She brings me a rose

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)

In the Ever Present Rain

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)

a cat in the present

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.

What's the answer?

"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.