place to exert power and control over children and adults.
Here is a word of caution to all: church is not a safe place. It is a human institution, which makes it a place of division and politics and power plays. Don’t walk in thinking it will all be sweetness and light. It won’t.
So why go?
Because church is “a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.” I forget which Anglican said that. You really can experience spiritual growth, and good companionship and community, and that is church at its best. It won’t be an entirely comfortable experience – I also forget who said, “Christ came to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
If you are not of the Christian persuasion, but you embark upon a true spiritual journey, you will still find it is not an entirely comfortable journey. That’s the way spiritual journeys, and spiritual honesty, work.
One of the positive outcomes of spiritual honesty is true humility, and acquiring true humility can be a painful experience at times. Like that time years ago when I realized that the one consistent factor in all the crappy relationships I’d had was…me. Ouch. See, that was painful, but it was a good thing to know.
Still want to go to church? Listen to that call, because it is a call. I hope I’ve made it clear that church is not for wussies, and that spiritual quests are not easy or safe. All you Star Wars and Lord of the Rings fans know that.
If you’re just going for the social contacts and the coffee and cinnamon rolls, it might not matter where you go, but watch out. Once you open up the door for God to come in, all kinds of crazy things can happen. You might end up writing evangelical columns for an alternative newspaper. You never know.

Pickin’ and Singin’

2008-10-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

Whew. It’s been a good singing and guitar week so far.
Sunday night Rick, Becky, and I went over to Bremerton to watch the Brothers Four and the Kingston Trio in concert. Yes, Bremerton. Bob Flick of the Brothers Four expressed his thanks to Mapquest that so many people showed up.
The two groups had been doing a “Fiftieth Anniversary Tour,” about fifteen dates in three weeks, in California, Oregon, and Washington. This was the last date of the tour, and you could tell they were glad to be done and ready to go home and kick back a little.
That did not stop them from giving a great concert.
The Brothers Four have maintained the same sound over fifty years – the epitome of mellow male harmony. People a little younger than I am (that is to say, under 60) might not know who they are, but, talkin’ about my ge-ge-ge-ge-generation, people my age and older sure do, and in Japan they are loved greatly.
The Kingston Trio is a franchise, more or less. Two of the original trio are gone now. Dave Guard passed away in 1991, and Nick Reynolds passed away a couple of weeks ago. John Stewart, who replaced Dave Guard in the trio in 1961, died last January. Bob Shane, the sole survivor, retired from touring and now the trio is represented by George Grover, Bill Zorn, and Rick Daugherty. Grover has been the banjo man for the trio for over 30 years; Zorn played with the trio back in the 70s; and Rick Daugherty was Glenn Yarborough’s replacement in the Limeliters for many years. Bill Zorn was a Limeliter with Daugherty for a few years. So they have plenty of folksinger/trio cred, and while they don’t sound like the original three, they sound pretty good and they sing the old songs and a few new ones and indulge in snappy patter, which I envied. Being an old singer/songwriter myself, I can only say that you should never underestimate the importance of snappy patter on stage.
We Tuels have a connection with Rick Daugherty that goes back a ways. He directs operas down in the Bay Area, including for Sonoma City Opera, and has directed my father-in-law, Mark Tuel, in many operas. We mentioned Mark to him and he was delighted to hear of him and meet my Rick, and to hear that, at 87, Mark is going strong. “He’s made of iron,” Daugherty said. Yup, he pretty much is.
Becky and I bought stacks of CDs and listened to them on the way home, and here at home since.
This morning I had my own gig to play. Occasionally I sing at the local nursing home. Most of my audience gets wheeled in; some are no longer verbal, and some are what you might call a little too verbal. I took the summer off to do other things, so hadn’t been back for three or four months. There was a big crowd – the lunch room was packed!
I tend to sing songs from my parent’s youth: It Had to Be You, Melancholy Baby, Always, As Time Goes By. Songs like that. Red River Valley, a little Johnny Cash, Misty, Me and Bobby McGee – it’s a fairly eclectic mix of songs that were popular over the middle twentieth century.
One of the wonderful things about the internet is that you can find the lyric to practically any song in about a minute, and I print up lyrics of songs I’d like to sing and put them into a three-ring binder. I don’t always learn the songs, but today I turned the page and there was the lyric to “Plastic Jesus,” a song I have never performed before. I hauled off and sang it, and got to hear the words with the same sense of discovery and amusement my audience had: “I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic Jesus, riding on the dashboard of my car…” We all had a ball.
But then someone asked me to sing Stardust, which I keep meaning to learn but don’t know. Flo Ann was there, though, and she knew it and she has a nice voice, so I said, “Let’s have a singalong. Flo Ann, you lead it,” and she did, and a lot of people sang along, and that was sweet.
At the end we all sang “You Are My Sunshine,” and then they got ready for lunch and I got to visit with Christine, a friend who has been severely disabled by multiple sclerosis. It is for her I learned the Johnny Cash tunes, and I thank her for it, because everyone seems to like his songs.
So, a good gig. I came out exhausted. Singing takes energy, and that’s not my long suit these days, but it felt good to pick and grin once more, and of course the applause never hurts. I’d like to take a nap, but instead I’m going to haul some discards up to Granny’s Attic, our local thrift store supreme. The more I get rid of, the happier I am.
Hope your week is going well also.
Blessings.