outside the windows

The mail piles up...

2012-02-16T19:43:00.000-08:00

The mail carrier brings me handfuls of mail each day, bearing the names of dozens of friends and travelers. No, not writing to me, but being written to. If your home is an overpass, a bike, the nearest comforting oaktree, a moving target…it is hard to find a place for long term mail. General Delivery is only for a month in our area. So I receive boxes of plantains from the Virgin Islands for a guy whose cousin wants to make sure he has good food; boxes with cookies and boots from a worried aunt, letters from courts, from social workers, from parents and lovers and hospitals and insurance companies. From jail.

Lots of names, lots of stories, lots of people. Some of the stories and the people dart close to my life a moment and then…there’s silence. Departure, disappearance. Sometimes a vaguely unsettled feeling, and sometimes calls from across the country: “have you seen our boy/our daughter/our dad? He said he spent time with you there”. Those are hard ones.

But when I’m lucky I get a few check in calls, or a sudden appearance after months away. A baby has taken her first steps in Seattle after her stormy advent here more than a year ago. A young woman in San Diego has made contact with her family for the first time in years. Friends call in from Occupy (everywhere) and talk of squats, arrests, recipes, and greetings, and friends call from jail, on smuggled cell phones or on their one call out. The pretty young girl from China via Australia is on her way back to her mother; she came by the week before her plane left, after 4 months travel. I was glad to have her check in.

It’s like the sound of the blackbirds settling for the night. They fly together & apart & keep up this constant call & response, this mic check, this connection. I’m here, you’re there, we’re alive, all’s well another night.

But there are spaces. And I wonder. I wonder about the 17 year old who’d been released from mental health hold after his last suicide attempt, the one who told me he slept roadside under a cardboard box, shivering with cold and fear. Or the kid who managed to annoy everyone, he whose cute puppy played with my dog, he who was last heard of going to a nice warm place to “make it big” and probably not legally. Or the veteran, whose wounded body ached so, who gave me his food money to help with the park I tend, to do a good thing. He believed in and dreamed the same dreams I do. Dreams of beauty, public space, compassion. And the kid from the Mexican jail, and the Canadian wanderer who was waiting for god or healing or something to tell her what to do. And the handsome, broken soldier back from Afghanistan, and the mother with the scared 14 year old daughter, living in her car.

I haven’t heard from them, or from dozens others, but I turn them over in my mind and heart each day and night and hope they are well, alive, happy, in this world in which brittle and abrupt endings happen all too often. Those are stories I know too; I have a litany of vanished friends.

The other night my partner left for a half hour radio show at a bit before 8, and didn’t return…well, he didn’t return until the wee hours of the morning. Yeah, I knew the clutch of darkness on my heart that night, and very close. He’s fine; he was distracted by music and conversation and the sparkling lights. It made me think more of my disappeared, now and in the future.

So..I hear the winds are rising. They are blowing strong tonight, and bringing storm. The blackbirds are coasting on the thermals…apart, together, apart. They are keeping contact. In the coming storm winds of this world we too need to keep contact with one another. With our dearest, but also with the strangers at the edges, with those who may not have many to miss them. We need to watch over each other.

I’m here. You’re there. We’re alive. It’s a dark and creative night. Let’s see , together, what dawns in the morning.

Season of the Hunt

2011-11-08T22:00:00.000-08:00

There’s a certain beauty and comfort to the swing of the seasons, the certainty of traditions, the trusted cycles. Used to be in this region of long summers and long rains that the first drops signaled the slide to the holidays, the days of harvest, of snugging up the homestead. Back in the days when I cleaned motel rooms between poems, the rise of the rivers brought the travelers intent on snagging a steelhead or salmon in the swollen rivers of winter. Trade at the motels rose as the rivers rose. The summerfolk had gone, the adventurers and the rains were here.

Now in our region there is a new tradition, a new sport with the twist of the season. The start of the rains, the drop in temperatures to below freezing—these signal the good times of rousting the campers and raiding the homes of those without addresses.

Perhaps a signal goes off in the offices of deputies as soon as it is wet enough and cold enough. Severe weather alert: hit the camps.

Again this year teams of sheriffs went to the hills and bushes and beside the river. Said theSheriff, chatting carefully on local radio, the deputies went in and “we were actually here last week starting notification, letting them know it’s gonna happen, giving them some alternatives, giving them some ideas…where they might go & some other county programs”.

This sounds like the most beneficent of social welfare programs. Go to that elderly veteran trying to recover from his wounded heart and body and reach out a firm, loving hand. “hey man, you don’t have to sleep on the muddy ground!” Say to the young mom and her daughter, “hey, no worries”.

But that’s not what happens. The veteran, the mother, the dozens of others receive a note telling them to clear out or else.

What programs are they offered? Where are they told to go, as they leave what possessions they cannot carry, or as they return to their camp to find all they had has been taken and thrown away?

Here’s the Sheriff again: “Well, obviously, one of the biggest problems we have…is services. There’s not a lot of services here…we’re trying to encourage people to go to where the help is available.”

And where might that be? Los Angeles, with its thousands, not dozens, of people sleeping on the streets? Eureka, where the few shelter beds are not enough even for the people of that city? The helpful TAP (transportation assistance program) can help those who have families to return to.

That won’t help the young woman whose family is the furthest thing from safety. That won’t console the widower fearing everything he has left, everything he has left to love, will be taken from him if he is found again trying to sleep, just as his wife, his home, and all his previous life were wrenched from him. He doesn’t sleep too well at night, waiting for the sound in the brush, waiting to be found once again.

We force our neighbors to live as if they were hunted. Because they are hunted, in this traditional season of the hunt. And even if the TAP program fits some temporarily displaced soul, the program requires some waiting. When your gear has been taken, when it is raining, and your clothes are wet, and the temperatures are dropping into the 20’s, and you have no place to go…how are you going to wait for the paperwork?

Says our Sheriff “uh, I feel that it is time for this area for us to step up and help. There’s a lot of people in this area who have expressed their concerns so I’m trying to help deal with that”.

Right. The confiscated gear, according to the papers received by our most at risk, will be stored 30 days. In fact, it is taken to the dump by the helpful SWAP team (a new twist in the games, using prisoners—well, at least they get some fresh air and time outdoors).

“They broke my home” said the wild eyed, shocked man. He’d lived there for many years, in the curve of a hillside, with his things. “They came and they broke everything down”. Where will you go, I asked. “I don’t know” he said “I’m homeless now”.

It is the time of the long rains. Of the return of the salmon, and the greening of the moss. It is the time in which nights bring frost and memories. People draw their children close and sit by the fire and dream.

And outside our neighbors shudder. It is the time of bronchitis and pneumonia. Of death by exposure. Our neighbors, without their bags, blankets, or a place to rest, hope to find a moments sleep. Maybe even a dream or two.

“Are you okay?” I asked the man who is dying of cancer. “I mean, with the raids and all”. He says “I’m fine. I carry all I have with me, and I get up before light”. He smiles and asks how I am doing.

I don’t quite know what to tell him.

Trick or Treat

2011-10-11T19:47:00.000-07:00

The peach tree gave sweet, sweet peaches for the thirteen years I tended it, though often folks walking by would hungrily strip it, and one year a guy in a white pickup pulled into the space beneath those fruit laden branches and sent his kids up to pick everything. Well, they must have been hungry, and in these days so many are, so I let it go. And it bore well the next year too, and the one after that.

Three years ago we moved the store, and I said farewell to the peach tree and the roses I’d planted, and to the other trees and bits of purest beauty. I’ve left a lot of gardens behind in my traveling life.

Last week the tree was cut; it was a shelter, I was told, for the homeless. A slender shelter at best, but there is a kind of logic that is hard on trees and flowers. I went to touch the stump the other night, and saw the scraped ground, and thought of upturned olive trees a planet away, and salted fields. It’s okay, I’ll plant another tree, and another. For each vanished one I try to plant ten or more, somewhere, in a personal balancing act against forces of..concrete and razor wire. Yes, sure, it hurt my heart. The trees I’ve cared for are close to me as friends, dear as my children; it hurts to see them fall. I can’t dwell on that pain, and I won’t; I’m figuring out where the next trees will be.

And I’m thinking, adept at distraction, of my favorite coming holiday, of the feast of masks and contradictions, in which we all can become anything we wish, in which the homes of strangers are thrown open, in which all children are loved and welcomed for a second or two into a circle of light and sweetness. It’s always been the best time of the year; the time of delicious thrills, of being a princess or a pirate, of sticky sweets and salted popcorn and running through the leafstrewn darkness confident that magic was in the air.

When I guided my own set of dinosaurs and princesses through the streets at night (and my firstborn paused to query whether the sweets had artificial flavor in them)…oh, for all those years how I was encouraged by the lit houses, the handfuls of candy, the flocks of little ghosts and goblins and fairies. I thought—and I still think—this is what the world probably should be like. Where our homes shine with light and every child is welcomed in. Where we can be whatever wonderful thing we secretly desire to be. Where perhaps our dead walk with us, and whisper to us, and tell us all is possible, have courage, taste the sweetness, walk towards that glimmering light.

Trick or treat? Hey, I’ll take both; I want to trick the concrete into blooming and bearing fruit, and I want to share all the treats of this lovely, impossible, heartbreaking world with those who hunger…for food, for love, for righteousness, for welcome.

Dreaming of Gardens

2011-09-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

When I wake in the night and have trouble sleeping, when my thoughts race, when the past with its bitter sweetness and the future with its hope and torment consume me, I settle my heart by imagining gardens. Gardens I have, or had, or might invent someday. I shift the colors, I indulge in fantasies of impossible opulence—thousands of daffodils! A wilderness of roses! A maze of medicinal herbs, a walled garden of sweetness.

So when I went over today in the heat to talk to my new friend and to return some change to him, I understood at once how his heart works too.

He dreams in the language of gardens.

But let me fill you in. There’s a disputed place in my town, a would be park and garden. And by the grace of the universe and the generosity of good people I’ve been able to start watering in the height of summer, trees and roses, plants that fruit and flower.

And in the shade of a circle of oaks, on the hard ground or on the boulders, people sit and talk. Mostly a bunch of my friends. Mostly not rich ones, sometimes campers, sometimes travelers.

They’ve been eager to help. Something to be carried? Moved? Garbage to be picked up? My friends are there.

Yesterday I was deeply soaking the little fringe tree, concerned by the dryness at the growing tips, when a guy came over. “Bet you planted this tree, sister” he said. No, I told him, not me. Told him past and current history. Admitted I love trees and flowers with my full heart. He watched me try to reach another, more distant tree. “You need a second hose”. Yeah, I told him that was a great idea; I’d work on it. And he said “here, you get you that hose”. And he handed me a twenty.

He’s from Tennessee. Perhaps my age, more or less, though life has been harsher for him. Neck in a brace, shoes worn. Twenty from him was likely the equivalent of a thousand from a wealthier friend.

That’s why I was concerned about giving him his change back today. But he was having none of that. It was a donation, freely given. “You tell them an old homeless man from Tennessee donated twenty dollars to make this park beautiful. Tell ‘em that.”

And he said he’d had trouble sleeping—pain from his injuries, trouble on his mind. But then he thought of the park, of how it could be—the stone benches, the real sidewalk, the beautiful plants. How it would be so wonderful. “Wish I was rich” he said, “but I’ll get my reward in heaven”. I told him to please hold to that vision he has, of beauty, of people enjoying that beauty, of how this place could be. We need those dreams, those visions, those magical gardens in which all are welcome and all can flourish.

Welcome the Wild Geese

2011-07-09T16:01:00.000-07:00

Apparently there are flocks of wild geese enjoying the water that laps over the porch & window sills of the family house on the banks of the Souris River in Minot, North Dakota. I saw a couple photos today. The street sign was helpfully in the middle of the flood waters. Otherwise it’s hard to tell. One neighborhood under flood looks kinda like another, one shocked human, counting the losses, pretty much like another. Cats perched on rooftops—well, they look like cats. That one is a dead ringer for my old cat Perdita, but Perdita left this life years ago.

I wait for word from my brother and meanwhile chat with strangers, witnessing the unfolding of drama, connections, & concern from hundreds of miles away via the online stream of a family run North Dakota TV station.

I’m not from the Magic City myself, though my kids and I spent the summer before my mother’s death there at that now flooded house, and my brother has lived there since then, more than a decade now.

So I ask questions, and there, instantly, people tell me what they know. People trying to figure out their own futures—how to clean clothes for their newborn, where to go for clean drinking water—tell me how the mail is being delivered for the flood refugees, where the shelter is, how to find photos and information specific to my family’s neighborhood.

Lots of online hugs & encouraging words are exchanged. The TV newscaster has evacuated his 4 cats & doesn’t quite know when he’ll get to go back to his own submerged home.

He stays on all through the night. 11,000 people were evacuated. The waters are still high. Of those 11,000 most were taken on by friends, family, and strangers. Churches on high ground converted extra rooms to temporary homes. Some hundreds sleep on cots at the Dome, my brother presumably among them. When there are stories from the Dome I watch eagerly, hoping to catch a glimpse of his profile, a moment in the background. To know he’s really safe.

It makes me think of the thousands throughout this world who are separated from loved ones, who have no clear lines of communication. I’m lucky. I know this flood caused no immediate deaths. I know there is not—as in Japan—an unstable reactor in the process of meltdown. I know that—although there are certainly many soldiers on the ground—my brother need not fear them. I know no drone is likely to hit the shelter in which he sleeps. And I can send word out, however tentatively, however randomly, and know that, perhaps, word will reach him.

A kind stranger let him use a cellphone to call our Mississippi brother, the one who sold his cows because of the long drought.

Tough times all over. But I can’t sit remembering my mother or the house or the watercolor paintings my uncle did, the small family treasures floating somewhere through the floodwaters, the little birch tree, the lilies of the valley.

The wild geese look really content. And I’m impressed with the city, with the warmhearted reaching out to others, the kindness of strangers and the determination to survive, to do better, to have hope.

As I waited for word of my brother and the flood, two in person conversations struck my heart.

The first was an exchange with a young travelling girl who asked early in the morning when I opened the shop. I told her, and she waited patiently, and then came in—yeah, I opened up a bit early. She needed some water. I showed her the spigot and told her to be careful of my goldfish, and said “I’m sorry you had to wait; you should have just told me, I’d have been happy to show you right then”
And she said “well, I know businesses don’t like to have people like me hanging round.”
Nonsense, I said, you’re people. Period. And you’re just fine.
But I wondered at what hurts had proceeded our encounter, what insults, how many rejections.

The second came at an official meeting at which a colleague said “well, you’re an extremist” I looked at him, asking what that meant. He said “You believe this town should treat everyone as if they were human, welcome them with respect and kindness and open arms.”
“Yes,” I said.
“But no where on earth has that ever happened. How can you think that it could happen here?”

Well, I said, we always need goals…We can’t be stymied by “it’s impossible” or “it has never happened”.

And if we’d welcome the wild geese, we can welcome our brothers and sisters. Wherever, however we find them safe.

(the beautiful photo is by someone named, obviously, Ed Porter. I hope he doesn't mind my borrowing it.)

It's Like Home-coming

2011-06-08T15:07:00.000-07:00

When I knocked on the door only a weak voice answered, but it said "come in". So I did.

There on the bed, wrapped completely in a brown, tattered blanket, only her glowing brown eyes peering out from a very pale face, she lay. I introduced myself "the woman from the bookstore", not sure she would remember me. Whether she remembered me or not, she seemed happy to have company, and immediately asked if I could help her with her clothing and bathroom needs.

She was very frail; skeletal from the thin breasts upward, her arms like sticks. Her belly was swollen beyond what seemed possible; her legs too were swollen. Advanced liver disease, perhaps cancer...she hadn't seen doctors in a long while.

When I helped her from the bed I could see the print of my hands pressed into her swollen flesh.

The tangible comforts were important, the little things. To get from the bed to the bathroom, to have her face bathed, to have a clean shirt. I did what I could, that first day, but mostly I listened to her stories. And day after day, between the practical matters, we talked.

She had been a dancer when we were both young. We had children of about the same age; they tumbled about in the grass at festivals where she danced and I passed out peace petitions, years and years ago. They came to the bookstore and read books together.

She had two sons. One was killed in a drug deal gone wrong, years ago. He was just young, barely needing to shave that fair face. She told me she knew from the start that he would die, she just didn't know how or when or how to protect him. His color was orange, she told me, glowing orange. Hers, she said, was midnight blue.

I listened. I rocked her in my arms when the pain was bad. I tried to get help for her. She had rejected Hospice care and she was afraid of doctors and she said she had so much money she could stay in that tiny motel room for years and years and years.

Though she was afraid the owner might notice she was dying.

I told her my first job in the region had been at this very motel; I cleaned the rooms each morning then; it was the only job available. It's like homecoming, I told her, and she laughed with me.

Her life had been a hard one; she told me stories of abuse and stories of loss and stories of pain. She hadn't spoken to her surviving son for years, though he was only a few miles away. I tried to make a bridge for them, but I failed.

The last day I spent with her, coaxing her to take some spoonfuls of pomegranate yogurt (her favorite), she suddenly looked up at me with those beautiful sherry colored eyes and said "you were the best thing to ever happen to John".

"well, I did love him" I said, smiling at the thought of the father of my first son, 25 years older than I, such a charming and eccentric soul.

"He loved it that you loved him" she said. I smiled. And she said "you know, when he was flirting with everyone at the bars and at the parties...I want you to know, we always had your back, sister."

And there we sat in that tiny motel room, the sunlight coming through the window I'd opened, thinking back over the decades. John's been dead...can it be six years already? He made it to his 80's and died with a curious soul, telling me his only regret was that he had not spent more time concerned with poetry and less concerned with money.

Ah, she was such a dancer, so delicate. She made you believe she could fly. She was part of a circle of friends who founded a still performing dance group--they choreographed vast dramas, they taught children, they brought joy. She had not kept dancing, not after the death of her son, not after her addictions shook her soul, not after jail and accidents and betrayal.

But I sent word to the women who had danced with her, and they came to talk with her, to love her, to recognize her in those last days.

We talked of flowers and of Welsh poetry. Someone smuggled in some liquor and she asked me to mix her some drinks, just a day or so before she died. I took orange juice and tequila and ice, per her instructions, and did my best. "It's not good for you" I felt bound to say. She flashed a wicked grin and said "I can tell you are no drinker; pour in a bit more tequila please."

I did.

I woke one early morning with anxiety dark on my heart. It didn't go away as I started the day, and when I was able I took a moment, went shopping for fruit and yogurt, and hurried to her room.

The police were there already, with the coroner. I introduced myself and asked if I could stay with her a little, even though she had died in the early morning. I told her how brave she was, how beautiful she was, how I had enjoyed this time with her clear and beautiful soul. It's okay now, I said. It's all okay now.

The police offered their condolences. I gave them her son's contact information and what other strands of information I had. She was a beautiful, beautiful dancer, I said.

There wasn't much more to say. I brushed her thin hair back from her face and said "we'll meet again, don't worry, my dear. "

Breathing

2011-05-01T18:02:00.000-07:00

I have been watching my son’s breaths since he was born, 22 years ago in a cabin in the woods, welcomed by his sister and brother and father, welcomed to a circle of light and peace by his midwives.

Nights watching your child breathe can be long sometimes. The terrors of pneumonia, the times I sat up holding him against my body, willing his breath to continue, in, out, in, moment by moment while the moon crossed the sky and the dawn slowly unfolded, with birdsong & exhaustion—those were times at the edge.

I almost fell. It was an April morning the last time I seriously considered an early exit from this beautiful and painful world, an exit in which I felt I had to take my fragile child. I am a good mother.

I sought and received help. But I have faced inner and outer bleakness, and these nights as I set up machines to help my boy relax and breathe and sleep, as I adjust the mask and hoses, as I time my heartbeats by the pulse of oxygen, and do not sleep, I consider this fragile world.

There’s a rush of image and information. There’s my throat closing with grief.

My son stopped speaking during the bombing of Gaza two years ago, first telling me he loved all his family but, as he said, “thinking hurts too much”. Be-fore that he had begged me to save the children, to stop the walls from falling, to deal with the wolves that came out of the air and frightened him.

Last night I read of two NATO bombings in Libya and I gasped with pain. Yes, one was the strike—such an innocuous word, like the lighting of a birthday candle—that murdered Khadafi’s 29 year old youngest son, and three grand-children under 12.

I felt the walls falling, as I do each time I see those dry reports across a geography of pain—a wedding party, a young soldier, a marketplace, a dance, a school, a hospital.

The other report from Libya was of the bombing of a school for children who, like my son, have Down Syndrome.

I remember a photo from Iraq, maybe 5 years ago, from such a school. Smiling children who looked a bit like Gabe danced in a careful circle, wearing bright paper hats, as the sky shattered with bombs.

Sometimes my son’s efforts to get oxygen to his heart and fingertips and brain only get him to a bit above 60% of the 100% oxygen the human body craves.

I think we are all gasping for air now. Gasping for hope, compassion, sense.

I watched the Royal Wedding as I timed Gabe’s breaths and monitored the machines. Such lovely lace, such luxurious satin. How sweet the little brides-maids, with their lily of the valley crowns, and how pretty the row of trees. Hornbeam trees, beautiful trees of the ancient British forests, brought into the abbey to make a pretty, artificial forest to delight our eyes. Oh, I love romance and happily ever after. Yes, I once was sure I was a lost princess, when I was four.

It passed the time, this wedding. For a while I didn’t think of children dying or truth tellers imprisoned, of babies without their mothers, of lost elders, of hungry people right on my own mainstreet, of despair. I just thought, gratefully, how pretty, my mind a wash of white satin and bridal bouquets.

And then I kept trying to breathe myself, adjusting the machines, the darkness there. My son was sleeping well. Dawn came again, with birdsong and a wash of pink light.

And I don’t know, really, what to do with this precious world but to love it. And I don’t know what to do with all the wrongs I see but name them.

And keep breathing.

The Fairy Tale I Tell Myself

2011-04-11T11:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I tell myself this fairytale.

There was once a girl from the north country. Her hair was like curled copper in the sunlight; her eyes were ocean blue. She was born to the queen of silence, and she learned to talk with her fingers before the words awoke on her tongue. Some loved her and some did not, and when she was very young she went into the world disguised as a wandering storyteller, disguised as a beggarmaid.

There in the world she met good people and bad. She slept in fields and she slept on the side of the ocean, and sometimes she slept in the heart of huge cities where people stared at her. Sometimes her body was hurt, and often she was hungry.

And everywhere she went dogs and children and cats and gentle people came to her without fear and without malice. If you had a lost dog the disguised princess of silence would find it. If you had a lost child you would find it listening to her stories.

After some years of wandering she discovered she was to have a child of her own. She asked for help and was rejected, there in the heart of a city.

So she disappeared to the forests of the north, coming to rest near a small bookstore, waiting for the birth of her baby.

In storms and in sunlight the baby was born. The baby and mother took shelter in a home near the ancient forests, under the protection of many wise women.

(and here's where my story goes into purest fairy tale).

The baby grew there, in the woods and by the rivers, and the wise women and the princess of silence taught her all they knew. All the townfolk rejoiced in the growing girl. She danced with her mother and visited her father. From her mother she learned the language of the animals and birds; from her father she learned how love will cast away hurt and anger.

In the shelter of love this child and her mother became artists, healers, singers. All who met them came to a center of calm.

And everyone lived happily ever after...

That's the story I tell myself.
The reality...well, the reality is a little different, as we face down yet more court dates. My young friend was almost convinced to sign away all her rights at the last court hearing, at which her lawyer said her advocates were exerting too much pressure and that the mother understood she couldn't care for her baby.

You are stirring up a hornet's nest, he told me, I hope you are ready for this.

Always, I said to the young public defender who has characterized me as a pain in the ass, a proud thing to be, I think, under the circumstances.

But he gave me, and another advocate, time to explain the papers to our young friend. Truly, given her anger and "I know what I'm doing" I figured I'd been wrong; that she was in fact ready to give her daughter up. I told her I would stand by her whatever choice she felt best, and if this was her choice I was there for her. She gave me a confused and angry look and ran from the little side room.

I went into the court hallway with my fellow support person and said "well, we've learned a lot".
And I tried to keep from sobbing aloud as I contemplated the future. Tears did fall from my eyes; sometimes the heart is too full.

And then we heard the mother say loudly to her lawyer "no, you are wrong, I want to fight this".

Pretrial is April 20, trial April 25.

The young mother's chances are still...as ever...very slim that her baby will come back to her. Once the bureaucracy starts grinding forward much seems to be lost. Oh, I don't think anyone is evil here. Not even in my fairytale version. We don't have evil wizards plotting to steal a baby.

But I so want this baby and mother together, sheltered in a circle of care.

did kafka write this story?

2011-03-14T16:51:00.000-07:00

It was court day today for Reign and her mom and all the support people with our official notices to appear. 8:30am sharp in the city to the north. I was awake at 5. Well, I didn't really get much sleep in any case.

Into the ribbed tights, the acceptable suit, the nice little boots, the sterling pendant. Cup of very strong tea, long journey through the forests under the dawn light.

In the corridors of justice we waited. And waited. And waited. I said hello to the paternal grandmother and the birth father. I hugged Reign's mom, I chatted with other support people. I watched the social workers gather, each holding reams of paper.

At last Eddiethepublicdefender darted from the stairwell into the room. Reams of paper in his arms too. He came directly to me and said "have you heard, we have a settlement". Ever skeptical I asked what the terms were, what was given, what was taken. As he started to tell me--Reign would go into state custody, but maybe someday her mom could have her, wasn't that nice, and the state would no longer charge the mother with starving her child, and...
As he started to tell me, as I was about to say something...well, I was so tempted to swear, but I am a ladylike soul--the CPS lady across from us said "Eddie, Eddie, we don't have a deal".

Consternation on the lawyer's face, confusion everywhere. Does this sound familar? Are we in some careful Noh play? Or perhaps it is a novel by Kafka?

The attorney for the birthfather stomped by saying to the father and his mother "I am shocked to even see you here, why are you here?" Heidi said "my granddaughter's life is on the line, why wouldn't I be here?"

And I looked at my midwife friend beside me and said "something is very wrong here; there is evil in this hall now".

She looked at me and did not disagree.

Into the courtroom for ceremonial announcements of who we were. Lawyer bluster. Confusion.

Afterwards I spoke with one of the CPS lawyers who informed me that they had grave concern over the mother's mental state and her ability to care for her baby and she needed to prove her ability. I said "I saw her and her baby daily during the first month and I have no doubts. It's a bit hard for her to demonstrate her mothering without a baby to mother." I said "don't you people realize there is a baby with a whole vast family and everyone is hurting now?"

He told me I was being unreasonably argumentative.

So there are more hearings to come. And...my gut feeling? Reign is in state hands and due to be adopted. She will not know the story of how we fought for her. Her mother was poor, her mother was young, her mother was without shelter.

Those are crimes in our system. How can you fight that?

But yes, I'm still fighting.

those strange halls of justice

2011-03-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

I saw the baby a couple weeks ago, coming from San Francisco and the best surgical care in the state, or so I was assured. She is still frail. She was traveling back to her foster mother, while her birth mom got dropped at my bookshop doorstep.

I got a baby smile, and a little more heartbreak.

The trial to determine ultimate custody of this child has been postponed yet again. Yesterday, girded in a borrowed suit-of-power, wearing my sterling Phoenix pendant and my bravest demeanor, I traveled with the midwife friend who so many years ago helped in the births of my three children, and consoled me through the early loss of a fourth. We are both under court order to appear and speak what we know of this mother and this baby.

In the overheated halls of justice, lined with numbered courtrooms for all sorts of family court matters, we waited. We looked at the list of cases on the docket and couldn't find ours; the bailiff explained that cases involving juveniles are not listed, but he assured us he would make sure we were called in time and guided to the right court door.

While we waited we talked with the beautiful redhaired mom. We met her mother and her mother's best friend from childhood. We were joined by the brave woman who runs the woman's shelter where baby and mom spent their first month, and where the young mom still lives, the baby bed still beside hers, the pretty clothing for a growing baby still there, except the little outfits she has sent on to the foster mother. We were joined also by another fierce woman who has befriended baby and mom. A circle of support. The grandmother is deaf, and so is her friend, but we carried on a little conversation. They had gone with my young mom to visit the baby just before court and they had pictures.

We looked at pictures. I don't know, perhaps I am imagining the sorrow in Reign's eyes. I was told she laughed.

Across the hall I spotted the baby's father and his mother; another grandmother. They were turned from our cluster, where despite the tension--or perhaps because of the tension--we were laughing. I looked at the back of the paternal grandmother, Heidi..and my heart went to her too, despite the messages I'd received from her son and from her that made me want to take the young mom and her child far, far away. So much...anger, so much judgment.

The birthfather slumped in his tie dye jacket. They had driven 600 miles to be here. The maternal grandma and her friend had driven about the same. Everyone was tired.

As we entered the courtroom I paused to introduce myself to Heidi and her son. These are strange moments.

Incomprehensible court babble. Clusters of CPS workers. Lawyers talking to lawyers. It took...oh, less than a half hour for the court to postpone everything yet again. The birthmom's defense lawyer is promising at least a 6 hour hearing; the state is hardlining the case. Everything is hardening.

There's a baby without her family. There's a young mother who cries herself to sleep sometimes, but who says "I'm not postpartum" and gets very defensive. There's a father who says he loves his daughter, who has seen her only a few times...and I believe he does love her, whatever he did in his relationship with Reign's mom.

There are sets of grandparents fretting and not communicating.

Tomorrow I'll find out when I go to court again. I look sometimes at the photo of Reign and her sad, wise baby eyes, and send her--through the universe--all the love I have, all the hopes I have.

As we were dismissed we paused to talk with the young mom and her mother a bit more. My midwife friend was curious what language the new mother first spoke--American Sign, like her mom, or spoken words. It was indeed ASL, and the grandmother laughed and signed that her own baby's first word--after mom--was for milk.

Some things are pretty universal. Right now, I'm tired, and hoping something wiser than I am will get Reign safe and home...somewhere...and heal all our breaking, breaking hearts.

Reign

2011-01-13T20:06:00.000-08:00

In early December one of my street friends, she who once brought me a striped rose, who spent much of the warm days of summer and fall reading on my porch, who looked as though she had stepped, sweet and slightly grubby, from the frame of a PreRaphaelite painting, came into the shop and sat in the chair usually occupied by Champ.

For her, Champ was glad to make room.

She looked pale. The storms had been hard for a while, and she was staying beside the river with a friend. He, at least, had a tent. A little better than a single tarp to keep the rain and wind off.

"My stomach hurt all night long" she said.

I looked at her, considering. I knew she was pregnant, but she had said the baby would be coming in mid January. I had been looking for housing, support, and help for her and the coming child. We had just managed to get a copy of her birth certificate and started applications for services and foodstamps. She'd just had her first meeting with the midwife who delivered my babies, a dear friend, two days before.

"I didn't get any sleep at all" she said.

I asked what kind of pains these were. I asked if I could feel her stomach during a time of pain. It was rock hard. I made some phone calls, the last to a nurse friend at the clinic. He asked to talk with the young woman and then told me "Holy sh*t, get that girl to the ER".

Which I did, with the help of a customer who was browsing. I left the shop wide open, telling another customer to take her time and I'd be in touch later.

And a beautiful baby girl was born that night. Her mother called her Reign. She had her mother's red hair and the face of an angelic elf. Yes, I fell in love with her at first sight.

Child Protective Services immediately moved to take custody of this baby. I gathered all my contacts and all my fierceness and got the mother and child into a local women's shelter and got Child Welfare to back off for a moment.

And we had a party at the bookstore celebrating the child and her mother, a party to which everyone came--street kids and very important business people and folks from every corner of my community. Oh, we loved that baby and her mother, and we were so happy. The light itself seemed rose colored. Gifts and supplies poured to this baby and her mother from all over the country, not only from our little town. We were so glad.

I saw her daily, the little one and her mother. Her mom was having some new mother adjustments, for sure. Sleep was hard to come by. She couldn't have friends at the shelter, so met them in town. Child Welfare had watchers everywhere, who reported that the baby was out in all weathers with the mother.

I got calls from investigators. I told them I thought the mother and baby were doing quite well, thank you.

But the baby began to lose weight, and the public health nurse began questioning the young mother's feeding style. To me the mother cried "I am feeding her, I am doing everything they are telling me, I don't know what's happening."

The baby saw a pediatrician every week. He noted the weight loss but didn't seem alarmed, not really alarmed: "come back next week, we'll check".

The mother said the baby spat up a lot. I wondered. I asked the nurse, my midwife friend, and doctors "could there be a physical problem?"

All of them said no, all of them pointed at the mother--a street waif, after all, a little wanderer, a tough girl who didn't thank everyone for their advice--all of them said she was obviously not feeding the baby enough. Or at all.

I saw her feed Reign, often.

But a week ago the police backed up a child welfare person and my young friend was confronted at the local market. She unwrapped the snuggly sling that held Reign against her body as she shopped, and handed the little one to the waiting child welfare officer.

And then she went back to the shelter and cried all night long, rocking in a corner, clutching one of her daughter's sleepers.

I went to the meeting with Child Welfare the next day, to sit beside her and speak on her behalf. Perhaps my passion was admired, but "the baby has lost weight since birth" they said, and the baby was indeed hospitalized up north. Slam dunk neglect case. She was going to foster care; the hearing a few days later would just be a formality.

The next day the doctors at the hospital diagnosed Reign with pyloric stenosis, a condition whereby the infant could not assimilate her food; it would not pass into her intestines from her stomach in sufficient quantity. Surgery on Saturday.

I thought "well, it's obvious this isn't her mother's fault; she'll come back to mom". And Reign's mother was by her side as much as the hospital allowed, day and night, watching and holding the baby's hand and taking over some of the feedings under the watchful eyes of nurses.

The judge said she should have known her baby was sick. Clear neglect. There will be a trial at the end of the month.

So today Reign went away from the hospital with some foster parents; we will not be told who they are. I am sure they will love her.

And today Reign's mother came to me, with her bundles of legal papers, and her determination, and a sheaf of photos of the baby, and her bemusement.

Me, I alternate between tears and fury. But when I talked with the current child welfare worker and she asked "are you continuing as an advocate for this baby and mother?" I said yes, forever, wherever they are, whether they are together or apart. Yes, I am here for them.

Someone has to be.

A Revolution of the Beautiful

2010-11-02T13:04:00.000-07:00

I realized the other night, sorting through articles & photographs, calming my despair over photos of oilslicked birds & stories of death, loss, vigilance--I realized that in fact I was born into an atmosphere of grief, into a world of mourning, into a culture shell shocked, guilt ridden, & desperate.

And so, perhaps, were you.

When I was born, six decades ago, in a military hospital while my father waited on call for duty across the world, when I was born my mother sobbed inconsolably. Because, she said, I was a girl.
I would have to bear the pains of womanhood in this world, where her mother had died not a year before from a botched operation.

Yes, her labor had been hard. I bear to this day a memento of my hard delivery.

And yes, she was expected to birth a son. What to do with the football and the cute boy-blue clothing?

My grandfather sent small pink roses.

So I came in on a wave of grief, and I learned to sleep to the sound of trains and bombers, and I learned to hate the sound of air raid sirens, and I loved the Japanese hillsides and not so much the Mojave plains, where we waited for the end of the world in the early 1960's. As an officer's family we'd have nice quarters in the secret underground bunkers, waiting out the post nuclear radioactivity. No problem.

I loved the flowers of the high desert and the snakes. And we didn't die, and my father warned me against commies and we fought our own sort of cold war. My brothers became soldiers.

One went to jail for murder. One, after his time in the missile silos, retired to raise corn and cows in the Mississippi bottoms. And life goes on.

And I've lived six decades of wars, learning geography through atrocity stories.

You too, maybe. Or two decades, or four, or seven.

We've been huddled here in a sort of darkness, trying to deal with it all the best we can, at the edge of this stream of sorrow and joy.

The young travelers come by, and the old ones, in increasing streams. Words of loss come from across the planet and echo everywhere. Volcanic dust, earthquakes, white phosphorous, oil slicks.

How do we go on? How do we hold to an entire world of passion and suffering and not go under, and not give up?

No, I don't have the answers. But I think we sit with it, as we would sit with a crying child through the night, looking out into the trees for light dawning.

I think we play with it, when we can, like the group of people in Belgium--200 strong, who arranged a sudden dance/son explosion in the middle of the Antwerp train station, singing and dancing to a song from the Sound of Music.

Or like the soldiers in Afghanistan who posted a preposterous and silly video taking off from Lady Gaga's Telephone. With their cardboard and duct tape costumes, in the moments between...oh, death and murder, boredom, despair. They were good dancers.

I think we try in every creative, every grateful, every compassionate, every determined way to keep going. To listen to what gives us joy. To act on that knowledge.

It won't change the world. It won't stop the storms. But maybe we can transform some moment, some thought, some action.

I walked through the cemetery with my dog and sat beneath a dying cedar tree to watch a young hawk fly over the graves and the flowers. I watched a long while, the early sun warm on my face, the scent of mown grass in my nostrils.

Before I become part of the dust that softens the edges of this world, before I am still, I want to care more, dance more, sing more, watch more free flying hawks, love more.

And since every breath could be a last one, and every word a last one, I am not going to be caught saying "I give up". With every breath I am going to be saying Yes. Or at least...maybe. And "I love" and "how beautiful" and "let's be silly,let's make a revolution of the beautiful, of small pink roses, of courage".

And what will you be saying?

(I wrote this a few months ago for the newspaper my partner and I publish each month. I felt I wanted to share it here as well. The photo is of one of my supervisors, checking to make certain the newspapers are cared for.)

She brings me a rose

2010-10-23T15:48:00.000-07:00

She came in with a striped coral rose, rain soaked. She said it was from a seemingly dead rosebush on a back street of the town where an old building burnt to the ground in the summer. There's a bud still left, she said, but she thought she'd bring me the open rose, for pretty.

I put it in the old greeny-purple medicine bottle dug from the desert sands some years ago by a crusty old traveler who brought it in thanks for the time I called for medical help for him, as he lay in a field unable to move. It does look pretty, the rose in the green bottle, near some photos of people I love and critters long since vanished from my life.

She approved. She goes by her initial, D., and she looks as if she stepped from the frame of a PreRaphaelite painting: red-orange electrically curling hair, pale skin, a determined but wistful set to her expression.

She is 22. For some weeks, maybe a couple months, she has quietly come and sat outside, in a little nest of her own making, reading books from our free book display. Sometimes she has discussed her reading with me, sometimes she has simply smiled and nodded.

Once she asked for food, not having eaten in a few days. I told her I always have fruit, the fruit is always available, she need never ask.

She tidied the porch a few times; she likes to remove the falling leaves from the top of the little fish tub so that the water doesn't get clouded and she does seem to know a little about fish, a little more than I do.

Like many of the travelers she has made a fast friend in Champ the pitbull, who whines with joy when he sees her, and gazes with great love into her pretty eyes.

She lives beside a fence, in a vacant lot, out of the view of people in houses. She has a small tarp, a good sleeping bag, a couple changes of clothing.

Three days ago she told me her baby will be born in January. She smiled, saying the due date is the birthday of her mother, who is living in Seattle, which is where her dad also lives, which is far away. I haven't asked if these nice people know she is pregnant; she left home when she turned 16, and I haven't asked why.

With the travelers you don't ask a lot of questions, you don't start a lot of sentences with "you should..." What you do is offer a little space, an open heart, time to talk if talking is needed. An endless bowl of fruit. Clean socks. Connections, if wanted, to a clinic, to public health, to whatever shreds of resources might be out there. And books.

She came indoors today for most of the day--I told her yesterday that she should always feel welcome, she could sit by the fire and read, she need not do or say anything, she'd be out of the rain. I was glad to see her, because the storms began last night, and I couldn't sleep, knowing that she was by her fence, under her fragile tarp, probably awake and wet, feeling her child move and turn.

And not only her, but little Rhea, about the same amount along in her pregnancy. She was just taken to the emergency room after her boyfriend beat her in the rain, in the storm, in their camp. He's not a bad guy; he is trying so hard, he has come to me for help and advice and focus--but the rage comes on, and this frail blonde child I saw growing up is now battered and broken and he has been arrested.

There are times I cannot bear the weight of it all, the children in the ditches and beneath the bridges, the pain, the cycles of hopeless violence. But there must be a way.

Meanwhile, it is a beautiful rose. It is glowing, perfect, unfolding. A gift of love.

(the rose photo comes from someone in Switzerland called Tambako the Jaguar)

another of the disappeared

2010-10-10T19:33:00.000-07:00

A letter came from her mother the other day, and I put it in the basket where I keep the mail for my street friends, hoping that perhaps she will make her way back to my door soon.

But I stare at the return address, and wonder if maybe I should send a note to a waiting woman up in Canada, and tell her...but I don't know what to tell her. So I keep the letter in that basket, and I consider what to say.

Leah is tall, and slender, and very young. The first day I saw her she was turning in the sunlight, turning and turning out on my porch, her face lifted to the gentle late autumn sun, her hands stretched out. She seemed in her own world. The store was closed, and I didn't want to disturb her, there in her small, centering dance. And after a time she walked away, leaving me wondering.

The next day she came to my desk. Her hair was cropped very short; I know the style well because I cut my own hair myself, or did before I discovered the wonders of letting it grow long enough to be coiled and pinned up out of the way. A pair of scissors and a few moments and you get that rough gold look, and it is easy to care for, and it keeps pretty clean. These are nice if you are on the road and don't get much of a chance to wash up.

Her first words to me, after she gazed at me with those hurt blue eyes, were "I think my toe is broken".

And I of course jumped up to look. Her feet were bare. She was wearing a thin Indian print muslin skirt, wrapped around her hips and legs, and a wooly pink/orange sweater a little too small for her. Her toe did look bruised at the very least. So I talked of the clinic, and I talked of what they might do for her, and how they might give her some pain pills too, maybe.

But she said "if only I had some arnica I think it would feel better". Being a lay homeopath, well, I had arnica on hand, pills and salve, and I gave her both.

I thought about finding shoes for her. She said she'd hit her foot on the rocks by the river, where she had been sleeping.

The next day she came in and said "I'm hungry". I gave her some fruit and bread and almonds and water. She was wearing shoes and said her toe had felt better as soon as she had put my salve on it. I told her I was glad.

She stayed a while and talked with me, with a peculiar and disjointed clarity I have seen before in people with diagnoses like schizophrenia. "Are you a healer?" she asked, "because I need healing in so many ways".

I said I wasn't, not trained, I wasn't a doctor or a nurse or anything official in this world. She said "But you see that we are not separate, I can see that you see that. You are a healer."

I told her I simply listen,mostly.

Over the course of a couple weeks we talked almost every day. Leah was curious about many things, from the way plants grow to what my pitbull dreams of. Champ the pitbull liked her a lot; she was gentle and very attentive. The cats would come and sit in her lap.

One day she came in holding something in the palm of her hand. "What do you have?" I asked, and she opened her hand to show me the smallest of mice. She'd found it on the roadside. She thought maybe it should live with her. She was radiant with joy at her little pet, and wondered if I had a mouse house somewhere.

We found something--a container that might work--and I looked up the care and feeding of small mice. It was a cute thing, bright eyed and delicate, much like the girl who'd tried to save it.

And then one morning, very early, I found her sitting on my steps, and asked how she was. She said she was fine, but worried about the mouse. She thought maybe it was sick, or it needed milk, or something. As we wandered through three hours of odd conversation she told me she was leaving, and the mouse maybe needed not to travel, because the mouse didn't understand the road.

I offered to keep her mouse for her, for a day, for a week. I offered to do my best, and she put the creature in my hand, where it sat and cleaned its whiskers. I had discovered puppy formula is good food for toddler mice, and mixed some up, and Leah and I encouraged the little creature to have some.

He wasn't impressed. We had another hours conversation, and then she said "The mouse needs to be free. It has to go find its family. And if it finds its family, then maybe I will find my true family and I will be healed".

Maybe, I said. You found the mouse, so the decision is yours, whatever you think is right.

Freedom was right, she said, and she left, thanking me.

The next morning the empty mouse house was on my steps. She'd said she was traveling south, and I suppose she has gone on, finding some new place where sometimes the sun will warm her face, and maybe someone else understands we are all connected.

(the mouse photo is by a photographer who has the awesome name randomtruth at Flickr)

some of the disappeared

2010-10-07T19:47:00.000-07:00

It's my stepfather's birthday today. Or, well, it would be, if he and my mother had married and if he had stayed in my life in some way, or in hers.

Sometimes I check out his name on the internet, but there aren't any hits that make sense. Of course, he could well have changed his name. He could perhaps be dead, but if he were dead...I think, if he were dead, somehow the echos from far away and long ago would reach me even here.

It's not as though he was in fact, in any way at all, a father to me. It's not as if he held me on his knee or read me stories or walked me to school. I had a father. That father also did none of those things, but, well, he was my father.

Tony, well, Tony's something else again. When I met him he was motorcycle slick and back from Vietnam. He'd met my mother in a bar. He said she seemed so sad, so beautiful, sitting in the corner nursing her drink, her long gold hair spilling over that black dress. He had to go over.

And I gather things progressed from there, I don't know, I was traveling through Europe. The last thing that mattered to me was the love affairs of my 40 something beautiful mother.

I'm not even sure Tony was 30 yet, back then. But they had a lot of years together, and mostly they seemed happy, and he helped her through some of the really rough ones, the years of crime and punishment, the years when my brother served time for murder, the years the world seemed to fall apart.

He carried my picture in his wallet and showed his friends. My mother said he'd say "This is my beautiful daughter and her children". Yeah, it was strange. Sure, it was touching.

He helped seal the roof of my cabin one year. And somewhere along the way he disappeared.

Well, my mother's life kind of fell apart that year, between the cancer and the end of her job and the loss of her apartment, and she was swept up to North Dakota by my other brother.

The last time I heard from Tony I was visiting her there--it was maybe 14 years ago. He called, he always called, said my mother, he always promised he'd come up, only there was a court case. Only there was a job somewhere. Only there was another woman, or two or three. Only...

My brothers won't even mention his name. My mother in those days was...discreet. I never knew quite what she thought, quite what she felt; she was busy trying to survive. She managed another year.

I guess he knows she's dead.

I think of him on his birthday, because it is close to my own, and easy to remember. I wonder where he is, and what was ever true, back in those days. With his startling blue eyes he claimed he was Indian, he claimed he knew the old ways. He taught my son how to make paint of flower petals.

It left the slightest stain.

(the photo, which was titled "umbrella man" is from Flicker, where the photographer goes by mysza 831)

That Black and White Hat

2010-09-19T18:50:00.000-07:00

I saw the black and white hat in a shop window, as I walked in the rain gleaming streets from the market.

Ugly hat. But my heart stopped a moment, and for a moment time shifted.

Acrylic knit, with a visor. Sort of pseudo hounds-tooth check. It had been a present, along with a red hat for me, sent to England by my mother to my love of the time and me, to keep us warm and cheerful through a British winter. I think my boyfriend actually liked it. At any rate he wore it, back in that autumn, back in that winter, in the days we walked across the heather outside Edinburgh, or around the many corners of London.

In September time shifts for me more than in many months. September's calendar is pocked with little points of emotionality and little stars of "oh, that was good". It is the month of my own birthday. It is the month my parents wed, the month my father died in my arms, the month my partner of now almost 30 years first lay in my arms, the month one of my great loves and mentors was born, and then died, the month of my daughter's partner's birth.

And it was the month we walked around Edinburgh and looked at Blake watercolors in a little library and thought we'd live together and in love forever.

September is the month I said I would travel no further with that love. September is the month I took a job in an unlikely bookshop in a town with less than 2000 people in it and said "I need to stay here".

So, you know the great what-if? What if our ten years had turned to twenty and to thirty and to forty and nearing fifty? I don't usually indulge in these fancies, but the black and white hat took me by surprise.

I know, looking back, what happened with that choice. I look at my children, my roots, my land, the forests I love, the people I care for, the sustenance I get and that I share. I look at trees planted and bearing fruit, at gardens, at a series of griefs and joys and complications. It has been a very rich life, for which I am grateful.

My love of the black and white hat has written a lot of very well received books, and lives what appears to be a good life thousands of miles south of me, with a woman I've never met. Now and then he tells me when a new book is due out, or a prize is awarded.

How we raged and loved, those years so long ago. How I rushed into the night air to walk and walk and walk and calm my spirit. How arrogant I found him. How arrogant I was.

His latest email mentioned, in amongst the dates of future publications, that he is losing weight rapidly. That the surgeons took out his gallbladder, but to no avail. That they are running new tests, but he is off meanwhile to Mexico with his current partner, whatever the results. Living, he says, on gummy bears and pasta.

Just a little "oh, by the way".

Sort of "well, I might be dying, but...my books are coming out". Sure, I congratulated him, and wished him well.

Yeah, we thought we'd live forever, love forever. We were so very young.

(the poignant photo is by a photographer called Dalona)

What Do You Need?

2010-07-09T13:43:00.001-07:00

The raindrenched days of May long ago gave way to summer in the hills, to hollyhocks and to jasmine and to dust blowing in little swirls in the middle of the road.

There are more travelers than ever, particularly those who go on foot with very little, but also those with cars and bundles and long histories. Sometimes I am delighted to see or see again someone who sparks something interesting in my soul. Sometimes I inwardly sigh and think "I really don't want to deal with this, I am not a patient woman, I don't have resources and answers". I grumble inwardly, but...well, I answer the door. Or I sit with the person, meet the cat or the dog or the little bunny.

I thought today how fortunate I am to have these contacts and these lessons, over and over again. Gentle guidance towards learning...something I can't quite name. The privilege of providing a bit of sweetness sometimes, of balancing out the seeming grief and chaos of our lovely world.

Armen stopped by enroute to another country. I see him at intervals, sometimes with years between, but we always settle down and I get to hear where he was last, how the plum trees in Armenia are doing, why he is not ready to marry the nice Armenian girl, why his heart is drawn to the one in Argentina, what the skies are like in Finland, how you feel when you wake up with nothing on a roadside in Eastern Europe, what the sunset is like when you are leaving home. He is handsome and very young, for all his experiences, but comes and brings them to me like a bundle of pretty stones and treasures. "And then the Syrian witch told my fortune" he says. Sometimes I wonder where in those stories I might figure, with my flowers and my animals and cups of tea. He's easy for me, a taste of adventure and pleasure drifting by my shop like the scent of spices from far away. I send him off with another book of poetry and my blessings.

The visitors aren't always so easy. She is whitehaired and very thin, with sharp blue eyes. The man who brings her to me says she has been wandering and...what can we do. I find out later that she is well into her eighties. We sit and share stories; she is not linear, and she is cagey about letting me know very much. I ask her name, telling her my own, and she says "what name would you like me to tell you?" She tells me a name that is the name of the month and I wonder. She will not tell me any more, but as we chat she mentions that a grandchild worked at a restaurant in one of the towns some years ago. No, she will not name the grandchild or the restaurant. She claims to have lived here for decades, but I have not ever before seen her. And I wonder. I suggest the man take her to the public health folks,who can maybe assess her needs and her condition better than I, and then I sit and think about the handful of clues I have.

She mentioned burgers. Now, oddly, not many of the local restaurants serve those. I call the one most famous for them and ask to speak to the owner, who is not there and not due there for days. I almost hang up but then think...why not...and I tell the person on the line about the frail old woman and a possible grandson and....She immediately gives me a name. The young man has moved out of the area, indeed all the family is gone, but there is, she thinks, one person left, Jacob. He's friends with another young man.

As it happens, I know the young man who is supposedly friends with Jacob, and I call his dad. Who tells me Jacob is living with him. A few calls later and I know who my whitehaired visitor is, and where her daughters are, and that she goes on walkabout from time to time because, well, when you are 84 you don't like being told what to do.

Small towns are kind of nice that way.

The woman from the little nonprofit that has programs for the disabled brings in a very diffident man. She says "I don't know what to do, he needs everything, I don't know who to call, I brought him to you". My heart sinks. I don't have everything, the guy is very somber and very silent and heaven knows what the story is. The woman is anxious to hand him off to me. I talk about "well, there are so few resources" in a very disconnected way. The man is staring at his feet, he is uncomfortable, I feel terrible, searching through my mental list of agencies and helpers. There really aren't many. The guy apparently needs income, a place to live, food, friends, a new lease on life, direction, and possibly medical care. I don't have those things. I feel worse and worse and I know he is feeling bad and then, then I think...I don't have to solve everything.
I say "well, hi, I'm Kathy. What do you need right now, what could I help with right now?"

He'd most of all like to be able to call his dad. And maybe have a place to leave some of his things. And a glass of water.

Those are all so very easy, and with those he cheers up and starts solving his own problems. I laugh at this later, hoping I can remember that I only need to take one step at a time.

Today I was relaxing for a moment before opening the bookshop for the day's business. I was sipping my coffee and enjoying the quiet, feeling the luxury of having another fifteen minutes till I opened. It was sweet.

But then the man came to the door, a long time customer and friend. And I couldn't just let him stand there, though my heart grumbled and I felt very put upon. I said "I don't usually open for another few minutes, but come in" I'm sure my tone was anything but delighted.
"What can I do for you?" I asked, sighing. He said he just came to vent a bit. And then he told me his friend had just committed suicide, leaving a very messy situation. The vultures--not my lovely birds, but people with what he thought were material interests--were buzzing around.
There's a mother, there's a little girl, there's family, there's land, there's money.

And there is heartache and guilt and second guessing.

We talked a long while. I know the territory of suicide, and I know the territory of being a survivor. My coffee got cold, but I thought--we have to stay open to each other. We need to be able to respond to the knock or the sorrow, to the joy, to the immediate need.

There's no one else to talk to, said my grieving visitor. And there's nothing I can do, he said, I know that.

Stay centered, I said, try to stay compassionate. And come and talk, you know I'm here.

A strange place of privilege it is, being here, trying to be present, holding out at least a friendly hand for just the moment.

Trying to break through

2010-05-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

Time passes. The rain falls, the sun comes out, flowers in my gardens open, bloom, fall. In the graveyard I see doves and ravens, woodpeckers and jays.

There are meetings, and partings. There are books read, books sold, books given. There is bread given out to the hungry, blankets; there are phone calls made.

There are depositions and witnessing. I take down the stories of the ones no one listens to. I try to make those stories heard.

My hands are usually dirty, with newsprint and with ink smudges, with garden dirt, with soot from the woodstove.

I pin my hair up, but it straggles down.

I don't get enough sleep.

And sometimes I cry. When Benny brought his friend to me, and asked if I had shoes, I had none. And I looked at his friend's feet, which were raw, bare, swelling. Which oozed with sores. Which barely held him up.

And he was a young man, walking as if he were so old, so pained. Yes, I cried. I had soft new socks, but I had no shoes for him. I sent him to the clinic, being serious, being stern, saying "you must go there, you must have them look at your feet, there must be salves or medicines, give them my name."

And I cried all that night. Well, the oil spill had also happened, but somehow it was those poor feet, that had walked so far, in such pain. It was my lack.

Today my friend Debra had close to 50 people, poor people, travelers and locals, gathered in the hope of food in the town two miles north, where usually there is a lunch. The lunch had been canceled, but Debra had heard that another friend was bringing sandwiches. So imagine her, a big, tall woman, wearing velvety red and purple, rings on her fingers, her blond hair graying, her voice loud. And imagine our friends, all of them, gathered about for food. And imagine that the food did not come.

And they waited. Now, that's not so bad, but as they waited the police came and said "move on". So they went to the vacant lot. And the police came again and said "move on". And again.

And there was no food. Debra came here to my shop and we talked and shared news and schemed. And a customer came in, a nice woman, asking "what was that demonstration in the other town".

No demonstration, said I, those were merely a few of the hungry people. Perhaps they were demonstrating poverty. The woman was shocked. Hunger?

The guys gathered in the park across the way were also hungry; we brought fruit and bread. I'd already gone over in the morning, trying to find Frank Senior. I walked into a rowdy group, busy singing the most amazingly obscene song I had ever heard, at the top of their lungs.
I stood a while, near one of the guys I know best, and suddenly another looked up and said "oh, no, hush, that's the booklady". I told them I wasn't offended by the song, but needed to get in touch with old Frank, because his son is in intensive care. Broken neck. May not live out this night. I knew they'd get word to him, through our network of the dispossessed, the mad, the loving, the lonely.

And I've been thinking tonight of young Frank, in the ICU, down in a city far away. It is strange that he shares his name not only with his dad but with a friend who died in the same city, long ago, perhaps in the same hospital. At about the same age.

I remember meeting young Frank one Thanksgiving, when I was walking my old yellow dog down by the camps. He came up with a pup of his own, Gargomel, a spotted and very happy dog who only lived a year. We talked dogs, and I told him about the free Thanksgiving meal; he and his dad were new in town. He was just a kid. He had hard luck stories and wild hopes. His mom had been dead a long, long time. He met a pretty local girl here.

She's with him now, down in the city, waiting for the news.

Rains come. Sunlight comes. Sometimes I think...how can this all go on? And my friends are told again, "keep moving". And in this plentiful land there is real hunger. And I keep trying, trying to break through.

update: I met Frank Senior today as he came into town in the rain, just as I was walking out of the graveyard with my dog. Some phone calls, some scrambling. He's now enroute to his son at the hospital. Come what may, at least he'll be there. He has my number and instructions to contact me when he needs a return ticket home. His hands are covered with burns from when his tent caught fire, after the pretty dog died. I'm keeping them all in my heart and thoughts; you could do the same.

Second update: June 1, 2010...tonight there was a knock at the closed bookstore door, and Frank Sr. was there, grinning, back from the city. "How is your son?" I asked, bracing myself. He is out of the hospital and recovering at the home of the woman who helped raise him when he was a little boy, after his mom died. He will live. He will walk and dance and sing and play and be joyful.
Oh, and so will we. There was much hugging and rejoicing and grinning going on tonight at the bookshop, let me tell you.

The Blue Flowered Dress

2010-03-28T17:45:00.000-07:00

Odd, the things that stay in your mind. I know people who can tell you every phone number they had, or their street address from when they were five years old and carefully memorized it, just in case they got lost in the crowds somewhere. My own memories tend to be concrete, specific, and peculiar.
And very often, though I don't think of myself as a material girl, the memories are of objects, possessions, treasures.

This week I've been thinking a lot about the blue flowered dress. It came to just below my knees. It was made of a white silken fabric, probably nylon, but then I only knew "fancy" and "plain" and this dress was fancy for sure. Over the white background hundreds of small blue flowers were scattered, the blue of a clear summer sky when you know all is right with the world, when you are sitting under a big tree and the grass stretches on forever, when nothing has hurt you and nothing will hurt you. That sort of blue.

It had a belt, made of the same fabric, cunningly threaded through little loops.

It had a rounded collar, and the collar was edged in a whisper of lace, as though a small cloud had drifted over that summer sky.

And it had buttons, six of them, down the front. The buttons were shiny black and in the center of each was a rhinestone--I was sure they were diamonds--that caught the light and made rainbows everywhere in the room in which I tried this dress on, over my plain white slip, as my mother and my aunt looked and commented and told me how beautiful it was.

Oh, I knew it was beautiful. In it I was beautiful. In it I could take on the world.

My aunt Irene bought the dress for me, smiling at my unguarded rapture.

I was 4 years old, almost five. The buttons sort of matched my black patent leather fancy-only-don't-dare-wear-them-in-the-dust shoes. I loved that dress, that moment of understanding that beauty was attainable--that I could, yes, have that bit of fancy.

That year my brother and my mother and I lived in a tiny apartment next to my aunt and uncle and my four rowdy boy cousins. My uncle owned the apartment; it was a refuge for us as we waited and waited for word from my far away Air Force father that we could join him across the Pacific.

I was sick most of the year and my aunt, busy though she was with her boys, always made time to sit with me, to bring me books, and twice to bring me kittens. She was an extra mother, as beautiful as my own mother, though with a different beauty--black hair, ice blue eyes, a laughing air of elegance. We were heart-bonded from the start.

And she had that gift of the perfect object, the material blessing that transcended the mere material world. I think I remember everything she gave me, and she gave me a lot in those material moments, from the blue flowered dress and the kittens to most of the books of my childhood, the first grown up jewels, the sultry perfume. And even the propane based cookstove for my rustic cabin as I struggled to raise my own brood, decades after I wore the pretty dress and thought the world was mine for the taking.

She was beautiful and funny. Proud of her grown sons, proud of her grandsons, always a support to my mother. In her youth she had truly been a beauty queen, a pageant winner. She survived brain cancer--I returned from Europe and was so impressed with her very short hair. No one had told me about her illness, and she laughed when I complimented her on her fashion daring and said how glad she was that I was back, since everyone else was all woeful and overly sympathetic about the loss of her long black hair. She had the proper attitude whenever I broke up with a lover--none of them were good enough for me. "I always thought he was selfish" she'd rejoin, as my mother lamented the nice guy I'd traveled so long with.

Oh, she was lively. I have a photograph in which she and my grandfather are singing, looking silly and half drunk and fully alive and delighted. I've kept it near me for years because it makes me smile; it says to me--oh, something about "have fun, sing off key, do it, love it!"

Very early in the morning Thursday I heard a knock at the front door and wondered who was in distress, what was happening. I went to look, ready to deal with whatever crisis or request was there.

But there was only the night air. I made a note of the time, and sent some love and gratitude to my aunt, whom I knew was close to her next adventure.

Today my youngest cousin confirmed my time; yes, she had passed.

Her death leaves me as the oldest woman of my family. I am summoning up my blue flowered dress with its power of the summer to help keep my grateful heart from breaking.

rainbows and visitors

2010-02-07T20:05:00.000-08:00

My English friend who lives on a unstable hillside in a newly thrown together shed, with his cat and his memories, stopped by the other morning to tell me there was a rainbow.

I immediately left the bookshop to rush out into the mixed rain and sunlight and stare at it.

I have very few rules in life, but one, as I told him, is to never miss the opportunity to stare at a rainbow. There aren't enough in a lifetime to take the risk of missing one.

He's a good man, married four or five times ("why on earth did you bother?" I once tactlessly exclaimed). He's a twin, adopted at four or five months of age with his pretty blonde sister. He was, he said, the extra--the dark and crying boychild. Much of his life...well, I don't probe where it hurts. But I see the pain.

"Stinky old dog" he greets Champ, and Champ is delighted. And because it is said with warm affection I don't get upset. Sure, call my old dog stinky and chat with my cats, it's fine.

There is an odd privilege to being the bookstore lady, the person who can be found with ease, who will take a moment to listen, who has some bowls of good fruit and a well known box of warm socks and a sort of Mary-Poppins grab bag of what-might-be-needed. I'm pretty lucky.

And people like my English friend do alert me to rainbows.

Yesterday was exceptionally full of visits and revelations, amongst the chat about the latest mystery novels, and whether someone who likes Steinbeck would like McPhee, and poetry, and rain.

What struck me was the common thread though, amongst the stories I was told.

Poppy's companion came, as he does most days, for apples and water and some bread and a biscuit for Poppy. Poppy's a little black and tan dog with white paws; to my untrained eyes she looks like a beagle, but she dances like a poodle and her person once told me she was a particular fancy sort of hound. Her person showed up last summer with her and asked for a needle and some thread to repair his sleeping bag. I had those on hand, but I also had a light sleeping bag not in need of repair, which I gave him. He said then he was moving north, just here for a day or two. Fine, said I. He said "I was once a meteorologist". Handy knowledge, I said.

So he came yesterday, got some apples. I offered him some kiwi fruit as well. He confided that pears were his very favorite. And he told me how his mom used to leave offerings of bread and fruit in the garden when he was very young, for the fairies.

We thought there were fairies, he said.

Well, maybe there were, said I, you never know. And I asked if he had many sisters and brothers or what.

And he told me. He told me his mom had been 15 when he was born, the eldest of her children. He told me his dad was drafted and sent to Vietnam, and the young girl said to hell with that, she wasn't gonna wait for a dead soldier.

And she gave her son to her sister to raise.

"How old were you?" I asked.

Four, he said. And he said when he was 15 his mother got in touch, but he didn't want to have anything to do with her. "I was 15, I didn't need a mother".

I said nothing.

"And when I was in the Navy later she wrote...well, she emailed...she had three children, she didn't need four. So that was that."

She's a nurse in Ohio. High up in some hospital, he said. He said he was proud of her. And his dad died, and his wife died, and there wasn't much to live for, so he walked out of the house with his dog, with Poppy, and that was a few years ago. And so it goes.

No sense in getting close to anyone, he said. And then he seemed a bit ashamed that he'd told me all too much, so I got busy looking for some biscuits for the dog, and wished him a good day, out there along the roads.

The next guy, with his pitbull puppy, had been thrown out again by his girlfriend. "So, I'm back beneath the bridge" he said, and he said he was sorry, cause he'd told me he was getting money together to replenish the dogfood and he didn't.

I understand, I said, things come up, don't feel bad. His girlfriend had taken up with some drugs he doesn't do, and some guys who can supply them.

I'm sorry, I said.

I know about his mom, who died long ago, and he found her. I know about the jail time and the series of girls, young women, who cling to him a while and then drift off.
The pup is looking good, though.

And then John came in. Now, I haven't seen John for a few months. The last times I saw him my heart was full of trouble. He was lean, and dirty, and desperate and sick. He was using, he was drinking, he was looking for some quick way to fortune or some quicker way to death. I'd run into him at night and his eyes were haunted.
Yes, his story has abandonment in it too, and foster care, and hardening.
John used to bring me small treasures. Small, stolen, treasures. I'd quietly try to get them back to where they belonged. He would offer me his gifts with hurting, pleading eyes.

Women liked John, especially women who shared his drugs. Oh, there were stories.

So he came in, after some months of no news, and he said "Kathy, I had to come see you. I'm clean, I'm okay. Took some jail, but I'm okay".
He'd been picked up for something minor, and had done a bit of county time, and then decided to go to a clean and sober house.
"Kathy, it's been 124 days. I'm not using, I'm not drinking, I have a job. I'm living up north, but I had to come see you".

I hugged him. I thanked him, I told him he looked great. He'd put on a little weight; had cut his long ragged black hair. He was smiling.

"You never gave up on me" he said. "You never did. So I'm not giving up either".

And then I cried.

(the photo, oddly, comes from Finland. But it so looks like my part of the world)

In the Ever Present Rain

2010-01-19T16:34:00.000-08:00

Yes, it seems it has been raining at least 40 days and 40 nights. The water drips down from the porch, over the stones, in a tiny rivulet, a mini waterfall over the green, green moss. The air is warmer than it was in the days of the hard frosts that covered the hillsides with glitter, but everything is wet.

When you walk the ground squelches. Champ the pitbull looks at me as if I am out of my mind as we set off for the hills or down the road. Go out in this? Get wet? I insist, and off we go, splashing through the streets turned into little creeks and the creeks turned to rivers.

Winter here sometimes seems to last forever, even though it isn't the closed in, cold winter of the east coast. I peer at the signs of green. I am pleased the tulips are rising up from the mud, that the geraniums I feared dead are showing green again, that the days are getting longer, second by second.

I think I can make it.

Winter has been healing and breaking my heart again. There have been deaths. There are always deaths, and don't tell me it is simply that I am older and people die--people have forever been dying in my life, and really...can't they stay around? So the guy who had the show following my poetry show on the radio died, and he was just a bit past 40, and his eyes were speedwell blue, and he was a joker and an artist and...

well, how come, world?

Meanwhile I selfishly was rejoicing that my oldest son made it through a medical emergency and a hospital stay and is healing, is well. But--having one's child go under a surgeon's knife has got to be one of the more terrifying moments of my life.

And so I balance that with my dead friend. At least it wasn't my son, I think. And I think--well, that is harsh.

"I was so lonely" says Scott, one of my friends who camps out in the rain by the river and who comes to talk with me when he has a moment and can be indoors. Scott, like my dead friend, is one of the blue eyed charmers of the world, worn and sobered by a lot of strange turns. But he's glad now, because a cat has come to live with him. From out of nowhere. He asks me a lot of questions about the care and feeding of cats, and I am so afraid this cat is just an opportunist, soon to vanish. But no, Big Cat seems to have settled for the winter with a gentle wanderer, content to sleep in an almost dry tent, on a special blanket I have dredged out of my boxes of rags and riches. There are good moments in the winter.

"Do the papers inside come with the book?" asks the very handsome young man, holding out a critical work on Nabokov as his very lovely friend browses the poetry shelves. I say yes. We always keep ephemera in the books as they came to us--the recipes, the love letters, the funny matchcovers, the grocery lists, and the newspaper clippings. In the Nabokov are mostly newspaper clippings--other reviews, notes on the author. I glance at them as I tell the young man the price of the book, and the total price of the interesting stack he has gathered. And I say "this book came from the library of a fascinating woman; she died a few years ago, but she was a good friend of mine"

And he says "she has some poetry in here".

I am startled by this, and ask...where? And he pulls out two sheets of folded paper. I laugh.

"She was a poet, that's true, but these--these were drafts of a poem I never finished. I'm so surprised she kept them".

He offers to return them to me, but I let go of that poem a long, long time ago. "I was probably younger than you are now" I say, "when I was writing that. It's so odd to think of that".

It's an interesting moment, this collision of the past and the present, and the future. I wonder what the young man or his pretty girlfriend may write. I wonder where their journeys will take them. I wonder why my friend, who once destroyed an entire pile of my manuscripts and letters, tucked away these two imperfect sheets of a poem that never really finished.

I write my name on a scrap of paper for my book buyer. And he thanks me, wondering perhaps...well, I'm not sure what he wonders. He has good taste in books, though.

And they walk out into the ever present rain, almost bumping into Scott who is come with another report on his new friend the cat.

(the photo is by someone called lepiaf. geo on flicker)

phone calls for the dead

2009-11-29T13:14:00.000-08:00

The phone rings. It is early, before we open, or it is Sunday, or it is late at night.

My heart always stops for a moment, thinking, fearing that it might be word from one of my children, children of my body or children of my heart--there are so many wandering the world these days, so many of the young travelers, and sometimes the calls come from jails or hospitals or in the middle of nowhere, where the voice on the line says "the demons tell me I should be dead, oh what am I supposed to do?"

But this isn't one of them. The recorded message clicks on. "This. Is. A. Call. For. David. Lindgren. If you are David. Lindren. press one. If you are not. David. Lindgren. press two."

We've had this call ten times in the past week. The first time, because I am not David, I pressed two, and the voice bid me wait while my "information" was updated. I waited. Fur Elise played nicely. I waited. Fur Elise kept playing nicely. I waited.

The phone went to dead air.

I hung up, after trying to press various keys to get a human.

Today I thought, what the hell, I'll press one and see if that gets me a human. No, it just gets me Fur Elise, and then dead air, and probably gives the collection agency false hope.

There seems to be no way to tell them they aren't going to get whatever David owed them, that he is far, far beyond their reach.

He was called Cricket when he came through here, disheveled, angry, desperate, sweet. He was traveling then with a woman who called herself BirdSong, but who gave me her true name, because she was a poet and had written some poetry she'd had published in one of those huge scam "you are a great poet, just spend money on this beautiful anthology" places. Her poetry wasn't bad at all, and she loved flowers, and talked wistfully to me of the house she lived in once, where there were glass windows, small paned, and she grew houseplants and the sunlight shone, and she was warm.

They were both drunks, and they weren't very trustworthy around small valuable things. Like magpies they collected interesting bright lovely things from my bookstore. Sometimes it made me mad, sometimes I thought--well, I've got a lot, what's another trinket.

I tried to help them get food and I gave them sleeping gear and clothing all through many a winter here.

Hard to believe, it must be 7 years or more now; they would come and stand with me sometime when I stood alone in the cold in some Women in Black vigil. Cricket said he was a vet, and told me tales of Vietnam. Other vets claimed these were bogus, that he'd been in jail on some petty charges, that he was a scam artist.

He wasn't very popular, and he was prone to fights. One day I stepped between him and another guy, Buffalo, also dead now. They'd both drawn knives and were roaring and beyond reason and my action was incredibly stupid.

I'd do the same thing today, though. I stood between them, very aware of those sharp blades, and yelled "I will not allow you to hurt one another! Put those damn knives away! What are you thinking?!"

They sheepishly did just that. I invited them into my shop for a bowl of warm soup.

Birdsong left him, and that was probably a wise move. Buffalo died in jail. Cricket...ah, Cricket. He came to me with a wounded hand and asked what I thought. It was oozing green and swollen and he had a fever and I told him, I told him to get to a hospital. Right then.

Yeah, he died there. I guess his mom got contacted somehow. So I heard. I hope so. Must have been 4 years back?

And the phone calls bring it all back to me. I remember especially the Christmas Eve we happened to spend together, Cricket and Birdsong and me. It was storming and cold out. I had ordered a couple bushels of oranges--I do this a lot in the winter, figuring fruit is a good thing for hungry people, and oranges are vitamin rich. I invited them in for some hot tea and to give them a bag of fruit and some other food to get them through the next days. Birdsong was decorating herself with costume jewelry strung into a crown about her tangled brown hair, and had a brocade coat--glowing but tattered--she was intending to wear over her usual layers. Because, she said, she was an Empress and if she went out on the steets in her finery maybe, finally, someone would understand this about her. She was off her meds that night, and prone to screaming. No one could ever quite scream like Birdsong could--it should have shattered the gates of heaven.

And Cricket told me of his one good Christmas, in Oregon, when he was...maybe 5, maybe 8, I no longer remember. His dad had work that year, they had food, and, best of all, he was given a red wagon.

"You should have seen it, Kathy" said Cricket. "It was new. It was so bright, and it cost my dad plenty. We were so happy."

For a moment, looking at his worn face, I saw that little boy, delighted with a gift.

And I didn't cry then, but later, and still now, I have, wondering how that child's life was so torn later. And what could have kept him safe.

A brief thanksgiving

2009-11-28T22:44:00.001-08:00

There was a time I could walk beneath my grandmother's table without bending my head, and peer out through the flowery white design of the lace tablecloth, scarcely breathing, trying not to be noticed, to watch the doings of the grown ups in the room as we gathered for Thanksgiving, long, long ago.

The legs of that table were dark wood, curved and carved, and ending in paws that my mother told me were lion paws.

They were very pretty.

I remember, after years away, how surprised I was that I stood far above that table. Had I ever been so small? I still tried to keep quiet, to listen to the grown up conversations, to try to understand that confusing world. But I'd get tired and soon be off to the walnut tree with a book, cozily leaning against the trunk, high above the ground, getting my best dress stained with walnut husk.

This time of year the oddest memories come back. I remembered my grandmother's table as I looked down the mountains from my eldest son's house, where my family had gathered for our thanksgiving. I was boiling potatoes and stirring sauce and cutting up the beautiful golden mushrooms my daughter and her partner had gathered in the woods with me the day before--chanterelles, the most luscious of mushrooms. My grandmother wouldn't have recognized much that I put out on the table--my vegetarian feast might have confused her. I can imagine my father laughing with disbelief.
Well, we did have sweet potatoes, and mashed potatoes, and chanterelles in a light sauce. And cranberries, and stuffing, and a tofu-turkey. My eldest son's best friend laughed at that, and I laughed at his laughter.

It is longer than 30 years since those two boys met. They were rowdy and rough and tumbled all over the cabin and the land like young bear cubs. I had known A., son's friend, since his birth. Since before his birth, when his mother wondered if he'd ever be born and I told her he'd wait to be born close to my birthday, late September.

He was, showing himself to be a very intelligent person. My son was born the following year, and they might as well have been brothers. So it was good to have them both, though when A. said "now, we really must do as the matriarch bids us"....well, you know, it's a bit strange. It was yesterday I was walking beneath that table.

And my daughter's partner and I had a long talk. Now there's a lovely soul. Just the day before, when the police brought us another lost soul, he had helped me transport her--54 years old, heart trouble, head trouble, homeless, distressed and surly and difficult and very pretty--to a safe place in the north. And refused my thanks--it was, he said, nothing at all. So we talked about my youngest son, Gabe, who had asked the day before which one of him was going to be at Thanksgiving. Interesting question; whichever one had come was having a great time. But E. and I talked, and how odd to think this young man had such instinctive insight into the mind of my sometimes mysterious youngest.

My daughter seasoned things deftly, my eldest made sure I had sufficient coffee, the day was bright and we were all silly and sweet and ridiculous and alive and together.

And so glad of this.

(the photo, taken by my eldest, is some of the view from his home)

Poetry

2009-11-18T20:32:00.000-08:00

Just a note, for I know that poetry is not to every reader's taste, but I have been putting more of my poetry at my other blog which is linked on the side, over yonder, or is right here

http://jarvenpa.blogspot.com/

Although my poetry has, as they say, been widely published in the literary and little magazines, it has never been collected and printed in a book. (ah, and not for lack of trying. The stories I could tell). Every so often someone wanders across a poem of mine somewhere and takes the time to discover where I am, through magic or cyber saavy. Since I direct them to my notebooks, and since some come back to me and ask where they can read more, and since the mice and rain are doing their magical transformations on my old paper notebook it seemed a good time to put more out for tasting.

The internet may not be the best place to read poems...but it is what I have to offer you, if you like.

The leaves drift

2009-11-13T21:15:00.000-08:00

Yes, the rains have set in. Before the first rain, nearly a month ago, with the wind from the south and the falling leaves scattered over my porch, I met a young guy on a bicycle and we talked philosophy and politics and community and literature in the warm bookstore.

The next day, early, he was back. "I don't know if this is the right place to say this..." he started, and I said "go on". The first raids on the homeless encampments had begun, he said. He was sleeping on what is called the Island--a triangle of land between road and freeway, up above the cliff that goes down to the river. And the police came. They were cordial enough. They gave him 15 minutes to get his gear, his bike, his food, and leave.

And they told him the other gear, the tents, the sleeping bags, the clothing--all would be taken to the landfill.

Because it was trash. Because the people who slept there were...well no, they didn't call them trash. Desperate. Homeless. "undesirables".

My new friend had met some of the people camping there, and knew they weren't around, and worried. I told him he had of course come to the right place, and my partner and our beat up pickup went out to the Island and loaded up the survival gear and the real trash.

I spent the next day getting word to the street, washing clothes and blankets, bagging things, trying to preserve these little bits of people's lives.

I also sent out a message to everyone I could think of in my local circle of contacts, explaining the situation and asking for warm clothes, sleeping bags, survival gear.

Because--bottom line--please, no one die this winter. No one die because you were rousted and hounded and suffering on the street and in the woods. Oh please, not on my watch. Let me keep you safe.

A week later the next camp was hit. No notice. Earnest, intelligent, sweet officers of the law, just following orders, a little sad about it, but what to do? This time an ally of mine picked up the raid on her police scanner and hightailed it in and snatched up gear from the truck headed to the dump. The driver said "it's just trash". Deb showed me the "trash"--tents, papers, blankets.

And we were sorting through the gear on the porch, trying to figure out where the people were, and what belonged to whom. As we stood there, a young man came up to me and said "oh, sleeping bags? Oh, all my stuff was taken, could I have one?"

Not those, I said, but I did have one for him. And I invited him inside. And he told me his story.

"So, I tried to jump off the bridge," he said, fairly calmly. "Cause, I wanted to die" he said, with equal calm.

I nodded. Been there, I said, it can get pretty dark at that place.

So the police took him to the mental institution in the north, about an hour by car. And held him the allotted 72 hours. And then he was released.

"So, I walked south" said he. "And after a while I got pretty tired, and it was dark and cold and so I went to sleep beside the road. I covered myself in cardboard boxes to try to stay warmer"

I nodded. He had walked, in the night, about 20 miles.

Have you eaten? I asked. Yes, he said. The nice man who picked him up in the town he'd slept in treated him to breakfast, and brought him here to my shop, because, he said, this was a good place.

He was going to call his mother, who lives in Austin, Texas. He didn't want to call from my phone. We talked a while longer, and in the notebook he carries, under his mother's contact information, I wrote my name, address, and phone number. And told him, as I've told so many of the young wanderers, that I answer the phone and that I accept collect calls. So if ever it would be of help...call me, I said.

He had just turned 17. He had beautiful dark eyes and a sweet smile. We talked a bit longer, but he was ready to be on his way, clutching my list of resources and his new sleeping gear. He said they call him DJ on the street.

Stay on the planet a little bit longer, won't you? I asked. You have things to do here, you are needed. Think about it.

Yes, he left. And I think of him every day, through the new raids--every encampment within a 10 mile radius has been "cleared" now. This doesn't mean that my friends are gone, just that they are having to scramble more as the icy rains fall and frost makes the hillsides glitter.

The local county supervisor dropped by to talk with me yesterday. My Maine coon cat sat on his knee and Champ gazed at him hopefully, though the guy says he's not a dog person. He'd come bringing some warm jackets and little soaps and such. I thanked him. He was enroute to talk with the police; I told him to give them my best regards, but that I had major problems with the illegal raids being conducted. He told me he had only a minute or two, but nicely pinned by my helpful animals he stayed an hour. And he'll be back.

What I told him was...well, no dead kids or dead elders or dead anyone from hypothermia on my watch. And...what I've been telling everyone these days...that I'm ruthless. I'm going to use every bit of light or energy or compassion I can find in anyone. I'm going to seek it out. I'm going to find it in the officers of the law and in the people on the street and in myself. And somehow, somehow, we are going to make a circle of compassion in which no one, no one is going to have to wander the roads and sleep covered in cardboard and look at bridges as means of ending it all.

The beautiful leaves are drifting down with the rain. Beautiful souls are drifting by on the streets. Somewhere, somehow, they must be held and cherished.

Lost and Found

2009-08-26T20:11:00.001-07:00

In August, as the days grow hotter and the fields turn paler and my pitbull joyously falls to his back in the long weeds, wriggling and sounding like a dolphin, huge emoting, moans of joy--as the days of August come to an end the dust on the roads grow thicker, it seems the more desperate or broken find their way to my stairs or my door or perhaps my heart.

"There's a...girl, passed out by the steps" said my partner to me one evening as the heat baked from the stones and the sun began a slow slide in the west. "you should check on her" he said, not wanting to startle or alarm a young woman.

And he's right, a mild middle aged or aging woman is far less alarming, surely.

So I went to the foot of my steps, and yes, there was a girl. She lay in the gutter, curled on her side. Her hair was in short rastas, covered with dust. Her bare legs were folded to her stomach. Her long, tan hands bore a couple very worn silver rings. She wore a very short shift, which once may have had flowers patterned on it but had been worn and washed so often the flowers were simply memories. Her feet were stuck in old tennis shoes with holes, several sizes too big.
Her long eyelashes made faint shadows on her cheeks; her lips were pale and gently curved.

I stood there a moment, looking down at her. Yes, she was breathing. Fairly evenly. "Sweetie" I said, using the endearment that comes so quickly to my tongue, the one my children, I fear, hate, "sweetie, are you okay?"

I asked a few times. My partner came and stood beside me. A sherrif's car passed by. "We could take her to the emergency room" said my partner. But I said, "We'd have to wake her first, and if this is an overdose they'd probably send her to jail instead". Unfortunately, we've had experience like that.

I kept murmuring to her.

"You'll have to shake her" said my partner. "I don't want to scare her" said I. But then I knelt beside her and put my hand on her thin, bare shoulder, still talking. Her temperature seemed pretty normal. I took her pulse...yeah, steady, firm.

She moaned and spat, twice, still sleeping, her head pillowed on a rock. "This is not a good place to sleep" said I, hand on her shoulder. "Have you taken something? Can you speak to me?"

And then the guy with the brindle pitbull came up. "She shouldn't have been drinking so much in the sun" said he.

"Athena, wake up!"

And she opened her hazy blue eyes. And swore. And said "why did you wake me? Now I'm hungry, and I don't have anything to eat".

So we got them both some food, and the dog as well, and the guy said he'd get her to her camp.

But late that night I saw her again, wandering the road in her thin shift, eyes glazed. I've looked for her since. If she's 16 I'd be surprised, this thin and beautiful wanderer. I've got to get a better grasp of where the new ones are, where the camps are, how the children are.

When they are sleeping at your stairs, well, you wonder.

The young couple who came by the next day were in better shape, but they'd been crying, and they had two puppies much too young to be away from their mom. Brutally hot days then. The little pups were limp and dehydrated. We talked a long while, got them food--all of them, yes, of course the little dogs too--thought out strategies, heard their stories. They've been back a few times now, and each time the pups look better. Yesterday they were playing and romping and Champ my pitbull--who had seemed woefully concerned at the first meeting, nudging them and whimpering--finally gave up and gave me a glance of disgust and went into another room to escape their bouncing and pouncing.

What did you call them? I asked. The one in the black collar is Mocha; the one in the purple collar is named...Athena.

Okay, fine. I do inhabit a realm of coincidence.

Today's first customer stood in the store talking to himself quite a while. I kept typing. I talk to myself sometimes; it's not very alarming. I figured if he wanted to talk to me he could, but meanwhile, fine, talk to the bookshelves and the dog and the air, that's okay.

After a while he came and said "I do want something". I waited. "Do you have any borscht?"
I said unfortunately I did not, though borscht is very good. "Then,maybe, do you have squash baked slow with honey?" Again, sadly, I could not provide. "But I do have fruit and bread" I said, and offered him some.

He stared at an apple.

No, others have been here, I can feel them, he said.

Well, yes, this is a bookstore, we have a lot of people come through.

So maybe, said he, you have what I am looking for. I lost it so long ago. It is a box with three parts, and in it are roses and feathers. And there's a gold frame around it, like wheat, and there are pictures of everything that matters. And there are maple keys spinning over the surface of it, and when you have it you are okay again.

No, I said, that sounds so beautiful, but I do not have it here.

Someone is mistreating it, said he. And he went to pick up my broom.

Oh, I understand, said he. You are a witch. I see your broom. And your cat. And your dog. But I think you are okay.

I think so, I said.

He looked at a few more books, and brought me one on mythology. Here, he said, look.

Athena and her owls.

(the photo of Palas Atenea now at the Louvre, was taken by someone calling her or himself purolipan. Amazing lighting)

I've seen fire and I've seen rain

2009-08-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

There was a day in the bell tower of the old campus building in which we let the mome raths out. And there was much mimsey.

We were celebrating Lewis Carroll's birthday, and decided the balloons, bright creatures, would do well for mome raths. Oh, we were whimsical. There was cake.

Those days we celebrated anything at the drop of a hat or the baking of a cake. I fed the bluejays from the far up window and skipped classes to write poems on the window sill. I fell in love. I fell out of love. I edited a literary magazine and triumphantly rejected the poetry of a professor who'd rejected my work.

Oh, I was not always nice then.

But she and I, we had fun, as our paths crossed. She was majoring in a science, and I was an English major, but she appreciated the odd, and I embraced her very tender sensibilities.

There were parties at her apartment and walks in the rain and adventures in which we fed 200 from a woodfire and she filmed me playing with the orphans, my long hair streaming, blowing soap bubbles.

As if soap bubbles and dancing might save the world. Many years later she wrote that she still had that film, with me as the soul of the California girl, and had shown it to her new husband, trying to explain the time.

I don't know if she mentioned the mome raths. Maybe she did.

So the decades went on. She was very successful in the scientific and academic world, and probably adored by her students. When she met and fell in love with her husband, when she married him, and they combined their household dogs, her notes to me were less frequent, but brimming with delight.

And now and then there'd be an email, out of nowhere, a bit of humor or a pretty thought.

So when I got an email from her today, I was happy and mystified. The subject line was her name, which seemed odd, but you just never know.

I opened it. It said "You are receiving this because you were on her contact list; she died suddenly on Thursday..."

I stopped reading for a moment.

The rest of the email was full of details on the coming service.

How did that song go...

Yeah, something about "but I always thought I'd see you one more time again"

The wolves are back

2009-07-28T14:47:00.001-07:00

The wolves came back a couple nights ago, but so far we are fending off the worst of the night, and my son is cheerful and only scared from moment to moment.

The wolves, it should be added, exist in my son's mind, not rampaging our sleeping room. But when they are there and my son decides it is time to join the pack, when he removes his clothing and goes to all fours and vocalizes chilling growls and moans and scrambles through the early morning thus, it can be hard.

It can be fascinating as well; I follow my son as far as I am able into his world. These nights are better by far than the nights of January and December, when I terrified him as well and he cried out so heartbreakingly. Gabe meets my eyes, he comes back to our consensual reality, we sit and talk. Or I talk, and watch his expressions very closely; I give him drawing paper and pens; I let him select toys, and we talk about them. Or, as I said, I talk.

On into the dawn, trying to be centered, fighting my exhaustion, trying to think of it all as fantasy.

I am a poet; why would my 20 year old with Down Syndrome and other labels not also walk the paths of the imagination in his own way?

We've had two nights now, and maybe that's it; I kind of hope so. My partner said yesterday he'd take the night shift if need be, but when the wolves came he was sleeping too soundly. You can't wait around much in the world of the wolves; the energy changes pretty quickly, you want to be there.

So, without much sleep, my mind wanders. I've been thinking of the subterranean life of the mind, of things that flow on beneath the surface, like creeks encased beneath the roads.

Now and then they break through.

Last weekend was one of those times for me, in which I found myself inexplicably crying, and still went on with my busy life. A meeting, sales at the shop, interactions with friends and strangers.

And moments of heartwrenching weeping.

Usually when this sort of thing happens I check the calendar. I seem to have an internal ritual life as solid as any pattern of saint's days, in which sometimes some long ago event comes out and stands in the center of my heart.

And I say, oh, yes, I recognize you. Been a long time. I see the pain is still here, funny thing.

I checked the calendar and my heart and realized, oh yes, of course, it was the time of the accident and the 3 days waiting and the death at the end. It was the anniversary of a time that sent me into a dark time in which if there were wolves to join I would have, gladly, tearing off my clothes and my civility and gone raging into a chaotic night. It was the anniversary of a death that divided my life's path.

There have been other deaths, many before that one, many more after that. This one, however, claims me still, three decades and more later.

So, I was in the midst of keeping my social face and selling books and not sobbing when Vern wandered in.

"Kin I take an apple?" said Vern, and I said yes, and he did. Now, Vern is...well, Vern ranges the streets and does a lot of things that aren't very good for him, including large amounts of vodka and large amounts of less legal substances. Vern used to be a chain setter for a logging company, till the chain slipped and a tree hit him and he suffered brain damage.
Vern howls at the night pretty regularly, and Vern talks to me in rifts that go something like "Did you get the stars that are worth a lot? I think the telephone wants them now"

I say, "no, don't have any stars, have another apple".

We have our interesting conversations. More sedate customers are often a bit stunned. Talking with people like Vern helps me a bit in the wolf time conversations with my son; I'll follow you anywhere.

This day Vern looked at a photo on my desk. "Your daddy, right?" said Vern. I checked it out--I do have family photos scattered about. "Um, no, not that one".

Vern stared at me "He's your real daddy!" he said, though I said no--here, that's my dad, in uniform, so young.

Vern shook his head. "Might be. But this guy here, he's your daddy too. Most your daddy."

And off he went, munching his apple. The photo is of William Butler Yeats. Well, I didn't much like his poem to his lovely daughter---but, hey, I'll claim him, father to my subterranean heart and the times of wolves.

It wasn't Thoreau's birthday

2009-07-11T21:16:00.000-07:00

I thought it was though, that hot summer afternoon as the Greyhound bus wound its way up over precarious mountain roads and at the edge of sheer cliffs. I waited for the redwoods, and was surprised that they were--brown, really. But so huge, so tall. The driver pointed out osprey nests. I ate a little container of yogurt and conversed with my boyfriend. Or whined. Or fought. My memory, actually, is that our nerves were strained, I was tired, and the start of a migraine beat at my left temple.

We stopped in a small town, about an hour from our destination. The hills around were dry, golden, dusty. Some sad looking children poked at a dead bat they'd found. Where on earth was I going? I thought, staring at the children, at the leathery, beautiful, sad wings of the little bat.

The bus pulled into the town we'd found, at last, on a map of the state back when we were considering journeys and we were closing up the house outside London and I was destroying the start of a novel I'd written and wondering where the year, the wonderful year of writing and freedom had gone.

The streets were bare, dust blew from the north. The friend who was supposed to meet us wasn't there. Well, the bus was, after all, over an hour late. And she did eventually show up.

But what stunned me as I stepped out onto the sidewalk, head hurting, mouth dry, was the message.

I suppose I should backtrack here and assure my readers that I am usually sane. But now and again through my life I have heard voices--internal and external. And I have seen things that apparently other people do not. So, at this moment, as I stepped onto the sidewalk of the ugly and dry and uninteresting little town, as I looked at boarded up buildings, as I wondered how long my head would ache...a voice within said "This is where you are supposed to be".

Of course I figured I was indeed not as sane as I've just assured you I was. What I thought was "great, fighting with the boyfriend, migraine, bus late...and now I am going into a major mental breakdown or something. Great".

And the quiet, patient, still voice within just said again "This is where you are supposed to be".

I took it on advisement.

We were supposed to be traveling further north after a weekend with the friend. I would work at a library, my boyfriend would write a thesis, we would live happily ever after.

So my friend arrived, and we went to the place she'd bought by the river, where there were two little extra cabins, and she kindly showed us to the one nearest the river. It being July the river was a tiny trickle over a lot of grey rock, and my friend apologized, assuring me that when she'd moved there, in November, the river had been right up to the fence. Hard to believe.

And within three days I knew I had to stay.

I've fallen in love a number of times in my life, and hope to continue to do so. I've fallen in love with men and women, with dead poets, with buildings, with dogs and cats, and with the color of the sky on a summer night. That year--indeed, that day, some three days after my arrival and two after Thoreau's real birthday (my friend the librarian was good at fact checking)--I fell in love with a landscape. I fell in love with the scent of river water running over mossy stones and with the dust that covered my sandals. I fell in love with the plants I didn't recognize, and with the white egrets. I fell in love with the way the light hits the hills, the way the sunlight filters through evergreens, the way poison oak gleams. I fell in love with the gnarled hands of lumbermill workers and the crazy stories the old timers shared with me.

This love is ever renewing. So I got a job as a motel maid, and I broke up with my boyfriend, and I fell in love, and I fell in love, and I fell in love. Sometimes with people. And my children were born, and there were as many twists and turns to my life story as you can imagine. Someday I might share a few.

But every year, on the 11th of July, at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, I pause and think about the day I stood on the pavement with my head pounding and a voice in my mind and a sense of craziness.

There is no way I could even begin to say how glad I am, how thankful, how purely delighted, how lucky.

Thoreau would have approved.

The Snail's on the Thorn

2009-06-30T18:08:00.000-07:00

Well, actually, the snail is in a little basin, under water, gently nibbling algae while wandering over pebbles and larger rocks. The snail is black and white, about the size of a quarter, and when it pokes out its eyestalks to look through the watery contained world I am unreasonably charmed.

I am easily amused, and oddly trusting. These traits I think are inborn, like my twinned toes and my blue green eyes; I don't take credit for them, but they get me by. Yeah, even the odd toes, which used to make me assume I was meant to be a mermaid somewhere.

Above the little basin in which the snail and a few little fish live, an orb spider has been building a web. When I go to check on the fish and admire the snail I always look for the spider as well, and usually she is there, mid web, waiting, noiseless and patient. When the web tears and I think she is gone--the next morning brings a new web. Renewed, beautiful, perfect. Sometimes frogs visit. A family of little salamanders lives deeper in the recess above the basin. All's well with the world.

The lark may not be on the wing--the only larks I've seen here are closer to the river, in the wild vast meadows by the river, meadowlarks who rise up singing and fall again--but across the way there are woodpeckers, and ravens who come perch on the still blank sign that someday is supposed to say Books and lure all wanderers in. And little sparrows.

We walked in the meadows yesterday, my partner and my youngest, down in the lands put aside for a park, down by the river where the community farm grows greens and radishes and the fields are harvested for hay. It's an old ranch, many acres of flat land in an embrace of hillsides. The river is across the road. The river is much too low this year of drought. But the meadows stretch on, and the song sparrows and bluejays and birds I can't name and can barely see as they flit from shadow to sun--all those are there.

We went to the labyrinth. My partner expected something grand--I think he envisioned a formal shrubbery maze, not the simple pattern of laid stone and gravel circling to the core and out again. My son lit up and made signs in the air and great bowings and dancings. My son loves spaces that have--I don't know. Something simple, something holy in them. And I think this little labyrinth does. It winds, I reflected, as I walked it while my partner and son laughed at me, at the indirectness, the going and coming--something in the same way the little watersnail's shell does, upward to the center, downward to the edge.

As you walk it you can look up and see the sky, you can see the turns of the hills, you can see the curious deer as they bound away, and the birds. It's a heart pattern, somehow, by which I mean that the walking of it seems in tune with the beat of one's heart, which seems in tune with the wind in the trees, which seems in tune with...well, with the whole wheeling universe.

The time I was there before this was at the end of construction, when I was called on to come help with the gravel and the cleanup while the sun blazed in the sky, a few days before the dedication ceremony. I was unable to attend the grand opening, and I was actually glad of it in a way. I sent my good wishes and my blessings, the group did assorted neoCeltic ceremonies, power was called down--I was told it was wonderful; I was celebrating Father's Day with my dear and our assorted children, who came by with stories and treats in an unplanned row--my eldest son and his partner with wine (and where is our corkscrew?), my daughter and her partner with cake and trinkets, and my youngest--always here, at the last with his carefully chosen gifts: a handful of dinosaurs, a flashlight that makes noises, a shiny pocket knife. It was also the anniversary of our bookstore, opened with a handful of boards and a trailer's worth of books in a long ago burnt down building, 28 years in the past, but we simply marked that by staring at each other in wonder. Actually, my partner scoffs at 28 years. Too soon to celebrate, he says. Now, 38 years--that would be something. And I laugh. And I try to focus back to the present moment, where joy lives.

Flickering perhaps. Sometimes seeming gone. Ever returning, this core where all's right with the beautiful world, despite all I know, all I grieve, all I love. Or because of that.

The snail on the stones is a photo from Flicker by theearlofgrey who has many other photographs, some very very odd indeed: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7436734@N02/

Something for the summers yet to come

2009-05-15T21:09:00.001-07:00

In my memories of that time it is always summer, or spring about to break into summer. The light is soft, the air is scented with flowers. The river has turned tourmaline blue/green and sparkles as it runs over the rocks. There are otters when I walk out at sunset. There are deer when I wander in the morning.

And it was summer, for a time. I was pretty young, my friend's daughter was younger still, and the landscape of the hills and rivers and creeks was new to us. What else to do but hike through it, summer day after summer day, on our strong young legs, looking around at flowers we didn't know the names of and trees we were seeing for the first time.

In the evenings the herons and egrets would settle down behind the island, furling their great wings.

We would come back tired, and her mother would be playing scratchy old Beethoveen records on the record player. All the string quartets. And now and again some old radical folksongs. We'd talk of poetry as the moon came up.

There were sandstone crevices and hillsides of manzanita. There were walls of green ferns, dripping with falling water, even late in that summer. Thrown horseshoes, bleached bones.

She was younger, and always far stronger, and I struggled to keep up with her. After all, I was supposedly a responsible adult. It was in that guise that I led a climb up a seacliff covered with poison oak as the tide rushed in. It was in that guise that, as I wandered with her and some other young folk into a midnight torch lit scene, I talked fast. We'd gotten lost--and in fact that was the truth. We were just looking for a way back to the road.

The carcases gleamed red by firelight; poached deer being stripped of its meat. Only in retrospect did it seem scary though--the guns, the long knives, the rough men. They pointed the way, we trudged on, over the swinging bridge that fell down years ago, the one with 4 feet gaps between the rotting planks, a hundred feet above the shallow waters.

We made it home. We walked someplace else the next day.

Perhaps we were claiming the territory of our youth, I don't know. I was walking off a lot of grief, though it would be two summers later that her brother would die and the world would shift for all of us.

Yes, I remember it all very well, those days of summer. My young hiking companion settled down by the river after some years of wandering. Her son is a poet, now older than I was when his mother and I clambered hills and watched the herons settle.

On mother's day, after a champagne brunch--my eldest son does things well--I visited a couple graves. My daughter's boyfriend believed me for a moment when I said "but of course we're going to the graveyard now; it's an old family tradition!"

I planted rosemary on the grave of my friend who loved Beethoven. I planted a little on the grave of the poet lying beside her as well; he was a dear friend for so many years.
And some bright iris.

Something for the summers yet to come.

(photo is by eldest son of some of our beautiful coastline)

Loving the wild skies

2009-05-06T23:05:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking of the Vietnam vet--well, I think he was a vet--who for a year stayed in a seacave overlooking the Pacific ocean, down in southern California. I remember very little of his story. What I remember is the sunsets. He was taking photos of each sunset, he said, for year. And each was different.

I think he's on my mind because of the skies here, which are so changeable and so magical that every day when we are not soaked in rain or covered in fog I simply stop and stare. The sky takes my breath away here. Great swirls of clouds, great billows, and wisps.

Yesterday I asked my son Gabe to wait with me outside as the sun set. We have to see it, I said, I think it will be one of those flamingo days, or violet. He smiled and stood, and waited. It was a softer sunset than I'd predicted, but for a moment the new leafed maples across the river were backlit and glowing. So beautiful.

We have to look at beautiful things, I tell my son, so that we can keep them with us, so that we keep strong. Because Gabe so seldom speaks now I carry on a strange conversation with him, and I notice I keep telling him these sorts of things. Why it is good to smile at people. Why we need to take time to look at the birds. Why we feed our goldfish carefully.

Gabriel listens, and sometimes he laughs at me.

"Look at the sky!" I say to my daughter, as we walk from the coffee shop to the bookstore. "Oh, just look, look at those clouds". She glances up "well, they're all right, I guess". It's my turn to laugh. "You don't know, Laurel, you were born here. These skies are one of the things I love most about living here. Some places the sky is flat, all one color, all the time." She gives me the "sure, mom" look.

Robin understands the skies. I met her years ago, and no longer recall what we first talked of. With Robin it could have been anything, depending on her state of mind at the time--or mine. There are days when the world is full of danger and conspiracy and signs, and she talks of them. Those are harder conversations for me; usually I simply listen, struggling to find the thread.
But there are the days we talk of beauty, or when she comes and says "the fawn lilies are up already!" or lets me know the state of the river.

And she talks to Champ, my rescued pitbull, a great deal. I think Champ talks back. I know Champ loves her.

Robin sleeps where she can, outdoors, under bridges, by the river. She's had a few carefully hidden homes. She's lost a few, as the police find her and threaten her with arrest. During the snows of the winter I looked for her and begged her to come in to shelter. She told me she couldn't; she'd lose her edge and not be able to survive. She accepted an extra sleeping bag and blanket.

Sometimes, rarely, she asks to borrow a book. The latest was on John F. Kennedy. "I love to learn things" says Robin. And she brings me food--a chocolate bar; a snack for Champ.

I think I love her because ours is a mutual and respectful friendship, and I am easy in it. One of the days when she was being threatened by police I went out to stand beside her. The officer--I'm old enough now that I knew this officer's kind, gardener mother--said "Why are you here? This isn't your concern". I told him of course it was my concern, and he asked why. The words leaping straight to my tongue were simple, and stopped him.

I said "Robin is my good friend. I'm staying with her now".

And I put my arm around her shoulders, more to anchor myself than to reassure her. The officer left.

There was the year of the foxes, when Robin came and asked me for bandages for her bitten hands. And we had days, weeks--nearly three--of conversations on the theme of "you must go to the clinic, you must be treated". It was early in our friendship. I recall pouring peroxide over her wounds and saying "you can't die, please don't do that, go to our clinic".

Our beautiful foxes so often carry rabies. She did, at the last possible moment, seek treatment. And maybe she was right, she might have been fine without it. She told me how delicate the foxes were, prowling round her campsite, the mother and the two kits. Robin watches many animals through the seasons; she knows them, she knows the river.

And she knows the sky. When she runs into me on the streets she grins as she catches me staring up at the clouds; "It'll be a great sunset tonight!" she calls. Robin has no camera, but over the years her heart has recorded thousands of skies and sunsets and dawns. She has walked the mountains. She has migrated with the wild geese some years, and some years stayed. She's been robbed, and hurt. She's been cold and she's been hungry and I've come on her drunk and sobbing and raging at the skies we both love so. She survives.

We run into friends, teachers, sisters, brothers in strange ways in our life. I've been very fortunate throughout my life in having them walk right up to me, or turn up in the oddest of places, like Robin on the streets of a small town, admiring the sunsets with me.

(the rainbow photo was taken by my daughter once upon a time. She loves rainbows the way I love clouds).

April, that complicated month

2009-04-21T11:23:00.001-07:00

I wonder what it is about April that breaks my heart? It is certainly the month of poets; heavens, it is even National Poetry Month. It is the month of songs and poems, the cruellest month, the brightest month.

It's the month of the births of two of my children, the month in which my father was born, the month in which each day has the name of a friend on it, and most of those friends dead now.

It's the month in which I actually was in Paris, decades ago, dazzled by the pure light, amazed that even little children spoke French with flawless accents, enchanted by the hotel concierge's huge marmalade cat.

And yes, there were chestnuts in blossom, great candelabras of chestnut flowers. And little captured foxes in wire cages by the Seine, and doubtful gentlemen trying to pick up a much too innocent little blonde.

They thought I was Swedish. For some unknown reason--my professors in college also remarked on this--when I speak French I speak it as my Swedish speaking ancestors would have. Wasn't a bad thing, back in the day, though it dashed the expectations of my gentlemen.

My lovely daughter is now a few years older than I was. Though in some alternate universe that thin young blonde poet is still staring at the Seine, mulling over a line or two, waiting for her April born, dashing young love.

He would have been busy poring over dusty files in a library while I was off weeping over the little foxes.

April is the month of my last time at the edge of suicide as well. I was thinking of this the other day--not suicide, but that phantom anniversary, that little fork in a winding road I didn't know I was on. As I get older I am astonished at how quickly the time flows by. It was surely yesterday I wept and lay down in the long soft April grass and plotted my death so carefully, with such pure exhaustion.

And..I think 16 years have passed now, since I faced such a dark door, and then came through into the purest light. Think of that. 16 years. Entire trees have grown up that I planted by seed then. I have planted such gardens, and watched over dogs, and cats, and my growing children. My dear Gabe, though still fragile, has had a pretty good time these years. I have seen my quirky little girl flower into a spectacular womanhood, and my eldest son become a wonderful force in our community.

What on earth was I thinking? I can only tell you that the logic of suicide is strange and seductive. I wept the other day when I heard the news that Nicolas Hughes, the son Sylvia Plath wrote such moving poems about, had stepped out of this life. But I know the territory.

It was April. The friend I called to, out of my despair, was most fortunately for me a doctor and someone I trusted. And indeed loved. We walked through the river valley where the new flowers were blooming and the April rains were falling. We talked. For me I think it was my one last bid for life, and I didn't really think it would work, but I felt I owed it to my friend and to anyone else who might care to reach out once more.

But my soul was exhausted, my body was aching, I had gone through a winter in which my youngest was near death over and over and over again. When I lay on the long grass I was longing for my heart's mother to just swoop in and take me away. Let me rest. For God's sake, let me rest.

I intended, of course to take my youngest along. I was a good mother.

Of course I tremble when I think how close we were, my boy and I. And life had a lot more to give us and ask us, both of us.

My friend the doctor gave me a remedy. I had no belief it could work, but I took it.

And the sun came out in my heart.

It was April, the season of rains and flowers, and birthday celebrations. I sort of count one of my own birthdays from April onwards, not from my actual date of birth. Sort of "welcome back to life". It's a private celebration--but I'm glad to mark it.
(photo was taken in a long ago April. I'm showing my daughter how elegant it might be to wear four o'clock blossoms on one's nose)

Why I add cocoa to spaghetti sauce

2009-04-12T16:24:00.000-07:00

"Hey, girl, whatcha doing there?"

The ponderous, loud voiced woman across the street seemed used to commanding a great deal of respect. I stood up, dusted the dirt from my jeans, and called out "planting bulbs".

"Hey, that's not your place, what do you mean?"

So I crossed over, and explained that I was renting the little white cottage with the rose garden and the leaning plum tree, and that I'd be moving in as soon as the deceased owners belongings were taken south by her sister. But I needed to get the crocus bulbs in now, in October.

That was how I met Lucille, who was my neighbor in the few years I lived in the white cottage, cherishing the roses, planting more flowers, happy to have found so lovely a little shelter. Lucille was a survivor of the San Francisco earthquake. She fancied black lace dresses and flowers with some color in them. She had no patience for cats or boys, and in the time we were neighbors I was always interceding on behalf of both--the little boys who would come to play at my house and bake cookies with me, and the cats, my own and those of my other neighbor, who persisted in entering Lucille's little garden.

She had a dog, a little mutt. "Smart as a whip, too" said Lucille, who was mostly called Chub by her friends. I never dared.

Lucille had been a nurse at the local hospital, and so had been her friend Leona, who lived on the other side, in another tiny cottage. Leona was thin as Lucille was fat, and wore jeans, even though she was, I thought, quite old. Leona was friendly, but Lucille would have me over for tea and chats from time to time.

Strong black tea in a rose patterned cup. Two Oreo cookies. A lot of stories. She told me she'd known Leona since they were girls together in the Gold Country. They'd married at about the same time.

"Weak men" said Lucille, staring off into space. "Chicken farmers".

I sipped my tea.

"We did all the work, all of it, mind you. We was getting sick doing so much work, and the mens were just drinking it up, drinking it all up"

So what happened, I asked. "They died" said Lucille, and sipped her tea. "and then we went to nursing school, and then we came here"

Okay, then. I wish now I had asked more questions, but my own life was engulfing me. And pretty soon Lucille asked "so, when?" staring at my waist. I told her. "Well, it's a crying shame" she said, "but I think you are a good girl anyway".

When my first son was born--and I was obviously single, living by myself in my white cottage--Lucille gave me a lacy, hand knit, yellow blanket for him. It had belonged to her baby, who hadn't lived very long. "Seems strong enough" said she, staring at my infant. "Would have been better to have a girl, but you can't help it, I guess".

And she gave me handgathered blue columbine seeds, and the secret ingredient for her spaghetti sauce, handed down from her grandmother. Lucille always made me smile.

Years after I had moved to another place, beside the river, with my little boy, I'd check on Lucille and Leona. Leona had a stroke, wasn't expected to pull through. Lucille nursed her, day after day...and she lived. The whole town marveled.

It's funny, the people who pass through our lives. I hadn't thought much about Leona and Lucille for years, until the other day I was wandering the cemetery, where now the wild flowers and planted flowers are in full glory, great heads of lilacs, scatters of buttercups, and I came across a small marker I hadn't noticed before. I brushed aside the leaves and read it--yes there, together as they'd been for so many years, well into their 80's, rested my friends, in a single grave. Lucille had lived just a year longer than her dear, and they've rested there about a quarter of a century now.

But I can still hear that rough voice. And I still smile at that loving heart.

He's 20 now

2009-04-11T20:12:00.000-07:00

Gabriel turned 20 yesterday.

It's hard to believe that two decades have passed since that April day, so sundrenched, so lovely, in which not even an entire day's labor brought this child, this being, into my life. He was born at home, in our very ramshackle cabin, barely an hour and a half after my midwife and her helper rushed in.

After the tumultuous events of his older sister's birth in the same cabin--the stuck shoulders, the intricate cord wrap, the near death of mother and child--Gabriel's birth was so easy. He slid into a welcoming world, embraced by my midwife's assistant, who sang a welcoming song to him.

I was busy comforting his big sister, who was just barely 4, another April's child. She'd been wakened from her sleep by the noise of the birth and cried with her newborn brother.

But mostly there were smiles.

Gabe was the easiest of my children; nursing him I would find myself drifting into a world of peace and sweetness that was unlike anything I'd experienced. When my brother came that summer to help build a needed extra room he said "he's your favorite, isn't he?" I denied that (and still would) because finally my mother's "All you children are my favorites" made sense to me. But it was undeniable that Gabriel calmed my soul.

It wasn't until he was 6 or 7 months old that the likelihood Gabe was more unusual than I'd thought, that there was something...very different...struck my dazzled mind. And when I realized, sure, I mourned. I cried all night for my Down Syndrome child, I rocked with fear.

And I won't say it has all been easy. There were the years of pneumonia and the lack of sleep. There were the infinite challenges no one had prepared me for.

There were the moments of pure joy.

So he's 20. And we went to the ocean the day before his birthday, taking the dog, smelling the salt air. I caught a few smiles. We had some pizza. A nice woman complimented his favorite shirt, which has Winnie the Pooh on it.

The winter was hard. The spring has been sweeter, kinder. We see more smiles. Gabe doesn't talk these days, though he sang happy birthday to his sister last week, full on, on key, happily. We work with books and words, we draw, we play games, we walk. He gazes at his father in particular with a funny expression--as if he knows something beyond what we know. And perhaps he does.

The night of his birthday I tucked him in bed with his new Ken doll and his bunnies. He smiled and went to sleep with ease.

The simple moments, the good moments, feed my heart

(my lovely daughter has been scanning her baby journals into her myspace; the photo I just popped into the top of this was taken the day after Gabe's birth; fey sister has been gathering forget me nots in the woods; Gabe is sleeping in my arms)

that sentimental journey

2009-02-15T18:26:00.000-08:00

Valentine's day I walked the dog early, through the rain and small bursts of snow. Tiny pale yellow crocuses are in bloom near one corner of the graveyard; narcissi are starting, the white, fragile, early ones. My friend Stan brought me a huge bunch of those last week, piled into an old garden boot and left on the bookstore steps. Stan and I have talked gardens for nearly 40 years now; his wife and I talk babies, since she's one of the area"s midwives. And besides, gardens and babies are amongst the best of subjects.

Stan also brought me two pots of growing narcissus, because the last time we spoke we realized we had--now maybe 25 years ago--independently rescued plants from the old gardens where now the biggest and fanciest motel on main street sits. I dug mine with a pen, the one tool I always have to hand, and brought quince and old roses and bits and pieces of lilacs off to my woodland gardens, where most have thrived. Stan managed to rescue some of the old bulbs, and the ones he brought me were from that batch, multiplied over the years. Since the bookshop is just down the street from the vanished gardens, we thought it would be good to return some of the bulbs to near their home.

But I think I'll wait till the snow storms are over.

Valentine's morn, after fetching some dark French coffee from uptown, and scones studded with blueberries, warm from the oven--the baker threw in an extra one, in honor of the day--I put the Saturday morning Metropolitan opera broadcast on, and my partner of all these years joined me over coffee and scones, listening to the soaring and tragic music.

Eugene Onegin was the opera. Now, back in the day, back when I was sending passionate postcards to my love, back when we were so much younger, and confused, and enchanted, I gave him a set of cassette tapes of this opera. The story, should you not know it, is of lost love and bad timing. Looking back, it was sort of a cautionary choice for me, though I'm not sure he got the message: young Tatiana, drenched in poetry and yearning falls in love with Eugene and writes an honest and impassioned heartwrenching letter to him, which he...kindly receives and rejects.

And then (it is an opera, after all, and it was based on a story by Pushkin, and no one is as tortured as the Russians)...ah, they meet, so many years later. There's a duel, there's loss, there's sorrow. Tatiana has married, and stays with her husband.

The music is wonderful. And how nice for Valentine's Day, this love story. Okay, tragic, but..aside from Eugene's best bud, no one dies.

My partner grew very depressed. And I too--ah, I was thinking of some of my lost loves and renouncements, of the vibrancy of youth, of the sorrows. And he read me some of the Pushkin--do we like the Nabokov translation better, or the one in couplets? Predicably we disagreed--I hated the couplets.

Our youngest son, still on a strange schedule, was sleeping. It's been a rough month. Well, in some ways it has been a rough lifetime, a rough love.

We'd found out this week that an old friend had died--another of my gardening friends, whom I treasure--it is good to talk the time of apple blossom with someone to whom it makes sense. I'd found out that the recent terrible death of a young father in the town up north directly involved the husband of a woman I cherish, who has three children. "How are the new medications working?" asked the family doctor of her the other night. "not well", she said, "my husband is in jail for murder". And the little boys are being teased at school. I'm here, I told her, and I told her of my brother, his crime, his time in jail, how it turned out.

And the rain kept falling, and my partner, thinking of some love or another, grew more melancholic yet, and snappish.

Little things get to us sometimes. The car that's not running, the son who is so fragile still, the world that just never quite is as it seems it should be.

The closed shelter. On Valentine's day, in the snow, I gave away a bunch of blankets, coats, warm socks. I listened to some new stories, after the opera, after my fretting partner went to read something about the life of Pushkin.

Love isn't really a pretty sonnet, or an eloquent phrase. My partner's hair has thinned, my waist has thickened, over these decades of work and laughter, of angers and sorrows, of loneliness.
We walked with our son in the rain and sleet, in a row, like ducks. If ducks held umbrellas. The nightstreets were very still, save for the rushing waters. At the market we chose peppers and bread, a treat for Gabe, some food for the cats and dog, all to the tunes of piped in music about love. Oh, baby.

On the way back I was thinking of how all the times of pain in my life, all the times I thought "why me? why this? what have I done?" seem to have at some point come in handy. No one can speak to someone in the depths of despair without knowing the territory; when I talked with the mom whose husband is in jail--well, as she said, no one else seemed to know what it's like. So I'm glad.

And my partner's melancholy was somewhat lifting; we went on to talk of the Greeks, of theories of anarchism, of virtue. I stirred up the fire in our small woodstove.

"Wait, it was Valentine's Day today and I forgot it" said he. I laughed--it's fine, I said, we had coffee and the opera and a romantic walk in the rain. What could be better?

dark of the moon

2009-01-22T18:46:00.000-08:00

The fogs have come and gone each late night, each early morning. They rise up from the river, or billow down over the hillsides. The trees drip, as though it were actually raining, and sounds echo, and all seems gentled. I walk, late at night, early in the morning, all hours, with my son, trying to calm his heart, trying to still his fears.

We look at the street trees, still wearing their blue-white holiday lights. We listen for sleepy birds waking in the remaining redwoods.

He carefully steps over each crack or flaw in the sidewalks.

Since Christmas, with brief respites now and then during which he announces "I'm back" and returns to his normal sunny and interested self, he has been living in a world of pain and darkness and strange things that come and go and can't be expressed. Or shouldn't be expressed. He stares at empty corners. He speaks in whispers. He weeps and says that there are buildings falling and children hurting and that the world is so sad.

There seems little to say to that. You're right? or "Hey, look, the kitty is sleeping on his back, doesn't he look funny?"

The smiles of my son are fleeting.

So, when your son with Down Syndrome has gone through a number of times of clutching his heart and saying he is scared and that his heart is sick, broken, hurting...well, you take this seriously indeed and you haul him off to a doctor.

Our doctor happens to be a very pretty young woman with a wise soul, and this suits Gabe tremendously. And a few days ago we sat together in a little treatment room and chatted about...stuff. Anxiety. Hearts. Life. Tears filled the eyes of that young woman, as I told her about Gabe's worries. She said to him "it is sometimes a hard world, and these are sad times, and if you are a sensitive person--and you are--it does stay on your heart". Gabe nodded.

His heart is fine, and that was indeed a relief. So we talked about the other things--the wild sleep cycles, the strange things in corners, the anguish. That he believes his father is a bear. Now, I think that is very accurate, though the corollary that Gabe and I are, instead, wild wolves, takes some getting used to.

That unseen people talk with him--well, this too doesn't give me pause, because I've had my share of odd experiences.

Anxiety? Depression? Spiritual crisis? Breakthrough?

You know, I don't care about the labels. What I care about now, with my son having been awake for 36 straight hours weeping about the world and seeing things in corners, is that I seem so unable to comfort him.

At about 3 in the morning, as he looked at me, eyes wild, as though I were indeed a wolf come to eat him, and I backed away gently, saying as I would to a wild and hurt animal--"it's okay, I'm sitting here, it's okay, you are my dear son, you are human, I am human, let's turn on the lights" (and I did)...and he sighed as the lights illumined the scary corners...well, I tell you, my heart has been breaking.

And that's when he said "I love you, mom, and I love my papa, and I love my sister, and I love my brother, but it's too painful to think".

And you must understand that my beautiful Gabriel has never in his life said he loves anyone. Well, maybe his childhood dog, or a cat. But those are not Gabe words. And you must understand that Gabe, on a good day,speaks in signals and brief utterances: "water" "shopping" "Papa funny". Not in an inflected statement of love and pain.

So I took out his baby book, and we started again at the beginning. Once, Gabriel, you were growing within my body, and we were very happy you were coming to be born, and there were blackbirds singing in all the trees. Once, Gabriel--look, here's the photo--your brother was just a kid, and your sister--look, she was kind of funny looking, wasn't she? now she is so pretty. And here, look, it is your papa, and he is holding you--see how he loves you? We all love you, my dear, we did from the start. Oh, look, here you are with Pepper, she's licking your face--isn't that silly?

And on and on. And he fell asleep, finally, curled against me, safe for a moment.

His pretty doctor phoned today; the blood tests are in, and yeah, there might be something about his thyroid going on; let's try some medicine. And we will. And maybe the night will lift.

And maybe I will see that smile a bit more often, and let those wolves retreat. And yes, maybe..maybe sometime I'll sleep as well, letting the fog settle around me.

Dr. Quill has almost reached the creche

2009-01-04T14:26:00.000-08:00

Dr. Quill, with the Stag King, three pigs, the Tinman, and assorted other treasures and relics of my childrens' early years, is enroute to the stable. Well, really, he is enroute to a corner of my large amazing bookshelf, the one built by a young handsome carpenter who is fond of French literature, who helped during the summer bookstore move. There on the corner shelf, not far from the little carved statue of Gandhi, is where Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus were set up for the 12 days of Christmas this year.
Starting on day one, the 25th of December, the wise people (and animals) journey to visit. They arrive on Ephiphany, the 6th of January.

And this year we had Dr. Quill lead the group.

Dr. Quill is orange. Well, really he is coral and pinkish, a 70's plastic color. He is a monster with hands outstretched and fingers waving. He is covered with bumpy prickles. I bought him for my eldest son when son was 3 or 4 and I was having a fun and somewhat guilt ridden weekend with my current partner, leaving the child under his father's care. When my son and I moved out to the forests to live with partner, despite all my vows to the contrary--"I will never set up house with an adult male" I told myself, content with my single motherhood--when we set up house together, all the toys came.

And actually, before that, the toys covered the floor of my tiny rental by the river. Paul and my son would enact long Russian novel sorts of scenarios with Candyland figures and plastic dolls.

Dr. Quill was the acupuncturist of the group. He made everyone else well, being just covered in energetic prickles.

Since my eldest is now 31 he probably could care less about his childhood toy; he is good at letting go of things. I rescued Dr. Quill from the trash some years ago. My daughter recalls how she'd push madrone berries down the good doc's gullet, pretending they were poison. Complicated youngster, that girl--she made homes for the little sowbugs, yet she tried to poison the poor doc.

When I rescued him I did have to remove some rotting berries from his stomach.

So now he sits, benignly about to visit a holy family, and we have come through another season. We've had some comfort and some joy. And some loss, and the world doesn't seem to have paused much in its madness and its beauty.

Christmas Day my youngest grew suddenly very sorrowful and withdrawn. We'd been celebrating at his sister's house, with his brother and his adored brother-outlaw. The potica (I must remember to print the recipe here someday) was duly baked in my daughter's oven, since the bear destroyed the stove at our cabin and at the bookshop we have just a hotplate. Games were played, presents admired. The big yellow cat my daughter and I brought back from the edge of death last summer was also admired and petted. Outside the storms raged, snow fell.

And suddenly Gabe was sad, and needed to come back to our own private realm, through sleet and snow.

The world, he said, was sad. People were sick, people were dying, the world was hurting. His urgency and the tears in his eyes--these were hard to deal with. He tugged at his father's sleeves, he pulled at me, he said, staring into our eyes with desperation "make it better, make the world better, help the people".

And then he tried some deep breathing, and then he told us "breathe bad in, out breathe happy".
And then he seemed to feel a little better.

It was an odd few days after that, during which he refused to look at television, in which he once looked at me, and patted me, and said "tears come, always, breathe". We did what we could. He said his heart hurt, but was careful to tell us, no, it wasn't that it hurt physically--he searched through a box of cards to find the word "good", to tell us "heart good".

And on the 5th day he smiled and said "I'm back now".

The world is a mysterious place. Lord knows I weep, thinking of the terrible things going on. I wish I could help and heal and save and comfort. I wish I were as capable as my youngest son believes me to be. We do what we can. Gabe has enjoyed going with his father to bring books and food to prisoners, to the emergency shelter. We feed the little birds. We laugh.

It's a complicated thing, this life.

Oh, my dears, wherever you are--comfort and joy to you. Maybe the loving crazy energy of Dr. Quill--of our childish imaginings and hopes and dreams--could really heal us all.

Who knows?

I was born singing

2008-12-01T22:14:00.000-08:00

I was born singing. Well, that's probably not true. I was born wrapped in a caul and likely squalling my lungs out, hung upside down, smacked by the doctor, wrapped and tossed and put into a glass crib in a row of glass cribs where my grandfather came to see me and said he'd have known me anywhere.

That was before he took off for a long wandering trip with his dead wife's best friend, over the countryside, into Canada, searching for...something.

But in my singing babyhood I knew nothing of that.

It's not, mind you, that I have a splendid voice, or that I grew up and became an opera singer, or that music is the blood of my heart and the breath of my lungs. Nothing like that. But as I walked past the bars tonight, having walked up town to buy a quart of milk and some roses, necessities of life, I found myself singing an old folk song and remembering how much I loved to sing as a child, and how now and then, alone, walking somewhere, I find myself singing.

It just feels good. It probably sounds god-awful, although since I sing quietly it may look as if I've just lost my mind and am striding through the world mumbling madly.

I recall in college when a dear friend expressed grave concern, having seen me apparently talking to myself with much passion as I walked from class to class. Don't worry, said I, I was probably singing.

She looked concerned still.

As a child in Japan I wandered the woods searching for spring violets, climbing trees, and when alone, singing. I sang all manner of made up songs in those days, full of drama and love and longing. I was 6 years old, 7. Plaintive songs of love modeled on the songs I'd heard when I was much younger and we were in the states and had a radio, such luxury. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.
Listen to the Mockingbird. Love Letters in the Sand. Rambling songs with horses in them.

I suspect those songs, that constant stream of songmaking, was what later turned into my poetry. It always has seemed to flow from that same part of my mind or the universe or wherever such things bubble up like spring water.

So, as I say, I was singing about milkwhite doves tonight, and betrayed lasses who should never have listened to the guy at the tavern, and oak trees and such. And I remembered all the parties of my youth, where there was always a person with a guitar and we'd gather around, waiting for the long tuning of the strings, waiting till the first verses poured forth. And we sang. All of us. Seated around some parental living room on a shag carpet, singing old labor songs and old folk songs and some of the new songs of the then just in the wind new folksingers, who were telling us of changing times, and we were ready for that.

And we sang.

It's been a long while. Even then my more musical friends told me I couldn't keep on tune--and it is true, I want to wander and swoop and play when I am singing, walking through the fallen oak leaves, walking the pitbull, thinking on life and loss and possibility.

Once, when I was around, oh, 19, I had a bit of a revelation. I was watching the wind stir some branches against a stucco wall. Up, across, over. There was a rhythm to it, and for a heart splitting moment I thought--but, it's all singing. It's all that rhythm, we are all in this huge and wonderful and terrible song cycle. And it won't end. And it is beautiful.

And it is beautiful.
So, I was born...sort of singing. Maybe. And I hope that when I die, I will at least be humming. Off tune, probably, but with a sure joy in my heart.

This number is always connected

2008-10-19T20:32:00.001-07:00

I love the light slanting through the grape leaves and the last sweet small purple grapes dangling above the steps to the bookstore door. Looking across the road to the unnamed hill at the end of town, the hill I hiked decades ago when I first came here, where there were limestone walled creeks hung with ferns and deep forest glades and old dusty logging roads, where one night the teens I hiked with and I ran into illegal poachers gutting deer by firelight, where one whole meadow was full of shooting stars in a difficult spring, and where in fact my eldest child was conceived--looking at that hill I feel a sense of having come home.

Or--well, I'm not sure it is home. But it is a sense of joy and refuge.

When we moved the bookstore my partner wanted to switch phone companies and numbers. It made sense financially for certain, but I told him no. My phone number is in the hands of too many wanderers these days, and I never want some kid dialing a number from a jail cell or a broken down corner in the middle of nowhere and hearing "this number has been disconnected".

Two nights ago one of those calls came. From jail, from a prison I don't usually get calls from, one out in the high desert lands. As usual the modulated voice droned "This is a collect call from X at ABC prison, to accept the charges..." I pushed the right number, and the voice of one of my wanderers came on. As ever he thanked me for taking the call, and as ever I said "I will never refuse a call from you".

He's about the age of my oldest son, around 30. This is his...gosh, I've lost count...perhaps his 5th time in prison. He's been in and out on petty charges since he was a kid. His younger brother was a close friend of my son's, till they had a falling out over a girl. He's in jail too. I met the younger brother when he was 14, in a storm. He was living beneath a bridge with his heroin addicted and very sick Vietnam veteran dad. His dad had pneumonia. He came for help.

And there are two sisters; the eldest doesn't touch base with anyone, or with herself much; the youngest is a survivor. When she was 4 and 5 I used to make sure she had food, as she wandered with her addicted and desperate mother.

The mother in question was not the mother of my caller, however, nor of his brother. But close enough; their mom drowned in the beautiful river at the base of the hill I used to wander. The boys were..I don't know, maybe 6 and 7.

The stories I could tell you would break your heart; shatterings that started when that father was left for dead in Vietnam, years and years ago. Shatterings that seem to continue in the boys, who are always about to get rich, who are beautiful to look at, and very charming.

So my caller said "Dad died, I just got the letter, and my sister says she's gonna call me here, and she can't do that". His young voice was choked and desperate. "I have to be tough here" he said "I can't break, I can't break down, I wouldn't survive". He said he had 25 days to his release and he didn't want to blow it. He said "Call my sister, please. Tell her I love her, but not to call". And we talked, a conversation about his father, his sister, his life, punctuated by the "This Call Is From an Inmate at a California Prison. It is Being Monitored".

"At least Dad died clean" said my friend. And indoors, was the subtext, because that was an issue. He was a charming man as well, and like his boys always about to get rich. And when he did, he'd say, when his luck turned, when his ship came in, he was going to buy me a huge building for a bookstore so I'd never worry about rent. And all the roses my heart could desire. And all the treats for my animals. "I'll set you up good" he'd say, and I'd smile and thank him.

"It's only us" said the voice in the phone, in the darkened bookstore, as I sat beside Champ and listened. "It's just my brother and my little sister, and she did everything. Tell her how proud I am of her, she did everything. It's her birthday you know, the 25th. She'll be 21 then. Tell her I'm sending her a card."

I will, I said, of course I will.

"You are the only one who will take my calls" he said. I said, "it's because I love you, and your family. Somehow you are part of mine. I'll be here as much as I can for you". And I told him we'd moved, but we hadn't changed the phone number. Remember the old donut place, I asked?

It took him back. Back to the days when his mom was alive, and everything was possible.

So I phoned my redhaired surrogate daughter, and there was laughter in the background, which made me feel good. And I passed on her brothers wishes and his love. And she said she was fine, and she said she couldn't wait till her brothers were free again, and they could be together.

And yes, she always carries my number with her.

I hung up. And I cried, and I inwardly hoped once more that these kids will get some breaks, that they will be smart, that they will make good choices, that the boys will please stay out of jail this time, that their beautiful young sister will be okay.

And if they are, or if they are not, I'll be standing here for them, ready for their calls. And maybe their parents are standing by for them too. I don't know, life is pretty strange.

But the grapevines--oh, they are beautiful these days.

Broken Glass

2008-09-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

For some reason these days of early autumn I have been thinking of glass. Bits of glass. Broken glass.

All my life I've had a fascination with glass; there is something about the way light comes through it, something about the colors, something about the odd feeling that glass has, being solid and liquid and air and fire all together, all in one.

The second scar I acquired in my life came from a bit of glass, shining in the sunlight, so beautiful, so translucent, so enticing. And at the bottom of the broken bottle, some sweet liquid. Of course I had to drink it. The scar sits as a little half moon, hiding in the line of my smile. I still remember the sweetness, and the amazement at the sudden cut. I could not have been more than...oh, maybe nearing 3 years old.

The first scar, since I can't leave you all wondering, is at my left eyebrow. That one I do not remember, though my mother told me how I nearly lost the eye. You know how you aren't supposed to run with sticks, let alone scissors? In my case, according to family report, it was a wooden handled flyswatter. I hope I wasn't dashing about as a murderous two year old, intent on destroying the poor insects, but I don't know. I fell, the handle snapped, the wood went into my face above my eye. My godfather--conveniently enough, he was a doctor--was visiting. Every so often through my childhood my mother would bring out the story, in which she lamented my brush with certain blindness and the intervention of the doctor, and my early rashness of spirit.

But glass. When I was 11, reading the book of Revelations, mourning my transplanting to a desert air force base where I had few friends, my school class had a mosaic project. Other, far more sensible students made their mosaic portraits of their dogs or stylized owls or whatnot with easily obtained dry beans and popcorn glued to a thick sheet of cardboard.

Beans and popcorn never crossed my mind. I wanted glass. I wanted the colors to shine, and the edges to be jagged and the world to come together from fragments to something beautiful.

It's still something I want.

So at 11 years I wandered the vacant desert lots of the air base where sonic booms shook the air, and I picked up pieces of glass. Blue, olive green, amber brown, dark green, CocaCola blue gray, milk white.
And I glued them to a board, painted white. I would have loved to glue them to a sheet of glass, but I didn't have one; my mother, perplexed, provided the board.

The pattern was of a wandering vine, and flowers. I cut my hands a lot working on it. I loved the way the tiny bits of blue worked against the green.

It must have been thrown away the next time we moved. I still recall, however, the thrill of the glint of tossed away, broken glass, gathered to make flowers and vines.

Ten years later I'd take some classes in stained glass, and true to form, working on a shag carpet in my grandmother's home, I'd end up bleeding. I'm not sure which numbered scar that is, but it marks the top of my left foot and took several stitches to close.

But I loved the light through that many colored glass. It was well worth the blood.

And why was broken glass on my mind these days? I don't know. Maybe it's that I've been carefully placing my cobalt bottles on my shelves, and the one small yellow medicine bottle brought to me by one of my street friends, dug up somewhere in the desert, carried in a pack through a winter and a summer in thanks for a small kindness I'd forgotten.

And maybe it's that I keep thinking that someone needs to love the broken bits purely, and see the patterns of vines and flowers and stars and moons that are there, just scattered a bit.

At the new windows

2008-09-14T14:49:00.000-07:00

In July, if asked, I would have assured you I deal very well with chaos. I am accustomed to doing several things at the same time; I am usually fairly graceful about it. Or so I would have told you.

In early August, if asked, I would have cheerfully told you, "No problem; yes, it is complicated, but all is well."

That would have been true, but it would have ignored the month or so to come, and the late night times of "I do not want to lift another box of books in my life" and the dust in my hair, and the fights with my partner, and the poor confused critters.

But now--well, the view from my desk is of the beautiful hillsides I fell in love with more than 30 years ago; the hills I wandered with a friend, that slope to the winding river. The view is of some redwood trees across the street, of a little park graced with plum trees, and of my vast porch and windowbox and the very old grapevine clambering up the building on the north, and the sheltering plums, locusts, oaks and bay on the south. Old rock walls support the porch; the grapevine makes a graceful arc over the steps down to the path north. The steps south lead up to town.

When the sun sets I watch it over the distant green and gold hills, and my heart is at peace.

True, I still go to a shelf all confident in search of a book and stop.."oh, gee, that one isn't in alphabetical order yet..." But that is easily remedied.

We are on the main street of a pretty little town, and people can wander down to chat with us and buy books and pay proper attention to Champ and his feline companions.

The main street is also pretty much the highway for hitch hikers; I can be found by my wandering friends when they need me.

I hadn't figured on moving, though. The universe is full of surprises, and some of them come as shocks.

This move...well, it all started in late July, when there was some controversy over the installation of a portable toilet in the lot of the post office near our bookstore. It's a long and tangled tale, and involves allegations of destruction and such by folks without homes, causing the closure of the PO during evenings and weekends.
This was quite the problem for people who live in the hills and come in once a week--no one could pick up their mail. It was about a year long problem, and some folks got together to work out solutions with the PO. Seems there was a meeting, and the portapotty was one of the factors.

Not a bad idea. I mean, we all do have bodies and such, and many the tourist came to my shop wondering where on earth they might...um, go. We were informed of the portapotty by a rep from the Chamber of Commerce and by a candidate for the board of supes. Okay, fine by us.

Except we were told it was being placed next to our front door, near the roses I'd planted and tended.

Big reality time. My partner was enraged at what he saw as a deliberate slap in the face. I talked him down, because when I thought about it I figured...hey, we ask people to be compassionate. We ask people to go beyond their personal comfort all the time. How can we block this.

He grumbled, and said I was right.

So the glorious toilet day was coming, and the postmaster came to tell us it was being placed "tomorrow". And I was figuring, okay, I'll build screens and plant vines and all will be well...but then I wondered if anyone had bothered to talk with my landlady.

Well, no.

So I suggested the postmaster phone her.

And thus I became...well, lord knows what she was told, but she'd wanted for a long time to renovate the building, so...we, who invented homeless people (I gather) and had held the meeting to bring her property values to the ground (though we hadn't been there) didn't have to move that day, but tomorrow would be nice.

Sure, I know that's not legal. But here's the deal: I hung up the phone, told partner and daughter, and daughter phoned her boyfriend who said "hey, so and so is moving her office next to where I work...get on it".

And we did. Within 10 minutes we knew where we were moving a zillion books and...oh, you don't want to know about the piles of leaflets and the odds and ends.

It seemed to go on forever. A week stretched into another week. My partner started likening it to a hostage situation "day 22, and counting..."

But the help that came was so amazing. Not a day passed without someone unexpectedly showing up with a truck, or a strong back, or a vat of coffee. Old friends, sure, but people I only knew vaguely as customers--the guy who loves French literature turned out to be a great carpenter and built me a wall of shelves; the guy who reads sci fi spent a whole weekend carrying heavy boxes. My street friends, who could get some good money for the sort of heavy work they were doing for me, refused payment. "You've been our friend for so long, let us give you something back".

Although it was exhausting, although I seemed to live on ibuprofen and strong coffee for a few weeks there, it was also touching and astonishing.

We are settling in with joy and gratitude. The town cemetery is not too far north of us, down a lane lined with redwoods. When I first arrived in the area I used to walk there and sit and collect my thoughts, wondering what I should be doing with my life. These mornings Champ and I walk through, startling the bluejays, admiring the autumn roses, plotting guerrilla planting of daffodils, and noting the many friends whose markers rest delicately beneath the old cypress trees.

It's a good place. It feels right. And the whole move, though so tiring and so long, felt all along guided and protected. As I say, sometimes good changes come with a curious shock.

different windows

2008-08-03T09:18:00.000-07:00

This is merely a quick note, typed between filling boxes of books. The next time I write I will be looking out different windows. The bookshop is moving, after our many years here.
I feel (besides exhausted and kind of in shock) a curious sense of being guided. We have a new location, I have signed the rental agreement, all will be well.
Books are very very very heavy.

My street friends have been putting in long hours, for free, to help. And sometimes I cry, for many reasons.

But all will be well.

"How are you going to manage this?" asks a shocked customer.

"Just a book at a time. Just a box at a time."

And I will.

At The Heart's Windowsill

2008-07-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

Somehow I'd expect winter, not summer, would place my dead in my mind. Maybe it's just the wildfires burning, to the south, to the north, at the coast. The smoke gets in my eyes, in my lungs, I am constantly wiping the stinging tears away and staring at the vivid orange sun, the burnt orange moon.

When you have a bookstore, and you accept everyone's lost books, everyone's aunt's collection of Reader's Digest Condensed, every batch of literature from a divorce or a death, every so often you have a surprise. Or two. Because you are tending the orphans, the survivors.

And they come brittle, and they come with spiders, and they come with grocery lists and poems, with old letters and underlining.

Usually it is a pleasure. A couple weeks ago the daughter of a departed friend and mentor of mine brought in another batch of her mother's books. Poetry and gardens, literature and birds. And those underlinings, and...in a book of Nabokov, in the rounded young handwriting of my barely out of the teens years, two rough drafts of a poem.

I'd forgotten this poem entirely; the notebook of that time was lost long ago. It wasn't a great poem by any means, but there it was, in several versions, as is my wont still--striving to get the lines right, striving towards the poem that must be.

My friend must have picked these discarded pages up from where I tossed them, at the library we worked at, and held them. Perhaps she forgot she had them--but for decades she was, after all, my primary reader, the one who saw what I was striving towards.

Sometimes our friendship hit hard times, but her eye never faltered. It was a gift, and I have missed it greatly since her death.

And then, yesterday, in a batch of books stored in someone's garage, a little volume of poetry by Michael Skilling.

I never called him that; he was Poet. To some he was Michael the Poet; to me he was only Poet, and that last year or so of his life he came to me for a certain refuge from a difficult life. Most of the time he was drunk, often he was also sick, and in the end the drinking and the pain killed him.

My friend Red tended to him his very last days, and Red too is gone from us, and what do you do with the grief that still wells up, the loss of good friends, the pity of it all?

So Michael called me Finland, except when he called me by my full and formal name, a privilege he took to himself. And he howled mad poetry, and he wept for his dead wives, his burnt house, his still present and faithful cat.

He died in the winter. I remember rushing to his hospital bed, only to sit with his father beside his body, to sit and cry and talk about his son. His father too had just arrived. Red had made certain Poet's body was decent. The little hospital let us burn candles in the darkened room as the storms swept by.

His poems aren't great, but I can see him singing them. He hung out with Ginsberg and Neal Cassady; he was a great friend of Bob Kaufman's. He had rough times. He was street wise, friend of the Hells Angels, full of passion and regret.

I have his hat. I don't know how I ended up with his hat, a thing of patchwork and madness, but I have it. Probably he left it here one of the times he fell asleep near the poetry, relaxing a bit, leaning over "Hey, Finland, you're a fine woman".

From "A longing to be gone" by Michael the Poet

Sometimes he'd wander
But mostly he'd roam.
Sometimes use a treebranch
for a brush and a comb.
Sometimes he'd stay up late
To help people home.
Sometimes he drank raindrops,
Sometimes river foam.
Sometimes he ate wild oats,
Sometimes he'd just sow 'em
And even standing quietly
Would look like a poem.

So one day he laid down
And stayed down to rest,
As falcons flew homeward
While owls left their nest,
And bright fishes danced
On the dark ocean's breast
And the moon moved soft shadows
That chased on his chest.

He dreamed that a wolf king
Stood high on a hill,
Two paws like a thief
At the heart's windowsill,
Looking for footprints
Which a princess would fill,
For he knew you'd be coming,
In the ways that you will,
So far away, Magic,
But I love you still.

summer chicory and cats

2008-06-22T17:44:00.000-07:00

I inherited my father's eyes--not the color, not the rich sherry brown; my eyes waver through the spectrum of green and grey and blue, depending upon my mood and the weather--but the clarity of vision. He was a pilot; he saw into the distance. And as a child and young woman I could make out the markings on a leaf clear across the forest, see the feathers on the tiny bird in a nest, pick up details of a wildflower. He did warn me that come middle age I'd need reading glasses. I laughed at him.

Well, he was right, of course, and these days my vision far and close is pleasantly impressionistic; I keep reading glasses at hand everywhere, and--as for the rest--well, I see fascinating things.

Like the beautiful woman in a blue, blue gown at the golden edge of the vacant lot, who seemed to be feeding the birds, clusters of happy sparrows and little finches. As Champ and I drew closer we saw--well, maybe Champ saw all along, but I saw--that she was a patch of blue chicory, bright against the whitened summer grass, high as my head, shelter for birds.

Who would have missed that? At times like that I don't care if I'm seeing the real world; I'm seeing such a lovely world.

But that may be why I had so much trouble finding the kitten.

My daughter's cat, mentioned last month, has pulled through despite all odds and is back to robust health. I caught the veterinarian, who is a somber fellow, prone to dire cautions, grinning as he watched the big orange cat happily exploring the clinic room the other day. All those nights and days of worry, all the fluid-replacement-via-needles-and-tubes, all the pills and coaxing--for once, it worked. And not just "for once". I've brought up my daughter to believe that even when people tell you something is impossible, if you care you need to go on a bit longer. Don't accept "impossible" I tell her. If I were craftier and had more time on my hands I'd embroider that in samplers, or spray paint it on walls--whichever seemed more appropriate at the time.

But, kitten...Last week a couple of the street women came to me with two kittens. The little cats had been threatened with all sorts of harm from a group of thuggish guys. As they explained this to me, and mentioned that the nice man at the market might take the kittens in, the little white one darted into the street. We had an afternoon session of "lure the feral kitten", but in the end both were in hand, gobbling a can of food as if they hadn't eaten for days.

Given their skeletal bodies, they probably hadn't. White female with blue eyes, orange male. Little girl had extra toes. Little orange boy was a larky explorer. I kept them for the afternoon and evening, until the nice man could take them home, where they are reportedly doing very well indeed.

But there were three kittens. The third one had run into the field and disappeared. Over the next days that lost kitten tugged at my heart. Knowing the condition of the first kittens, I wondered if the third could even survive. At odd moments I'd go out looking for it, calling, leaving bits of food, bowls of water. I'd hear the crying of a tiny kitten at the strangest times, inside the bookstore, where surely I could not reasonably hear it. But I did, and it tore my heart.

After three days I sat down and sent out a...I don't know, prayer, intention, thought--to the universe and to whomever and whatever protects small lost things. I said "I will take that kitten in; I will see that it is cared for; I will love it. But I'm obviously not any good at finding it, so it will have to come to my hands some other way. I'm ready".

Fifteen minutes later a puzzled woman came into the bookstore. "I don't know why I'm doing this" she said, "but--I was just walking by the field, and there's this little kitten there, and I think you are supposed to go get it. I mean--I'm sorry, this is crazy, such an imposition, but.."

I laughed. "You're right, that's my kitten" I said, and my daughter and I went out and brought it home. A vet visit for her cat was in the works only a half hour later, so kitten came along, and got the medicines it needs for eyes and lungs. I got a curious glance from the veterinarian "another patient for you, eh?". He shook his head.

We haven't named the little scrap of life; he's a Manx with a tiny stublet of a tail, grey striped, white pawed. He has my pitbull totally in terror, poor Champ gives me pleading glances of "protect me from the monster kitten" whenever the kitty walks by. He'll live and thrive. Possibly he will learn to read and be very wise and select books for customers.

Nothing is impossible, you know.

a cat in the present

2008-05-24T17:00:00.001-07:00

Rain came in the night, dusting off the roses and the fir trees, refreshing the air, soaking the blankets of those who sleep outside, puddling along the rutted roads.

May rain refreshes my spirits, though I worry about those sleeping out, and though my own sleep has been restless and broken.

Pressures, inner and outer, seem to come all at once. Is it this way for everyone, I wonder, and then think--well, of course it is, and look, you don't have an earthquake to contend with, and the buildings are staying up, and there hasn't been a tornado recently up here.

So things are stable.

But one of the cats in my life is very ill. My daughter's red/orange cat, who for a time stayed as part of the bookstore crew, perched on the computer monitor, greeting customers, breaking for the door and the road whenever a customer came in. Meatwad (daughter is a fan of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force, what can I say) was low in energy last week, and my girl and her partner took the cat to the local vet. And over the weekend--after she called, fear in her voice, "he's breathing funny"--to an emergency hospital up north.

And now, here back at the bookstore, where I can watch over him pretty much constantly.

The diagnosis was pyrothorax. Pus building up in his chest, against the heart, against the lungs. The first x ray shows it, but the vet didn't notice. By the next day his lungs couldn't inflate.

So they tell us his chances are slim, and they tell us the treatments are very expensive. And yes, they are that--expensive. If the cat were old I'd have taken my dear daughter aside and said "well, maybe it is time". But this cat is young and a fighter and I raised a stubborn daughter, granting her my will, my sense of "you do not give up on what or whom you love. Not ever".

So we aren't giving up. "He could die any moment" says the vet today, after draining more from his chest. But he says, surprised, "his temperature is normal, and look, he's very active". And yes, he is.

So we insert the needles and hold the fluid, to keep him hydrated. And we offer food--all the treats, all the possible cat luxuries. And hour by hour, as he sits near me, I tell him stories.
He blinks his golden eyes.

I don't know if he's staying with us, though now and then I say "you know, after we pull you out of this you really have to live to be twenty or so".

I know that life doesn't make promises, not for the future. And my son Gabe has recently been musing on past, present, and future, coming up at last with his urgent message, which was--as he tugged at his father's sleeve to make certain he paid attention---"past, no. future, no. Only now. Only now."

Now, the red orange cat is curled in Sara's beautiful chair, by the brass library lamp MJ gave me, purring. The rain has stopped, but the air is soft. Now. Only now.

And who is responsible?

2008-05-22T20:52:00.000-07:00

Just tucking this in, in these busy days, until I have more time to write with more grace and detail. It's a letter sent to the local newspaper today. Of course here in my region I signed my usual name--which is not, dear friends, the one you know me by. A group of women from all the ends of my county have now met one another, and we are talking. And we are talking to lawyers and officials as well. But in the middle of our talks and our statement-recording and in the moments between D.'s constant pragmatic works of mercy (water, trips to the court, papers gotten and restored) I was thinking on the question of responsibility. No one here says they are. I had a revelation, and in this letter I tried to share it.

Dear Editor

When my friend took me to see his former home, he’d been out of jail a couple days.

I had heard from his girlfriend her story of the harsh awakening, the men with guns, and the threats of arrest for her as well, as he was cuffed and marched down the hill.

Not much remained now at the homesite.

My friend is the son of a veteran. Locally employeed, hardworking. Anyone would be proud of him.

Wasn’t much I could say there, looking out over the hillside, hearing the ravens call.

The day of the homesite raid I watched two young women who were walking on the side of the road at different times, one with her pups, one with a backpack. I watched the five or six police cars careen to a screeching halt, endangering the cars behind them. I watched the crowd of officers surround the small woman, take her photo, question her.

Later she’d tell me they said if they saw her again she’d be arrested.

I stood as the second woman, walking to her place of employment, was questioned by two officers, told if she was found sleeping outside, if she was found anywhere, she’d be arrested.

She asked questions. The officers had “no time for this”.

I asked questions—why, who, why now.

“You’ll have to step away, step back”.

I asked another question. The perhaps well meaning peace officer said, “This is none of your business”.

And I said, “Yes, it is.”

It is my business. Phoning many agencies, talking with the police in person and by phone, I have been told who they thought responsible.

Responsible for threats to the young kids with their dogs, traveling from SF to Portland for a folk fest.

Responsible for rousting people sleeping where they can, when they have no money and they can walk no longer.

Responsible for the little fawn and white puppy blasted with a spray of mace or pepperspray. “He came out of the bushes too fast”.

Responsible for promoting an atmosphere of “you aren’t welcome here”.

Who is responsible? Oh I’ve been told by “official sources” that it’s Public Health, Mental Health, CDF, the Chamber of Commerce, the State of California, the Board of Supervisiors, or, simply, “people” who are “fed up”. Agencies I have contacted, tracking down the sheriff reports, uniformly express shock and say things like “not us”.

So, obviously, none of the above are responsible.

Who is? I know. It’s me. I confess. And—you know, it’s you too. Because the final line was “it’s the community”.

And that’s me, and you, and your neighbor, and the nice young woman with the little puppy, and the kid down the road.

This stuff—what we are responsible for, what I am responsible for—it’s going to keep happening. The arrests, the hounding, the loss of property and the loss of civil liberties and the loss of our compassion, just as long as people with guns can claim “The Community wants this”.

Hatred, fear, misunderstanding.

I don’t want this, but as I said, I’m responsible. How about you?

In this life we are all transients. Life itself goes by in a flash of a moment. We are like dust whirled in the wind.

And we are all longing for home, our true home, our true community. That’s in love and justice, for everyone, even the least amongst us.

Sincerely, jarvenpa

Where we are at home

2008-05-12T23:53:00.000-07:00

You just never know what the day will bring. Today the old veteran who uses my address to get his too small benefits and keep touch with official folks came in, wildeyed and frantic. "Have you heard? Do you know what they are doing?"

No, I said, tell me. And we stepped outside, near the beautiful roses so valiantly continuing to bloom along the parking lot.

"They grabbed my son. They are going to all the camps, all of them."

"They" were the cops, some other folks. Nine vehicles in all. Animal control. Forest service. Up into the camps, where they were telling people to get out, to get out or else.

I sat down to try to gather my thoughts. The son--a fine kid who works down the street, who has a nice girl friend--well, I'd see her later this day--he'd been arrested for trespassing. Leastways that's what they told the father.

And the day went on. Sean darted in, near tears. He's about the same age as the veteran's child, close to the age of my eldest son. Sean is a reader and a survivor. He works two jobs, volunteers long hours at local nonprofits, keeps to himself. Doesn't like being hemmed in.

"They rousted us at dawn" said Sean. "They took our photos, they said we'd better leave town, they said..." They said a lot of things. Officer Fulton said, according to Sean, "nah, you guys don't work--tell me something else. The shit is sure getting deep here". Sean was indignant "How dare he say we don't work? Just because we sleep out?"
Of those 4 young men 3 have steady work. They were rousted from under an overpass.

So I started taking notes, and I started making phone calls, but as I was calling I saw the white cop cars cruising down the street, and went out to see where they were going. They pulled over, and out came two officers to talk with Robin, who has lived here all her life, who works for many of the local shops. Yeah, Robin lives on the edge and sometimes rages at the sky, but when she is doing well she is doing really well. Robin, on a good day, will bring half of her sandwich over for me to eat, because "you don't take enough care of yourself, sometimes".
Robin remembers Gabe's birthday. Robin looks after the stray dogs.
Robin was being faced down by two burly officers who were telling her "if we see you tomorrow we'll arrest you".
And I stepped in. "Please, why are you doing this?"
"People are tired of the homeless" said the officer. "They want something done".
What people, I asked? Who?
And he said "back off, this is not your business"
And I said "But of course it is"
"Why would that be?"
"Because I am a member of this community, and Robin is a friend of mine". And I stepped next to her, placing a hand on her shoulder.
"I don't need to argue with you" said the officer, whose mother I knew well. I was tempted to tell him his mother, dead many years, would not approve all this, but I held my tongue. We let the guys drive away in their shiny white car, with their promises of arrests and their self conscious anger.

I talked with Robin a while and went back to making phone calls. My partner called the local radio station and set Sean up with an interview. We called some meetings later this week. I talked with officials and more officials; I am fairly well known in my community and my views are also well known, for good or for ill.

The head of mental health services and I exchanged concerned messages; the head of my clinic and I exchanged concerned messages. I went out to talk with the veteran's daughter in law, who was trying to find out how long her partner would be held.

So--you might ask what of our shelter? It closed after six weeks. They were good weeks, in the heart of the hard weather, but...well, fragile reeds, tired volunteers. We did find permanent homes for several of the people, 6 found jobs, one found a way home to his mom. It was good. It wasn't enough. And now...the sweeps have come.

My clinic head reported, in confidence, that there were county wide attempts to stem the flow of transients through the region. Well, good luck with that, said I, it isn't going to happen. The bottom is falling out of the economy, and we have, always, an obligation to hospitality and to treat people with decent respect and compassion. With him I'm preaching to the choir--he wanted to be a priest once, as once I wanted to be a nun (ah, I was so stunned to be told that not being Catholic I couldn't. I cherished those black and white dresses)--and we can sling faith based arguments with the best of them. My partner, in the midst of all the phoning, ranting and witnessing, laughed "my god, it's like having Catherine of Siena facing down the political leaders of Florence".

I could use the power of saints, I could. Meanwhile--well, I'm going to stand up for the ones who need me. And I'm going to tell them, over and over, "Hey, I like you. You are good, you are important, you deserve to be treated well".

We're all home, you know. We're all family. As long as I have a bit of strength I'm going to keep insisting, pleading, standing.

And...I swear to you, hearts will be changed. We will have a community based on compassion. Love is where we really live, after all.

an afternoon with William

2008-05-10T22:27:00.000-07:00

It was in Edinburgh, I think, and in the autumn many years ago that my boyfriend of the time and I stumbled into a library after having a long conversation with a glowing-eyed young man who was part of the Children of God group. They were living communally, trying to trust to God and be pure. That morning, said the young man, whose brilliant blue eyes I found kind of seductive, God had provided bananas. Pounds and pounds of them, dropped off at the place the group was staying.

My boyfriend was fascinated--not because bananas in Scotland had innate interest to him, but because his area of research and expertise was peculiar cults believing that the end was nigh. He had more esoteric and acceptable terms for it, but I went with him to many an interview, many a gathering of spiritualists, many a revival, as part of the background to his research. Never mind that the group he was basing his thesis upon, and later his first book, had been active around the time of the French Revolution. He was always hoping to see sparks in the present. Or perhaps, to give him credit, he was simply interested in how minds sought the divine. I suppose we were in Edinburgh so that he could find some source material--I no longer remember. What I remember of that trip was the purple heather, the little bread and breakfast where the proprietor brought out pineapple cottage cheese for my breakfast, and strong, strong tea. And the brickwork, the Children of God, and the warm afternoon in the white library.

I hadn't thought of it much for years, but today I found in my art section at my shop a little pamphlet of watercolors by William Blake. Black and white illustrations. Earnest text.

And that brought it all back, that afternoon seated at a library table, the helpful young librarian (ah, he was pretty attractive too--what can I say, I've always had a weakness for the lovely people of the world) bringing out huge dusty folders. My friend was poring over letters and original documents in another room. I was sitting, staring at the dust motes in the air, talking with the librarian. "You are fond of poetry?" he asked, in reference to some mumbled statement of mine about my areas of love and exploration.

And he said...wait, wait just a moment.

And he brought out the watercolors, whose colors blasted open the daylight. Not under glass, not in locked cabinets, but there, put before my eyes, within reach of my hands, originals as painted by Blake in the previous century. Glowing, naked, amazing.

More than that, he left me alone with the paintings. He had something else to do.

As I say, I don't think about it much. But those moments with Blake count as some of the richest, and most privileged minutes spent in my life. I sat, and breathed, and felt...how extraordinary this was. So much innocence, so much trust.

And rainbows of light stirring from paintings of angels and heaven and hell.

the day of the good and evil drawing

2008-04-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

On one side of the drawing board, the right side, Gabe has made a swirling vortex of lines, circling a central eye, like a storm or a ball of yarn. Black circles connected, intermingled, tangled. And there is an eye in the center, unblinking.

On the left side Gabe has drawn an equal armed cross.

At the bottom of the magnetic drawing board are rows and rows of his earnest blob shaped people-figures. Some reach up their arms. Some stay still.

At the top of the board there are cloud shapes. At least I think they are cloud shapes.

He shows me his drawing with a quiet smile. "Hmmm," I say. "Can you tell me about this?"

He points to the vortex, makes sure I am looking at it, and says with vigor, "Evil."

And then he points to the cross and says "Good"

And then to the clouds: "Heaven"

And then to the rows of people: "People, they choose."

He points again to the choices: good, evil. "People choose. Always". And, as always, he erases his drawing.

He draws hundreds of things each day, but on his magnetic board, where the lines flow very smoothly, and where, it seems, the impermanence is part of the delight. Sometimes, with a lot of persuasion, I can get him to draw on paper or cardboard, and I save these more permanent works. An artist I know, whose work is in galleries throughout the world, sometimes comes by to beg for one of Gabe's permanent works--and I've given him some. The artist always tells me "don't think Gabe doesn't know--he's right there, right at the center where the rest of us struggle to go". Gabe enjoys spending a few moments with our artist friend, partly because the artist never tries to make him do things one way or another, but simply shares. Here's a picture I did; I like your pictures too. But Gabe resists permanence--he loves the flow, the dance, he doesn't seem to want to be held back to one moment, one drawing, one thought.

When he comes up with a philosophic drawing in the midst of dozens of cars, penises, cats, cartoon figures, dogs, trees, and whatnot (Gabe has a wide range) I am once again reminded that my so called simple child does spend a lot of time thinking about big questions, and I am grateful for the brief sharing of those thoughts.

The day of the Good and Evil drawing happened to be his 19th birthday. As is my custom I took a moment to talk about the day he came into our lives. I walked with him by the pomegranate tree and we fed the blackbirds, and I told him how flocks of blackbirds had been singing the day of his birth, how his father always recalled the song Blackbird, how indeed we had been waiting for him, for this moment to arrive.

I told him how my midwife's assistant, Kate, had scooped him up into her strong arms moments after his birth, while I tried to calm his sister. Someone had stepped on Laurel's hand as she slept and she woke to witness the birth of her brother, and she had cried. I'd gathered her, barely 4, into my arms as Kate held my calm new son. Gabe was amused to hear that Laurel had been woken, that there had been drama.

Kate sang to him, and each year I tell him "you were welcomed in with a song, a beautiful song". And he smiles, because he really loves music. And I tell him, which is true, "you were the prettiest of my babies" which also makes him smile. At birth he looked like a calm little Buddha, with his beautiful slanting eyes and his fair, fair skin and delicate features. He brought a sense of peace into the room in which his sister dried her tears and leaned against my breast, in which his older brother & father stood in wonder. And Kate sang.

The night of Gabriel's 19th birthday, after presents and cake, we took another walk together. The crescent moon was high in the sky; the air was sweet. Look, I said, look at the moon; it's a smiling moon tonight.

I told him "I'm sure the world is glad you are here". He gave me a sidelong glance, looked down, and smiled again.

my father's heart

2008-04-05T17:47:00.000-07:00

Between the birthdays of two of my children fall the birthdays of a few of my dear dead, including my father. April is a poignant month, if not the cruelest one, spotted with memories and lilacs and sparrows building in the eaves.

Tomorrow is my father's birthday. He has been dead...it will be 11 years this September. He was born between wars, fought in wars, died on a lightning blasted night in my arms, staring with trust into my eyes. Some days, most days, I wish we had had more time. When the burly funeral parlor guys came to take away his body I burst into wrenching sobs, and they put the stretcher down again. "Do you need more time?" asked the biggest guy, who looked kind of like a pro wrestler but had kind brown eyes. I got a photo of my father in his healthful days, a few years before his death, and made the guys look at it. "I need you to see who he was" I said, still sobbing. And I thought, I wished, that I could have years, decades, centuries. But I said "no, go ahead".

And sobbed some more. Perhaps more for the lost days of childhood, when he was off flying air rescue and I was reading fairy tales. Perhaps for the years of awkwardness and mutual misunderstanding. I don't know.

We missed a lot. We had a lot too, in between the arguments, the alcohol--it was years before I realized that the smell I most associated with my father was whiskey and tobacco; I had assumed it was some nice manly aftershave. We fought fiercely through all the years I lived under his roof.

Yet he would recount the story of my third year, in which, asked who the boss of the house was, I sternly answered "There is no boss in this house". I probably kept to myself my feeling I should be boss--I was, in my sweet and quiet dreaming way quite the bossy little first born. But I remember the twinkle in his eye as he'd tell the story, and the way he introduced me as "This is my little revolutionary" to the guys in his squadron. And the times he'd take me, fully against the rules I am sure, to see his airplane, to sit in the cockpit, to dream of flight.

We just never quite understood how to speak to each other.

So the other day I was going through an old box of photos and oddments, given me years ago as he was clearing out old letters, old photos, little bits and pieces of his life and my life. And I came across a little bag, a plastic bag. Inside were bits of carved ivory.

Once they had been a necklace; huge, massive. Most of the bits were flat oblongs with a twisted carved design on the surface. Tied together with sinew, which had long since rotted, they ended in an ivory heart.

My father had been given this, or purchased it, in the time after my birth when for 2 years, almost 3, he was flying air rescue out of Goosebay Laborador, surrounded by snow. I think it was walrus ivory. When I was 17 or 18 he showed me this necklace and offered it to me; we sat in the basement and I said scornfully "I'd never wear it, not my style". He looked, briefly, hurt. We never mentioned it again.

And here it was, in pieces, yellowing with age, smooth and cool. The day I found it I'd been reading an Inuit tale of Sedna of the oceans, Sedna who refused to marry, yet fell in love with a handsome stranger and left her father's home. But, ah, the handsome stranger was really a fierce seabird, and the home was a filthy and cold nest, and she wept for her father's home.

In some stories Sedna had married before, for love, not ambition, to a loyal dog, and borne children both human and canine who would try to help her later. In some the seabird was her sole mate, and a cruel one.

And her father came to rescue her. And here the story turns dark as any of the fairytales I used to thrive on. As the bird husband flew after the boat on which Sedna and her father fled, and the waves of the ocean grew so high and huge the boat was in danger of being swamped, and the skies darkened and a storm blew up from the north, and the seabird husband screamed, the father grew frightened. And Sedna's father, to save himself, threw her overboard.

She clung to the boat. He cut her fingers off. And as she sank into the waters each of her fingers became a beautiful creature of the sea--fish, otters, seals, walruses. All were born from Sedna's pain. She sank to the bottom of the sea, and there she stays.

And when those in the upper world are kind to her creatures, to all creatures, when they remember her, she sends the fish, she sends the seals. And the humans have plenty and peace. But when the world is cruel, when she is forgotten, she keeps her sea children close to her and the people on land suffer hunger and want. Then someone must seek her out, go to her in the world of the ocean, and comb the tangles from her hair.

Without fingers, she can't do this herself.

So, this is the story I was reading, or a version of it, as the walrus heart and the smooth and twisted pieces came to light again. Sedna's story is terrible and marvelous. My fingers still being quite connected to the rest of me, I stroked the ivory.

I still wouldn't wear the burdensome, heavy necklace, even were it intact. But I slipped the walrus ivory heart onto an old chain, and put it on.

The story didn't say what happened to Sedna's father.

I was wearing the heart today when an old friend stopped by with his wife and his two youngest boys. The three year old, who like most three year olds assumed I was about his age, sternly asked me if my mommy knew I had dirt in my bathroom, upon seeing the cat litter box. I said, skipping over the mommy part entirely, "so, you don't have kitties at your house?" and he said "no, only a dog" and sighed heavily. As I was explaining the mysteries of catboxes he reached up to touch my ivory heart. "Now, that is very very pretty" he said, "hearts are good".

Yeah. Hearts are good.

They are going to be frogs

2008-03-30T20:50:00.000-07:00

She bounced in, brown hair flying, clutching a plastic bottle filled with water and floating bits and pieces, calling "where is she? Hi Champ, where is she?"

It was sort of like having a little tornado whirl in the door, and I greeted her smiling. I'd seen her the day before for the first time since November, when she and her mother left for the southern end of the state, and I was glad to see her looking well and happy, though tired from the 18 hour drive. Her mother, Angel, said they were just up for a few days to visit friends, but maybe they'd be coming back, and anyway little Jessica wanted to see me, and Champ, and the cats.

"Look, look!" she cried, my little friend, thrusting her plastic bottle into my hands. "They are going to be frogs. I found them!"

Yep. Six little pollywogs were floating about. I took the cap off the bottle to give them a bit of air, though I couldn't recall if they needed extra air at this stage in life. It did seem to make them a bit more lively.

So we caught up on life a bit. Her little dog had been given away, which made her sad. Her kitten, the lovely Princess who wore doll dresses, had run away down in San Diego. This made her sad too, though I told her that perhaps the cat had run into someone who would love it, and care for it. "Not as much as I loved her" said Jessica, and sighed. "But mom says having pets costs too much".

She cheered up and asked if she could help me with Champ's footwrap. Due to my pitbull's nerve damage he gets to wear a stylish sock, wrapped in the flexible wrap racehorses wear on their delicate and strong legs. Jessica wanted to use two colors to make it pretty, so we wrapped in red with an overlay of midnight blue. Very stylish indeed.

And then she invented a cat toy to amuse Pippin the laundromat rescue cat, a big Maine Coon cat, who has been sad this week since his cat friends have left the shop, going to live with my daughter in her new, cat friendly home.

"I want to make animals well" said Jessica. I told her my niece does that, that she's an animal doc. "Oh, can she teach me?" said Jessica, her face alight with possibilities, and I had to tell her that alas, Jen lives far away. But I told her, and hoped it was true, that she will get her dreams.

I'd thought a lot about Jessica and her mother during the winter, hoping they were well, hoping they had shelter and food, that Jessica was warm and maybe happy.

Yesterday she danced out the door with her tadpoles before I could hand her a book or two, and I regret that, because for all I know she and her mom may be on the road again already. The customer who was browsing during the latest visit asked me about the little girl, and I told her a bit of the story. Oh, you are so nice, said the nice woman, a teacher visiting during her spring break. She teaches special education students down in the city, and told me she'd seen it all. The children who live in cars, the children who don't get enough food, the struggling mothers, the moments of pain and violence. I said "well, think of all the difference you have been making with your children, over the years. That counts for a lot".

I looked out to see Angel and Jessica and a couple of guys pulling out in their new car. The little girl had her face pressed against the glass. She was waving, holding up the bottle of tadpoles.

I smiled and waved back. They will grow up to be frogs. May she grow up to be what she wishes. May the world not break her heart.

The Green Grass

2008-03-02T16:50:00.000-08:00

We are in the fragile and beautiful moments of false spring. The plum trees are open, chalk white and tender, dropping petals on the long green grass. Though the mornings bring frost they also bring daffodils. Hail will come, and snow, before April, but for now the air is sweet.

So walking Champ the pitbull, whose advent in my life after his encounter with a hit and run truck down the road a bit was 4 years ago, this rescue of a night, I was thinking of the grass.
I have loved flowers all my life, and routinely stop to talk with my favorite trees, laying a hand tenderly on a branch, staring up into the dizzying sky. But I think it has always been the grass I have loved most, the lawns of childhood, the slopes near the Japanese woodlands down which I tumbled, over and over and over again with my brother in the early summers, the watered desert lawns, a dozen humble corners and vacant lots.

When I was a sentimental and dramatic teen I wrote a poem in which the sun was a dandelion and somehow the grass was the pelt of a green tiger. Yes, I mixed my metaphors in those days, fairly badly. But the grass does seem to me to be part of some great beast, some supportive companion.

So when last I longed to die, it was to the grass I went, and in the April sunlight lay full length in my meadow, and cried that I was tired, and my child was so ill, and I just wanted to enter that green light and be still.

And when I was much in love, my heated blood pounding, my loves and I did in the happier springtimes go to the wilderness, and to the meadows. When my firstborn was conceived my blue shirt was turned green with smudges of the wild grass from the slopes near the sea.

It has always been kind, and welcoming, the green grass. Whistles for my childhood hands, source of daisy chains and clover, quietly there, though I pull it from around the roses, walk over it, ignore it.

Sure, Walt Whitman was here far before me, and was it Julian of Norwich who saw all the divine in a hazel nut? I think so. But in the days of false spring the grass calls me home to my heart, comforts me when the world seems raw, connects me through all the days of my life, and the days of lives before my own.

Quietly. It is enough.

What's the answer?

2008-02-04T18:14:00.000-08:00

"What's happening? Something is wrong." I knew the voice on the phone; I'd been expecting the call since the woman who owned the place Daniel had last stayed had run into me at the market and said he was phoning daily and she didn't know what to do. Give him my number, I said. I'll talk with him.

He was calling from San Francisco. "Have you ever been in San Francisco?" he asked. Yes, I told him. Lots of people, right? Yes, he said, and he said "they are reading my mind. I try to keep my thoughts quiet but they are reading my mind and they are scaring me".

We had a long conversation. He hadn't eaten for days, he hadn't slept for three. Well, said I, just that will make you extra vulnerable. But I knew that wasn't what was needed. Where are you now, I asked?

He was in a bus station. He had a bus ticket in his hand. Where had it come from? He didn't know. He said one of his demons had been torn out of his body in the park. He said he felt pains in his stomach. He said he was scared.

I gave him the phone number of the mental health outreach worker he'd met at my shop. I told him "when you get to the town at the end of your ticket, there is a clinic there. Maybe you should go in and talk to someone there".

So he showed up a few days later, in the company of a young couple; I'd met the girl before; she often comes and curls up in the big armchair and reads interesting books while my dog sits at her feet and the rain pours down outside. Didn't know her new friend. Felt good that Daniel was at least hooked up with some friends.

But a few hours later he came to me and said that people look at him funny. They are reading his thoughts again. He can only sleep if he hangs onto someone else, otherwise he will fall through the center of the world. "What's happening?" he asked again.

You know, there are questions to which I don't have answers. I gave him a new sleeping bag, because somewhere he'd lost his. I gave him some clean dry socks. I said I'd look for some boots, since his are wearing out.

I looked over at Dina, the girl with the huge dark eyes who loves to sit and read poetry. She smiled. Neither of us knew the answer, I think.

Daniel said "the father sits on my back, and the sister is by my side. They are trying to eat my heart" is what Daniel said. Oh, said I. Here, have a banana, take some more fruit for your friends.

And the rain keeps falling.

Come on home

2008-01-11T23:48:00.000-08:00

I met Tim not long after the stray pitbull ended up bleeding down the road a bit, and anxious streetfolk showed up just as the storm was breaking at the southern hills, to ask what should be done.

Well, I took in the dog. Just for the night, mind you. Just until his home could be found. When a dog is hit by a truck and thrown to the ground, bewildered and broken, it just seems to me you can’t stroll on and pretend nothing has happened.

Tim showed up a few months later. Champ, the pitbull, had found life as a bookstore critter pretty good. His injuries were healing, but his nerve torn leg needed constant tending and his bandages brought sympathy.

Tim was tall, young, slow spoken in the way of southern folk. He loved dogs, having grown up with hounds. He was an artist, a wanderer, a seeker. He liked old books and philosophic discussions.

Was he here months, a year? I no longer recall. What I do remember is looking at each new carving in wood or stone and listening to his stories.

In these carvings women turned into birds, the wise people of the forest walked under the stars, a dog prowled, an owl spread her wings, a fern unfolded, a baby’s eyes sought the light for the first time.

They were magic.

Tim slept rough. I might have helped him with a blanket or two, with a coat, or a sandwich now and then—I don’t really remember. What I do remember is the photos of the little girl feeding the ducks. The daughter he fathered, and gave up to a nice adoptive couple. The new father was a doctor. They had money. The pretty child looked happy and well cared for in those dog eared photographs.

And I recall the times the dark and lack of food and loneliness and stress brought him to my door and he sobbed in my arms. Because, damn, the world is beautiful and the world is broken.

He didn’t talk about his time in Iraq.

When he came to tell me he was moving on, 3 years ago or so, he gave me an old book he’d carried with him since he’d cut out on his own. Had been his granddad’s. He thought maybe I could sell it for a lot, and help Champ a little more.

I didn’t tell him it wasn’t a book of great monetary value. I took it gently into my hands as though it were, as it is, a gift of much preciousness, much rarity. I thanked him.

And the months, the years, passed. Yesterday the phone rang and that slow southern voice came over the line, a bit hesitant. He’s been in another state, where he is living in his 8 mile to the gallon old van, and doing gardening work. Yeah, he’s still carving. No, he doesn’t know where his path is really taking him.

The nights are hard. He no longer hears from the couple raising his little girl. His choice. “Tore me up too bad, I couldn’t take it.”

He said he’d just been feeling homesick, remembering the dog, and the bookstore, and our talks. He asked that I pray for him.

In an ideal world maybe I could have said “come on home” and there would have been space for him, with the injured pitbull and the rescued cats, with my children and my partner and all the piles of books.

Because walking by the broken and bewildered, the ones slammed by life and left by the roadside, isn’t good.

Pat Champ for me, he said.

I said I would.

Two Dinosaurs and a Pig

2008-01-01T13:50:00.000-08:00

Two dinosaurs and a pig are making their quiet way towards the Nativity.

Well, they are supposed to be Wise Men (or, as we have sometimes said, Wise People). And one year the Nativity was of dinosaurs, as I recall, since my partner put it together. During the 12 days of Christmas they search and wander, and I move them ever closer to their goal.

Yes, we celebrate all the 12 days of Christmas. While others are stripping down the ornaments and piling tinsel in boxes, we are barely started. We celebrate other things as well; this time of year I am game for just about any moment that brings light and delight into my space, but I am fondest of these 12 days.

It takes that long for me to start to come to terms with a sense of return and birth and light; I'm slow on the uptake. It also eases the push to Do Everything!!! Only So Many Days to Buy!! Our Christmas Day was always simple as our children grew; yes, Santa would bring trinkets, and created gifts would be exchanged. I'd be seeking a bit of joy and light; we'd light more candles and sing (badly). Sometimes we'd festoon the dogs and cats a bit; my now departed yellow lab would put up with red hats or bows and glitter fairly well; just another human folly.

And, the evening before, baking.

I've been careful to avoid most vows in my life. I take them too seriously to give them away freely; no piecrust promises, no easily sworn and forsworn words. But when my partner and I got together lo these many decades back I did promise him I'd bake his traditional bread. At Christmas, at Easter, and sometimes for his January birthday. Somewhere I still have a stained index card in his mother's handwriting with the original recipe for the nut filled Slovenian bread, potica. (the "c" has a funny curl at the bottom when properly written). It's a typical traditional recipe, in which the instructions are vague: you put in "enough flour for a soft dough"; you grind "enough nuts to make a filling".

This Christmas Eve we were busy; partner had places to be and a radio show; I had things to do as well. We didn't connect in the same space until it was coming on 10 that night, and my youngest had already fallen asleep, talking of angels.

I told Paul "I don't see how I'm going to make potica this year--maybe for new year's or something". He was kind of willing to compromise "you made that great Finnish bread last year" he said wistfully. I pointed out that the baking of a yeast raised bread is not a quick task, and our space was cold; the bread would rise so slowly.

And I thought "really, how unrealistic, how stupidly demanding". Oh, yeah, Christmas. Merry merry.

Champ woke me at 3 in the morning. Gabriel was awake. Gabe was persuaded to not venture near our Christmas twig (well decorated, a bit of a fir tree from the land) until, as I said, the sun was up. I plugged in the little heater and the hot plate and made some tea for both of us. Gabe was still talking of angels.

"Want to help me with the bread?" I asked him. Yeah, that sounded okay. I helped him pour some rice milk into a pan with a chunk of butter and some brown sugar. We heated it. We folded in some finely ground whole wheat flour mixed with a bit of white. We added yeast dissolved in a bit of warm water and put it all aside and played with some toys a while. I realized after the first rising that the eggs were supposed to already be in the dough. Well, okay. We separated a bunch of eggs (the recipe takes 8 of them). Yolks into the dough. Squish. More flour. A bit of salt. The fun of kneading (Gabe is good at this). More rising.

Beating the eggwhites takes a long time, especially if it is still dark and you are thinking probably you have lost your mind. We did it, added ground almonds and sugar and a bit of cinnamon. The cinnamon is heresy, but that's how I like it. For that matter, the almonds are heretical too--walnuts are the proper nut, according to the original recipe.

Couldn't find the bread board. Well, who needs a bread board. We kind of stretched out dough in mid air and tried very hard not to drop it on the dog or the cats; really it is supposed to be stretched paper thin, but I've never had the patience.

Balancing it on plates we spread the filling, rolled it up, put it in bread pans (two loaf pans, one bundt pan). To the circular loaf's filling I added cut up apples and raisins. More heresy. Let it rise yet again.

And...into the toaster oven, the only "oven" I have at the shop. The tops burnt, but the loaves were delicious.

When Paul got up Christmas morn, when our daughter and her love joined us, when my eldest son and his girlfriend stopped by--yes, there was, as promised, potica.

A miracle, I think. We still have one slightly stale loaf left; Paul is dunking it in his tea with much pleasure.

But I was talking of the dinosaurs and the pig, wasn't I? I figure they wander around a bunch. They've heard of something amazing. They've seen signs. But it takes a while to get there. A while to take it in.

As when we fall in love--so quickly--and take decades to let the truth of partnerships grow in our stubborn hearts.

Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. A thousand blessings.

a world full of blessings

2007-12-23T14:27:00.000-08:00

This morning he was scraping some dog food off the sidewalk and eating it.

He smiled at me as I passed. "How you doing today?" Fine, I said, are you okay? "Sure, God provides for me."

My partner, when I told him, brought out some of the left over soup from yesterday's lunch, after grumbling "well, hey, the dog food is probably good for him, it's the stuff we give out to the folks out there, practically people food--and it's not your problem is it?" He was feeling grumpy. The weather does that to him, that and trying to clean up things. Grumpy or not, he made sure Jack had food today--and behind my back at that.

Jack's about my age--oh, maybe a year or two younger or older; he looks a lot older, but then he sleeps rough and eats what he can find. Wild fruit, leaves, and--now, dog food. He's a veteran, a small man with gentle brown eyes. Last month he asked if I'd please read the important things he has been writing, and I said yes.

He brought in an old grocery bag crammed with scraps of paper. Some had mathematics on them. Dates compressed to one number. His mother's birthday. His mother's death day. His father's days. The days his two daughters were born. His own birth. Historical dates. Many add up to similar numbers. In large letters he prints: This is important, remember this.
On other sheets he writes things like "I am a slippery fish living on the fruits of the lord". There are details of an inheritance he rejected. There are statements that, try as I could, I couldn't make sense of...strings of letters, strings of numbers, words.

He tells me this writing, his life work, has the secrets of the universe in it and he needs to go to Sacramento and present this to the governor so that everyone will be saved.

And then there are the days he falls on the asphalt road and cries out "NOO!", talking, screaming, beseeching someone, something to leave him be. When I come to him then and ask if he is okay he says "oh yes, I just have some problems with him". Or, perhaps it is Him. I don't really know.

Over the months I have, when asked, given him blankets and coats and sleeping bags and tents. He sheds these like leaves. Yesterday when he came again as the bitter night was setting in and I handed him a sleeping bag I said "you know, if you could bring back some of the others--I could wash them..." I've said this a lot and it is quite unlikely I will see these again. He says "I don't like to be seen carrying a bag. The cops know you are homeless then. So I leave them and other people will find them." Ah Jack, I say, you know they just get rain soaked. He says he is very sorry. He then tells me...it's a great secret...that this spring, God tells him, he will be graced with the stigmata.

My conversations with Jack are very odd. I mean, what do you say to that? "Gee, that's nice?". I just nod my head and ask if he'd like some tangerines.

Meanwhile there's a local cleanup continuing. People have difficulty distinguishing objects that are garbage from people who are, they think, garbage. So three of the earnest clean up crew came by and said "Everything you give out we have to pick up". I said, earnestly, thank you so much for your hard work. I know this isn't easy. I'm so sorry if I am adding to your burden. But I am not going to have anyone freeze to death while I am able to prevent that.

The crew leader--also a small man with gentle brown eyes--asked "Are you taking care of that guy?" Upon inquiry I realized he meant Kevin, who is quite mad, and quite lost, and heartbreaking. He sleeps down the street a bit, having moved from the vacant lot. I told the leader "I don't really take care of anyone, but yes, I check on Kevin a lot. You know his family lives over there." "Yeah, I called his father. He can't do anything". I agree it is a sad story. Schizophrenia, brain injury.

"Is he a veteran?" I say yes, I think so. "But so are you, I'll bet, right?" Turns out no, and someday I'll sit and hear that story. Meanwhile we share a moment of...I don't know. Sorrow, hope. I know this cleanup guy has disrupted the camps. I also know he has given out gear to desperate people. I know, if we only can keep our hearts open, we are on the same side--wanting a place of compassion and care in our small region. Taking little steps on our own. Trying to do what feels right.

I was asked, last week, to meet with a state senator on behalf of our health center and as what was down on the program as a "homeless advocate". The local hospital administrator (who would later say "and when we discharge people with no place to go to we call her" gazing at me) (yeah, they do), said "so, as a 'homeless advocate' do you want everyone to be homeless?"

I think she was trying to be witty. It was an interesting thought though. I said no, of course. I said "I want everyone to have a place of refuge and warmth". As usual, when asked to talk about the situation locally, I ended up with tears in my eyes.

As usual the senator said "I hope you folks don't want any money from the state".

That night I came across Jack buying a pint of vodka. He said "it's not for me". Paul, my partner, says "it's funny how they all want to tell you they are really good".

They are really good, I said, really, at heart. I was thinking of this as I hitchhiked back from the bigger town a bit south of us. The deal had been that I get dropped off, do some needed stuff, phone my partner and he'd come get me--because I don't drive. After a few unanswered phone calls I thought "hey, I can get a ride, it's not far". There was a young man on the roadside ahead of me. He often stops by the shop, and told me I'd helped him a lot in the summer. I asked "so, do you think we'll hitch better together, or would you like me to wait till you get a ride and try on my own?" Since it was raining, since he was there first, I didn't want to hurt his chances.
We decided to try our luck together. A car loaded with other young guys stopped very quickly, and we squeezed in the back. They wanted to know why on earth I was out hitching. One said "if your oldest son knew he'd give you a ride". Of course he would, I said, I hadn't thought of it.
"Well, it's okay--you can think of all of us as your kids. We'll make sure you are okay."

They made sure I was safely back at my shop, at any rate. And came in for soup. And made me tear up. It's a world full of strange blessings. You just have to look.

gifts and small blessings

2007-12-16T19:46:00.000-08:00

This morning I was given an armload of chickadees.

Well, okay, no one walked up to me and handed me a bunch of twittering and excited birds, but when I was walking Champ the injured pitbull through the nearby vacant lot just after dawn today an excited throng of little birds fluttered and hopped all around the stalks of blue chicory, now gone to bird delighting seed. What can I say? It felt like a gift.

The ravens were out in great flocks as well, calling from the oaks, swooping down to the pavement at the school. Champ tried to catch them, as he always does, though I tell him he really can't fly, tug at the leash though he may. He doesn't believe me. My youngest son never believed me about this either; he was so certain, when he was 5 or 6, that the whole family knew how to fly and probably did so when he was asleep. These days he spends a lot of time earnestly holding up two fingers, one and then the other, and saying his words for "good" and "evil". He is perpetually trying to figure out the world; his other categories of preoccupation are "real" and "not real". He'll be 19 this spring, something that seems incredible to me for many reasons. Because he had such a difficult first few years, in which every wind, every change in the weather sent him into pneumonia and desperation. Because, as a person with Down Syndrome, he just doesn't quite look that old, though his prized fuzzy beard is growing in. Because...well, yesterday I was 19, and this is my youngest child.

How can that be?

I was recently off in another region, in a city, in an apartment looking out to the ocean. And there's a long story to be told there, of old friendship and the passing of time and the joy of taking time out of a life full of distractions and obligations, but this is not the place to tell all that. Still, when I was there, with a cherished friend, I glimpsed, on her bookshelf, a blue vinyl volume. High school yearbook. Our senior year.

Well, being a writer and a narcissist at that, I was curious to read what I might have written back then to my dearest friend. Of course, I also teased her by reading aloud a lot of the other nicely scrawled sentiments...you know the sort, "you seem like such a nice person; it was nice having you in Spanish class" or "I hope to know you better in the future". There was one by a guy neither of us could recall that sounded like a confession of true love. How had we missed that one? Well, he was younger than we were.

My statement, written in my still childish hand--it wasn't until I was in my 30's that my handwriting got some strength and dash--said pretty much "it is so odd to be writing to you". And I added a line of cryptoscript, bidding her "make that say whatever you want". I don't remember doing that. My ever faithful and loving friend thought it highly original. I thought it was a writer's cop out, personally, but inscribing year books is not a highly thought of field.

And we laughed. One of her cats captured and killed the dread feather duster (he is diligent in protecting his mistress from the incursions of the hot turquoise monster). It has been a long, long while.

Indeed, it has been pretty much a lifetime, though I'm hoping we have a couple decades left to us. Her mother said, one afternoon, "I still feel 17". Yes, I said, I know that feeling too. It was kind of nice to know it would go on--this lovely woman is going to be 85 next year, and still flirting madly with attractive young men. "Oh, women really love tall guys" she said to one blushing checker, and nudged me "don't they?" I chimed in in the affirmative "oh yes, especially when they are so cute". He asked us what we were doing that evening. Thanks to her I am kind of looking forward to becoming a thoroughly wicked old lady, scandalizing the neighbors.

"Ever see the movie Harold and Maude?" I asked, as we left the smiling--and yes, very cute--guy. Turns out to be one of her favorites. Ah yes.

It has all made me think more about blessings, about my life of such wealth. Traveling to that city I talked a while with a woman on a train who said "If you have three friends who will drop everything and come to you when you need them you are rich beyond most". Why yes, yes I am.

Gabe and I are cutting snowflakes from bits of paper. I have to keep adjusting his hand so he doesn't end up cutting himself, and it is a slow process, but the end result is very pretty. Tonight the streets of this little town shine with rain and colored lights; this morning my cats managed to turn on the radio, blasting the air with old Christmas songs sung by little children with clear and delicate voices. Coming to the door I thought surely we had morning carolers, how odd. No, simply the cats doing their bit.

Does it connect? Well, of course it does, this time of year, when connections are made with more ease, and the air is bright with renewed, impossible promise. And chickadees.

They're burning the camp

2007-11-25T18:36:00.000-08:00

"They're burning out the camp" said the young man. "Oh no" I replied, and asked if anyone had phoned the police, and did he want to use my phone to do so. He stared at me a moment and then said gently, "The cops are there. They're helping."

And yes, looking to the north and up into the hills I could see the plumes of smoke. My friend, who works at a local shop and is quick to make certain the coffee is on when I stop by in the morning with my mermaid cup, ready for the first jolt of caffeine, told me that the guy who'd led the police in on the "cleanup" was last seen throwing kerosene pretty wildly through the forest, making certain the damp woods, the sleeping bags, the blankets, the clothing, the papers and the piles of whatever was there caught a good steady flame.

My friend had to come down to work. He'd brought his puppy with him--a four month yellow and brindle mix of some unlikely dimensions and great size, with curling hair and a puppy's smile. Tank, the pup, was tied up outside, safe.

Later that evening, while the fires burnt on and on, I got more reports. Seemed the good citizens and their police friends had in fact missed a couple of the more remote homes, including that of my friend, his girl friend, and their pup. "I know better than to camp where I can be seen. You got to work and pant a bit to get to my place". And I was glad for that. I asked what remained of the burnt out sites; had anyone saved the sleeping gear or the tents. No, didn't seem so.

So I sat and thought about it, and tried to calm my heart, and began getting new blankets and warm coats ready.

That was the day that Kenny died. He'd lived in that camp at one time, and in another hidey hole down by the river. He was a striking dude when he first sauntered into my bookstore to check me out, a low to the ground, stout black dog named Digger at his heels, a battered cowboy hat on his head. His hair was black and grew to his waist. His eyes were shrewd and green, and I heard tell later that he'd been quite the ladies' man in his prime. He himself told stories of his 4 or 5 wives. Beautiful women, he said, were his weakness. And he'd peer at me significantly, trying to charm the bookstore lady as he'd charmed many a barstool companion.
He did charm my animals. The cats would sit on his lap and the dogs cluster at his feet. When Champ the pitbull joined the crew it was Kenny who told me stories of Champ's past. Like many of his stories they may simply have been good yarns, but they had the ring of truth. "Ah, you've tamed the beast, you have" he'd say. "That dog, trust me, he was a killer, and now look at him, meek as a lamb." Champ would wiggle with joy and smile.

Kenny was a drunk and an addict. In the years I knew him--ten or more years--I saw him grow thinner, more unsteady, more befuddled. He suffered head injuries dating from his time as a veteran, and more from beatings, falls, accidents. He did jail time. He went to rehab. He got sick, and sicker, and sicker still.

I was his address and his link to bureaucracies. Some of them helped, some didn't. Everyone tried.

I was also his bard, for early on, as he told me his adventures and as I learned of his situations when he wasn't around--in jail, in the hospital--I wrote a few columns about him for the county paper.

He loved being the hero of printed stories. After the first he'd announce himself with "I've come with another episode in the Saga of Kenny" and settle in his chair. Yes, he had a designated chair at the bookstore.

There was the time he asked for me to clean his injured head and give him a bandaid. The skull looked broken, and I made him go to the doctor, though he protested mightily. 17 stitches, and his head was never quite the same after that.

So, as I say, he died the day of the burning. I didn't know it. I learned about it later, after Thanksgiving.

And I sat down and cried and cried. Well, he loved my old yellow dog, Buddy, and old Digger is also dead. So I can imagine, with sentimental foolishness, that Kenny is hale and hearty and wandering some fine forest land, with a low black dog and a cheerful yellow one bounding ahead into joy.

speech after long silence

2007-11-10T16:59:00.000-08:00

"How does he look? Is his hair gray?" The phone call came from an acquaintance who had heard an old friend of mine had passed through town briefly.

I paused and thought a while; it has been a few years since I last saw him, and nearly a decade since he moved to another region, remarried, had new children. There was a time...well, it was long ago.

I said "yes, his hair is graying now, but he looks good". And indeed, the ones I love look perpetually beautiful to me; I am just not a terribly visual soul; I tend to see with the eyes of love, and those are unwavering.

To this brief visit he brought the oldest of the new children. The other children, the children of the first marriage, had been the ages of two of my own, and in those long ago days they were with me and my children day after day, extensions of my heart, as much my own as the children of my body. I had not met the first child of the new marriage, though I sent him, and his small brother, embroidered blankets when they were born, and their mother has sent photos over the years.

The little boy and his dad rushed into the shop as I was due to go out for a peace vigil. The father, as he always did, engulfed me in an embrace. The little boy stood quietly by. "Hello" said I, and told him my name, you must be...oh, let's call him James, which is not his name at all, and held out my hand. He gravely took it. A most polite child, the image of his older brother, who is now in college, save that he has his mother's fair coloring.

"She's been a friend of mine a long time" said his father.

The store was very busy, my partner not back yet from a visit to a friend in another town. My old friend and I spoke quickly of many things--the older children, the youngest child, with his mom in another state for a visit to her family. I helped the child find some interesting books. There is something of his grandfather in his eyes, I thought--I had loved that rough and ready guy tremendously, as well as his elegant wife. Both are dead now, but I could see flashes of the past darting like light over the six year old's face.

Time is a strange thing. My friend said he and his family are considering moving out of state, to be near his wife's family. That will be wonderful for your boys, said I.

I play music these days, at night, after everyone is asleep, he said. I drift off into that world--there's no pain there, there is beauty. I think of you, sometimes.

The little boy wanted to know why the dog wears a sock, and I told him Champ's story. My youngest child wanted to see his old friend--my friend was Gabriel's stalwart helper and champion in many ways, back when Gabe was tiny. I could tell James seemed puzzled--a big kid with Down Syndrome; might have been the first person he had met like this. I trust his father will explain. My friend said, "wow, last time he didn't have any facial hair at all" and Gabe smiled, for he is proud of his bit of pale fuzz.

And the phone rang, and my partner returned, and someone needed books on how to train dogs, and a kid I've helped came in to tell me he was out of jail, again, and to return the money he'd borrowed, and I needed to get to my vigil.

I wish we had a longer time to talk, said my friend.

I do too, I said. It is lovely to have met you, I said to James. You have your mother's beautiful eyes. Not that there is anything wrong with your dad's eyes, mind you.

My friend laughed, and left.

I found my peace signs and adjusted my black clothing and rushed out to my corner, apologizing to Sara for being late. And watched them drive away.

Patch up these souls, please

2007-11-01T23:38:00.000-07:00

He was wearing a top hat the last few days, jaunty atop his greying curls, a perfect image from Alice in Wonderland, dashing about the streets of this town, finding places to curl up and sleep in the bushes, raging at the stars.

"One of these days" said the blonde who works sometimes at the laundromat nearby, "someone will put him in the back of a pickup and tie him and beat him and no one will find the body. Good riddance, I say."

"That would be murder, and that would be wrong" I said, mildly, putting some blankets into the big washing machine.

"But no one would miss him"

"His parents might, you know they live down the street"

"Yeah, and he tried to kill them"

"Well, I don't know about that. You know, he's hard to take, but I might miss him"

The conversation wasn't going very far. I got the machine spinning and went back to my store. And it's not that my friend the blonde is fully unkind. After a very rocky start to our relationship, in which she tried earnestly to convince me that it was best to have folks freeze in the hills than try to help, she now and then slides into the bookstore when no one is around and hands me a bag of clean socks, or some wool sweaters. "Someone will need 'em. Don't like waste."

The thing is, there have been deaths. Murders. Beatings. Knifings. All in the beautiful little towns, in the forest lanes where the ravens look on, beside the green river.

The thing is, there are a lot of broken people. No, not all of them are without homes either.

My friend with the top hat once had a home, a kid, a family. He had a dog too, a yellow Staffordshire much like my Champ. I don't know his whole story of descent into whatever hell he is mostly in. I do know I felt very pleased the day, years back now, when he stopped for a moment to watch me plant petunias and said the first whole sentence I 'd ever heard him speak. This was after 2 or 3 years of my daily "Good morning, how are you doing?"

He said "My mom likes petunias too."

His mom does. She shares my love of flowers; I've always meant to ask her for some seeds of her broken-color four o'clocks; the sort my grandmother grew, which are so hard to find seed for these days. I grow yellow and fuschia and white ones, but all self-color. I have gazed enviously at her splotched and patterned flowers for many a summer now.

I went back to put my laundry in the dryer. "You know," I said, "it's not that folks like that guy really want to annoy or scare you. Think about..well, suppose someone had a broken leg and walked all slow and got in your way. Would you blame him? You might get all irritated, but you'd know he couldn't exactly run, right?"

She nodded.

"so, this guy had kind of a broken--I don't know, heart, mind, soul. And he gets in the way. "

I doubt I convinced her. Ah, but there are days I simply want to call down divine healing or choirs of angels, or devas, or whatever would work--I'm not even fussy about the name or the tradition. Just send some divine healing, okay? Patch up these souls. Free them.

The checker at the market said today "you know Sean? The one with the leafblower?" Yes, I do. The guy has driven me nuts for a few weeks. He has the loudest leafblower in the universe and has decided to make the world neat, being at the top of his manic cycle.
Well, he's in jail. Or with luck, being evaluated at the mental health hospital up north. But probably in jail. Broke out all the windows in a vacant restaurant. To free the air. I knew he was spiraling out--but there's no one to catch him. His sister owns a shop down the road, his parents are fine and well known and compassionate. No one could help.

I made a little trip--I don't have to go far--to the place a young guy enroute to his mom's house was beaten to death one thanksgiving some years ago. He'd spent his last day with me, listening to Mozart in the shop. We'd given him the blanket he died in. I was the last person to hear his breathing.
There is still a stain on the cement. I pass it nearly every day, but tonight I went there, and stood a moment, and said again "I am so sorry".

"I didn't plan on being homeless" says the tall dude who has asked for some raingear for weeks--and finally got some. "I know" I say, "life is odd, you just never know" "Got that right, sister" he says.

"Did you know some homeless people have dogs?" asks little Jessica, who is six, who has spent several days now hanging out at the shop. I affirm that this is so. "And some, like me, have kitties" she says, brightly. Right again. She's living in a van with her very young mother and father, and a kitten she dresses in doll clothes. The kitten has also spent a lot of time visiting, much to the interest of the store cats and Champ the pitbull. Jessica has instructed Champ very sternly in the best way to treat kittens. "You must never ever eat a kitten" she says. She was running a fever yesterday, but came by for early Halloween treats. Princess, the kitten, was dressed as a fairy princess.

"Do you ever just want to fly away?" asked Jessica, leaning her hot head against me. Sometimes I do, I said. Sometimes I do.

Are they dancing near the ocean?

2007-09-18T14:10:00.000-07:00

Children, especially very young children, always seem to believe I am about their own age--just a slightly taller child with interesting reading glasses poised on her nose. This suits me fine, because at heart I have great sympathy for the littlest ones, and tend to see the universe very much through their eyes.

True, I have in my decades of life learned a little bit of decorum. I don't skip nearly as much as I did a couple decades back, and that isn't only because my left knee has grown annoyingly fragile and my dogs get disconcerted when their human moves erratically. I refrain from blurting out all the questions in my heart--though I do still blurt one or two, and have very little fear of seeming stupid or ignorant--if you don't ask questions when are you going to get answers?

So, when the sprite with the long yellow hair and bright blue eyes, perched happily on her dad's shoulders in the grocery store line caught my eye, I smiled back at her. And she chirped up, "what's your name?" I told her, and she told me hers. And then she asked "where's your mommy?"

Her mommy was in front of her in the line, and I glanced at her, and at the stalwart young father who was acting as a nice horse for his little girl. The direct answer would have been something along the lines of "dead". And indeed, dead nearly 10 years. But that didn't seem like the sort of answer to give the little girl--I mean, did she even have a concept of death yet? Was I the one who was going to introduce it to her? I said "oh, my mom isn't around any more", which, as I said it, was bad enough. I could see my little blonde friend pondering.

"Why isn't she here? Where is she?" she asked, reasonably enough. Remember, kids do view me as one of them, and this little one is never, probably, far from her parents--she was wondering why I was wandering around without the help of a mom, I am certain. Before I could answer she said "well, if your mommy isn't here, where is your daddy?"

I gave the listening mother a glance that said "help!" because...well, my father has also been dead a decade now. She stepped in and said "I think her daddy is with her mommy" I smiled, "yes, that's right". The little girl--her father later told me she is only two and a half--asked "Where are they?"

The mother then said "oh, maybe they are together at the beach. Maybe they are dancing." Seems the child loves to dance. I smiled. "I'm sure they are having fun" I said.

The girl stared at me a moment, and then she said something I've carried with me a few days. She said "It's okay. If you need a mommy and daddy you can have mine. I share a lot!"

I smiled, though tears had sprung to my eyes, and thanked her for her very kind offer.

seventeen

2007-09-01T21:32:00.001-07:00

My youngest brother, the Mississippi farmer, writes to me asking if I have a potion to restore him to his 17 year old self. It's a wistful response to a more serious note I'd sent him about my partner's health, and the healing measures I am taking.

Made me think--would I even wish to be restored to my 17 year old self?

Sometimes, as I look back over the scraps of my life, I hardly recognize the person I was at a given time. If I were to meet my 17 year old self along the road...would I know her? Well, probably, and I'd probably smile, but it has been a long, long journey.

I lived with a view of palm trees when I was 17, in a beach town. I walked the beach a great deal, when I could, sneaking out of my house in the middle of the night, foolish and fearless.

When I was 17 I walked barefoot and sang in the rain and wrote letters in code to my boyfriend. We met while cast in the school play as husband and wife--a husband and wife struggling with their relationship; my character was icy and scornful and the script called for me to smoke cigarettes with nervous disdain. Alas, the cigarettes were written out, but the disdain kept in. By the play's end my character melted and fell in love with her husband yet again. Kiss and curtain.

We had a lot of rehearsals. He counted his lines--he had a lot more than I did. He noticed that I usually carried books of poetry with me to read on the bus or between classes and asked if I also wrote poetry, and if I did, could he read some? I think I gave him a sheaf of 50 poems--oh, I was prolific in my youth, and didn't revise much; the stream of poetry gushed forth onto my careful typed pages at three or four bad poems an evening.

He returned the sheaf to me with corrections.

Nonetheless I fell in love, and he wrote poems to my eyes, my lips, my hair, my hips, and so on.

We were such innocents, the two of us, happily exploring lust and connections, constantly getting into trouble for our blatant display of public affection, and causing both our sets of parents much concern, since he was Jewish and I was not, and both sides were doubtful of the wisdom of this alliance.

But when I was 17, sweeping my long blonde hair out of my eyes, I wasn't worried about what anyone thought. Certainly my father and I had raging political arguments, and I got in trouble at my church for questioning doctrine and for teaching the little ones about the wonders of nature (somehow planting of mustard seeds led to accusations of sex ed for the 4 year olds). But the world was pretty shiny and bright, and I was very self absorbed.

When I was 17 I learned to bake, and planted a wild garden my father threatened to mow down. "Weeds, nothing but weeds". We had another argument.

When I look at photos from the period I see a barefoot, slender, and somewhat tense young girl staring at the camera. Opening a Christmas present. Standing in a family group. Holding her white cat in her arms.

I didn't know it, but it was just before the storms. My parents would divorce--ah, but by then I would be in my little beach house, struggling with my first suicidal depression. My competitive and critical poet boyfriend would be on another coast--well, we would meet again and again, and travel together. My poetry would get better. I would write and destroy two bad novels.

My hopeful heart would be broken countless times, and I would see love and loved ones die, and I would want to die myself. When I was 17 I would walk through the city streets and cry, thinking everyone I saw was doomed, that life was fragile.

And when I was 17 I wrote on all surfaces, in chalk, "Life is beautiful" and embarrassed my poor brothers by skipping and dancing in public, reciting poems, singing songs in my best off tune soprano.

Ah, I was innocent. Or blind. Towards the end of the year I started reading Emma Goldman. My arguments with my father were harsher still. I made plans to somehow get to the university; I longed to leave my family home, that home that would soon shatter.

I was very young. Younger, it seems to me, than my daughter was when she was 17. Perhaps a bit more tender. Probably a lot more naive.

I do remember one illicit arranged meeting before dawn at the beach. It was cold. My love and I shared a green pepper and stared at the pinkening sky. We thought we'd be in love forever, and forever young. We had no idea the pain we would cause each other, or the strange new twists our lives would take.

The kisses were pretty sweet. But no, I don't think I'd go back.

A moment with Justine

2007-08-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

We were discussing Ezra Pound that summer afternoon, just a few weeks ago, my partner and I and some customers, when the people ran in the door in a rush of confusion and shouting. Call the police! Violence! Craziness!

My instinct in these situations is always the same--to rush out, to see for myself, to see what can be done. And this is what I did.

By then the action was right in front of my bookstore anyway, in what we term our violence free, drug free, peaceful zone--"hey, do what you like, but not here, guys, okay?" The wild eyed blonde was grappling with the sweet checker from the market down the street. My partner had come out behind me. He pulled the checker away, and she ran back to work. I laid my hands on the wild girl's shoulders. She'd been screaming a lot, and as she whirled to face me she screamed "I want to die, no one cares about me!"

I do, I said, and used her name. I care about you. And she started to sob as I held her , there on the sidewalk, the crowds around. Oh baby, I said, I know it is hard, it is so hard. But I care.

We got her into the shop, and I had her sit down and have a cup of water as my partner called 911. She was shakey, she was on some drug trip or another, she'd just been left by her current male friends who'd driven away laughing, and she'd exploded into that whirlwind of anger and grief.

We'd hoped to get some medical attention for her, but of course it was the police who came instead. I helped her to the door, I earnestly asked the officers--please, please, will you see that she gets some medical attention.

They told me about the check in process at the county jail, where...well, I've had a number of my friends from the street die. I wasn't too impressed. It showed on my face, yeah, you bet it showed.

How do you know this woman? asked the cop. Are you her mother? I was tempted to claim her as one of my own, but I knew that would certainly complicate things...so I introduced myself to the officer and commented that I hadn't met him before.

Of course you know me, said he, I've been in the newspapers.

They cuffed her and drove her north. She never saw a psychiatrist. She never saw a doctor. At 3 in the morning she was released, because no one was pressing charges.

And today she's in the field again, a bit dazed, smiling. "oh, I'm trying so hard to be good" she tells me, and says, yes, she had something to eat today.

She grew up here, child of an old family. Pretty girl, with her bright blue eyes and lovely body and her bright gold hair, though she cut her hair off today. She's been raped, sometimes by those she's trusted. She's been hurt in a hundred ways. Her brother killed himself a couple years ago, and she was there.

She has the soft trembling mouth of a four year old, and a mind that is perhaps stopped at about age 10. For months I've talked with her, as she's wandered through. For months I've tried to watch over her just a bit.

And the other day the governor of my state cut all the funds for mental health services to the homeless.

"oh, I'm trying so hard to be good. Won't anyone help me?" How do I answer those blue eyes?

crazy quilt days

2007-07-29T16:00:00.000-07:00

When I was in college I saw a low budget indie film called, I think, Crazyquilt. Black and white and all about creative angst and stirrings of feminism, as I recall..I don't recall much, just the framework, the quilt, and the feelings.

I was working on my own actual crazyquilt in that period of time, living with my grandmother after a heartbreaking love affair, working in a library, saving money to go off on my first European tour. The bits in my quilt were mostly very tiny, postage stamp sized. I had no formal sewing training or experience and the quilt showed it--staggering stitches, puckers, big frayed corners. I worked on it while sitting with my grandmother in the evenings after work, as she watched the Lawrence Welk show and we talked about life.

"You are very patient" she said, looking at my growing coverlet.

It was probably the first time anyone in my life had accused me of that virtue.

All the bits came from my old dresses, worn out shirts, childhood scraps. My uncle, stopping by, noted that the quilt had no red in it. It is true, it started with mainly a sea of green and blue, a bit of yellow, but when he noted that I dutifully found a bit of red to put into the mix.

I worked on the quilt for...well, let me think...probably three years, maybe four. I finished it off on the east coast in a hard winter, embroidering all the edges carefully.

And it traveled with me, back to England, back to California. It shredded a bit and bunched. And when I was pregnant with my first child I took a corner of the torn quilt and made a baby blanket from it, backing the scraps with soft yellow flannel, embroidering more over the little squares. It wrapped him well in those early days.

I've made other quilts--yes, as imperfect and strange as the first one, over the years. The metaphor of piecing together a pattern--always a strange pattern, for all my quilts have been free form, crazy--of the pieces of a life, of bits from a past and present--seems such a true metaphor for my life.

These past few days I have had a few experiences that seem to want to come together but--I don't know the pattern. I just feel some odd connection.

My friend the beekeeper came by with a jar of purest sunshine. Pale yellow, sweet. Honey from the hives he has out where three rivers flow together. He said he thought the honey came from the wild owl clover that blooms there, purple and sweet. I held it to the light. I brought it to my youngest, and told him that Seth's bees had made some honey for us. We had toast with sweet light drizzled over it.

My friend the vegetable growing poet came by with a basket of small white peaches, and news of his bear.

Our bears have been coming by with regularity; what can we do? The little print of a small bear marks the back of our car; the dogs bark late into the night.

Out of nowhere "bearsmoma" left a comment back on a February post...the one about Jacob and Ida Hardi and their marriage certificate, which I rescued from a thrift store. In the post I mused about love, about family, about history, and wondered what sort of life the young lovers had. I imagined a happy one for them. The comment came from someone who said--yes, they lived in Dallas, they had 7 children. 6 grew to adult hood, one remains alive--his or her Father in law. And there are 15 grandchildren. One of the sons, for a time, lived in the city near me, and perhaps that is how this lovely certificate, all forget-me-nots and hope, came to the thrift store. I left a comment in return, telling my contact that--if it were desired--Ida and Jacob's certificate could go home. We'll see if I hear more. I was so pleased--the end of a story I thought I'd never know.

And a week ago I sat with my youngest son and a psychologist for an exam required in the latest "jump through governmental hoops" phase of our lives, now that Gabriel is 18, an adult. In a previous phone conversation I'd been promised games. But there were no games, just most of the same questions I've answered in writing 3 or 4 times in the last year or two.

Gabe sat in Sara's chair. The psychologist sat in the rose chair. I pulled up a stool. Champ the pitbull inspected the psychologist and found him worthy.

Gabe answered a few questions himself: favorite food (Pizza), name of brother. He drew a circle on request. He was asked to draw a square, and he drew...lines. Lines at the top, lines at the bottom, lines that curved into some private realm.
He was asked to draw a triangle. He stared at the doctor and drew his face, a frowning face.
It was about then I got to answer all the questions. Can he....No. And...No. And...No. No, he doesn't understand money. No, not at all. No, he does not jump rope.
Two hours of questions. A few jokes between--the guy was trying to be nice, respectful, and professional.
He'd talk to Champ now and again as well, which I am certain Champ liked.

After he left--no games, not necessary, everything very clear to him, though possibly not to me, I wanted to sit and cry. Not because it was uncomfortable, though early on the doc said "hmmm, you aren't used to thinking in these terms, are you?" No, I said, no I'm not.

I live with my son day to day. We have honey on toast. We go for walks. Sometimes I can coax a smile from him; often he is far away.

I realized from the questions and from the psychologist's response that, when the reports come back, it is likely my boy will have yet another label. To Down Syndrome will be added, perhaps, autistic spectrum disorder.

Nothing has changed. It is only words. And I love words; they are the other bits of my crazy quilt life. Little bright counters in a game. Things to roll on the tongue. New concepts to explore.

And life goes on, with sweet honey, with odd connections.

In my first quilt, when it was finished, the dark green wove through in a pattern like a river. I hadn't planned that,but as it grew the river moved through it nicely.

In my crazy quilt life I am not certain what color or pattern is weaving through it all. But I think maybe it is okay, maybe it will be, at the end, a surprise and a joy.

A little update:
I posted this, then checked my email, where another comment had arrived from someone connected to the marriage certificate. And this evening I looked into the gentle eyes of Jacob Hardi and the lovely, intense eyes of his bride Ida in her gown of patterned lace, with a billow of a veil and flowers in her hair. Jacob has a fine waxed mustache. The year is...I think 1910. This is the photo that went with that certificate. And tomorrow I will try to box up the framed celebration of that marriage and send it home. That family's historian told me a bit about her family; that Jacob was a baker; that one of the children, a girl, died when she was 10, and more.
I am thoroughly delighted at the strange connections made through this universe.

just a bit of light

2007-06-21T00:53:00.001-07:00

The photo is one my eldest son snapped one day on a hike. My long hikes over the hills and through the forest lands are mostly memories, but he continues the tradition, without even having known that it was my comfort, my writing workshop, and the way I tested out the endurance of his father, who was 24 years my senior, but kept up with me very well in those old days.

These days, for me, are days of busyness shot through with the light of sudden memories. Gifts, and losses. Sometimes I'm not sure which is which.

Following news of my friend Berk's death--indeed, five minutes after I posted those paragraphs--I received news of the death of the father of my highschool sweetheart. We were together--10 years? 12? that poet-historian and I, and his father stalwartly disliked me every day of that time, because I was not Jewish. And because, he would add, I was sloppy and a dilettante and--oh, I don't know what else. They were probably always true things, though they cut to my heart.
I cried when I heard the news. He was in his late 80's, I had not seen him for--let me think--perhaps 35 years? I heard news, bit by bit.
And he is dead now, with his cleverness, his passion for Israel, his baritone voice. There's not a story I can tell now, not really.
And I don't really like being struck silent and bewildered.

My dearest friend from highschool stopped by a couple weeks ago with her mother, on a whirlwind tour of the coast, up to Canada. Over pancakes her mother told me stories and paused to say "I can see the young girl you were". I laughed and said I was glad, and that she is probably the only one now who can do that, look back through the decades to my 15 or 16 year old self and cherish that lost girl and all her dreams. It's a precious thing. Her daughter, my dear friend, mentioned the possible journeys of our retirement..or, well, her retirement. Retirement isn't in my dictionary of possibilities--but I could be tempted to weekends of irresponsiblity, in the name of the young crones everywhere ( & with fond nods to Lori and Marly). The mother--my own sole mother of the heart, in absence of those of blood--is 84 now, and vibrant as ever. I wistfully wished I really did share those enduring and clever genes; my friend says perhaps, by long acquaintance, they rub off.

It's a good thought. I'd love to be in my mid 80's racketing off somewhere. Or maybe hiking again, a little slowly, but with great stubborness. Climbing towards the light.

out of the sky

2007-06-18T22:26:00.000-07:00

I have asked for a sabbatical from death and grief. But, I am not quite certain where my application should be filed, and perhaps that is why people keep dying. I feel like a puzzled child some of these beautiful summery days.
One of my friends said Sunday, "oh, you heard about Berk?" And I said..no...and he said, dead. But we didn't have the details.
And why should the details matter, I wonder. I spent a day thinking...I don't think he was ill, but sometimes these things come quickly. Heart attack? Maybe a car accident in the mountains. And I waited.

He was a pilot. One of his joys was flying a little airplane, just about everywhere, off in the wild places. And it seems he and his wife, Suzanne, were off in one of those wild places, and took off to check some Idaho canyon. They were due to meet up with some other friends--other pilots--at some point. And that was Thursday. And they didn't show up. But the friends thought--well, they were adventuresome, maybe they camped elsewhere, having gone a bit off course or something. And that was Friday. By Saturday people were looking, by Sunday they'd called in the officials. And caught a faint, a very faint signal from a deep canyon, and spied the wreckage, and found the body, and Suzanne, beside it, injured but still alive. And they pulled her free.

So what do we say? "Oh, he died doing what he really loved" "Gosh, guess it was his time" People say all sorts of things. I think of Suzanne, with her long golden hair, beside her partner of the past 30 or more years, watching nightfall, dawn, nightfall, dawn, nightfall again, and dawn again. And what did she think, and what did she say?

But I'll never, probably, just come out and ask her. And I wonder at my own--story creating heart, that is pondering this, trying to make sense--but also seeing a story, or a poem, or some way of making it all a bit more..bearable.

Like words. "the body".

Not: Berk, who was funny, and involved in all sorts of things, with whom I fought and with whom I worked. Whom I called santimonious and patriarchial. Who laughed at me.

My eldest child posted a memory on a local blog. Seems he recalls the white bearded Berk at the Oregon Country Fair, holding a glowing hoop, inviting everyone to pass through it to the other side, to a new dimension. My son, who is more acquainted with death than many, says no one ever dies. He's kind of like my youngest child in that matter--Gabe too says death is nothing at all, though he is prone to now and again beg his papa not to die yet. My eldest, however, thinks it is love that holds our friends here, forever.

I guess it's as good a story as any.

throwing you a rose or two

2007-06-07T20:42:00.000-07:00

Hmmm. I'm not sure if this is the same photo I put up on "jarvenpa's notebooks" (see the nice link to the side of this page, it's my other blog) some days back; my dear daughter took a couple at my urging. No one can have too many roses in their life, even if it is the same rose twice. This is just a quick check in post, inviting you to go visit the other blog for a moment or two, though I realize poetry is a specialized taste indeed these days.
I'll be posting something new here fairly soon I hope, though whether it will dwell upon the bears (we have return-of-the-bear-tribe going on at my cabin), the beauty of enduring friendships, merriment or sorrow--well, you know, I'm not sure. This evening the sky is darkening to evening-in-Paris blue, I am nostalgic and melancholic and listening to some lovely unknown music...baroque, I think, on the local radio station, played by a woman who also grows roses in my little town. But really I must go and fix pancakes for my youngest child, who has been promised these for days. Pancakes often take temporary priority over poetry in my life.
The rose, for those who care, is a David Austin rose, "Teasing Georgia". And a beauty it is, growing in the parking lot garden.

remembering eden

2007-05-16T16:53:00.000-07:00

For the last day or two I have been surprised by tears. Not gut wrenching sobbing, and not casades of tears down my face, as when I was a child so tender and unshielded I would cry at just about anything--a hard look, a hurt animal, the way the light touched the trees. But tears. The catch at my throat, the prickling in the eyes. I pause a moment, put myself back into my more socially acceptable mode and go on.

I know grief very well, but this grief always surprises me. I am missing a child who would be 13 today, or yesterday, or possibly tomorrow--or, given due dates and the imperious certainty of babies who chose, I think, their moment--anytime in May. I forget about her a great deal, until the anniversary dates come near, and then...the tears catch me.

Her name was Eden.

I have three living children, and I had a number of miscarriages besides. In some cases the miscarriages were timed so that one of the children who lived would not have been born, and sometimes I pretend that perhaps...well, perhaps my daughter is in fact the same soul, the same gentle being who lived within me a little while and then no more. That was a springtime miscarriage, preceded by a poignant dream in which a little child in a nightgown--how predicable, how cliche--rushed to me through my empty cabin and gravely hugged me and said "I'm so sorry, I can't stay with you this time", a dream from which I woke sobbing, a day before the torrents of blood started. I conceived my living daughter in early July that year, and clung to that pregnancy with fierceness.

Eden was not planned, and indeed, her conception shocked my life. All three of my living children were with me by then, the youngest, Gabriel, would be five in the spring when this new child arrived. The chances of yet another child with Down Syndrome had increased by some geometric jump. My life had just begun to get some space in it--the two older children were pretty self sufficient, and even Gabriel had at last achieved skill in walking, and need not be carried everywhere. I had writing I needed to do. I had plans.

And then, I was suddenly pregnant. It was a hard time with my partner--indeed, at that time I was dealing with the temptations of love of another person, and the shattering effect that might have on a number of innocent lives.

And let me add--yeah, I'm pro choice; the first political actions I ever got involved in were for women's reproductive rights, marching in the streets of Washington DC with a huge crowd of women of all ages, shapes, colors, feeling such a sense of power and determination...I was..ah, I was the age my daughter is now, 22.

But I accepted the new possibilities. So the kid could be another Down Syndrome child? Well, maybe that would be good, Gabriel might have a great companion. My daughter and her best friend were delighted with the prospect--they would be 9 that spring, an age at which babies possess the charm of kittens and puppies. My eldest was thoroughly disgusted; he was 16, and he sardonically said "and they talk to teens about birth control!"

Summer gave way to fall. It was a gentle fall that year, warm, sweet. The hills were golden with the turn of the big-leafed maples. The dogwoods changed to the strange gray-rose shade they turn some years. The rains were late in coming. I had dreams of the child: she was a little delicate, she had quizical eyes, hazel in my dreams, the color of the spring ponds reflecting the light.

I made plans, I tried to get my life into some shape that made sense, that had grace.

It was a warm day when the blood started. Only a trace. I was working, I called my doctor, he was unconcerned. I took my daughter and her dear friend, daughter of my heart, to the movies that night. It was a silly comedy, and for years whenever it came on TV or reference was made to it I would feel a stabbing pain, my body's memory of that time.

The next day I stayed in my woods and walked my garden and cried.

She was wrapped in a perfect birth sac when she left my body. I was kneeling by the clambering white roses and the quince, neither in bloom. I held her in my hands and cried and cried.
But I also marveled at this--how amazing to see, this tiny creature in the palm of my hand, in her opal sac. Hands, feet, tiny alien face.

Yes, I thanked her--in a way she gave me my life back. She's buried under another rosebush. I think I am now the only one who remembers her, who recalls that she was to be called Eden, and that she would have been loved, scolded, fed. My heart never let go of her, and each spring, sometime in May, the tears grab hold of me again.

It doesn't make much sense, I know. But sometimes I hope that somewhere she is dancing, in some other life or some other realm. I hope that she laughs, and that she realized she was loved, if only for a little while.

an addition: Marly has suggested I link to a post in my other blog, which relates to this. http://jarvenpa.blogspot.com/2007/05/another-poem.html

Spring updates

2007-04-28T20:05:00.000-07:00

Spring has come..now more than a month ago...to our hills. The little orchids from which my daughter got her middle name, thanks to her older brother, are in bloom, scattered pink and white in the shadows of old firs. In some hidden corners the white trilliums are up.

Winter is gone. But so, says Sara, are the little foxes. She is concerned that the gray foxes (who are only distantly related to the quick red fox I used to try to type about) are no longer seen near her coastal home. They were there: the townsfolk watched them play with their kits and climb trees--gray foxes climb trees, and like fruit as well as mice. She saw them a year ago in February, when they were mating. And then she went away for a journey, and returned, and no one saw foxes. Not anywhere.

Being a methodical and curious woman she is in touch now with the local university and is trying to figure out what is happening. That I have seen foxes in my woods does not console her for her loss.

My friend Woods, when I talk with him about the foxes, supposes it is loss of habitat. Lots of beautiful expensive homes being built out along the coast, lots of brush and trees being cleared. He doesn't worry much about foxes. No, he is worried about the amphibians. Where are the newts, he asks? What has happened to the frogs?

I have a goodly population of newts in my shaded forest, and I hear the frogs and toads calling their mating calls every place I walk, but Woods--who is a scientist and should know--says they are gone from his area of the forests, north and west of my own.

I am pondering, along with many, the situation of the bees. Honeybees, that is. As Woods is quick to point out, we have lots of native bees around here who are doing quite well. The honeybees, he sneers, aren't native. Over the years I've known him he has been prone to lecture me a lot on my loves. I love the wrong birds, the wrong flowers, the wrong mammals. He has stopped short of telling me I love the wrong people...but someday he might continue to that as well. Stellar bluejays, european roses, star thistle--all wrong. I will never make it to naturalist's heaven, being unrepentant of my sins.

Certainly others are quick to tell me I love the wrong people. The young pregnant woman living in a tent with her husband in the worst part of the winter miscarried her child. She left her husband. Her husband left the area. She has found work at a local restaurant and drops by, ever cheerful, always hopeful.

The frail guy with the eyes the colors of the summer sky, known as Hobbit, was released from the hospital and is back on the streets. Still alive. He may make it through another summer, or perhaps not. "I don't walk so good anymore" he tells me "that's why I haven't been by to see you".

The mother who was living in a van with her daughter and her boyfriend, just down the road a bit--I passed the van often, greets me with a warm smile as I go to the market where she works. We trade casual good wishes. Her boyfriend raped the daughter, who bore a child, who was placed in foster care. The mother and the daughter--she's 13, think of it, just turned 13--did finally find a place to stay. The boyfriend was arrested last week, as the gossip murmured below the surface.

My friend Pat died last week, with her daughter and her long time companion at her side. Kevin sent me a poem of Emily Dickinson's as the news--the one about the going of the inland heart to sea. He and Pat met when she happened by his boat building place. I recall her saying what a delight it was to see these strong young men working on the graceful wooden boats. They did a lot of sailing over the years.

The neighbor whose apartment adjoins the bookstore broke down last week. At midnight we heard him howling and sobbing and screaming and crying. I have never heard a soul in such distress. We called the police. I walked one of the young officers back to the side of the building to listen (you reach the apartment from another road). He turned pale, there in the moonlight, hearing the lamentations and screams and the sobbing, sobbing, sobbing "I killed her, I am so sorry"

My fears were great, for the guy has a daughter...but in the end it was a drug trip, and possibly a broken heart, and possibly the weight of this universe pausing in one soul for a night. He's okay after some time at the hospital.

No one died this winter of exposure in my hills. No one died of hunger. Some people felt better for a few minutes.

Yesterday a beautiful young woman dropped by. We talked for quite a while, about books and life and travels. She said "4 years ago you let me stay overnight at the bookstore; I've never forgotten; it saved my life". I had forgotten. My memory is such a sieve when it comes to these encounters--but as she spoke, I did remember; she had mentioned a contact up north, and we couldn't bear to leave her to sleep in a strange town, a very young and pretty woman by herself, stranded for a moment.

She said "I've thought of you everyday for four years" and hugged me, and hugged my partner, and left to continue her journeys and her studies. She is studying to be a doctor, and wants to come back to this region to work.

Meanwhile my partner went for his first hearing on his trespass case; he'd spent the night at the congressman's office and was arrested after 20 hours. They've brought the charges down to an infraction. I read the charges...something about crossing a closed gate into a field, which made little sense. I read the arresting officer's report, in which the young man repeatedly mentioned the "elderly protestor"s respectful, serious, and nonviolent demeanor. Paul had told me, after the arrest, that the police had been close to tears.

It's a strange world, my friends. These days it seems a patchwork of light and dark, of beauty and pain, of wonder and sorrow.

But it is spring, and the air is heavy with blossoms.

thinking bloggers

2007-04-25T11:15:00.000-07:00

I woke this morning to discover that hopeful beirut, whose blog gives an inspiring and poignant glimpse into the life of a rather remarkable woman, had nominated me for the Thinking Blogger Award.
What I have to do, says she, is basically nominate 5 others.
She already nabbed Lori, of Chatoyance. (and I'll just bet lori is gonna nominate Marly. But--closing my eyes and not checking lori's blog, I will do so. Zip. Quickly).
So. 1. The Palace At 2 AM in which Marly Youmans offers her exquisite mind and writing. Poetry, life in the palace, whimsey and wisdom. I stumbled on the palace one evening by accident. Obviously, in the universe, there are no accidents. Marly is the author of a number of unique novels (and a book of poetry). Dipping into her blog is always a refreshment to my spirit.
2. Five Gallon Bucket details a life of craft and homemade joy and search. For a time this blogger and her beautiful family lived in my region, so I drop in on her blog for vicarious tea and conversation. But even had I not known her, I am certain her creative spirit would enchant me.
3. Shirin in Engelestan is the often funny and just as often thought provoking blog of an Iranian born artist now living in England. She hasn't posted in a while (since announcing her coming baby) and I hope all is well with her. Hers is a delightful blog.
4. Dr. O2 of Sweet Hallucinations of a psycho is a young Iranian doctor whose brief, sometimes poetic, sometimes cynical, sometimes totally puzzling posts never fail to make me stop and think.
5. In the Blink of an Eye contains the extremely varied writing of Livewire. No one more authentic out there in the blogosphere. (and is that really a word at all??).
And now I need to find time to tell these folks what I've done here. And return for a much belated post of my own.

heart to heart

2007-03-26T19:35:00.000-07:00

Dora stopped by yesterday, dancing into the shop and hugging the dogs in turn, and asking in her slightly bossy 8 year old way where each of the cats was. Cats were found, and patted, and she settled in Sara's armchair normally termed Champ's chair, but not when my friend Sara is listening; it is a lovely antique from her childhood and not suitable for pitbulls, probably. Except in my life, everything literally goes to the dogs, the cats, and the children.

Dora asked, quite seriously, "Do you have every book in the world here?" I assured her I did not, recalling my own encounter with a bookcloset at 8, and a teacher who snarled that I had read all the books in the world during my illicit moments of reading between lessons. I'm sure the horror of my belief that all the books in the world were in that closet--and what was the rest of my life going to be like?--shaped my path towards libraries and bookstores. I'm not sure what Dora's moments surrounded by the books in my store will end up doing for her.

At any rate, she wanted to read some poetry to the dogs. They were eager to listen. She checked through my poetry section and settled on Shel Silverstein as appropriate for canines. In between poems she chattered and confided.

And then she asked if I'd play Heart to Heart with her. It's not a game I knew, but she ran to her mom's car and produced a pack of cards with questions so we could take turns. "What is your favorite childhood memory?" She thought maybe we both should answer that. Hers was her 5th birthday, when there were bouncy-castles--five of them--and a cake that was made of icecream and her family was together. Mine was my 6th birthday, when the ship I'd traveled in docked in Japan and I saw my father for the first time in two years.

"You might have trouble with this one" she said "because, you know, you are old and you would need to remember back a long way probably". "Okay, what's the question?" "When was your first kiss?"
"Oh, I remember very well, Dora" I said, trying not to flinch at my increasingly dottery status. "It was a stage kiss, I was playing someone's wife. I was 16 or so, and we did end up girlfriend and boyfriend for a while". "Mine was when I was born, I think. I think my father kissed me on my head. He loved me."

"I'm sure he did". She has a very pretty smile that comes and goes like sunlight through clouds.

We found out each others favorite fairy tales: hers is Sleeping Beauty, mine was the 12 swans--a story she didn't know yet. She read some more poems to the dogs. She brought me her diary, in which the names of the boys she thinks are nice are written with hearts and flowers: Austin, and Gabriel, and Laurie. We tried hulahooping for a while.

My other customers were, as usual, tolerant--they have to be, because you never know if you are going to find people with hulahoops near the metaphysics books or a heavy political discussion or what when you enter this space.

And she dashed off again, her stepfather checking that all was well, her mother saying "she talks about this bookstore all the time at home". This time her book for home was on cats ("my favorite, favoritist animals of all, they are sooo cute"). I added a little blank book with roses on the cover--I usually have stacks around for my own writings, far too many to fill in the time I have. "I'll come back and show you all the stories I write!" she said.

Dora is lovely respite from some of my other visitors and their troubles, and from the crash of reality outside the bookstore walls. Today my partner waits in a congressman's office, where he has vowed to stay till he is arrested. Today a good friend who is keeping watch over his wife's long dying came to get some light reading, some escape.
The wife, Pat, is a poet whose life has been long and full and ebbs now, moment by moment, drop of morphine by drop of morphine.

The last note she sent, while she was still able to write, said "I watch the beautiful colors as they light the edges of the trees, as the sun goes down, as the night comes on."

those things that fall out of books

2007-03-18T12:39:00.000-07:00

At my shop we deal often with boxes of random books: "These were left in my garage" "My aunt died, I don't know what to do with these" "I'm moving". There are also the trades for credit and the desperate traveller who says he or she needs gas money and would I buy a few books they happen to have with them.

But it is the boxes, the piles of ten or twelve crumbling cardboard cartons packed with books, that are our challenge and our delight. Very often these turn out to contain a nice set of encyclopedias--some off brand--missing only two volumes, with water damage to all. Or a few cartons of all the Readers Digest Condensed Books issued from 1963 to 1971, in great condition. Or stacks of old catalogs.

My partner says "the book stops here". I remind him we have to pass the book...or books..along, somehow, or else why are we in the business. For many of the truckload volumes we have our free table outside. It is there the Readers Digests go, and the somewhat damaged but still readable volumes, a lot of the romance novels, and..whenever I spy a child from the trailer parks meandering our way, a stack of interesting children's books. Over the years we've sent thousands of books out into the community; we figure someday someone will wonder why our tiny region is so book obsessed and literate, and will likely credit the school system, never knowing it was the secret book-pushers at the odd little bookshop.

Over the years it has intrigued me what falls out of the books; what little bits of ephemera have been used as bookmarks, or tucked into some volume for safekeeping.

There have been photographs, usually the out-takes, the unflattering ones where the subject was caught mid sneeze, or with her eyes crinkled shut, or with a tree sprouting from the top of her head. There have been bonafide bookmarks , usually the cheery cardboard kind with owls, puppies, and bad poetry, plus a bit of thread in chartreuse, bright orange, or dayglo pink.

Clippings: the war has ended. Someone died. Someone was born. The book was reviewed.

Letters, receipts, bills.

A few times a Valentine--from the 1930's or 1920's, pressed away. And pressed away also, flowers, now pale smudges and crumbling bits of tan or brown or murky green--a wildflower, a corsage. Once, a sprig of Edelweiss collected, according to the fading note on the envelope, in Switzerland in 1909. It had kept its lovely fuzzy white form, living in the envelope in a travel guide all these long years. I wondered what the trip was like, how the mountain air smelled, how the light struck the mountains where surely there was still, even in summer, a bit of snow remaining. What other flowers were there? Who had been with the person who gathered and treasured this?

What did the war bring to those lives?

The other day I was moving some of my own books around. My cats help me a lot, pushing over the piles I stack around my desk, pointedly nudging one unstable group after another and staring at me as they fall as if to say "normal people are much, much tidier. And please notice the gleaming white fur at my neck while you are at it." As I was gathering up some of my books of poetry, a few little papers fluttered out. I picked them up, and stopped, and stared a while out into the almost-spring air.

One was a letter I'd forgotten, from someone I had deeply loved. When his latest child was born I made a quilt for it; having made quilts for nearly all children dear to me--odd hodgepodges of fabric with embroidered animals and little snippets of rhyme and the name of the new baby. He was writing--evidently many months later--to thank me. It's been a long time since we were in the same area; it was a complicated time, but a sweet one in its way.

All the joy and sorrow of those times rushed back as I held his letter, with its news of mountain journeys and his work and the wellbeing of his growing family. I made the right choice, back in those deliriously tempting days. But in the spring, as the river runs deep and the willows start to show flashes of bright chartreuse, and the air is so sweet, I recall those days and hours so vividly. Passion is a complicated country...but the hearts of children should not be damaged. I thought that then, and I think it now, and send that now distant family my heart's good wishes, and turn back to my own. I know where I belong and where my heart's true home is--but, in another story, in another time--well, the ending could have been different. Probably not better--literature is full of cautionary tales: look at poor Anna K, and the heroines of Hardy, and Henry James, and all. Perhaps it was my background in literature that kept me to a ethical center?

Anyway, I tucked the letter into another book. And looked at the next bit of paper. My mother's handwriting, that elegant Spenserian hand, on a scrap: a recipe for Apple Crisp. Apples, honey, lemon juice, cinnamon. Topped with an oat mixture, but the recipe for that isn't with it. I remember it, however--it was an old childhood sweet, and I've often made it for my own kids.
Made me think of my latest email from my stepmother, bringing up again the affair my mother had with her husband (it is complicated indeed: two couples, one of them a church pastor and his wife. My mother, supposedly, involved with the young pastor. Two divorces. My father marries the now freed pastor's wife. Oh, soap opera had nothing on this). Now--it is, what, 40 years from that time--my stepmother writes still of her hurt and the shame of it all.
My mother always said the accusations were untrue; my very beautiful mother, buried now near a lilac tree in a far northern state. She died 6 months after my father. My stepmother says she recently found...falling out of a book--a letter from my mother to my father, sealed. Never opened. She says she'll send it my way someday, if she thinks of it.

The final thing from between my book pages turns out to be a torn card on which at some time or another I took the time to scrawl a quote from Lamartine: "I am a fellow citizen of all who think. Truth, that is my country."

It is an odd quote for me to have wanted to save--I tend to love the stories more than the truth per se. But possibly it was in a moment in which I needed the world to make a bit more sense.

Facing the Photographer

2007-02-26T21:53:00.000-08:00

Some would have called it a favor to a friend, others an honor gracefully bestowed upon me. Whatever it was it brought up old anxieties and most of all, vanity.
A local friend, a charming and whimsical artist who has a gallery in town and a garden shop that is like a glimpse of fairyland; a beautiful storyteller and peace activist who has planted her hillsides with olive trees--she asked me one morning at the post office if I would consent to take part in her Goddess project.
Sounded pretty lofty. She explained that what she envisioned was a lot of photographs of local women. Artists, grandmothers, midwives, writers, firefighters, activists. A whole spectrum of faces. She had asked one of the most insightful local photographers to create the photos. Would I let him take mine?
I said yes, though within my heart I knew this little moment would bring up all sorts of inner turmoil.

Yesterday I walked to the pink house with the laughing Buddha in the planter box. The bright quince was in full bloom, a burning bush if ever I'd seen one.
He met me at the door. The storms had abated a bit, but I was carrying my Sistine Chapel umbrella, full of voluptuous nudes on a golden background. It cheers me up, come the weeks of winter storm. I walked past his kitchen alcove, where his wife and a friend were chatting, and into the room with the silver reflective screens and the window looking out to the mountains.

Sit down, said he, indicating the lovely, pale woven rug on the floor. I did.

Now, the whole concept of "Goddesses" had troubled me a bit--I am no goddess, nor was meant to be--and I wasn't all that certain of what the intent here might be. He'd asked, when we spoke on the phone, what characteristic item might I be holding. My answer was immediate: a pen. I always have a pen in my hand, and two or three clipped to my shirt, just in case I need to write something down--some flash of poetry, some thought. He'd said he kind of wanted to focus on hands.

I was curious about the list of women--about 30 of us--and asked to see it. He handed it over, and they were certainly all known to me: the midwife who cradled my children into the world, the artist in glass who is one of my favorite board members--the one who doesn't mind my hula hooping at important events; teachers, artists. Quite an exalted company.

The photographer, far from carefully arranging a pose, liked to snap a zillion shots while talking. Did I ever relax? No. I'm pretty sure in my background is some tribal memory of soul stealing through photographs. The only photos of myself I have really loved since childhood were taken by people who loved me. The photographer, gentle, whimsical, and snapping his shots, had no reason to love me. Did not know me, save at a distance. We got through the half hour and finally he crowed "That's it! I've got it!" and showed me the photo, in which I have a puckish smile and my hands near my face (must get those hands in).

"Hmm. I look a lot like my dear mother. Well, I loved her."

What I longed to say, what raged in my vain heart, was "when did I stop being twenty? Where have the years flown?" It is the same question I ask my mirror some mornings, as I meet my eyes--nice eyes, sometimes gray, sometimes bright turquoise, depending upon..I don't know what--and the crinkles by them, and the high cheekbones, and the nose I never quite liked even when I was little, and the myriad small lines, and the serious mouth. The photographer likes smiles. If I were to have faced his camera on my terms I would have stared it down, like the old photos of my great grandparents: a steady stare, a serious confrontation. This is who I am, and what of it?

As I grow older, and see the lines not only of my mother's face in her last years, but of her mother before her, a woman I never met but whose gaze I meet in some of my photos, I am coming to terms with...I don't know quite what. Time, vanity, the loss of youth. I have good bones, and when I reach 80 or so I plan to try to carry off the "she was a beauty in her youth" role. But this in between stage is as awkward as my teen years were. I just don't quite recognize that woman, though she has an elfin smile still, and a wicked gleam in her eyes. I don't recognize all those lines, that softening flesh.

I do recognize my hands--thin, inkstained, with broken nails from work and gardening. They serve me very well still.

After the photographs I asked to meet the birds--the photographer has some bright and lovely birds in an alcove. His wife cautioned me not to touch them, assuring me they'd bite. I went in anyway, and he handed me a bird he said was a parakeet--the largest of that sort. Orange and yellow and black and green, with a salmon ringed eye and a quizzical tilt to his head. The bird and I exchanged looks and murmurs, and the other birds gathered and watched. Pure delight. I'm sure the birds never bother to worry about how they look, or how they are aging. These ones fly and climb and murmur.

I'm trying to learn their aplomb, their joy.

The most enduring thing

2007-02-10T17:15:00.000-08:00

My dear of all these many years sometimes tells visitors I have an imaginary family. It is when they are looking at one of my old photographs, propped up in some corner of the store or shining from a wall. In truth, many of the pictures are bonafide relatives--my father as a beaming two year old in his rompers with a kitten on the pocket, standing in front of a bank of irises; my grandmother on her porch; my parents as young--very young--newly weds; my mother's mother and father at the beach, staring into the sunlight with such confidence and enjoyment long, long before I was on the planet.

But I do adopt photographs. There is something infinitely sad to me about the old photos forgotten in dusty boxes in junk stores and antique stores. How did they get there? Is the family gone? Does no one remember the name of the woman with the black lace and jet pin at her throat? What about the beaming little girl with her hula hoop? These photos I take into my care, and they join my relatives.

Well, we are all related, somewhere down the line, right?

My youngest brother, the farmer in Mississippi, this year sent off a sample of his DNA to some project sponsored by National Geographic. I didn't know he was doing this until he emailed me the results. It's sort of an extension--a big extension--of his fascination with family history. Since we share both mother and father, I assume the lines traced in his cells live on in my own. And in the case of the matrilineal DNA, in my daughter.

It was no surprise to see our mother's line most common in Finland, which is indeed where our family originates on that side. What was astonishing, however, to my mind, was to think back through...what...hundreds of thousands of years to a woman somewhere in Africa, who bore a daughter, who bore a daughter..and each of these survived to bear at least one girl, who survived to...

And so on. It is like the little Russian dolls, each with a little one inside, and another, and another.

What are the odds? My father's line got traced back to the middle east. To Iran, Iraq, that area of the world. From there, eventually, the families moved on and on and on...we know this, because that line ended up in Virginia back in the 1600's.

But my mind can barely grasp all this.

I can, however, grasp photographs and oddments and bits and pieces, and catch the bits before they are lost. For at least a little while.

In the corner of a dusty dark shop I found a badly framed, yellowing marriage certificate. It is written in German, and decorated with lithographed angels and flowers and scrolls. It bids us, in German, to remember that "Lo, I am with you always, even to the end". It says, in German, "as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord". The frame is carved and painted silver. The certificate, tearing at the edges, has been pasted to a bit of flowered wallpaper.

Had they no children, no grandchildren, no tender niece who remembered them? I don't know.
But I hope that Jacob Hardi and Ida Ureck, who were joined in holy matrimony on the 5th day of February in 1910, in Dallas, Texas, had a long and happy life together. I suppose at some time they must have moved to California--how else did this certificate come to my area. I wonder about them, as I stare at the pattern of blue flowers and angels, the lithographed church, and the flamboyant signature of the priest or pastor, A. Romanowski. Bernhardt Wepf and his unnamed "Frau" were the witnesses.

Yes, it is very unlikely I am actually related to this couple. But I gather them in..remote cousins. I start inventing a happy life for them, believing in happy-ever-after stories.

In my mind it connects with two other lovers, much farther distant, found near Verona a few days ago--buried together, a lasting and tender embrace. We won't know that story either, but it touches my heart, particularly in these troubled times.

Nothing endures longer than love.

A visit from Dora

2007-01-29T12:35:00.000-08:00

"Why does that doggie have a sock?" The earnest young girl paused before entering the shop, staring at Champ, who was trying to look very sweet and nonthreatening, thumping just the end of his tail. "Will he bite me? I don't like doggies who bite me."

I assured her that Champ would not bite, but that if he scared her I would let him go sleep in the back room a while. And I told her about the accident; brief version, and tried to explain nerve damage.

"Does it hurt him a whole lot?" She had moved to Champ's very lovely armchair, the one a friend gave me, the elegant antique. Sara disapproves very much when I call it Champ's chair.

"I don't think so, but it might tingle a little. I keep his foot protected so he doesn't hurt it".

Dora, for that was her name, had some time on her hands. Mom was doing laundry next door, and "it is boring to watch washing machines" the child informed me, telling me her mom had said it was okay to come over to the bookstore.

"You have So Many books!!" said Dora, looking around as she patted Champ's golden head. "How did you ever get so many books?"

"Well, we've had a bookstore a long time, probably much longer than you've been alive."

"I'm 8 years old!" said Dora.

I wasn't quite certain if she meant she was the very advanced age of eight, or if she was the very young age of eight, but I told her the bookstore had been around for 25 years now, so it was older than she was. And that was a long time in which to have books come and go.

We had a long conversation that afternoon, mostly directed by queries from Dora, who was interested in every aspect of the store. She found the kitties, or they found her. She paid proper quiet attention to the aging golden lab, Buddy, whose hips were hurting him. He was in the very plush armchair that used to belong to a silent film star, with a nice blanket wrapped round him. Dora proclaimed his ears to be "just like silk!"

"Do you love any people?" asked Dora. I told her yes, I do love some people. She said "I love Austin a lot, but my daddy wanted me to meet these other boys, but I love Austin, and those boys, those boys were old!"

Turns out the boys were 9 and 10. Turned out that Austin is six. Dora wiggled in the rose chair, determined to make me understand. "I don't have a crush on Austin, but I love him. I like to play with him, I like to talk to talk with him. He has a nice rat."

And then she said "I miss my grandma so much". Fearing the answer to the question, but needing to know, I asked where grandma was. Grandma is in Reno, where Dora was born, but someday--maybe this summer, but that is so long to wait, Grandma may come visit the hill community in which Dora and her mom and dad live these days.

"At my school they call me Citygirl. And I hate that." I nodded, and the conversation turned to rabbits ("very soft and cute") to whether I had a little girl (I introduced my daughter, who was on her way to work, and who merited the "she is grown up but very pretty" assessment of my visitor). And then to poetry.

Dora told me she'd had to write a poem or run laps at school and she was very very glad that she had memorized some poems from her book of poems because she wrote one of those down and the teacher didn't know and anyway it was good she didn't have to go out running because the poem was okay.

But--what if he finds out? Then she'd be in such trouble. She gazed at me with those brown eyes and confided "I really can't rhyme very well yet". I told her poems don't always have rhymes, and she was very shocked. But she said she was going to take care to hide the book of poems so her teacher will never, never know the poem she gave him wasn't hers.

Someday you might write your own poetry, better poetry, I commented. "Well, the poem I turned in was really a stupid one, but the teacher thought it was okay. Maybe you are right. Could I write about your dogs someday? Maybe I will write about Austin. He has nice green eyes."

And she told me about looking for moonstones and agates on the beach up north, about the lights in Reno, about her new kitten, who scratches sometimes, and more about Austin, who has naturally curly hair and likes to listen to stories. She chose and bought a book of horse stories, and her father came to collect her, asking the question parents always ask: "was she good?" I told him she was charming, and welcome to visit any time she chooses.

"Good, I will!" said Dora, jumping up and down joyfully.

"Oh, wait" she said, and while her father waited, she came to say goodbye, one at a time, to the bookstore critters.

"Are you sure poems don't always rhyme?" she asked before she left. When I said "yes" she flashed a bright smile.