Saint Eerie

It’s summer time, and the living is easy…. It’s also rushing by – yes, summer time too. Wooosh, like those August winds I felt, hot and dry, making their way up from Africa, while I slept under a full moon on the Island of Majorca de Palma in the sleepy village of Sollier. I was in my late twenties and the world lay out before me like a feast. It still does, but I don’t rush it so madly. It seems like the more I slow down to soak it in, the faster it moves. In this regard, I hate what technology has done to us.

We had a minor earthquake the other night. After returning from a slow rolling hike up at Bon Tempe, I was changing my shoes and readying to meet LB for dinner and the house began to twitch. Secret Agent Dog ran from something chasing her about, or so she thought. When things like this happen there is a instant, though only momentary, confusion. What’s this unfamiliar thing? Reflexively I search my memory banks for a touchstone of experience. It’s funny that the first thing my mind landed on was a commuter train.

Many years ago, not long after I first moved to California, I lived in a house away from a commuter train track in San Mateo. It was also an intersection so not only did the house thunder and shake as the train went by, but the bells and flashing lights of the crossing gates were harbingers of the roar. While our earthquake didn’t have bells and lights, for a moment I found myself looking out the window, wondering where the commuter train was. It just disappeared into the early evening summer air.

And yes, at about the time I was looking out the window for the train and Secret was looking behind her, equally at nothing, it settled in my head that indeed that wasn’t a train, that was just little quake – that was just the earth giggling a little. The phone rang, it was LB, did you feel that!? Yes, I felt that.

I was a teenager playing house with the first boy I thought I loved, whose name was Ed. This isn’t my Ed, but a different Ed. At the time, my Ed was only eleven or twelve years old and to my surprise was living just around the corner. Further strangeness is that he was my paperboy. We likely passed one another on the street a hundred times. I find that all very weird and eerie.

That Girl

I had an amazing experience yesterday. I went to see the lovely and amazing Tati for a two fucking hour massage. Yes two.. I said two. Seeing her is always magical and amazing. Two hours of seeing her was no different – just more. More on that later.

So Cassie came by weekend before last, or maybe even weekend before that. We talked out possible strategies and supplements that might help my poor, aching feet and chatted, etc. Some things resonate, other things don’t. I like her approach. She puts forward a menu of ideas and encourages me to move toward those that resonate for me. I mull things over for longer than the average bird. My ways are so odd. I don’t discuss my processes often because they work even if they don’t make sense to the average onlooker.

For months (years?) she brings up the whole yoga thing. My neighbor has asked me to go with her for months (years?) So I approach said neighbor last weekend and she’s taking me along with her this Saturday morning. She was so excited – it was sweet. I’m really looking forward to it. Now I have to buy a yoga matt.

Anyways, back to Tati. I realize that one of the things I really get from Tati, besides a kick ass massage and wonderful intentional healing – is time. Time to think, reflect, not think, meditate, let myself go, stop myself. It’s really valuable time that I don’t give myself enough.

I had a reminiscence of traveling through the Italian Alps with a man on a train. It was cold. We were holding hands. It was dark. We were whispering. But I kept thinking that I’d never been to Europe with a man, never traveled there with someone I was so cozy and intimate with. Or have I? I kept finding these memories. I was with someone, getting off a train in Rome when a swarm of children surrounded us, begging, trying to pilfer our pockets for whatever they could. I grabbed the hand of a young boy from my pocket – I looked at his eyes, defiant and rebellious. I’ll never forget those eyes. He was missing teeth. His fingernails were painted blue. I was with this same man. Where was this coming from. And suddenly I remembered.

He flew from San Francisco and joined me in London. I think we were in Paris on Christmas and it was snowing. It was all beautiful and I remember feeling very, very tired. There was a time this boy thought I was something. He was a sculptor and a playwright. Conversation was indeed scintillating. I’m not sure what happened. After several years – four maybe – we said goodbye as easily as saying, pass the salt. And that was that. How was it that I had forgotten all this? Misplaced these nocturnal train rides, Paris, even? But I remember New York with this boy, almost like it was yesterday.

This comes back ‘round. One thing he mentioned is that he held in a certain awe that I would do what I say. I would make a plan and I would do it. It would feel big, a pipedream, out of reach – but I would mention it and then I would make it happen. This mystified him. The thing is, I wouldn’t bother mentioning the really out of reach, the real pipedreams, the things I feel are too big. If I’m taking about it, surely it’s eventually going to happen – when I’m ready. He’d see me drawing out an idea on a sketch pad in a train and talking to him about an idea. I’d stuff the scrap of paper in a bag. A few days later I’d have it etched out on canvass and be filling it in with acrylics – asking him how he thought I could get an affect I was striving for. He didn’t know how to make his ideas happen. I don’t know how to not let mine have life.

So as Tati is working her magic, I come to see these moments. They surface – scribbling in a sketch pad and then the canvass laying on the floor of the apartment in the Western Addition. And it seems strangely attached to telling my walking companion that we should rise early and go to such and such a place to try to take photographs of birds. And it seems related to telling Cassie, over coffee one day, that I’m exploring the possibility of buying a house. And it seems related to bad art nights and water color painting. And suddenly this is related to decreasing my hours to four days. And I know I need to work four days a week and I realize I’m afraid like I’ve never been afraid before. I’m afraid and I’ve been letting the fear stop me instead of trusting – just trusting – and doing – just making it happen.

So I went to The City today with this feeling left lingering and I sat down with the new Administrative Director and explained how I was going to work four days a week. He asks me when. June first, I say. We’ll work out the details, but let’s start there. And then I unravel a tail that needs telling – one best saved for telling here at another time. But this is another beginning. And I’m left with the feeling that there’s a scrap of paper in a satchel somewhere that needs transposing on a fresh canvass with all different shades of green.

I wonder what became of that boy. But not so much, I suppose, as I wonder what became of that girl.

We Were Children

Eenie meanie miney moe, catch a tiger memory by the toe. If she hollers let her go. And my mother says to pick the very best one and you are IT!

Yesterday I drained and cleaned out the hot tub. The fiberglass shell is much slicker when it’s not full and just a little damp. There’s an inverted V-shape in one of the contoured seating areas, intended for your knees to drape over, positioning your feet at one belting jet that gives an awesome foot massage. For reasons I can’t explain, I was standing with one foot on either side of the sloping upside-down V and for reasons I further can’t explain both feet slipped outward at once and both knees crashed inward, toward the top of the V, simultaneously. It hurt like a mother. The right knee seemed to get the worst of the tork. I kept it elevated all night. I suppose I’m lucky. I don’t think I tore anything, just torked it good – no bruising but it hurts, hurts, hurts.

So while an early evening of chores was fumbled, I was laying on the rug in front of the fireplace, knee propped up on pillows and had plenty of time to think. Thinking is my affliction. The unexamined life is not worth living and all that rot. Examine, I do. Think, I do. I let my mind thumb through a pile of reruns, memories from this era or that. It paused on this one:

I was twenty four and he was twenty five. Under other circumstances I don’t think we’d have even been friends. In these circumstances, I watched his friends disappear one-by-one – unwilling or unable to sit with the changes happening in him. But I don’t think he really had friends – he just didn’t know it. Or maybe I just couldn’t see the friendships – built on such strange and frail foundations. I cared for him, perhaps I even loved him, but I didn’t like him. I spent hours and hours with him. We spent one night together. I arrived at his place around midnight. There was a candle on his bedside casting a warm, almost romantic glow around the room. Sometimes I held his hand. Sometimes I talked to him. Mostly we sat in silence. The folks from the coroner’s office didn’t arrive until five or six that next morning.

One day, a few months before, I held his frail, wasted, naked body as he wailed. The porcelain bathtub in his Tenderloin apartment was too hard and he lacked buoyancy – he was just bones and nerves covered by a bit of flesh. If I held him, he could bathe and not be in pain – nerves crushed between porcelain and bone. He cried. He shook as he sobbed. “I wanted to make $30,000 a year,” he screamed at the wall. “I don’t want the first time my name is in the newspaper to be in my obituary,” he pleaded. As though either money or some notoriety is worth anything – has any value. And some people don’t know how to make anything of their lives. He didn’t even really get one.

No one else knows these things about him. No one but you, now. You and I. That he wanted more. That what he got wasn’t enough. That it was just he and I. I cleaned shit off the walls and floor when he couldn’t make it. Sometimes he thought I was his mother – no, really, he really thought I was his mother. I was twenty four. He was twenty five.

We were children.

On The Subject of Blood

I didn’t know Zimbabwe used to be called Rhodesia. I wonder if Rhodesian Ridgebacks roam the rural roads.

On the subject of blood. It’s very dirty. I think I’ve addressed this before. If you have fantasies and ideas of vampires, the whole undead thing, I think you’d do better off sucking on a potato. It’s safer, cleaner and it’s sort of undead – it thrives in darkness. While I say this, I personally have yet to come to appreciate the potato as a complex and beautiful thing. Blood may be dirty, but it’s also beautiful, historic and complicated. I wish a clever scientist with aural appreciations could find a way to convert cytokines to tones and unleash the symphony of blood. And you know it’s not just blood – it’s the entire system that’s so wonderful. It is not ‘irreducibly complex.’ The brilliance, wonder and genius of it is that it is reducible. The redundancy in the system is exactly what allows it to be a dynamic, evolving and learning system. It is mathematical, musical and mysterious.

We can break the immune system down in many ways. It’s no different than anything in this regard. For example, we can walk into a room and talk about the number of people who wear glasses versus those not wearing glasses. Similarly we can talk about the cellular versus humoral arms of the immune system. We can talk about people who write left versus right handed. We can talk about innate or acquired immunity. And in all instances there is a spectrum, a spectrum of sight, those who wear contacts, and those who perform some functions with their left hand and others with their right and of course those who fall smack dab in the middle as wholly ambidextrous.

So what’s the difference between innate and acquired immunity? Innate immunity is what we’re born with, ancient immunologic knowledge passed down generation after generation. It’s very old wisdom – very valuable. It’s our first line of defense and it’s typically extremely effective. That we carry this ancient wisdom in our blood, this intelligence, isn’t it some kind of evidence of reincarnation or at least proof that it’s really quite possible that we have other kinds of ancient wisdom that we’ve yet to really tap into and understand? When birds migrate or animals engage in certain unlearned behaviors that promote their survival, we’ll call it instinct. But what is instinct other than mysterious wisdom? And why is this wisdom mostly recognized as behavior? Haven’t you ever had the experience of knowing things and not really understanding how you know it? When people say, trust your gut, what they often mean is trust the innate wisdom that is within you – the ancient knowledge that we need to learn to get in touch with and learn how to listen to. But then I wonder, in the same way some people’s innate immunity fails to control disease, perhaps not all innate wisdom is good. Makes you think.

And acquired immunity is learned. While certain cells and functions within us are a result of ancient wisdom, to complete the system there is also the ability to learn and learn we do. We can teach cells to do new things – which is the foundation behind vaccination – to teach the immune system to recognize and respond to say a flu virus before it ever actually encounters the flu virus. Thus if and when someone becomes infected with the flu virus, the immune system is primed and ready to act – to contain and control the infection before it causes disease. A very misunderstood thing about vaccines is that they do not prevent infection, they prevent disease. But I think a very cool thing about the acquired immune system is that we are not all equal – we’re not all able to mount an effective and robust immune response to an “immunologic lesson” – we do not all learn the same. Some have immunologic learning disabilities and/or defects and often these are in discrete areas – in some instances causing no noticeable harm or effect, in other instances leaving one vulnerable to certain diseases and in other instances these defects have benefits (perhaps unintended.) And I think when we dig deeper, what we find is that on some fundamental level, something is controlling our capacity and breadth of learning. I’m apt to believe that what’s controlling our capacity and breath of immunologic learning is actually much to do with ancient wisdom, genetic information passed on through history, from the earliest days of evolution, from our mothers, mothers, mothers, mothers, mothers, mothers… and so on. So there’s that spectrum, that continuum of experience – the inability to slice diversity neatly along a line.

It seems (almost) the human condition to deny this link with the past. It seems (almost) the human condition to deny this link with the future. It’s perhaps something we need to rail against, the inability to live in the long now. Somewhere the silver cell divides.

I digress.. more on blood later. Or, well, maybe not (does it bore you?) But you know, think about it… if I touch you is there perhaps some wisdom my skin cells whisper in the ears of yours? I like to think on it – the logic of your touch, intelligent kisses, our ancients communing while we pretend we’re just having tea…

Men At Work In Trees

Good morning world. I started the day off with a 7 am conference call. In honesty, I had the phone on mute most of the time and was perusing the internet for interesting reads. Isn’t it their job to keep me engaged and entertained? Oh wait.. where’s my responsibility in that? Well.. there’s that again now isn’t there. Back to my responsibility.

I have my morning routines – my ablutions, rituals, what-have-yous. I drink my coffee, scan the blogs, read the newspaper, cuddle with the Honey Bee (she is such a cuddly punim!) When I’m done reading and cuddling I take my coffee out to the hot tub and meditate on the day while I look at the sky – be it clear blue like today or marbled with veins of wispy clouds like yesterday – whatever the case, I look at it and I contemplate the day while my coffee is perched on the edge.

Yesterday the clouds reminded me of my grandmother’s fireplace mantel at Christmas. She’d drape multicolored lights on the mantel, cover it with spun glass and place little angel figurines in the clouds of spun glass that reflected and diffused the lights just so. She’d sing Sunday school songs to me and my sister. Her efforts never cultivated or instilled in either of us a belief or faith in God, but I loved to hear how her voice trilled and quivered when she sang. It made her happy and that was fun to watch. Equally entertaining was watching her in church, sway like a fan at a rock concert, hand in the air, waving back and forth like tall grass in a gentle breeze, chanting like a mantra with eyes closed, “yes Jesus. Thank you Jesus." That was part of the color of my youth.

Her and grandpa’s purple Cadillac, his big silver and turquoise rings, his boleros with scorpions encased in amber or Lucite and his Pentecostal preacher ways. Fire, brimstone and the odd and out of place pool table and pin-up-girl calendar in the basement. In the weeks and months before his death he would chant, “Through faith we are healed. Through faith we are healed.” But he died anyways, quite young really – a painful death from cancer. That big formidable man brought to his knees like that. It just wasn’t right. He was larger than life, like the character from Big Fish. He spun tales. He’d win us prizes at the winter carnival ice fishing competitions by going to his fish house on the big lakes up north, catching huge fish and keeping them alive in ice water until the competition on Lake Nokomis. They’d never seen such fish come out of that lake! He’d proudly present his grandchildren with the spoils of the day – a twinkle in his eye and a big belly laugh. He could instill belief and faith in a frog.. not necessarily a faith a God, but definitely a faith in him. He was the kind of person you could believe in.

I love my memories of them. So back to my ablutions. I am distracted in my routines because there are tree trimmers in the redwoods next door and there’s something disturbing about peering up at the sky and redwoods and seeing a workman’s butt and the soles of his shoes. It somehow disrupts and disturbs things like fond remembrances of grandma and fails to bring an order to the day. So instead, I’m here, leering at the workers through the living room windows who are infringing on my routines and wondering when I can get back to the dealings of the day.

Whichever Comes First

The frog in the riverbed at the top of the falls was maybe the size of a dime. It looked like someone doodled on its back with felt tip pens.

Back at Doodlebug it was just me and a few teenage girls who work there. At one point a ten year old came in to work on a project for spell. I sang along to Tommy James and the Shondell’s while I put the second and third coat of ceramic glaze paint on Secret’s bowl. The teenage girls seemed to know the words to all the songs that I didn’t. We have committed different things to memory.

Tar and rock roads were laid through Southwest Minneapolis, in the 1970’s, during the recession. At that time it was a blue collar neighborhood. My parents rented farmland from Mrs. Rudder in Eden Prairie in expectation of disaster and the basement was stocked with canned foods when the first news and ripples of economic crisis began. We filled our red wagon with ice and bottles of Coca Cola and mom and I pulled it round to where the workers were laying road and sold them Cokes for a nickel or a dime – I can’t remember which. We waited while they drank so as to get the return on the bottles. Mom laughed while dad tossed mud crusted squash across the kitchen after the harvest. He worshiped her and she was happy. I wonder what happened to them.

Despite everything, there’s not a part of the story I don’t cherish. I wish I could have loved it all more when it was happening. I remember being a very nervous child. Something frightening lived behind the wood panels of the walls. At night, the vacuum cleaner would come alive and make sinister faces at me. When I dared leave the bed and slip downstairs, mom would let me slip my cold feet between her thighs to warm them up (that must have been cold and uncomfortable.) My grandpa was a Pentecostal preacher who wore boleros with scorpions encased in Lucite, big silver and turquoise rings, loud Hawaiian shirts, drove a purple Cadillac and pointed to a scar from an appendix operation and wove tales of being injured by Indians. Grandma canned tomatoes and made strawberry preserves.

In the summer, mom would haul a lawn chair and a cooler to Lake Harriet and I’d stay in the water until the very last minute – crawling along the shoreline and then running across the hot, hot, hot black top foot path to the shade of the concession and just hope she might buy us ice cream or saltwater taffy. We’d all put damp towels on the searing vinyl seats of the Buick Station Wagon – avocado colored I think, or was it mustard? Everything was made of splintering weathered wood painted forest green or white with sun faded red lettering, not quite pink. Grandpa caught fish on big lakes up north and kept them alive in buckets of water outside his garage so we could win the ice fishing contest at Lake Nokomis during the Winter Carnival. My brother sold my sister’s turtle for five dollars at the Aquatennial. Under a full moon snow sparkles like diamonds and the trees have secrets. Before Dutch Elm disease, every street was a canopy of color in the Fall – you couldn’t even see the sky.

These girls in Doodlebug, they don’t know seasons like that. They don’t know poverty or wealth like that. They know it all differently. We have committed different things to memory. They will have memories of Oleander and Naked Ladies blooming in late summer. They’ll talk about what they were doing when the Twin Towers were struck by airplanes the way my parents remember where they were when John Kennedy was shot. And then once these pictures are painted just so, with the right number of coats and we set them to rest… we’ll fire them up and fix them like this for eternity or whenever they break.. whichever comes first.

Ode to Bed

What I’ve been meaning to say was that the beach was beautiful on Friday. The fog burned off about 200 or so yards off shore and while it was sunny, clear and mild on the beach, I spied the fishing boats shroud in a haze of crisp fog further out. Just brilliant.

Saturday we went to the funeral service, burial and reception for Ed’s second cousin (his mother’s cousin.) His mother was close with this family as they retrieved her from the orphanage after her father was killed in the war and her mother couldn’t manage being a single parent working full time. From what I’ve gathered she spent her weekends with her mother and weekdays with relatives after the stint in the orphanage. Any rate, this man was more like an uncle to Ed given his mother’s relationship. An Irish police officer and later a sheriff, the ceremony was all you’d expect with Irish prayer and proverb scattered in among the traditional Catholic Mass, honor guard, bag pipes at the burial site and a whole lot of libations. (He’d never arrested someone for drinking and driving because he didn’t view it as crime. The closest he came, his brother, who was on a drunk driving task force, told the story, was when a neighbor nearly hit his patrol car whilst careening through a red light at an intersection. His fellow officer drove the neighbor’s car home and they handcuffed him to his bed – releasing him after their shift was over.)

A different era. He was a member of the Elk’s Club. The woman who sat next to me at the reception said, “Oh they threw the best parties, the Elks. Bands inside and outside. Once I smoked a cigar at one of those parties. We were drinking and bands were playing and someone passed around a cigar. When we got home my husband said that the cigar was taking things a little too far.” And she laughed (may he rest in peace.) Somehow a more innocent time. A cigar taking things a little too far. Oh for our vices to be so benign.

On our way home we bought a new bed, again paying more then I’d planned or budgeted. (At some point the spending just has to stop, but it feels like it hasn’t even wholly begun.) I’ve had this old bed for some fifteen plus years and while it served me well as the best bed in the world, now that it sags and we roll into the middle it’s startling to think it once deserved that title.

A different era. The lovers that found grace in those sheets - quiet moments, forgetful moments. Ah. I have no sadness in shaking off the past. Sometimes I wish it would disappear with all its trinkets and baubles. Other times I cling to it like a life raft. What is it about ghosts that sit with us more steadfast then our closest living friends? It’s like once you die or fade into the past you become the house guest that won’t leave. That old bed is too crowded anyways.

The Reunion

The Reunion

Ed and I rose at the break of day and stumbled around the hotel room, gathering our manies and fumbling about as we bumped into one another and wiped sleep from our eyes. We took a taxi from the hotel to the airport and slumped wearily in uncomfortable vinyl chairs waiting for the boarding call. I slept heavy on the airplane on the way back to San Francisco while he dozed and read a bad airport novel – written for travelers who crave distraction without demand. Occasionally I’d wake up and look over his shoulder to read a paragraph or two, make a comment about the bad prose and resituate the pillow.

We’d been up until near 3 a.m. I’m not exactly sure why. The reunion came and went. I still don’t understand it but it’s a good thing to do once every twenty years or so I suppose. Good to remind. Good to remember. Good to go back and see what’s there.

A pre-reunion event was planned at a dive bar on Excelsior Boulevard – an informal no-host gathering. In truth it was the best part of the reunion because you could hear the person settling weight across from you and have some semblance of conversation. If it hadn’t been for that I wouldn’t have marked the time as worthwhile.

Entering Al’s bar I recognized no one and was overcome with a sense of foreboding. As I settled in, however, pearls of remembrance flittered by and it wasn’t long before I was hello-ing and what-have-you-been-doing people. It was empty chatter. I largely found myself bored before I even asked the questions. This was the problem – the context. People were in a mad rush to connect and move on – say their paragraph and drive to the next stop to say their paragraph again. I’ve never been inspired by stop and go schmooze. It doesn’t make it wrong. I’m not judging it. It’s simply not my thing. That’s okay.

Eventually two old high school friends arrived, bringing along a beautiful Texan girl as one of their companions. We sat, we talked, we bought each other rounds of this and that and something started to feel a little familiar – like color was entering the outlines. It was pleasant and far less contrived and the evening moved from a hair shy of unbearable into quite pleasing. This was good.

Reunion day approached and Ed and I collected our things and ambled over to the hotel with a collection of snacks for sustenance. We arrived later than we’d hoped and didn’t have time to avail ourselves of the pool or the hot tub. Instead we lounged in the room and watched a special on the attempt to salvage some wreckage from a Southern California breakwater region. Despite heroic efforts the salvage crew failed and left the fate of the disaster to nature’s devices in the end. We dressed with reluctance and eventually descended.

I was titillated, excited, to see old friends who were old friends, learn about lives and indulge in a feast of discovery and rediscovery. It didn’t really turn out this way. I actually had more substantive conversations with people I hadn’t known at all in the day and some of those who I was most anxious to see had few words and seemed readily distracted. One of the women looked at me rather passively and sighed, you just dropped off the face of the earth.

Yes. I did. Perhaps I thought we all did. But it was true. I did. It was taking more than just the weight of what we all had together to hold me to it. We were strikingly different creatures, moved and motivated by different things that weren’t apparent to us then for all our self-indulgence. But as the evening passed, at least among those women, I realized that my own self-indulgence was perhaps the mirror I was seeing. The weight had kept them together and grounded with one another. They had marriages, children and connected lives – they passed holiday cards among themselves and were genuinely involved with each other’s lives. In witnessing their ease, comfort and joy with one another I found myself looking on this with reverence and respect and a chapter of a book had written out its ending for me. I had to unclench a fist on that reality and admit that something real and enduring persevered out of it. A rather beautiful little epiphany unfolded and those women molded together to be an emblem of it. They closed a cold circle, but it’s the coolness that often lets the caste harden into shape. Not for a moment could I find myself begrudging that. To the contrary, it was a reflection of how we all chose to live out this story and it seemed impudent to resent fate in the face of beauty. I held to awe instead and let the pen fall.

I spent the evening largely with three of the boys turned to men over the years. For some reason men seem more willing to let life happen and remold even in the face of varied journeys without making it a betrayal. Maybe it’s simply more an expected and accepted gender norm. Ed inspired dancing and we waded through music and laughter. The rum and the whiskey loosened our spirits and our lives. We didn’t speak on the past, just the now. So we bounced around the evening with a casual disregard and this was good – an honest form of grace in the evening. Ed maneuvered his usual antics, stirring events to benefit the underdog and rise a little ire. He was a gem for the evening and we danced and we laughed and at some point late in the evening we fell into a short quiet sleep and it was over.

I’m left with a montage of stilted conversations – some of which it would have been interesting to carry through to some conclusion or another. Instead most will be left as things unfinished that were suppose to be in just that state of growth and decay. The evening was a little ribbon on the past – decorating something that’s perhaps more interesting when it’s left unopened as a perpetual surprise waiting to happen.