The Blog: Spellbound by our own imperfect lives...: April 2017

Sunday, April 09, 2017

some dog

This is our big Golden Doodle, Gus. There is nothing he likes better than a walk in a place where he can be off the leash to run and chase sticks or his ball. He's good about sticking close to Regis and coming back when he's called.

Gus and Regis went for a walk by the hospital the other evening. It was getting dark and cool so Regis was surprised to see a gentleman standing out in a field, hands in pockets. Assuming he was a bird watcher, Regis was ready to move on...but not Gus. Gus ran out into the field and made a few circles around the man, ignoring Regis's calls to return. He sat down in front of the man and watched his face. Regis finally trudged out to see why Gus was ignoring him.

The man said he had gone out for a walk but was lost. He admitted to not knowing where he was and he couldn't name the place where he lived. Regis suggested that he and Gus would take him in the truck and find his home.

When they got to the truck, Regis named a few of the assisted living facilities in the neighborhood and the man recognized the name. Mystery solved. They drove him home and made sure he was safely inside.

This is not the first time Gus has rescued someone. Regis and I joke that he's like Lassie. Another time, same vicinity, Gus took off, refused to return. When we turned the corner, ready to scold him, he was with an elderly couple. The man had fallen to one knee and his wife, a tiny woman, didn't have the strength to help him stand. We got him up and walked them back to their residence.

Gus to the rescue.

Thursday, April 06, 2017

spring cleaning: zoloft and sunshine

After a dark winter, my mood has lifted. Thanks to a little sunshine and a little chemical help from my doctor, I am awake...finally.

One of the happy side effects of that is I am more interested in righting the ship of state, our house. I can see a pile of stuff and have some ideas about how to sort and organize and put away. For a while, that was beyond me.

So, I started the ritual of packing away winter sweaters, coats, mittens, and boots and bring up from the basement the sandals, t-shirts, skirts, and summer pajamas. A guy just can't wear fleece leopard print pajamas in July, you know.

I tend to put things on the list and then I avoid the list, or perpetually move some items to the bottom. Making copies of some family papers and sending them out seemed like such a simple thing to offer to do. Why do I keep procrastinating? Most of these jobs, once started, are not nearly as bad as they appeared.

In the last few weeks, I have cleaned out the refrigerator, taken five boxes to the thrift store, cleaned out the back porch (kind of), cleaned and filled all the spring bird feeders, and cleaned out a ton of paper from my office. I can see the floor all around my desk now!

This morning, I'm washing new curtains for the living room. The description said little of no ironing. I beg to differ. Ugh. I hate ironing curtains.

I'm going to take a break from all of this productivity and watch our baby grandson, Easton, for a while. He has gotten a little funny about folks other than his mama and he doesn't like to take a bottle so we might be in for a run. He is so much fun and it's hard to be anything but serene when you're holding a baby.

Tuesday, April 04, 2017

coming back

I haven't written on my blog for almost two months. I have thought about why that is and there are a couple of reasons.

For a while, I got concerned about the opinions of other people about what I write. That was short-lived. Not a reason anymore.

I got in the habit of using my blog to document my daily life. That got oppressive because I felt like I had to have pictures and I had to keep up so it was current. Once you get behind, it's punishing to try and catch up. Like cleaning your house. I'm giving up on that notion. I'm going back to using my blog as a place to write my observations about my life rather than what I did today.

I quit using my the big computer in my office and started using the iPad more. I hate typing anything longer than a few sentences so I avoided my blog. What happened to five fingers on the home keys? That works so much better for me.

I've developed the game habit again...sitting in the chair playing Scrabble (some minor brain activity can be detected), Gin Rummy, and Solitaire. Not so much brain stimulation with those last two. I have to do what I did with Candy Crush and its ilk...delete.

One of the things I love about my blog is the way it provides a look back. I just read this post from December 22nd of this past year. I found my votive candle holders and thought it was safe to bring them out again since our babies were old enough for the candles to not be dangerous. Since then, we've had one new grand-baby and we've found out that two more are expected in September. So life changes, sometimes more than we can expect.

So, I'm back to writing. Might not always be earth-shattering and might not even always be interesting. But so it goes.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Winter Grace

by Patricia Fargnoli

If you have seen the snow
under the lamppost
piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table
or somewhere slowly falling
into the brook
to be swallowed by water,
then you have seen beauty
and know it for its transience.
And if you have gone out in the snow
for only the pleasure
of walking barely protected
from the galaxies,
the flakes settling on your parka
like the dust from just-born stars,
the cold waking you
as if from long sleeping,
then you can understand
how, more often than not,
truth is found in silence,
how the natural world comes to you
if you go out to meet it,
its icy ditches filled with dead weeds,
its vacant birdhouses, and dens
full of the sleeping.
But this is the slowed-down season
held fast by darkness
and if no one comes to keep you company
then keep watch over; your own solitude.
In that stillness, you will learn
with your whole body
the significance of cold
and the night,
which is otherwise always eluding you.

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Permission Granted

by David Allen Sullivan

You do not have to choose the bruised peach
or misshapen pepper others pass over.
You don't have to bury
your grandmother's keys underneath
her camellia bush as the will states.

You don't need to write a poem about
your grandfather coughing up his lung
into that plastic tube—the machine's wheezing
almost masking the kvetching sisters
in their Brooklyn kitchen.

You can let the crows amaze your son
without your translation of their cries.
You can lie so long under this
summer shower your imprint
will be left when you rise.

You can be stupid and simple as a heifer.
Cook plum and apple turnovers in the nude.
Revel in the flight of birds without
dreaming of flight. Remember the taste of
raw dough in your mouth as you edged a pie.

Feel the skin on things vibrate. Attune
yourself. Close your eyes. Hum.
Each beat of the world's pulse demands
only that you feel it. No thoughts.
Just the single syllable: Yes ...

See the homeless woman following
the tunings of a dead composer?
She closes her eyes and sways
with the subways. Follow her down,
inside, where the singing resides.

"Permission Granted" by David Allen Sullivan,

from Strong-Armed Angels.

Gratitude by Barbara Crooker

This week, the news of the world is bleak, another war

grinding on, and all these friends down with cancer,

or worse, a little something long term that they won’t die of

for twenty or thirty miserable years—

And here I live in a house of weathered brick, where a man

with silver hair still thinks I’m beautiful. How many times

have I forgotten to give thanks? The late day sun shines

through the pink wisteria with its green and white leaves

as if it were stained glass, there’s an old cherry tree

that one lucky Sunday bloomed with a rainbow:

cardinals, orioles, goldfinches, blue jays, indigo buntings,

and my garden has tiny lettuces just coming up,

so perfect they could make you cry: Green Towers,

Red Sails, Oak Leaf. For this is May, and the whole world

sings, gleams, as if it were basted in butter, and the air’s

sweet enough to send a diabetic into shock—

And at least today, all the parts of my body are working,

the sky’s clear as a china bowl, leaves murmur their leafy chatter,

finches percolate along. I’m doodling around this page,

know sorrow’s somewhere beyond the horizon, but still, I’m riffing

on the warm air, the wingbeats of my lungs that can take this all in,

flush the heart’s red peony, then send it back without effort or thought.

And the trees breathe in what we exhale, clap their green hands

in gratitude, bend to the sky.

From Line Dance (Word Press, 2008).

Starfish by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Do Not Expect That If Your Book Falls Open

Dana Gioia

Do not expect that if your book falls open
to a certain page, that any phrase
you read will make a difference today,
or that the voices you might overhear
when the wind moves through the yellow-green
and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the
dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon
your shadow walks beside you on the wall,
and the days stay long and heavy underneath
the distant rumor of the harvest. One
more summer gone,
and one way or another you survive,
dull or regretful, never learning that
nothing is hidden in the obvious
changes of the world, that even the dim
reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass
is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of impenetrable things.

Riveted by Robyn Sarah

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end — riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

"Riveted" by Robyn Sarah from A Day's Grace: Poems 1997-2002

I Was Always Leaving by Jean Nordhaus

I was always leaving, I was
about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released
into my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through.

Sometimes, I Am Startled Out of Myself

Barbara Crooker

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.