ONLY ON BAINBRIDGE

Only on Bainbridge Island does the local library so vigorously promote the reading of "the monthly book" which, in all Kitsap Libraries this month, has been CANNERY ROW. So that, if you go to into a shop or a clinic and someone is next to you, you can smile and say, "What about that Steinbeck, huh?" and possibly get an enthusiastic reponse.

Only on Bainbridge Island will your carry-out boy correct you about the type of glassware you are purchasing. The other day, at Town and Country, I was buying some "wide top" glasses which I referred to as "big liquor glasses" whereupon the carryout boy looked at me, smiled and said, "Martini. They're martini glasses. When I graduated from college the first drink I ever had in my life was a martini, served in one of these glasses." "Not a beer, not a whiskey," I said, "a martini."
"That's right," he said. "My Dad thought that's what I should start with."

Only on Bainbridge Island does a very nice restaurant serve free Belgian waffles every morning of the week for breakfast or brunch. Once, when the restaurant decided it wasn't cost effective, they stopped selling them and the public stopped going there. Since the rest of their food is excellent and sells for a pretty price, the BLUE OCEAN CAFE caved and immediately brought back the waffles. My daily breakfast has become a free waffle topped with fruit, which I buy, and accompanied by coffee, which I buy.

Only on Bainbridge Island is it absolutly normal to sit down at a restaurant next to a table of teenagers and notice they are enthusiastically reading to each other out of a small stack of poetry books.

I love all this. It's fun. Today a new client came to see me and noticed that on the small table by my chair, sat a book titled THE EIGHTH DAY. "How I envy you," exclaimed my new client, "to be reading Thornton Wilder at this time of year!"

WHAT I LEARNED TODAY: All influenza originates in birds. Pigs can get it from birds and humans, and humans can get it from birds and pigs but humans can't give it to birds.

A classic martini (I'm certain you all know this) is made with gin and vermouth. The vermouth is virtually simply "waved" over the glass of gin, which will hold either a slice of lemon or two green olives. A classic martini tastes like the flu and may be admired but never imbibed, at least, that is what I think.

There exists an excellent book titled "The Elegance of the Hedge Hog," by Barbery, which is a French book of some note.

Currently, the local thrift store has for sale four Diane Von Furstenberg originals. A fashionable young man took one off the rack (he didn't work there) thrust it into my arms and commanded, "Here. Get into this." "No, no, it won't fit, I can't," I murmered. "Get into it," he instructed again. The woman who was with him nodded Yes. So did the thrift shop owner. I took the dress, turned, entered the dressing room and got into it. I now am the owner of an original Diane Von Furstenberg dress, with more to come. The classic wrap. To own a Diane Von Furstenberg dress and be reading Thornton Wilder at this time of the year is wonderful.

Only on Bainbridge does the local bookstore have a special (lower) price for sending books to people in prison. Since prisons will not accept packaged books from an inmate's family member, this is a real boon. "Do you realize these books are addressed to King County Jail?" I asked the nice dark haired young man. He smiled. "Oh yes," he said. "We like that. Prisoners are an excellent source of income."

Only on Bainbridge Island can you have no discernable income and drive a Volvo. And I'm not talking about Trust Fund babies, I'm talking about real people, in this case a man, with chest hair and a great radio voice.

I have succombed to purchasing a pair of clogs hand built by Danskin, which every other woman on the island seem to wear. I have not given up make-up, which most women on the island do NOT wear. Nor have I given up perfume. Nor do I eat any healthier or any better than at any other time in my life. Canned peas still thrill me (I never tasted a canned vegetable until I married my first husband) - not including, of course, my mother and grandmother's own canned vegetables and fruits. The other day I was so hungry for something green I called out "Yippie!" when I found a can of green beans in back of the couscous in my pantry. I held the can of beans carefully in my hands as I walked to the island in my kitchen. I opened a drawer and looked for a can opener. I opened all the drawers in my house and looked for a can opener. It was pathetic. I tried to open that can of green beans with one knife, with two knives, with a screwdriver. Finally I walked down to Town and Country and bought a Super-Duper can opener. "Are you going camping?" the store lady asked. I smiled. "No, I'm going home and eating canned green beans," I said. She shivered. Really, she really did. She shivered, then smiled and patted my hand. "Good luck," she said.

"Good luck."

If You're Not Going Nuts, You're Not Paying Attention

I don't know why I've titled this blog with those words, I simply remember them from somewhere and they please me. And you can't fool the unconscious. One of my dearest friends has nudged me into posting a blog by saying something like (this is not verbatim) "Your latest blog was about your late mother's birthday and while we all pay our respects to your mother, it is time to move on. WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING?"

Well, baby, here I am.

It isn't so much what I've been DOING, although I suppose I have been keeping right up with the rest of the females in the country in terms of cooking, cleaning, working, loving, attaining a state of equilibrium and then bashing it all done like a child does with her blocks.....it's more a matter of what I've been thinking, what I've been paying attention to, what I've been writing down in my dream journal, my conversational journal, what I've been whispering in my sleep. Last Friday, for instance, I became so elated with a quote from Neil Bohrs (one of the father's of Quantum Physics) that I had to calm myself down with a cup of hot chocolate made with real sugar. Here's the quote:

"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy, the question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct?" I jumped up and whinnied like a pony when I read that quote. It is from a letter to one of his fellow physicists and I love the concept. But is it crazy enough enough to have a chance of being correct? Suddenly this life, this world, becomes a a "measureless theatre" which can somersault its way about the universe, never mind just this world, a universal theatre danced by Nurevye (by the way, why isn't my speller check marking that spelling-choice in red, what's wrong with it, is it defunct or just stupid?) - - Well, as Szymbors Kakfu said in her 1996 Nobel Prize winning speech, "Whatever else we might think of this world, it is astonishing."

I need more astonishment.
But not much more.

Last week I was possessed with memorizing two minutes worth of monoluge from the play "Mother Courage", by Brecht - - so that I might audition for the upcoming "Grapes of Wrath" put on by the Bainbridge Perfoming Arts Theatre. I needed a head shot (easy), a resume (not so easy but I did it with the help of Jim's scrapbook, my scrapbook and my graphics artist friend) and a two minute song, "Red River Valley". So I butted heads with my resistance to memorize the piece I assigned myself, I read it out loud, I wrote it, I read it AND wrote it, I ran line with my dear next-door-neighbor Katie (who was an absolute stickler) and with my friend Robin, I was agitated all day Friday (the day of what I thought were to be the audtions) - - and then I called the theatre.

"This is the seventh call we've received in two hours," said the Lady At The Desk. "The Grapes of Wrath auditions are NOT tonight. We are doing our best to locate the source of the problem."

I felt an intense sense of relief. And then I felt pissed. Because I'd done it, damn it, I'd gone over and over those lines I didn't give a damn about (until I finally undertood them) for three days - and, just when enough attention and enough sleeptime had occured, I HAD them, I really had them, and I also had to lay them aside. No auditions. Oh - and I'd reread Steinbeck's book AND I'd checked out the film (with a suprisingly good performance by Henry Fonda, I'd forgotten how good he was in that film).....and Friday came....and went.....and no Mother Courage. No Brecht. No memories of Brecht on Brecht or Three Penny Opera or The Good Woman of Setzuan or the good feeling I'd gotten when the Pulitizer prizer winner poet Howard Nemerov looked around the room at his sprouting writers at Centrum in Port Townsend and asked, "Doesn't ANYONE HERE have a QUOTE he or she might conTribute to the group? A quote that is interesting or clever or at least SOMETHING?" And I raised my thirty-year old hand and said, "From Bertold Brecht's "The Good Woman of Setzuan" - - "A decent man is like a bell. If you ring it, it rings, and if you don't, it don't." And Nemerov slapped his jolly big knee (but he wasn't jolly at all, no, not he, just his knee) and exclaimed, "Wonderful! Oh, wonderful! Anybodey else?" But there was no one else, or there were several "else's" but we were all afraid of Nemerov by this time, ever since the hour before, when he said to an elderly lady in our group, "My Dear. In regards to your contribution of this.....well, I will be gracious and call it a 'poem'.....I will simply say what the Marine's say: You can not polish a turd."

Anyway, no auditions. So I read. I read and I read. I read my way through Michael Steinberger's wonderful "Au Revoir To All That" and Michael Greenberg's beautiful memoir on his daughter's madness, "Hurry Down Sunshine" and Frank Huyler's gorgeous novel "Right of Thirst". I decided I WOULD buy Dan Brown's latest book, based on the fact that Janet Maslin (a writer and critic I enjoy) said it's "a wonderful read". I like a wonderful read as much as anybody else in this country but I still haven't bought it. But I will. Tomorrow.

Last weekend I took my grandson Aleister to the mall where he played with a play station and chose a new game which which to engage himself and where we settled our butts into chairs near Barne's and Noble's and chowed down on pretzel dogs, surely one of God's greatest gifts to humankind.

"What's your favorite class in school, Aleister?" I asked.
"Recess," he answered.
"And then?" I asked.
"P.E.," he responded.
"And then?" I queried.
"We go home," he said.
"Aleister, you haven't mentioned one real substantial class, " I said.
"Well, Mama Kay, I guess that's just the kind of man I am," he said.

And I have thought. I have thought about my favorite things, like bacon, smelling bacon, cooking bacon, eating bacon. Waking up in the morning to the prospect of making coffee and cooking bacon and eggs. Could anything be better on a cold morning? Don't even whisper "Oatmeal". I don't want to hear it. I refuse to hear it. And reading second-rate, if you will, books like Dan Brown's DECEPTION POINT in the middle of the night. Or this: simply waking up and noticing that you are ALIVE in the middle of the night and CAN do any number of things - read a book, watch TV, drive to Safeway....the options are endless. Buying books. Deciding that one of the immediate missions in your life is to buy hardbound books at Eagle Harbour Bookstore because even this beautiful, richly-stocked bookstore, finds itself in jeopardy in the middle of Bainbridge Island and I Am Going To Do My Part. I do NOT read newspapers on line, I buy them. I do NOT read books on line, I buy them.

And what else? The body perm I paid for one month ago turned my hair a lightish red, so what could I do but dye my hair a simple color of brown? But the light red hair was too light for the brown and the brown was too dark for the light red and I now have a mix of brown-black hair on top of my head, which looks as if it wants nothing more than to jump off my head.

"You might as well fall on your face as lean over too far backwards," said James Thurber. I like that. I think I"ll do it.

I watch Project Runway whenever I can. I watch shlock like Tyra Bank's America's Top Model and lesser schlock like In Treatment. I've been listening to Patti Smith and Yo Yo Ma. Every Wednesday night I sing three or four songs at an open mike at Tizley's in Poulsbo. This pleases me. There is also a somewhat prestigous writing group up here that meets on Wednesday nights and has invited me to join, but I prefer the music to the poems. Writing you can do by yourself, but music requires company; friends, even. People have given up too much to professionalism, to the recorded voice or group, to the well published writer or poet. The best two writers I have ever known in my life, and I have known a few, have never been published. Tell me, what shall we call them, those great writers who do not send out their work? Lazy? Scaredy-cats? They are the best two writers I will ever hope to meet. And they know who they are. And they're terrific.

I think I'm beginning to understand. I don't HAVE "spellcheck" on this blog service, that's why I am getting by so easily. Thank you, dear readers, for putting up with my pathetic spelling mistakes.

I still sleep with Jim's ashes; his ashes still remain warm for an hour and a half to an entire hour after I get out of bed. I still eat canned green peas. And I still sing while I walk down any street, because I don't want to let the bastards get me down. So long for now............

SHE WAS BORN IN NORTH DAKOTA

Tomorrow is my mother's eighty-fifth birthday. Eighty-five! She has been dead, of course, for thirty-nine years, dying at the age of forty-eight. Only forty-eight. When I turned forty-eight I drove to the old Silverdale cemetary where so many of the Greaves family are buried and begged her not to rise up and yank me back down with her. I brought one of her dresses along, the blue one she was so proud of, the one from Bremers, which must have cost nearly forty dollars. I brought flowers. I brought poetry. I brought myself, forty-eight, wide awake with love, heartache and fear. Always superstitious, both of us, I plead with my mother, part Assiniboine Indian who detested Indians, to leave me alone, to quit staring at me through night windows, to stop demanding that I cut my hair, to stop tormenting me about my bitten fingernails, to give me a break, to allow me some peace from falling in love, to allow me some peace.

She was born in North Dakota to an Indian mother and a Scandinavian father whow was a son-of-a-bitch, everybody said so, and there was proof. There was the Thanksgiving in Fargo where her father came late to the table, but not before the turkey had been sliced, grabbed the most beautiful of his daughters with one hand and the turkey, the entire turkey with the other hand, and ran out of the house and down the street. That skinny little wrinkled bastard, crackling with laughter all the way. My father and Grace's husband, who was also a son-of-a-bitch, named Lenny, ran after him but they couldn't catch him. We ate our dinner without the turkey, like I don't know what, like brushing your teeth in front of the mirror without toothbrush or toothpaste, like drinking nonalcoholic wine. The hub is not there. The kick, the punch, the thing, in this case, the turkey. Is not there.

She was beaten, they all were, and one day her father drove over her legs in his old blue truck, because she fell on the way out of the kitchen door, a move that incensed him. His truck had virtually no wheels, she was a bump in the road. A road bump. Whenever I drive over a road bump of any kind, I think of her. She was beautiful. The second most beautiful woman in Silverdale, next to Coma Youngs, who was the most beautiful. They wore red lipstick and smeared their swimsuited bodies with baby oil. They loved us kids but wished we weren't around. We cramped their style and we knew it. They lay in the sun as close to the highway as they could get. All those Bangor men, all those navy men, it was 1950. All kinds of soldiers were still around with their dimples and funny talk. Coma's husband was in the Air Force, my Dad worked in the Navy Yard. Both women had their days which they spent slouching towards fall at which time we kids would return to school and leave them to their, as my mother put it, "Monkey business".

She was insufferable, cruel, funny, more than funny - - hilarious, raucous, self-conscious, critical, nearly illiterate, smart as hell. She possessed a certain type of brilliance along with a high level of street smarts. She taught me to shoplift. She taught me to laugh. I did not absorb her cruelty nor did I absorb her propensity to judge, which came, I knew even then, from fear.....but I did inherit her, as she called them, "flirtation devices", and I have them still. I use them, on occassion. I wonder if I will use them when I am, God Willing, ninety?

Why not?

She taught me not to be a prude. She taught me the dead become new stars in the night sky and that Jesus was watching me closely, writing down all my faults and flaws in a book. She said that He paid so much attention to all my naughty stuff that she didn't have to, but she slapped my face in random moments, just to let me know she knew I was not a very good girl. She let me know I was a bad girl, but then she turned the bad into good with her illogical logic, in which I believed, lock, stock and barrel. She taught me that snakes could wind their way up and out of bathtub faucets. She taught me that all cats want to suck the breath out of all newly born infants. Once, when I killed a bumble bee, she put the dead bee in a box and taped the box to my arm, making me carry the dead thing with me all day. She taught me to open Christmas presents early, to drive people crazy with my desire to know what gifts they got me, to drive people crazy, in general. She taught me so many bad things in so many bad ways that I became a quite good therapist, able to read people and relate in ways other therapists simply can not. She did not teach me good boundaries. She did teach me how to heal. She taught me to not overly cae what other people think. A fabulous cook, she did not teach me to cook. Her obvious skills and abilities she kept to herself. She taught me to think that sleep is dangerous, that life is a hilarious and tragic blip in time and space, and that fancy restaurants are working for me, no matter how uppity they try to be.

She was sexy but she never said a word to me about sex. The day my period came she drove to a drugstore in Silverdale, bought a box of sanitary pads and a belt, threw them inside the bathroom door where I stood, changing panties like some people change partners, and never said one word about it.

By the time she died, she was the living dead. We all wanted her gone. The blinds were pulled, my Dad was suffering from severe migraines, she was drinking bottle after bottle of whiskey. She loved it. She had inherited alcoholism from both her mother and her father, the Indian and the Scandinavian, and anyway, she needed to self-medicate, because by that time she was dying from a fatal if undiagnosed disease called Addison's Disease, and her behavior had become so toxic that few clinics would allow her to stay long enough to meet with the doctor. Finally, when a doctor correctly diagnosed her and then asked, "Do you mean to tell me, Mrs. Greaves, that you have lived with this disease for fifteen years and no one has adequately diagnosed you?" he wept. I saw him. He held some kind of disease book on his lap, open to the pages on Addison's Disease, and he wept. That night, at home, we celebrated, but she was too far gone to have the diagnosis matter much.

Long gone, long gone. Like a turkey through the corn.

I loved her. I hated her. I loved her. I hated her. She was, she still is, my muse. I can not imagine having had a different mother. To have June, the Beaver Cleaver mother, must be terrible for a person, that is what I think. Even the mother from Little House on the Prairie, would be, at least for me, regrettable. I had a mother who bashed me up against Reality so many times I could not help but begin to think. At first it was a struggle to think my own thoughts and not hers, but ultimately I managed to shift myself into another gear and formulate my own inner explorations.

I heard the song again this afternoon as I drove to Town and Country for wine and flowers. "You can't always get what you want, but sometimes........you get what you need." Dear Mother, even with our quarrels, the harsh treatment, the slaps, the vibrating fears, I love you as a mother, a sister, a daughter. I was always at liberty to leave, but I didn't, did I.
I never left.

Happy eighty-fifth birthday to you.

Blog From the Isle of Bainbridge

It beomes more and more clear to me as to why it is that I am here in Bainbridge. It's happy here. No, not because there aren't any poor people to look at, there's plenty of poor here. There's also more Helplines, more church-kitchens, more life-lines, more shelters than I have ever seen. It's a good place to be poor. Wanna complaints about that? Some of my friends have turned up their noses on me, as if I, Kay Morgan, had no right to move to such a snotty place as Braindead Island. Well, folks, that's snobbery for you. I picked strawberries here throughout most of the years of my childhood. This is more my place than it is the new Islanders' place, not that I'm counting or labeling (of course I am, I always do). But this, too, is my place. I have lived within fifty miles of my place of birth all my live-long days, and this is my place, too. 'Nuff said.

Delightful Enough to
Remember Exchanges
From This Past Week
on the Island:

Monday

"But Monday morning, Monday morning, didn't guarantee that Monday evening......." It's 9 a.m. and a book seller at Eagle Harbor Books and I were singing an old Mama and Papa song. An older man stood with what looked to be a frown on his face and listened, or perhaps just stared, at us. I broke off the song and said, "Sorry, sir, we were just having a little Monday song." He raised his head and smiled. "Sing on!" he exhorted. "I haven't heard such frivolity this early in the morning for yeas!" "That wasn't Kay being frivolous," Mary, the book seller/book store owner said, "that was Kay being serious!" "Well, then, I haven't heard such good natured seriousness so early in the morning, so by all means, sing on!"
-Eagle Harbor Books

Tuesday

A young man from Kitsap Garage comes to fix my garage door. I sit at my computer and try to type as I hear clunks and crashes from downstairs. Finally there is silence. He rings my doorbell and I run down, hair in my morning array of colored curlers and open the door. "Ma'm," he says, "I'm afraid there was a terrible accident." His face is ashen. "Are you alright?" I asked. He looked sick to his stomach. "I'm alright, but that isn't," he said, pointing to a large glass chandeleir thing which had at one time been intact but now was a large pile of broken glass with a chain attached to its broken head. "Oh," I said, "gee." "I dropped a tool on it," he said sadly. He looked so downcast! Then he brightened up. "But I took pictures of it so I can show the pictues to my bosses and they can make restitution!" "Will this be taken out of my salary?" I asked him. "No Ma'm, I'm always dropping tools on things and it's never been taken out of my salary." But he still looked downhearted enough for me to want to ask him, 'Well, what do they DO, then, BEAT you?" But I didn't. "You know, we don't have to tell a soul," I said. He shook his head no. "Oh no, Ma'm," he said, "I wouldn't want even one person in the world to know that a representative from Kitsap Garage dropped a tool,and broke a chandeleir." I immediately wanted to adopt him but I have my fill of grown kids.
-from my garage, 135 Sadie Lane

Wednesday

I called Q-West for the tenth time and complained that my patients couldn't get through to me on my business phone. "I am losing thousands of dollars a week!" I yelled. "I am sorry to hear that, Ma'm," (Ma'm! When did I suddenly become named Ma'm?) "just tell me again what is wrong and we will do our best to make it better!" "Don't you even want to apologize first for screwing up my phones so badly?" I yelled. The phones had put me under considerable strain. I was reaching my highest pitch of negative-manic-ability. "I AM sorry, Ma'm, and if you will just tell me once again what is wrong...." I reached my zenith pitch. "Everything! Everything is wrong! And then, when I pushed the red button that says Setup..." "Who told you to push that red button?" the female voice asked. "Nobody!" I said. Loudly. "Nobody told me! I was simply down there, pushing all the buttons and that one turned red so I pushed it too, and......" "Nobody. Told. You. To. Push. That. Red. Button." she said. I hung up on her. I called Comcast.
I fired Q-West and hired Comcast. A guy came out and fixed things. I'm here, Nation. I'm here.
- Kay E. Morgan, Ph.D., 135 Sadie Lane

Thursday
After being on the market for one and a half days, my Liverpool Drive house sells. My real estate agent showed more excitement than did I. "This NEVER happens!" he said. "This is extraordinary! You have GREAT karma! Wow! This is UNHEARD of! One and a half days and they'll pay in FULL! They've been looking for a year and a HALF! They've got a THIRTEEN MONTH OLD BABY! You'll have your MONEY by the END of SEPTEMBER!" His face is flushed and sweating. Well, not sweating, he's too much of a gentleman to sweat. He's a real estate agent and broker and an attorney and an excellent jazz pianist. He studied in India with a guru for five years. And he's so happy! Thing is, I'm not so happy. I'm thinking thoughts like: gee, and I didn't even get to go incognito to the Open House which was scheduled for this Sunday. And, gee, maybe we priced it too low. And gee, this really means I'll never live there again, never live again in that house which held so many terific parties and Christmases and Thanksgivings with friends and relatives. Plus, it was the place where the infant Aleister came to live and be raised for his first five years and it was the place where my beloved Jim died.

I went to Joe's office. "Now here, where it says NAME," said Joe, "you write your name. Good. Now where it says Date. Yes. That's right. Now here, where it says Name again. Exactly. Now once more. Now, initial this page, initial this page, initial this page, initial this page, initial this page. Good. Now once more. And your signature. Wonderful. Wonderful indeed! Thank you, Dr. Morgan."
- my house and Joe Richard's John L. Scott's office

Friday
I go pick up my red Beetle. The one I backed up into either a pole or a tree a few weeks ago. It was an innocent enough mistake but it left my left read taillight hanging off a wire like an eyeball would hang if it only had one remaining vein to barely keep it even remotely near the socket. On the way in I am anxious. How much will this one cost? The garage door cost five hundred dollars. Cars cost more than garage doors. Plus, there was also the broken light in the right front light. My money is dwindling. I have just paid for hardwood floors and the most wonderful table in the world. I scrimp and save on food. I buy books on how to use egg cartons as jewelry holders. I know. I know I have this money thing going in the wrong direction. I know my priorities are wrong. I listen to Susie What's-Her-Name. Orloff? She of the one-pair-of-earrings. I bet she wears all kinds of different earrings when she's off camera. I bet she has a zillion pair of earrings and she pours them on her exquisitely quilted bed with its satin pillows every night, giggles to herself and rolls around on them That earring thing she does has to just be a gimic. I could never just wear one pair of gold earrings. But then, I am the one with the priorities issue and she is theone making millions off her books and television appearances.

P.S. The bill for the car was four hundred dollars.

Saturday

To Seattle to a dinner party at Steve and Katie's, with Bob and Mel Dietz as the other guests. Sitting across from Mel, opulent in her brown lace top, thinking to myself, 'My God, she is more beautiful than ever.' And I wasn't thinking about that deep kind of beauty (which she also possesses) that people like to talk about, the kind of beauty that's beneath the upper level beauty which certain fortunate women possess, I'm talking about physical beauty. Skin. Eyes. Mouth. Hair. An air. A regality of attitude. Lipstick. Alway, lipstick. And then Bob, so darling, so funny when he laughed and laughed at himself in a story he told (and I will always remember the time he was referring to) when he got caught up in his own head-thoughts and didn't make his appearance on stage during one night of the play BRECHT ON BRECHT. There he stood, to the side of the stage, while Bill Harvey and I, the German husband and the Jewish wife, made up line after line and waited for Bob to show up. Bill, skillfully making up Brechtian-sounding lines and me, linking together odd bits of Brechtian poems and song lyrics until Bob, as he put it, "woke up" and elegantly (but of course!) strode to his spot on the stage. Was last night's dinner grand? Grander than grand. A gorgeous fruit salad topped with mint and........I can't remember the name. Warm polenta with sausage, mushrooms, small tomatos. Great bread, buttered with distinction. Scallops, freshly cooked as the rest of us talked and laughed about cultural and political matter (well, some of them wept a bit), lying on a bed of sauteed spinach and something else I don't know the name of. You don't need to know the name of what you're eating if what you're eating is divine. Lying on a bed of Divine. Champagne. Wine. Friends for twenty, thirty, forty years. Friends forever, no matter where we live.
- Capitol Hill, Seattle, Steve and Katie's House

Sunday
It's still early. I've walked downtown for the Sunday New York Times, bought the new Pat Conroy book, given Katie a bunch of fresh beets and sat down to write this blog. I moved to Bainbridge in order to walk. Because my chronic neuropathy makes sitting in cars so damnably difficult. From here I feel as if I can get to almost anywhere. Come on over. The water's fine.

Re-Earthing a Life

This past weekend was the weekend my stepson David and I drove Jim's ashes to Eastern Washington where we were to scatter them above "Old StoneFace", a marvelous natural-stone sculptur facing Morgan Lake, named after Jim's ancestors. Holding the blue and white urn-jar filled with ashes in my hands, my arms alternately icy and burning hot, I held on tight, I watched, I listened, I imagined the clatter of tiny bones inside the jar bashing against the grey ash, imagined the gray ash and burned-white bone chips floating over the lake, swelling themselves into clouds, skimming along with the birds. We who were able, made our way up, up, up to the top of the Saddle Mountain cliffs, where columns of stone stood like giant souls overlooking centuries of fish, beasts, men and women.

To Jim on August 15, 2009

You know why we are here.
This day we scatter your ashes
hours past day break
surrounded by rock, water and sky - -
this place where love and farewell
can ease our sadness over losing you
to the black pain your
lumgs were forced to breed and bear - -

Today there is no pain for you.
Today you will belong,
ash, bone and spirit,
to this place you loved so well.
This place.

The contours of reality
hold us all in its arms, and you - -
you will float above the rock,
you will penetrate the seasons,
you will be one with the secrets
and the mystery known only
to that place of silent wisdom
where You live - -
ancient timless secrets made
of fine gray sand.

- Kay Morgan

The poem I wrote on the ferry the day before, from Bainbridge to Seattle. Such poems are not made in a factory nor are they made by the famous. They are the tame outgrowth of the waking nightmare. They come from a place where it hurt, it hurt, it hurt - - and then, after you sob enough, after you change your life enough, you settle once again for reality. We suffer, then we callin words to help us. We clean out our hearts and skulls with words. And the ash, it follows our arms out into the world where grief is not a mask, where there is nothing to hope for but a good walk back down.
Jim's brother Neil was there. "Jim changed my life," Neil said. "He took me from a 'nothing-life' doing 'nothing in Othello' to a life lived singularly and nationally. A life that mattered. A life of doing things that other people thought were significant." His eyes filled with tears. He was examining his own memory. "I was terrible to Jim when we were young," he said, "I used him to show how much stronger I was, how much braver I was, but it never quite worked out that way. He had a way of getting beat up and looking better than the guy who beat him."
"I know," I said, hugging him. "He was that way, he was that guy. He was always under-estimated at first. And then, when people knew him, at least those he allowed to know him, he was a rock. He was the consolation. He was the question. He was the answer." Really, I was that eloquent on that day, the day of the re-earthing. I felt ill and I watered Old StoneFace with my tears, but I was eloquent. Everything is repaid in time.
Kelly spoke. Brother David spoke. Sister Doris spoke. Cousin Larry spoke. The granddaughters prodded each other, teared up, nodded. I spoke. Everyone had a chance at scattering ash. We scattered it onto the stone upon which we stood. We left Morgan Lake alone, knowing that, sooner or later, the ash would lift, hover and finally once the wind found its own way there, in the afternoon, or nighttime, or sometime.
I held the Dietz's in my mind, and Steve and Katie, and Christine. I held Lisa in my mind and Leslie, Gretchen and Ann. I held Ann and Jan and the Johnsrudes in my mind. And the Freeburgs and my son Kevin, who, in prison once again, lacked the freedom of joining in on this particular hike. Sometimes one doesn't try to understand. Sometimes one just is with whatever else there happens to be.
To be. The reason for Life itself. To be.

There is love in the corpse, there is love in the bone, there is love in the ash, there is love in the five dollar jar, there is love in the tall son and the short widow, there is love in the daughter and the sister who is twenty years younger, there is love in the man who beat up his elder brother, there is love in the brothers who are ten and twelve years younger, there is love in the vibration of heat, there is love in the gray ash and white bone, there is love in the sun, hard yellow and trembling with heat, palpitating, with no place to lay its head.
Jim, the Cowboy, had been in exile and now had come home again. Jim, turned to ash, poured out of the urn with nothing to offer but color and speed, an avalanche of changes, of departures and new landings.

I don't know how to end this. Perhaps that is because Jim's death has not ended for me. A life is so much longer than the books we read. A life is so much slower than the tales we tell. We said fare thee well and godspeed. We turned outselves towards the language spoken at least a good century before. We said things we believed and things we did not believe.
Good-by, straw hat, good-by, camera-man, good-by, coyote, good-by, mind in bloom, good-by, cowboy, good-by, blue jeans. We said good-by and then informed you that we wanted you back. And you, you disappeared into the stone, you left again as you arrived. Silent, steady, satisfied.

Absence Makes the Mind Grow Fonder

Up here at Bainbridge my ability to be thoroughly absentminded has truly come out of the closet. I believe I can say, with some pride and just a wee bit of humiliation, that I am breaking new laws of logic and logistics. Already I have backed my car into my new garage door - - well, my dog backed my car into my new garage door, thus completely eliminating said door from opening and, therefore, closing. My outdoor art, consisting of a giant metal dog and a steel armadillo, have been singled out and banned from making further appearances in my front yard, which is not really my front yard, because I do not own my own front yard.

But perhaps yesterday I rose to new heights of unhappy hilarity when I entered a large building which I took to be BAC, the Bainbridge Art Center, which houses Bainbridge's live theatre. I was pleasantly pleased to note that the theatre was open to the public at noon on Tuesday, and even more pleased to see that the place was studded with plenty of nice looking individuals sitting behind tall desks, ready and waiting to answer questions about performances, schedules, audition sign-ups, etc. I strode up to one of the tall desks and asked a pretty young woman if she could tell me "Which plays you are putting on during this next year?"

"Which plays?" she repeated, smiling brightly.
"Yes," I said, "plays, performances, shows, live theatre ...... do you happen to have a schedule?"
Her smile began to vanish. She looked around for help. "We don't usually....we don't actually put on plays here," she responded. I could tell she was sorry to give me this alarming information.
"Well," I said briskly, instantly ready to be more precise, "wherever you put them on, do you have a play schedule? I want to audition for something this year," I said.
"Audition?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "It's been awhile......well, it's been thirty years.....but I think I can still manage," I said. I pointed to my head and added, "You know, see if the old memory still works."
She was a very nice young woman. She returned her smile to her face and said, "Uh, we are Evergreen Real Estate and Property Management." She waved her arm out and around, inviting me to take a look at the elaborate sign near the top of the vast building.
I brought myself to my senses and said in what I hoped was a blithe but clever tone, "What? You mean to tell me that Evergreen Real Estate and Property Management no longer puts on plays?"
She laughed. "I'm sorry to say Evergreen Real Estate and Property Management decided against performance theatre several years ago," she quipped.

Thank God for people with sense of humor. We both laughed as I backed out of the place, smiling my best smile as I opened the door and took my leave.

One moment later she was standing at the top of her building's steps saying, "I think you want to go to that building," she said, pointing at the large building behind us. "That's Bainbridge Performing Arts!"

"Of course!" I replied, "that is where I intended to go all along!"

We smiled at each other and waved. I walked to the other building but discovered it wasn't open. Two older women were pulling at the door, trying to get in. One was named Ann, the other named Betty. Betty was from Canada, just visiting Ann for a few days. "We were hoping there might be a matinee performance today," Ann said. I nodded my head No, as if I knew something. "Not today," I replied and smiled. They shrugged and linked arms, both seeming happy to receive information from someone who knew something.

I actually don't mind being absentminded, I have been all my life, at least in certain situations, and here I am, healthy enough and well educated enough. But sometimes it gets old. Or perhaps it is simply me who is getting old and my mind is trotting right along with the rest of me.

Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down!

The time has come but it is not my timing, I am still startled by the immediacy Jim's siblings feel about spreading his ashes over Saddle Mountain. Jim died nearly a year and a half ago, practically yesterday. And, when asked where he "wanted his ashes to go," he stated, "Over Saddle Mountain". His beloved siblings experienced his spoken wish as if it were THE spoken wish. I experienced it as a mere something he said because he could think of no place else that momentarily made sense. Not that I was against Saddle Mountain as the perfect spot for his, as they say, remains, but because I have discovered what so many of my grieving widows, widowers, adult children and parents have known, but only through the best teacher (which happens always to be experience) have known. A dead person's ashes are so strong a symbolic image that it is best for the owner (I am the legal owner, and no other) to relax and enjoy them until she or he is fully ready to part from them.

Enjoy them? What kind of talk is that" How does one enjoy one's beloved's ashes? Isn't the word 'enjoy', in this case, almost a taboo sentiment? Not at all, according to the people who know. And absolutly, according to the people who don't.

As a psychotherapist for well over twenty years, I have witnessed again and again an individual's or an entire family's trepidation, sorrow, horror even, about releasing the ashes to the wind or sea. One of my patients, a beautiful doctor who loved her mother very much, still can not bear to part with them, nor can she bear for them them to anymore sit on one of her kitchen shelves shelf where they have taken up residence for the past eight years. She has given herself a task: move the ashes a bit further away, inch by inch, spot by spot, until she feels ready to let them go. The ashes now sit close to the back kitchen door. The good doctor knows it is Time, but her own personal and unique time has not yet arrived. She knows she must do this in, as Bill Murry learned in the film WHAT ABOUT BOB? --- baby steps.

A widow I know takes the ashes out every birthday, every Christmas, ever anniversary, buys herself one white rose, sets the rose in the vase, puts on their favorite music, takes the ashes into her arms and dances with them as the music plays. Does anyone really believe this is an act of prolonged grief? Oh, good grief! Go back and study death and symbolism once again.

A parent I know who has lost her sixteen year old son (she didn't actually 'lose' him; he died) - - keeps his ashes in an old fashioned Gene Autry tin in which he kept his own treasures. It gives her comfort and appeals to what infinitesimal sense of humor she has left to know that her son would have chosen to "be" in that tin and that he could rely on her to know that.

Had Jim known that it would give me enormous comfort to sleep with his ashes which would be encased inside a beautiful red pillow, he would have said, "I want to sleep with Kay, thank you very much. And when and if she needs to change that, then have my ashes be spread over Saddle Mountain."

I think that's what Jim would have said.

And yet, here we go. I'll keep some of "him" here, of course. I will not allow this to become a staggering blow to my heart. This is all part of learning a new emotional vocabulary; take care of yourself first and other's second. And for God's Sakes, don't worry about what is normal or abnormal. The person who wrote the diagnostic manual we all go by sounds to me as if he was uniquely abnormal and - - worse still, uniquely without charm. Respect your gut at least as much as you respect your mind. Unless there's a fire and the unbearable happens, pretty much everything else is an irritant, a small confusion, a bee string to the heart. Go find a good salve. Hold your head high. Keep up a good stride until you can't. Whatever it is, face up to it. If you must, pour yourself into an imaginery bullfighter's outfit every morning. Face the damn bull.

Kelly, Erin, David, Angela and Aleister will be there with me.

And, in his own quiet way, Jim.

Hey, hey, Saddle Mountain, here we come!

From My Journal, My Quotebook, My Life

Monday

A female patient is considering whether she should or should not terminate her therapy with me, since her distress has been resolved. At the end of our session, she said, "Well, I think I'll keep coming for awhile longer just to keep an eye on my own ability to keep growing. Sort of like the crop visiting the farmer."

Tuesday

"Our heads are round so that thoughts can change direction."
- Francis Picabia, painter and poet

Wednesday

"Your body is the life force of some fifty million molecular geniuses. You and you alone choose moment by moment who and how you want to be in the world.
- Jill Bolte Taylor, MY STROKE OF INSIGHT

Thursday

135 Sadie Lane. Thus far I have distressed the Sadie Lane Landscape Committee by placing a (wonderful) tall dog statue-thing in my yard, not to mention the iron armadillo and the Welcome rock. I have laughed too loudly on my patio after nine P.M. And today I backed into my garage door, broke the door, entwined my petite red Volkswagen bug with the said garage door, and chose to worry about the steaks I had just purchased from the Town and Country Market
instead of either my Bug or my garage door. I am a bad, bad woman. Actually, "I" didn't do any of the above....I was babysitting Magge's Blue Healer dog Tess, and, just as we drove into my (narrow little) garage, Tess bounded from the front seat into the back seat, somehow bumping my Bug's gear shift back from 'Park' to 'Reverse'. I knew I was travelling somewhere fast, but my brain (I'm old!) couldn't tell which direction I was travelling. Was I going forward, in any moment forging through the wall into my office? Was I going backwards into the garage door? Well, yes. Yes, I was. It made a big noise. People gathered in the courtyard, just like in old Roman times. Jim, my neighbor to the right, said, "Kay, were you letting your dog drive your car?" I laughed. Ha. Ha. Jeff, one of my neighbors to the left, said, "Wow! What are you going to do first?" "Kill the dog," I said. Some laughed, some didn't.

So anyway, a nice man from down the way came and disengaged my Bug from the garage door and someone else called Kitsap Garage Door for me and the fixer-person will be here in ten working days. Ten working days. The fixer-guy managed to get my car out of the garage and into my drive way, so I can drive my car. I just can't use the garage.

Fine by me.

Friday

My friend Leslie wrote, "I hear your description of sleeping with Jim's ashes and it reminds me of when I ate some of my friend John's ashes up in the Olympic mountains. I felt so strangely close to him then, and filled with a crazy sureness that all of us - - all people and all things are made of the same stuff. I understood that whatever we do, we are, at any moment, eating dinosaurs and breathing in the dust of the Holocaust and drinking up particles of Einstein and Geronimo and Imelda Marcos and Yeats. I couldn't seem to hold that insight for long, but I can still conjure up the love and awe I felt when I held that pliant little sack of grit and powder to my chest."

Saturday

Leslie again. "If I could eat a pound of love, then what? Or shed five pounds of death? The heart is a red suit, as big as a fist, untrustworthy, the seat of the soul, an open book, a dark continent, a multi-chambered vessel from which life pours. The heart is forever making the head its fool. The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of. The hert has reasons that reason does not understand. The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom. In women, everything is heart, even the head. Well, YOU know the heart."

Anybody out there want to take Leslie on as a writer? She's one of the best writer's I've ever been blessed to know. Her and a woman named Lisa Trigg, now Dr. Lisa Trigg, from Tightwad Texas. Lisa, if you are reading this blog, I DO have that magnificent petrified chunk of oak, it stands as a welcome committee inside the threshold of my new home, I will always have it, I will never give it away, and I love it still. You gave it to Jim and he loved it. And we both love you.

Today I took Aleister swimming at the Bainbridge pool. On the way there, he said to me, "Mama Kay. I have a proposition." I couldn't believe he was using the word proposition, so I asked him what he meant and he said the word again and I knew by then that he did have a proposition, so I asked him what it was. He said, " Mama Kay. You know I have always called you 'Mama Kay'." I said Yes, I knew that. "But now that I am older I want to call you something else," he said. I drew in a breath and held it. I have always loved to be called "Mama Kay" by Aleister and I couldn't imagine what else he wanted to call me. "Okay," I said, "Shoot! What is it you want to call me now?" "I want to call you 'M K'., " he said. "It sounds good and it is still a respectful thing to say." I smiled. "MK is fine by me," I said. We all have to grow up sometime. Aleister is helping me grow up.

"You can't say everything, that's true enough. But never-the-less you can try to get across the real flavor of your life. Every life has a flavor, a flavor all its own, and if you can't describe it, there's no point in writing."
- Simone de Beauvoir from THE MANDARINS

I DON'T THINK I UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT THAT........NOTES FROM A WEEK

In the country, where I grew up, there were never so many events. There weren't bulletin boards filled with WHAT YOU CAN DO NEXT! info. There were cows and a bull, horses, a few peacocks, some roosters. Nobody thought of really hurting anything but of course anything got hurt anyway. A firecracker tied to a hand or a frog and light the fuse. A pitchfork in the foot while standing knee deep in hay. Or stir up an ant pile. I don't think I understand everything I know about that.

Has it occurred to anyone else that we are all Off-Broadway?

"A hundred people pass me literally unaware of their surroundings."
-from article in NY Times about cellphones, etc.

Michael Jackson will not be sculptured in butter at the Iowa State Fair next month. "It's a fine line we must straddle of maintaining the traditions that we know are important to our fairgoes," said Ms. Chappel, the fair's marketing director. Well, I'd say straddling the fine line is untraditional enough.

"Biologists don't agree with one another on what a behavior is. Biologists don't agree with themselves on what a behavior is. Biologists can be as parochial as the rest of us, meaning that animal behaviorists tend to reflexively claim the behavior label for animals only, while botanists sniff that, if the well-timed unfurling of a smelly, colorful blossom for the sake of throwing your seed around isn't the ultimate example of a behavior, then there's no such thing as Valentine's Day; and, finally, words may count, but thoughts do not."
-Natalie Angier

OH, THANK GOD!

Scientist Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington says it is highly unlikely that earth will ever be invaded by life from outer space. "The whole idea is pretty silly. The speed of light is so fast and distances are so immense between stars that there's zero probability that anybody could come here to invade. Traveling between Stars is pretty much the territory of science fiction. With our current best rockets, it would take us 100,000 years to reach the closest star. I wouldn't worry about the interstellar air-raid sirens going off tonight." Whew.

He was on the phone. A client from twenty-some years ago, who used to come see me in Poulsbo from Bainbridge. "I used to be in love with you," he said. "And back then isn't so far away."

My new life has its contrasts. That last year, at the old house, felt as though the entire world were drugged.

I have been going through picture album after picture album. My conclusion is this: I sat a lot, I stood a lot. We all sat a lot, we all stood a lot. We all smiled. We all ate. We all were young and then we got older.

"Mom!" Aleister called out. "Yes?" I responded. "No, I do not mean YOU, Grandma-Mama-Kay, I mean my MOM." And then, after a sigh, "This is too confusing. I will have to talk to the person at the desk."

HATE ALERT
I hate it when a waiter says, "Excellent choice." What did I just do? Take a multiple choice test? I ORDERED FOOD, for Christ's Sakes. And while I'm at it, I do NOT "work" on my food, so you can all stop using that nasty little question, "Are you done, or are you still working on it?" Eating is not work for me. Eating is eating. I taste, chew, swallow. I love to eat. I always love to eat. I do not always love to work. Where did they get that? Who said it first? They might as well say, "Are you finished or are you still sweating over it?" or: "Do you want me to take that away or are you still exerting yourself?" Or, "Applying yourself?" Who is the anorexic who said it first, that "are you still working on it?"

"The school was run by Communists."
- a client

"The thing about me is," I said, "when I'm confused, I don't mask it. I mean, I'm congruent. I I mean, when I'm confused, I'm confused EVERYWHERE."

Our sililarities draw us together. Our differences keep life interesting.


Wisdom waits
on the other
side of my
awareness.
I turn around.

Blood

Blood. I'm talking life blood, dried blood, movie blood the color of fingernail polish, pounding blood, thudding blood, flowing blood, rivers of blood, spraying blood, vaginal blood, family blood. When I talk blood, I'm talking families. Last night my cousin Linda (who, other than my children, is the closest blood-relative I have in terms of that bond of calm, mystery and excitement which washes over a person who sits with her blood-people and exchanges family stories, family smiles, family laughter and family tears) visited with her husband Bill and her sister - - and my dear cousin Donna, who is a few years younger than Linda and me. As I sat on my second floor patio drinking wine with these people, I felt again that kinship I don't feel with most people. Donna's smile was, in my mother's terms, a Blood-smile, a smile that you recognize from way back, a smile that knew how to shine through Donna's face but which had also shone through her parent's faces and my Dad's face and my Grandmother Vida's face and my Grandfather William's. When Linda laughed her giggle-laugh I heard her laughter but I also heard her sister Carolyn's laugh and my father's laugh and on and on. Sheer genetics, of course, but a history of genetics identified, in this case, with the Greaves family, that family from Scotland and Britain and Prince Edward Island, that family from water, fields and stones, that family with cads, renegades, bankers, mailmen in Alaska at the turn of the century, horse-shewers (ferriers), farmers and pretty women. That family of hay and horses, cows and tall grass, bullrushes and poplar trees and it all ended up in our faces.

Why does it take a lifetime to appreciate family? How I wish I could have known my mother woman to woman! How I wish I could speak with my father! Today I walked down to the Eagle Harbor bookstore and spoke with its owner Mary Gleystein (incorrect spelling, probably) and as we spoke I felt compelled to tell her something about her father and how he informed my twenty-fifth year on the day my mother died. My mother, at age forty-seven, died suddenly and harshly, of a ruptured pancreas. Dr. Gleystein was her surgeon, a large wooly mammoth of a man, or so I remember him, a man of shoulders and thick of neck, a man who looked as if he could do things, plenty of things, and think plenty of thoughts at the same time. Just as I arrived at mymother's hospital room, Dr. Gleystein opened the door and walked out, walked a slow and lumbering walk, and as he walked he cried. Tears ran down his face as if to say "poor girl, poor girl, there was no saving her and it's a sad thing, that," and on that day I learned that doctors are not all high and mighty or even always capable of saving lives, but that they are sometimes capable of tears, real tears, hot and fat, running down their faces. Tears of emotion but not tears of sympathy, which would be too trite and too shallow. I'm talking "Tears" here. Bloodtears. Tears that say, "What we want is often impossible." Tears that say, "Oh, the human body's rupture is a horrid, horrid thing."

So I told Mary this story and she looked at me and said, "Thank you. Your story means a lot to me. I will tell my brother and my mother. I'll tell my mother, too, even though she is in an Alzheimer's unit. My father didn't ever cry much, until he became quite old, and then he did cry, out of sentiment. So this is a wonderful thing to know. "

For some reason, I was surprised at her reaction, but now, five hours later, I'm not. Every man, every woman, if they live a life that faces reality, becomes a hero. Heroes, all of them. And all of us. Heroes, all of us. And it is a good time when one gets to hear something good or big or generous or important about a member of our family. It's Bloodtalk.

Three days ago I took my grandson Aleister to the movies. We sat through three-fourths of an animated film titled ICE AGE 3. I thought it was only mildly interesting and mildly funny and Aleister must have felt the same because when the movie's music swelled to a fully-animated-movie-swell, Aleister whispered to me, "Mama Kay! I have a great idea!" "What is it?" I whispered back. By this time the movie's music had diminished, but Aleister's voice rang out, through the theatre, "THE CHINESE BUFFET! I AM MORE INTERESTED IN THAT THAN IN THIS MOVIE! THE CHINESE BUFFET IS THE BEST RESTAURANT IN THE WORLD!"

Owen Meany, I thought. My grandson is Owen Meany, what a lark.

I thanked my god. "Let's go," I whispered and we scurried to my car, where Aleister gave me directions to the best restaurant in the world. There were three tables of breaded shrimp, long, skinny crab legs, rice and who-knows-what-sushi, more breaded fish, breaded chicken, breaded vegetables, salads and desserts. I ate breaded shrimp and three crab legs. Aleister ate shrimp, crab, sushi and ice cream. So much for vegetables, so much for salads. Only the necessities, fish, fish and fat.

Today I took Aleister swimming in the Bainbridge pool. The smile on his water-soaked face was a smile of absolute elation, not unlike the smile my father's face wore just before he dove into the cold waters of Puget Sound when I was a little girl. How we all loved to swim! How we braved that stingingly cold water, dragging our limbs through the waves until our skin puckered up like chicken legs! Bloodskin. Bloodwater. Bloodtalk. Bloodmotion.

When Aleister got out of my car and entered my new Bainbridge home, he yelled out, "Darling, I'm home!" No answer. His words amused me; a tv parody but one indicating well of wit. He yelled it once again, but louder. "DARLING! I'M HOME!" No answer. Oh dear, I thought to myself, perhaps they are upstairs making love. "I'm sure your Mom and Dad are on a walk, Allie," I said. "They will be home soon." I went upstairs. No darlings upstairs. No darlings anywhere. And then they came home, having gone to a nearby Mexican restaurant, which they pronounced No Good. Not San Carlos, but the one where the movies are. If they say it's no good, it's no good. I won't go there, ever.

This afternoon I spoke with my stepdaughter, "stepdaughter" being a slight and overly-tidy term for what Kelly and I share, which is immense love and immense respect and immense enjoyment. We decided we would each purchase a "Necklace for Ashes" so, after this August 16th's Eastern Washington memorial service and Ash-Spreading for Jim, we will still be able to wear a wee bit of him around our necks. How could we not? I have dreamed of Jim these past four nights. Each dream contains two Jims: one an infant and one a man. In each dream the grown Jim realizes he is dying and he is sad to have such a little while left to live. I carry the little pink baby in my arms from hospital to hospital, demanding that some doctor manage a miracle and save the child. I am loud, demanding, insistant, irrepresable, the way I'm certain I become when I am beside myself with anger and obliviousness to any kind of social norm. Bloodcry. Bloodinsistance. Bloodscream. Blooddemand.

My dreams. Tantalizing myself with hope, with the idea that if you scream loudly enough, you can make something happen that you want. Desirous of power, of the ability to heal, of the possibility of avoiding, of staving off, death. But, just as blood is powerful in its so-called goodness, blood is also powerful in its so-called evil. It is just as capable of carrying murderers as it is of carrying healers and who says that is a bad or awful thing? Surely it is an awe-filled thing.

So here I am in Bainbridge, in my new house with my deranged telephone system which disallows my patients or would-be patients to get ahold of me, here with my boxes and my bubble wrap and half my paintings hung and half my paintings leaning against this wall or this piece of furniture, looking deranged, left-out, bewildered. Which pretty much describes me, right now, as well. Deranged, left-out, bewildered maybe, but still a person who has family, who has love for her family, who refuses to clean up her act so much that she lose all power of Blood.