The Incredible Light of Being Human


"Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."
    - Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"



These lyrics crystallize what I love about Leonard Cohen.  The tipping towards impefection.  Like the ancient Korean potters who purposefully left a mistake in every pot, Cohen raises anthems to human error.  This past weekend, Alan and I traveled, by Amtrak, to Vancouver, B.C., to experience Leonard Cohen give a concert in his native country. Tonight, after sitting with five patients, all of them good people who hate themselves to varying degrees due to the simple fact that they, like me,  are homo sapiensand therefore must make mistakes, my thoughts go back to Cohen's lyrics and their message of error, acceptance and self (and other)forgiveness. 

If we are even to halfway celebrate life, we are going to have to come to terms with being human  Most of the people I see in my practice want to "error-proof" their lives, which is an impossible task and rather ugly, when you think about it, implying, as it does, that being who we are, is being wrong. 

Here's a quote I like:
"Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.  In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive enrvousness on their behalf.
    -William James, "The Will To Believe"

Yes, the same William James who gave Gertrude Stein an A on her philosophy test at Harvard (I think it was Harvard!) on the day when she wrote at the top of her paper something like, "Dear Dr. James, I am so sorry, but it is such a beautiful day outside and I do not feel in the slightest like taking a test".   He could stretch.  He could  weigh this against that. He knew what it was to be human. (He also knew, of course, the considerable weight of the considerable Gertrude Stein's intelligence and ability).

Back to Cohen.  The other thing I love about Cohen is his obvious passion.  It has become common practice, in this ultra-puritanical country of ours, to believe that extra bits of intensity and passion are such "overboard" emotions as to only be explained away by attaching mental illness diagnoses to the front or back of them.  God, I get so sick of this.  Think what diagnosis Dante would be given - or Shakespeare - or any of our greatest writers or artists. Well, it's happened to nearly all the best of them, hasn't it. Go ahead and feel - - but not TOO much.  And, if you DO happen to feel a great deal, for heaven's sakes, don't SHOW it.  Because THAT'S bad form.

To be judgemental, we must feel sure that we know right from wrong, and that we ourselves would never ever confuse the two.  But the experience, philosopher Kathryn Schulz says, "the experience of erring shows us otherwise.  It reminds us that, having been wrong in the past, we could easily be wrong again - and not just in the abstract but right now, here in the middle of this argument about pickles or constellations or crumb cake."

Pickles or constellations or crumbcake. Right in the middle of an ordinary hour in an ordinary day in an ordinary life. Because we are human.  Because we are mistake-makers. And mistake we need not dread being mistake makers.

Because there is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.

                                                                  Stores

Stores and philosophy. Stores and psychology. Of course.  Who says otherwise? Between the asiles of  mushrooms and marscipone are centuries of poetry, philosophy, politics, song, sexuality, intrique, language, poetry, he, he and she, animals, animal husbandry, laundry, sleep, sleep aepnea, medicine, drugs, and other medicine, rules, schools, discipline (or not), religion (or not), language, sexuality.....shall I go on? 
Or shall I go on, merely, to my own two small matters at hand, observed in two Bainbridge Island stores?  Yes, this. I've had a long day, the East Coast is drowning, Ive driven through enough rain to drown plenty of cats and rats all by myself, today, here goes:

               I was in the wine aisles at __________________ standing somewhere between Malbec and Merlot, but leaning and longing towards a Bainbridge Island-made wine whose name I could not recall.  It was a wine Alan and I had both loved (unusual, since Alan is not a wine lover).  We had enjoyed this wine at a local winery with the first name of the winery being Amerlia, while my daughter Kelly and her fiance Bill were here with us.  I remember (but of course!) what we ate with is....cheese, smoked salmon, two types of crackers, salami.  The dte was way before Halloween but the small and charming wine tasting place was adorned with tiny  Halloween decorations.  I even remember the art deco earrings on the very pretty, very nice blond wine waitresses' ears.  I recall everythig except the name of..........the wine.

_________________________wine steward approached me, asking if I needed help.  "I do," I responded, "but I have so little for you to help me with.  It's a Bainbridge label.  They sell this wine at ____________.  The first letter comes early in the alphabet.  It's a red.  There's a wine tasting place down the road on Winslow Way; they sell this wine. We love it. My husband and I were hoping you sell it, but I can't find it."
     "I'm so sorry, "the attractive wine steard said, "I think you might mean a Cuvee, but we don't seel that wine. Someday, maybe." She smiled, but her smile was sad.
     "Cuvee, Cuvee, YES, that's what I WANT!" I laughed!  "Thank you! You're so smart! And now I have to go!"
     "Can I interest you in any other of our Bainbridge reds?" asked the wine steward?
     "Afraid not,"  I said, "I have a patient coming at ten and I only have twenty-five minutes to pay for all this and get back into the office.
     "Oh God, are you a therapist?" she asked.
     I smiled and said "I am."
     tears spurted out of her eyes, she began to fumble inside her pocker for something. Finally, she brought out a sheet of white folded paper.  "Please," she said, "please. Yesterday I saw my doctor at Virginia Mason. She gave me the name of a doctor, a woman she said I MUST see. I have it right here. It's printed right here. Just tell me know if you have  heard of her or not. It will help so much."
      She unfolded the paper.  I looked at the printed name.  There it was.  It's always a bit of a surprise just as it's always no surprise at all. Not in this county. It's what a lifetime of doing has accomplished. Like walking in the same room ovr and over, in the dark.  KAY MORGAN, printed in a stranger's printing.
     "Do ou know this person?" the wine steward asked.
     Strangely, I thought of an old Saturday Night Live routine but I stopped myself from going there. Of course.  'It's me,"I said.  "I am Kay Morgan.  "Your  doctor is sending you to me."
     "The wine steward burst into tears and threw her arms around me, crying and saying, "It's God! It's God God is sending me to you! What else could this mean! I've never been to a therapist before! It's such a narrow little window and here you are! I'm so depressed! I want to die but I won't do it because iat's so wrong! And here you are! You are the name on the paper!"

Yes I was.
It has happened before.
It used to thrill me, as in: I'm Important (Aren't I?)
Now, the feeling is strangely akin to embarrassment attached to a kind of "caring"attached to resolution.

Apart from all of that "inner stuff", it is odd to see one's name, which comes down to being quite an intimate thing....printed on a prescription pad by a doc one has never heard of.....how do we position intimacy, professionalism, suffering, in human life?  How do we do this?  Where is the moral to this story?

October 30, 21012
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Today in Eagle Harbor Book Store, a Grandpa and his young grandson are happy and harried.
     "Grandpa! Grandpa!  I want this book! Remember? You said you would get it for me next time!!"
     The Grandpa, tired though he is, decides he will have some fun; not TOO much, just enough, for he knows how much fun he can have with his grandson, this happy and clever grandson of his.
     "But how do you know today is "next time"? The Grandpa asks with a twinkle in his eye.
      He says this both teasingly and lovingly, with his hand stroking the boys shoulder and the back of the boy's neck.
     "But of COURSE it is NEXT TIME, it HAS to be NEXT TIME, because here we ARE AGAIN, and we HAVENT been here ever since we were here before, which is PROOF, perfect PROOF that is is NEXT TIME!      ----------    Isn't it?"
          Time stood still in the Eagle Harbor Book Store.
     I stand still.  The poet John stands still.  The older man with the black and gray dog stands        till.   The pretty young girl with the red tights and the pink and gray polka dot sweater stands still.
   "Well, of course it is next time!" the grandpa laughs.  "Bring the book up to the counter here and I'll buy it for you right now.  And, by the way, where is your jacket?  Where did you put your jacket?
       The grandson, whose name was Roberrt, looks around for his jacket, but he can't find it.  He starts racing around the store looking here and there without having much success.  Other people too, other people in the bookstore, begin looking about, furtively at first  and then more openly, looking for a boy's jacket.
     The jacket is not found.
      "Well,then," calls out the Grandpa to his Grandson as they walk out the door, "just put your book on and we'll figure out something to tell your mother by the time we get home!"
             At that, everybody in the bookstore has a good laugh.
     There are ways and ways to live life.  There are ways and ways to communicate.  There are ways and ways to react.  There are ways and ways to agree. There are ways and ways to disagree. There are ways and ways to think you are being logical.  There are ways and ways to hurt people. There are ways and ways to stop hurting people.  There are ways and ways to learn. All the best medicines are not on the shelves.

All the best medicines are not on the shelves.      

A Sneeze Is A Cough Through Your Nose

9:45 a.m., on the ferry en route to Swedish Pain Center, this time to inform the director that DSMO ( horse linement, for God's Sake), was perhaps a mistake.  Mistake is the nice way to put it.  Horror story is more like it.  I found the linement in its pure (ha) form at Bainbridge's infamous Bay Hay store and on line in a more  civilized mix of 70% DMSo and 30% aloe vera. I purchased seventy dollars of the latter form, so high was my hope. First, I gave it a go with the undiluted form and my  bottom was red for two straight weeks.  I looked like the Marqui de Sade and I had spent a holiday together.  Do you know the not-so-lady-like-phrase "that burns my ass?"  Well, I was the living example of that not-so-lady-like-phrase.

I tossed the undiluted DSMO.  I suppose I'm lucky the doctor didn't want to have me shoed.  To be fair, chronic pain is inexact and annoyingly difficult to treat.  I don't know how he does it.  Perhaps he's ust a masochist. Or a sadist. I can't tell. His South African accent, though, is awfully pleasant.

Anyway, I'm on the ferry, reading the science section of the New York times; it's an article  about exploding colons and the fact that one can not complete a yawn with one's eyes closed.  I used to worry about that, most specifically, about having to yawn and, just at the end of my yawn, closing my eyes and bashing into somebody or something with my car.  Since I, the World's Worst Driver, have bashed  into any number of things (not people, not so far) with my eyes open, it only seems reasonable that it wouldn't take too many yawns for me to make my way through all sorts of contraptions out there on the highways.  And yet, I am glad to report, I haven't. Yet.  And this, from the same article - certain antidepressants produce yawns that trigger orgasms. Hey!  I've been a therapist for nearly thirty years and have spent many many hours trying to make the case, when truly required, for antidepressants. Come on, doctors of America, come on, you smarmy marketers of pharmaceuticals, let's hear more about this!  If this be true, USE this! (And, by the way, which antidepressants trigger these, um, orgasms?)  Modern therapists want to know.

So now it is twelve-thirty p.m. and I'm ferrying back from my appointment, which went something like this:

The Director: "Hello, there, how's it been going?"
Me: "The DSMO nearly burned my bottom off, the mixture of it  with aloe wasn't much better, the Nortriptyline didn't do a thing so I've weaned myself off, I've studied coxxydinia and have come to the conclusion that not much can be done, I'm fine except for sitting which is excruciating  but sitting is my job, I can't go on  opiates because of my job, I've ordered three chair-things specifically crafted for coxxydinia, here's the photograph, I'd like to give the Lamactyl you mentioned last time a go, I now have a sheet saying I'm good for medical marijuana and that's about it."
The Director: "I'd say you have things well in hand."
Me: "Yes, well, thank you."
The Director: "You're right, you know. Other than removing the tailbone there isn't much we can do.  Thirty percent of people with this diagnosis respond to medication and the rest don't.  It's bloody painful, we do know that.  I don't know how you manage to remain so cheerful."
Me: "I don't."
The Director:"Well, you seem to do better than many people I see with this."
Me: "What are my choices?  Besides, I cry and tear my hair and feel sorry for myself as well......but, look, I can walk, I can dance, I can hike, I just can't sit.....and that's not true, either....I can sit, I just can't sit without pain.  Lots of people have it way waaaay worse than me. In fact, I feel sort of embarrassed that I'm even hear at all."
The Director: "Oh, good Lord, you can get over that one. Here. I'm writing you a new prescription for a cream compound.  With a higher degree of a numbing ingredient.  But you must tell them that you are highly sensitive to anything like DMSO because, believe it or not, they do use emollients like that to push the rest of the ingredients through.  Will you do that?  And call me with the results."

We didn't make another appointment. Hey.  What's the use. 

It's now three-thirty and I have a four o'clock, although normally I don't see patients on Tuesdays.

 Here's an insightful joke the commedienne Dick Gregory used to tell about pain:.

"An old man falls down the stairs and breaks his legs. If he screams, people will run away and he will be alone. If he laughs, they will come to share the joke and stay to help him. That's how you deal with pain."
. 

They Numb Horses, Don't They?

My fourth visit to the Swedish Hospital Pain Center.  I'm sorry to say that the ever increasing doses of nortriptyllineplus the salve, compounded in Poulsbo for $148.00 a tube, have not yet done a thing except to empty my pocket book.  Nor did the rehab, the acupuncture, the botox, the surgical removal of the fifteen inch wire, the medical hypnosis, the series of spinal injectivions, the chiropractive procedures or the "forgiveness" entries, in case my pain was a case of repressed rage directed towards the urologist who surgically implanted the box and the wires or at myself, who allowed the entire botched-up to take place.  At any rate, I spent an entire month, writing letters of forgiveness to just about everyone I knew, to now avail.  Anyway, here I am, on the ferry from Bainbridge to Seattle, sitting on an absolutly flaming bottom, since yesterday I ended up sitting in my car for four and a half hours coming from Alan's place to mine due to an accident on the Agate Pass Bridge.

During my working hours, which are ever growing, I have taken to sitting on various stuffed animals which lie beneath a thin blanket beneath my bum. Throughout the many hours of each working day I only pray I am subtle as I arrange and rearrange the arms and legs of the arnimals in order to provide a continual sense of relief for myself.  My longterm patients know exactly what I am up to and so they go on, engaged inside their week, their histories, their relationships, never batting an eye.  Sometimes I explain, but mostly, I don't. I do worry, sometimes, that my newer patients must think I am playing with myself under my thin blanket but I am too tired, too bored with any explanations swirling around the subject of chronic pain, "You see, in 2005, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah............."

Blah. Blah.

So now I am one of the director of the Swedish Pain Center's patients because....well, it's some kind of  cliche' or law.....I just keep being bumped up because nobody else knows quite what to do with me.   Sitting in the waiting room I often feel "less than" or some kind of fraud as I look around and see patients in wheelchairs and the like.  The  lady I spoke with last time, for instance, the woman with only one usable hand who managed to rustle about inside her blankets until she brought forth a pack of cigarettes and then managed to roll up and out a lighter, wheel herself to the outside patio and light up.  If I were her, I told myself,  I'd do that. I'd smoke, I'd smoke, I'd smoke, so I went out and talked with her for the longest time.

But I am still here on the boat, we must be a bit more than half way across and I notice that we are all on the morose Woody Allen boat.  Somewhere out there is the gala Fellini-esque boat, filled with beautiful ladies with big breasts and big smiles, everybody having a good, no, a great time, and here are we, looking down, watching our inner images crawl across our inner screens, one two, one two, like grim soldiers who must get up too early.....Oh, what have we done to have been give entre' onto THIS sodden boat?  Are we all in some kind of pain?

So what do I hope for?  I hope for this:  I hope that Dr. Gordon Irving, five years younger than me, author of books on pain, will smile at me and wave his hand as if to say "No matter, no matter" when I report to him that I am "no better" - - and then he will pronounce, in a soft but firm voice, in a voice tinged with emotion, yes, just a tinge, "I have found it!  The exact place, the exact site of your pain.  And oh GOD, how you have suffered!  Do you mind if I publish a paper on your case?  I mean, once you are better, which you WILL BE, by the way, and VERY, VERY, SOON?  Perhaps I could write TWO papers!  One, on the anatomical systemology of your chronic pain and another on your absolutly spectacular heroism."  And then perhaps he might kneel down beside me, take both my hands in his and say with tears in his eyes, "Dr. Morgan, I have SO much to learn from you. Indeed, we ALL do.  So much so that we would like you to begin a series of lectures......"

The ferry is nearly ready to dock.  Apparently there is no grandious place my brain is not completely willing to go, and gladly.  Apparently I want both a cure AND applause. Yes,  I am the child, wanting the parent to say, "We can take care of you AND BY THE WAY, how BRAVE you have been!"

It is later.  My blood pressure is 116 over 67.  My weight is one pound above what it was three weeks ago.  There is a knock on the door and a big smiling doctor bounds in and introduces himself.  He is a Foot and Ankle Pain man.  He asks if he might talk with me for awhile.  I say yes indeed, although my feet and ankles feel very well.  He says he is glad to hear that.  He sits down and reads my chart, asking me this and that.  Then, right on the dot, Dr. Irving comes in, says Hello to Dr. Foot and Ankle, and asks me how the cream worked, plus the nortriptyline.  I say the cream needed more "numbing" ingredients and the nortriptyline seemed to have no effects at all.  "Oh, that's a shame," he said, "Well, I would still like you to continue going up on it, increase it to 50 mg for a week, and, if no side effects and no benefits, go on up to 75 mgs for a week, and if no benefits, begin to decrease and ultimately we will get you off it.  It's damned expensive, I know. "

He wants to talk to me now about the medicine Lyrica and at the mention of Lyrica I start to cry because I have been on Lyrica and went manic and then suffered some suicide ideation and I told him this and both he and Dr. Foot and Ankle smypathized and shook their heads and said No, no, of course, and Dr. Irving said, Well, there's only about a thirty per cent chance of it working, anyway.

"Can't you put more numbing stuff in the salve?" I ask.  "I grew up on a farm and sometimes we had to numb up the cows. Can't you treat me like a cow?"  He looked at me for several seconds and then said, quite thoughtfully, "Hmm I can't treat you like a COW, but there IS a cream that is given to horses and sometimes to people, called DMSO.  You get it from livery stable shops or on line.  I think that might be a Very Good Idea.  Yes.  I'm going to prescribe some of that and I want to see you back here in two weeks."  Dr. Foot and Ankle has gone from looking quite distressed to looking happy once again, now that he knows there is a chance that I might be able to take the horse ointment and that the horse ointment might help.

I say to Dr. Irving, "I'm sorry.  I think I must be one of your worst patients."
"Why ever would you say that?" he asked. He is from South African and everything he says comes out sounding British.
"Because nobody can figure out what to do with me?"
"But that is the very nature and challenge of chronic pain," he said. "That's precisely why I love it.  It is a horrible, horrible thing. If we could just cut it out, we would. But we can't. It is extremely difficult to treat. And, in fact, you are a most excellent patient. You have a sense of humor, which is wonderful. And you can sing! I've heard you! The thing is, you simply can't give up. I won't give up, and neither can you. I've written up a prescription for the compound with a more numbing ratio and I want you to find some DMSO. You can use the two together. Let's give it a go, hmmmm?  See you in two weeks."

    Well, that's it.  Life never goes the way one wants it to, or at least it rarely does.  But, as Teilhard de Chardin said, "It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm, you're going to have to wade through it anyway."         

   

Cousins Redux

Spending a yearly weekend with my cousins feels like being dropped into a tale told by Lewis Carroll where everything - or at least some things - are on the wrong places and the wrong sides of the wrong places - and common sense has not yet arrived, although there does exist a sort of common sensibility which twirls and swirls around all of us who are connected to each other by way of sharing a family name of Greaves and living our childhood during the forties and fifties on a Silverdale farm  where we were free to run wild in the summers from morning til night and now, now being ever since we cousins began meeting in 1996, we are free once again, to meet through the fleet form called memory which has both pleasured and scoured our futures.  Our memorys, laden with lacunea.

This past Sunday, Linda, Carolyn and I began our jouney from Poulsbo to Whidby Island at noon and arrived at our destination around three-ish.  Marily and Janet began their journey from Seattle at one o'clock and arrived at their destination which was the house where we were all to meet, at approximately ten o'clock that evening.  Certain stressors accompanied them.  Janet is nearly legally blind and Marilyn, who was driving, had recently undergone neck surgery and could not hold her head in an upwards position for very long.  Those facts, plus the fact that the GPA they were relying upon was a mechanical idiot, found them taking the Edmonds/Kingston ferry not just once each, but twice each, whle the ferry they really meant to catch was the Mukilteo ferry, which they finally took, once.

By the time they arrived at the very nice house cousin Linda had found for us, neither Janet for Marily could manage to say one word.  They just stood there, holding on to the backs of pieces of furnitures, with their knuckles bone white, staring downward and snapping at us if we so much as opened our mouths to ask  any style of questions such as how....or what happened.......    

"We just catch whatever ferry that happens to be in any dock, wherever that dock may be, and that's it," said Marilyn, who finally managed to sit herself down.  Sadly or not sadly, Marilyn's words sent the rest of us into huge gales of laughter.  How could they not?

Marilyn is on oxygen and had preplanned to have several bottles of oxygen sent to the house so that she would be well taken care of, but thre was a big difference between the oxygen bottles she was used to and the type of bottles which had been delivered to the house. Marilyn did have, or seemed to have, two of her own bottles left, but we weren't sure whether they were both full or not.  One might have been empty.  But which one?  L:inda began to tinker a bit with one of the steel levers on top of one of the bottles and suddenly the bottle toppled over to its side, came to life and began to spray a fursious loud and angry spewing of oxgen which sounded like something was going go explode.  I raced to the door, Linda ran behind the couch, Carolyn ended up in the corner, Jan went to the other couch and Marilyn just sat there and stared the exploding bottle in the face as if to say,You little bastard. Linda finally came forth and pushed the lever back down.  So then we knew which bottle was which and we stopped careening about and began to giggle a bit, partly out of relief because it really did seem like maybe the whole place might just explode and partly because we knew we must have looked so funny, all of us running for cover.  But our laughter didn't solve the problem  of what were we going to do about getting the oxygen out of the strange new bottles into Marilyn's bottles?  We needed, we felt, a pair of pliars.  But all we had was a wine opener.

It was either Carolyn or Janet who decided we must pile into Linda's car and go to the police station, which is what we did.  Certainly a police station is the place where ladies of a certain age go if they have a problem.  We sent Janet and Carolyn in and, after ten minutes out they came, staying nobody had pliars but they had called an ambulance and we were to wait for the EMTS who would come and help us solve our problem.  Finally, the ambulance arrived, an EMT man jumped out, with a key made just for oxygen bottles and then they drove us several miles out into the country side in order to get us to a hardware store where we could purchase a small crescent wrench.  At this point four police men magically surrounded us, all smiling and assuring us that if we needed anything more, really, anything at all, all we need do would be to dial 911.

On the way back from the hardware store Janet, who has suffered from child-onset diabetes all her life, took her blood-sufer and muttered, "Damn, it's 300."  Marilyn heard her say something and yelled, "What, Janet? What did you say?"  "Nothing! I didn't say anything!" called back Janet.  "YES YOU DID! I heard you SAY something!" yelled Marilyn.  "NO I DID NOT!" screeched Janet.  "YOU. DID TOO!" hollered Marilyn.  "Now What in the HELL is the MATTER?"  "I SAID I CHECKED my BLOOD SUGAR and it's THREE HUNDRED!" yelled Jan.  "Oh my God, we've got to stop for lunch!" Marilyn responded.  We've been going through this since 1996 and we usually have something, some orange juice or nuts or something, but on this day we had nothing.  Linda spotted a cafe, managed a U-turn and stopped her carwhere we started to barrel out but Janet said, "It's some kind of noodle place and I. Don't. Want. Noodles.  It's okay because I just gave myself an extra dose of insulan."  So we all piled back into the car, returned to town, found a nice cafe, ordered fish and chips, french fries, wine, then stopped at another place for coffee and ice cream.   Such is the way of the ill whom have been ill all their lives.     

Once back in town I knew what I wanted to do; I wanted to find the oldest, most formal jewelry store in Langley and look for a gold bracelet to wear next to my silver watch.  I have been longing for a few months now for such a bracelet, but no luck.  I found my store, went in alone and tried on several gold bracelets.  Too-fancy bracelets, too plain bracelets, and then the jeweler brought out a singularly beautiful bracelet from the Victorian era, shaped rather like two snakes, and it fit me, I liked it, and I bought it. Such is my way.  I rarely ask questions, other than: the price, please. and, if I can afford it, I buy it and that is that.   When I caught up with my cousins, however, there was hell to pay.

ALL MY COUSINS:  "How much did you PAY for that bracelet?  Because if you paid $500 and you were told it is real gold, it isn't, and you were duped.  And if you paid $3,000 and you were told it is real gold, you were duped again, because there isn't a stamp on it."
ME:  "I'm not TELLING you how much I paid. Leave me alone. It's real gold. Stay out of it."
ALL MY COUSINS: "Now, Kay.  You KNOW you don't ask the right questions.  You KNOW you just merrily go your OWN WAY and don't TAKE THE TIME to do things SERIOUSLY and you may have paid a GREAT DEAL OF MONEY for something that is JUST A SHAM and so you REALLY NEED to tell us WHERE THE STORE IS so that WE CAN GO THERE and FIND OUT.........."
KAY:  "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.
ALL MY COUSINS:"Yes. It's no good telling us no because you know we will find it and you know this is for your best interests, so let's go. Come on. We're going right now. It won't be so bad. Come ON. We'll be nice.  We're just taking CARE of you."

So down the street we went, me in front, walking backwards and yelling things at them, like, "Come on, come on, put some muscle into it, if you're so desperate to humiliate me, you could walk a little faster couldn't you? Come on, now let's go, let's go............."

And so we all entered the jewelry store and it is a most sophisticated and formal jewelry store which immediately took some of the hot wind out of their hot little sails ("oooooooh, I like this" and "ooooooooooh", this is a nice piece of work") and I called out, "Madame Jeweler, I have brought a small group of people who would like to have a word with you" and up the stairs she came with one of those round glass things in her eye and one of my cousins asked how many carots Kay's new bracelet has" and Madame Jeweler said, "Eighteen" and my cousins exclaimed, "Oh! That's very good!- - But why isn't it stamped?"  And Madame Jeweler explained that in Victorian Times they did not stamp gold jewelry, but there is a test that is done in order to discern what is gold and what is not and that this test has been done on this bracelet, in fact, it is normally done on all gold jewelry, whether it has been stamped or not, and Kay can take her bracelet to any worthy jeweler and find out for herself that it is, indeed gold, through and through, and eighteen carot gold, at that.

So my cousins were impressed and pleased and had no more complaints,  which is exactly the way that all good stories about gold and investments should go. And now for the rest of this blog please go on to the following blog which is titled "Cousins Redux".......................................    

COUSINS REDUX

At any rate, the Cousins were well satisfied and they agreed that it is a most singularly beautiful bracelet and when everything goes to hell I can sell my investment and eat for a month or so.

That night we went back to our lovely little home and ate hummus and chips and cheese and crackers and salami and olives and fruit and French bread and bottles of wine and we talked, as we do, about our grandparents and our uncles and our aunts and our ex-husbands and our grandchildren and suddenly Marilyn popped up and exlaimed, "Jesus, no wonder I'm not breathing! The goddamned thing's not even in my nose! It's on my chin!"  And I looked at her and at the rest of my cousins and thought, these are the peoples of my life.  They are essential.  Funny, sometimes difficult, often zany, always courageous.  To grow old means to lose what one has.  I am not near ready to lose these women. I love them and I bless them.  I hope the God I do not believe in  will take mercy on me and love me anyway if He orShe is anywhere nearby and knows about my love and about any of my cousins and how much I hate it that I squander my love for them so freely and so loosely during so much of every single year until the time comes when we see each other again.

Nora Ephron Died....And She Was Funny.

Nora Ehron died today and I feel strongly about her death to pull myself out of my blogging lull and pay homage to this phine author of "HeartBurn", "I Feel Bad About My Neck" and "I Remember Nothing", not to mention the author of such screemplays as "Silkwood" (with Alice Arlen), ""Sleepless in Seattle", "When Harry Met Sally", and "Michael" (and more.....)  oh my God, a member of my generation (well, bless her heart, at seventy-one, she was Even Older Than Me) - - Nora Ephron died today!

I don't think people with great senses of humor should be allowed to die.

Cary Grant. Will Rogers. James Thurber. Dorothy Parker. Victor Borge. Jack Benny. Woody Allen (hang ON, Woody!)  ......and, go ahead, add your own.  Bring back the humored dead.  Hold on, all you terrific humored ones!

Not to mention the ones I know, the ones YOU know, in our daily lives.

My friend Christine, she's got the best female sense of humor I know.  Every time we see each other I know it's gonna be a treat.  All I have to do, no matter what's going on in my life, no matter how much pain I'm in, no matter whether my water heater's broken or my hair just got caught in a drawer and I took the scissors and cut it out or I, the World's Worst Driver, just drove into a pole at the nearest gas station, no matter any of that, when I see Chris all I have to say is this:  "Say it."  And she looks at me with her warm eyes and assumes an East Indian accent and clips out, "My dog does not worry about the meaning of life."

And I say, "Again."

And she says it again. With a straight face. Totally.  "My dog does not worry about the meaing of life."  Okay, I know it doesn't sound like much to you, but to me, it's hilarious. It's groundbreaking.  And then I make her go into Yiddish.  And we go ahead and make up a conversation in Yiddish.  And then we just talk and the talk is always hilarious, even if there's crime and death and sodomy in there, even if there's bugs in the cereal in there, which there once were, at my house on Wheaton Way when we were in our twenties and I didn't change cereals quickly enough (or was it flour?) I don't remember - - it's always hilarious.

She says I make her think. Okay, good. I make her think.  But SHE.  SHE makes me LAUGH.
I guess it's a fair enough trade, only I think I'm getting the better of the deal.  Because I know.  I KNOW.  That laughter IS the best medicine in the whole. Wide. World.

And Nora Ephron was funny.  I miss her already.  I miss her in that category of people that you don't know and you know you never will know but you feel like you know because they have helped inform you about the world.  Nora Ephron told me something, something great.  She told me that there is a way of looking at the world, in specific, about bad, sad, really awful events, and turn them into something juicy, something fully of life in a real-sweet-and-salty way.  Without being crass or mean or evil.  Just by staying human and keeping your eyes open and reporting to yourself and to others with honesty.  Just, I guess, by being and staying human.

A friend died the other night.  A friend finally died the other night.  I say it this way because it's the only true way to say it.  Even the Hospice people, who called me today to say Thanks for doing so much and especially for sticking with it and for doing the hard stuff even when she (the friend) got so mad at your for doing all the hard stuff that she (the friend) hated you at the end (which went on for five or six months)  and you put back your shoulders and did the right thing anyway.......anyway, when the friend died the other night, I got together with  two or three other friends who were intimately connected with the life and death of __________ and we toasted ________and remembered the good times and the better times and the way better times and the way way way better times and before the night was over we were showing each other our upper arm jiggles and dancing to Simon and Garfuncle's "Diamonds On The Soles of Her Shoes" and, if that wasn't funny or humorous, neither was it being artificially  down in the doldrums (we had all said goodby about twenty million times) and, when I thought about it later, it did seem so human and so sweet and so group-compassionate.......and I knew that when I told my husband Alan, who also has a great sense of humor, he would enjoy the humanity behind the whole scenario.

Because Alan, too, has a great sense of humor.  Alan's humor is largely a product of New Jersey (exit 105!) , a place which gave us ..........nearly everybody who's anybody with a sense of humor.  Neil Simon. Carl Reiner. Oy, I can't begin to name all of them,  but there they are.  Slightly ascerbic, slightly (slightly! who am I kidding!) insulting! At Alan's fraternity reunion held at Sal's, the guy who came up with the ad campaigns "I can't believe I ate the whooooole thing"  and  "That's a some spicy meatball!"  - - you shoulda HEARD the friendly ???!#&$^@%#^&*#   razzing going on.  And then they'd throw their arms around each other (New Jersey guys are very loving, very physical, both with females and males) and call out, "God! I LOVE you, man!" and the atmosphere would be thick with that kind of missing and loss and love and sweetness that sometimes only grown men can seem to create or summon up. 

Alan can make me scream with laughter.  Like Chris, he can do accents.  Like Chris, he can enter a comedy routine in a snap.  Without his sense of humor he'd just be another smart, loving, handy-around-the-house, loyal, fascinating, generous guy.  Add humor to the mix and he's dynamite.

Alan left this morning, returning to his bungalow on the water for his/our three or four days alone, while he tends to his house and his gardens and his life in general and I tend to my patients and my hair and my life in general.  My pain was extra hurty today and I don't like it much when Alan leaves (our first wedding anniversary is TOMORROW!) but I had shopping to do so I went to the bank and then to Safeway and at Safeway I stood in line for a long old time with a ton of groceries in my cart and I unloaded them with tears in my eyes in that way that tears have of kind of,  it's like when you point your finger at a dog and command, "Stay" and the dog stays but he keeps fidgiting and you just know at any moment that damn dog is going to make a go for it, well, that's the way my tears felt as if any moment one or more was going to break loose and point to the fact that today I was Cinderella and was NOT going to the ball..........and the Safeway guy who was once a Christian counselor who couldn't stand the bad urges of his patients so he gave it up cheerfully told me what I owed and I plunged my hand inside my purse - - and I kept on moving my hand around and around and around inside the large summer bag until it seemed like my hand had developed a life all it's own, kind of like a motorized hand in a bad horror movie, just a motorized hand belonging to a woman who, by now, for reasons totally unknown, for usually I am the most cheerful woman in the vicinity, was a the woman with the moving hand and the buckets of tears running down both eyes, saying, "I - I - I - I - don't - know- whereeeeee - m-m-m-m-my  m-moooney  www-eeent - - - ' and the Christian counselor Safeway guy who really likes me because I say "GodBless" to him every time I leave his station came around and stood next to me and looked both ways like he was looking for traffic and then took me in his arms and gave me a hug and patted my hair and the woman behind me said, "That's all right, honey, you go get your money it's somewhere, that's for sure" and the check-out boy said, "I thought things like this only happened to ME!" which made me laugh and wipe my tears off my face at the exact moment that the woman from the TV part of the store came running over to me with a box of Kleenex because she likes me and she noticed I was standing there, sans dry face, sans money, sans everything.                  

"You go find your money, honey," said the Safeway Christian Counselor guy," and I'll put these groceries right down here, all safe and sound for you," and then he said this most wonderful crazy thing, he looked at the line behind me and said, "It's all right folks, she's a doctor!"

And me, I drove home and found my wallet on my couch, right where I had left it, paying bills.

It's all right, folks, she's a doctor.

And I thought: wow, I really am a wacky broad, but I'm in a great community and there's laughter and love and sweetness and a whole hell of a lot of groceries waiting to be paid for back at the Safeway store.  And then I laughed.  My pain was still clutching and throbbing but I laughed and laughed.

When I returned to Safeway I thanked the Safeway guy and the lady behind the Video place and she said, "Oh, that happens all the time, but we're all so glad you found your wallet, because, you know, we really love you, you kick ass!" 

What a day!  What a great, grand, glorious, wonderful day!  Who could ask for anything more?

Except for Nora Ephron not to die. From pnemonia-complicated leukemia.


Here is a little bit from Ephron's latest book "I REMEMBER NOTHING:

"Here is another thing I've known all my life, which is why you will not find me lying on my deathbed regretting not having eaten enough chopped liver.  let me explain this. You can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholestrol (like lobster and avocado and eggs) and they ahve NO EFFECT WHATSOVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I'm sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?

Which brings me to the point of this: the egg-white-omelette. I have friends who eat egg-white-omeletes. Every time I'm forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the firrst place, egg-white-omelettes are tasteless. In the second palce, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed. Sometimes I try to explain that what they're doing makes no sense, but they pay no attention to me because they ahve all been told to avoid dietary cholesterol by their doctors. According to the NEW YORK TIMES, the doctors are not deliberately misinforming their patients; instead, they're the victims of something known as the informational cascade, which turns out to be something that's repeated so many times that it becomes true even though it isn't.  (Why isn't it called the misinformational cascade, I wonder.)  In any case, the true victims of this misinformation are not the doctors but the people I know who've been brainwashed into thinking that egg-white omelettes are good for you.

So this is my moment to say what's been in my heart for years: it's time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette. I dont want to confuse this with something actually important, like the war in Afghanistan, which it's also time to put a halt to, but I don't seem to be able to do anything about the war, wherease I have a shot at cutting down consumption of egg-white omelettes, especially with the wind of this new book in my sails.

You don't make an omelette by taking out the yolks. You make one by putting additional yolks in. A really great omellette has two whole eggs and one extra yolk, and by the way, the same goes for scrambled eggs."

And then she gives a recipe for great scrambled eggs, which is one of the great things about Nora Ephron, she's always giving you great recipes, especially in her first book, HEARTBURN, which is a book written from the point of view of a cookbook writer, later played by Meryl Streep in the movie.
Great recipes, funnier-than-hell book, funny movie.  She was once married to one of those two reporters, I keep forgetting which one, who broke the Watergate trial.  If the book is true, and I think it's pretty close,  he wasn't nearly as cool as either Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman, but who is?  Nobody's ever as cool as people in the movies. That's their job. To be cooler than the rest of us. If Meg Ryan or Cate Blanchette or whoever the newest  - - well, no, let's say if Meryl Streep or Diane Keaton had been the one losing her mascara in Safeway today instead of Kay Morgan, they would have done it in a whole lot cooler way than the way I did it, just standing there looking sensationally miserable, like a really old eleven year old girl whose dog AND cat just died.

Later on, though, there's a zany funniness to it, which makes life great. Which makes life worth living. Because I did find my wallet and I did retrieve my groceries and I lived to blog about it and I love, more than anything, to laugh about life, even and especially my own life, and besides, when it comes right down to it, the people I love the most, all KICK ASS!

Here's to you, Nora Ephron!  Now you go make omelettes with TONS of egg yolks for Elvis Presley and Cary Grant and Jimmy Durante.  And forgive me my typos.  I'm in a hurry and you know how it is down way way down here, in living-people-land.  
   




















    

Side Effects

I had a huge fight with my psychiatric supervisor (ahem, the therapist I've been seeing since 2004),  this morning, the doc who became the director of the famed Menninger Clinic after Karl Menninger died, the man (but I don't even think of him as a man) - - who flies off to Minneapolis and Chicago and San Francisco and New York and God Knows Where and God does know where, because my psychiatrist also happens to be an Episcapalian priest, or something like that.

Or as close to "something like that" as you can get. 
He could be, if he wanted to be.
But he needs to stop treating me, first.
And I'm some kind of handfull.
Ha. As my North Dakota relatives would say.

So today I wanted a prescription for (a gasp from the entire audience!) benzodiazepdines.  Any of them.  They are extremely effective against anxiety, which, I find,  I am suddenly, in my mid-to-late sixties, up against again (I suffered from anxiety and panic disorders in my twenties and thirties and then, thanks to arduous cognitive therapies, managed to calm down enough to survive for decades without them) but now - - I find myself once again plunged deeply enough into the physical throes of an anxiety disorder so great that it clutches at my body as if I were fleeing and fighting at the same time.

We all know it, so let's say it together: it's the fight or flight snydrome.

Never mind the how of it.  Never mind the why of it. That stuff is all perfectly reasonable and psychologically obvious and observable to both the good doctor and myself.  Yep, here it is, never thought I'd face this again, but here I am, back in the middle again.  Even so.  Back to the benzos.  Of course, you should always think twice before you take a benzo and if you need escalating doses, you need to figure out why and you probably need to stop.  But.  On the other hand, they can save your life.  They are real good drugs. Because, see, the thing is, they work. You can take them whole, or you can nibble them. They help you deal.

 The side effects are, of course, addiction.

So, you guessed it, this blog is about side effects. Take love.  Okay, let's take love.  Love has plenty of side effects, but no doctor, other than Irving Yalom, who wrote the famous book Love's Executioner, is going to go on record as saying love is ultimately bad for you because it has so many damn side effects.  But it does.  It has plenty of bad side effects.  Like: Rejection. Blindness. Repetition.  Wounding. Withdrawal. Judgement. Clouded vision. Fear of vulnerability. Criticism. Seeing Through a Glass Darkly. Seeing Through the Same Glass Clearly. Censorship. The Wish to Keep the Surfaces Smooth. Oh My God, I could go on and on. Abandoment. Ultimant Disinterest. Sexual Dismissal. Sexual Dismantelment. And, finally, and believe me, one of the awfulest of all if you really love that person, death.    

Side effects.  How about..........having children. Raising families. Joining groups, like: churches. Charity organizations. Theatre groups. Becoming a professional. Obtaining AND becoming successful at having a career. Eating. Television. Buying. NOT buying. Becoming a know-it-all. Becoming a dumbbell.  Becoming an expert-in-your-field ("Show me a room full of experts," said Carl Jung, "and I will show you one huge idiot.") 

First dates have side effects. Second dates have side effects.  Sex has all kinds of various and sundry side effects, good, great, terrible, horrible, and indifferent.  And which is worst and which is easiest?  Well, indifferent is easiest, I suppose.  But don't tell that to some of the women who come to see me year after year.  Because the state of indifference can wear you down, folks, and can be a terrible side effect to your nervous system, not to mention your psychological and emotional systems, as well.

It's not all metabolic, you know.  Not by a long shot.

So my doctor, who is also, I think, my friend, or at least a man who cares for me deeply, as do I him, said  he believes I have been less than ....fabulous (my word).....in my reporting....of my goings on and comings off of anti-depressants,  especially in the years since Jim died.  And I admitted, yes, that is absolutly true.  I have not, shall we say,  kept him informed of THE BIG PICTURE. I mean, I didn't know he was so dedicated to wanting to know about T. B. P.  I always thought he would just lightly keep in mind that I was doing my best and that I would let him know if anything went truly awry.  I mean.  Come ON.

But he is a stickler.  Which is why I have remained with him for lo, these many years.

Because I am not essentially a wayfaring, casual, groovy kind of person.  And in the places where I AM casual, I want somebody at my side who is definiately NOT wild, NOT groovy, NOT spontaneous.  I want a balance, see.  I'm just like anybody else.  I'll rescue you and I want you to rescue me.  And sometimes I want you to see things my way.  And other times I'll bend and I'll see things your way.

Well, this morning, I tried to get Dr. B. to see things MY way. (While he, of course, was trying to get me to see things HIS way).  So, first we stared at each other for a long, long time.  Problem #1:  We are both Very Good At Staring.  So, number two, I tried my skills at talking.   Problem # 2:  We are both Very Good At Talking (except he knows Greek and Latin, and I don't.  But I can make up good poems and songs, and he can't. So I figure we're even, even though the two skills don't at all match up.) Finally, I tried humor. Problem #: We're both funny. He's quick. Very, very quick. AND he catches on to my manipulations really well. He can figure out the difference between what's genuinely funny and what's genuinely a manipulative ploy in a nanosecond.

He accused me of bullying.  I accused him of being withholding and not recognizing what a courageous woman I am, what a reasonable woman I am, what a serious woman I am. He smiled. I smiled. We began again. He said he would, of course, write the prescription, but he was not "entirely for it."  I said that, in that case, wild horses could not get me to fill it.  I would not fill it in a lake.  I would not fill it in a cake. (This is not, of course, verbatim, but pretty close.  Pretty close).  His last words were: "Don't forget to call me with the number of the pharmacy you want the prescription sent to." 

My last words were a scrambled up version of the ending of a T.S. Eliot poem.  Really though, just more side effects. 

So what do you do when your life feels like it's going sideways and you feel like you're all alone and the facts tell you otherwise but your chest and your stomach are yelling at you that it isn't facts you need, it's drugs? 

Here's what.  You call your doctor within the hour.  You say that you agree with him.  You say he's right.  You tell him to NOT fill the prescription, that you'll be going to the Swedish Hospital Pain Clinic in two weeks time and that in between time you WILL listen to the new tape on pain and meditation you just bought and that you WILL go to your husband's little bungalow on the water between Shelton and Olympia over the weekend and that you WILL write in your journal and even write a blog, if necessary and bare your chest, such as it is, and tell the world that you are just as sane and just as crazy as the rest everybody else and probably more, and that every single choice in Life has side effects, including the bill for this very phone call.           

Mother's Day Part Redux

Okay, so I got a little off the subject in my last blog about Mother's Day.  I wrote about my mother, then quoted from material I published about my mother, then wrote about two typologies of mother's ("The Madwoman Mother" and the Too-Nice Mother," then wrote a little bit about Anne Sexton, then went into the history of my first days with my son, then ended with a giant splash of generosity and welcoming feelings towards not only my mother but all the mothers I know and love the best.

Or, uh, maybe you read it.

But really - - really -- what I wanted to say (before I said what I did say) - - was this:  mother's are people.

That's it.

Which doesn't come as a giant surprise to anyone, I know, but it feels good just to say it, so let's all just sit back, breathe, plop a big smile on our faces and say it out loud: "MOTHER'S ARE PEOPLE!"

YEAH!!!

Isn't that good?  Isn't that great?  And isn't that true?

Mothers are people who were once little girls and who played dolls or who climbed trees and who ran and laughed and picked their noses when nobody was looking and dreamed and farted and sang along with cds or the radio and wondered about all kinds of things like where babies came from and looked at their Dads and their Moms and thought 'No way' and ate as much candy and cake as they could get away with and loved cereal and hated vegetables or loved vegetables (unlikely) and hated cereal and liked or loved certain relatives and disliked other certain relatives and grew up into junior high and got crushes on girls or got crushes on boys and started worrying about when they'd get their breasts and when they'd fit into their bras and how to deal with periods and how god, how horrifyingly embarrassing THAT would be and suddenly they GOT breasts and they GOT periods and oh god it WAS embarrassing, it WAS scary and somebody helped them with all of this or nobody helped them with any of this or somebody only helped them with it part way and they learned the rest of it from friends, duh, or books, worse, and they went on to senior high and they started dating and that got really scary because they had to go to classes and sit there and stare at the teachers and do at least a modicum of schoolwork while a whole different part of their brains were thinking about Randy or Fred or Johnny the star football player and whether or not to ask them to the Tolo or how to learn to flirt or how to get their Moms to let them shave their legs or how to get their Moms and Dads to let them go on dates and what  do they DO on a date if they get one and oh my god it's all so complicated and what about popularity, are they popular enough, and how do they get popular if they're not and how do they get breasts if  they don't have any and then they graduated from high school and they either had sex or they didn't have sex and, according to statistics, if they had sex it wasn't very goood because nobody's first time is very good, especially if it was the boy's first time too, so they had to go through that hurdle and figure out what to say about it, do you tell, do you not tell and what do you do if HE tells,  and then there's all the pregnancy fears, especially in my day, which, believe you me, was about one million-billion days away from today but even so, this is how it goes, or a variation on this, and the girl grows up but she always carries the "child part" inside of her, she always secretly (or openly) wants her candy as well as her vegies (if she really does ever like vegies), and she's only pretending to be grown-up until the day (if it really does come) when she truly feels grown up (and that could be a long, long way off) and she sometimes dreams about just shucking it and running away, because guess what, Teens, you're not the only ones who want to run away, so do your Moms.

Lots of times.

Yesterday I was sitting with a 48 year old woman, a beautiful, highly accomplished woman, a successful mother of three, and she said, "I was thinking that maybe I should have sent my kids a Mother's Day card that said, 'Sorry for the way I turned out'..."  and then she looked at me and smiled, so I smiled....and then she gave a small laugh, so I gave a tiny laugh.....and then we both threw out heads back and enjoyed a nice long laugh.  Because we knew.  We knew we we both mothers and we knew that motherhood is can be so damn life-defining and we knew that inside her funny little joke we both felt a small flash of liberation.

"Sorry, kids, for the way
your Mother has turned out.
Guess what.  Totally
human, after all.
Love,
Mom."

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY
      
    

Oh, Mother, Where Art Thou?

                      "A mother is a woman who decorates her life with babies."
                                   - Stupid Old Joke

                      "A mother's patience is like a tube of toothpaste - it's never quite gone."
                                  - Really Really Stupid Old Joke

Mothers.  I had two of 'em, both in the same body.  One was funny, beautiful, festive and warm; the other was crazy, furious and dangerous.  The "nice" one stuck around until I was around ten or so, the other one took over after that.  As Mother's Day approaches, I've been thinking a lot about them both, those two, even looking up old publications in which I've described their various gifts, characteristics and foibles.

My mother's name was LaVern, and she was an odd sort of mother.  Not that she seemed so odd at the time, but now she seems very odd indeed, I wrote and published in THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW in a memoir piece titled "The Goodnight Piece".  Odd and endearing.  She tried to keep a firm grip on life by never succumbing to sleep.  Of course she did sleep, but she didn't believe in it, or rather, she did believe in it, but not in the way most people do.  Sleep was her enemy.
     My mother considered life to be a tragically tenuous situation.  Combine this with her philosophy that human beings are weak, that when we finally lay ourselves down to sleep we lie down very still with our eyes shut tight, and that sleep mimimcs  this state nearly to a tee, and - - well, you don't have to be very smart to make the connection.  I don't think I was particularly brilliant, but I made the connection right off the bat.  I identified strongly, as the doctors would say.  My mother's enemies became my enemies, and the most dangerous of them of all was sleep.
     
     And on and on and on.  For msot of my writing life, my mother was my Muse; indeed, I have published more words about her than I have about any other subject in my adult life.  She's been the skeleton in my closet, she's been the flag on my mast, she's been the heart on my sleeve, the lump in my throat, the sword in my belly.  Oh, what is it about mothers!  What a complicated lot we are, no matter whether we are well balanced or tipsy as all get out, we remain one of the most complex  figures in mythology and psychology. 
     For one thing, of course, we are the portal through which you all, we all, gain entrance into existence itself.  We just don't get here without us.  We be it.  It is said that anxiety and fear live at the heart of existence and it may be that anxiety and fear live in the hearts of anyone who has a mother about  their mother.  Freud's famous question, "What do women want?" might be properly turned around to ask, "What do men really want from women?" For if mother is the Powerful Gateway  and the Nurturer, how can she also be the prototype of the One Who is Physically Desired in another woman's body?  What an emotionally and psychologically complex setup this is for males and it leads, I believe, to so much male to female abuse, no matter how many times males shake their heads and snicker, "Oh, get outa here!". 

Yeah, Right.

     International anger against females is just too great to deny that something's going on with men and women and female sexuality, and it's got to be fear.  Great gobs of it. Men hate it, at least, some men that it....that females experience sexuality.   Fear and loathing.  Fear and anger. But I digress....I was talking about mothers, and my mother in particular, that woman who taught me to love language - -  so much I have dedicated article after article to a term she made up, called Bloodtalk.

  From one of my three published articles entitled BloodTalk, Day Pages of a Psychotherapist, this one which appeard in CREATIVE NONFICTION, (may I brag? Along with the work of Ellen Gilcest and John McPhee):

     Language walks around my office all day: all I need do is sti and whoosh it comes, and with it comes thoughts of my mother, the second most beautiful woman in Silverdale, and could she talk!
     Mostly she talked a talk called Blood Talk, a term she made up, a term based on her belief that blood was the source of everything important and she had names to prove it: blood food, blood looks, blood songs, blood people, blood roots, blood time, blood land, blood talk.
     Real talk comes from the inside, she'd say, you'll know it when you hear it so use it when you mean it, otherwise, don't.  I've only known one person who spoke it pretty much all the time and he was a pain in the ass. Your teachers won't use it, the Lutheran minister won't use it, President Eiwenhower doesn't use it, those Bible people tried and ended up sounding silly.  All I can say is, it matters, so watch out.

And my mother said this: How would you like to go to bed as Eleanor Roosevelt and wake up as Mamie Eisenhower? What a joke. They saw Eleanor's husband said, 'I've had war and I've had Eleanor. Give me war.'  Nobody'd claim any anti-wife shit from him, an old bald man like God.  Listen: Eleanor was not pretty. Talk and not-talk get important fast when you're not pretty. Men who write books, they're not pretty, right? See? Mean your talk like blood. Quiet, that's blood, too; it can be mean. I'd say you're not going to be the prettiest so you'd better get serious about this. And stay out of Famous, they'll have you saying words you'll swear you never even heard yourself think.

Well, that was my mother, folks, I can't remember if those words came from her friendly years or......no, it sounds like they came from her furious years.   It's a strange thing, though, those furious years....even though her savage screaming and pounding, which set my autonimic nervous system on a life course of head ducking and tremoring, even so, I would still choose for myself an openly "Mad Mother' rather than the self-sacrificing "Saint Mother", that is, the mother who is overly self-sacrificing towards others, the mother who is so self-effacing towards life itself so that the daughter ends up living in an unconscious state of never feeling "good enough"as if if she were just a little more responsible, a little more dutiful behaving (not actually "feeling", but behaving), a little bit "nicer seeming"......then maybe she might be worthy of somebody's love.  Because, see,  at least you can fight with the Mad Mother.  At least you can develop a Self.  You can hit back, even, if you dare. In fact, sometimes, if you want to live badly enough, you'd better hit back. You'd better dare hit and yell to high heaven.  But the daughter of the Saint Mother of the mother who plays at being the Saint Mother has no tools at her disposal.  All she can do is watch, look and listen and make inner vows to be just like her mother.

Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy.

The daughter of the Mad Woman knows she will do anything, anything NOT to become "mad".  She may become lots of things other people may not admire or want to strive for, she may develop gaps (as I have) that would put the Grand Canyon to shame, she may follow her senses from here to Cheyenne, but she will not kill herself or others out of shame.

                                       I stand in the ring
                                        in the dead city      
                                     and tie on the red shoes.......

                                       They are not mine,
                                    They are my mother's,
                                       Her mother's before,
                                     handed down in Life as heirloom,
                                but hidden like shameful letters.
                                                               - Anne Sexton

And Sexton, of course, sexually used and abused her daughter Linda, and then, years later, of course, she killed herself.  Between mothers and daughters, madness becomes entangled inside a web of feelings --personal and generational feelings.  And there are many types of mothers and many types of daughters and the mothers know exactly what kind of daughters they want and the daughters know exactly what kind of mothers they want and the rule of thumb is, natch, stop it.  Stop it right now.  Give up your expectations.  Give up your demands.  Please.  Because they will not, I repeat - they will not be met.  Because, see, it's not all up to you.  Mothers!  Please!  It's not all up to you!

Remember in the sixties?  That guy, Dr. Bruno Bettleheim?  The doctor who coined the term "Refrigerator Mothers", that dumb bastard, about the mothers of all children who happened to be autistic?  And it turned out later that he was screwing around with his research?  And he was an anti-Semite?  Plus he was all kinds of other kinds of a jerk?   Well, listen, DON'T LET ANYBODY EVER DO ANYTHING LIKE THAT TO YOU EVER EVER EVER AGAIN! 

Because, it takes more than a mother to make a person.  It takes a peer group,  that's REALLY important.  It takes a a neighborhood, that's fairly important.  It makes genetics, ok, that's quite important.  It takes a culture, that's a big deal, too.  And who knows what else!  Actually, everything's pretty much all up for grabs, right now, because none of us can explain what really happens.......take a kid from the slums who gets shot at day after day and the kid grows up and becomes a good person, a well functioning person, a good enough parent, a law abiding person, and more than that, somebody with a sense of humor and an ability to connect with other people and be intimate.....and then take a kid from a so-called "good" family, even maybe a Bainbridge Island family, with the soccer and the ballet and the professional parents and the introduction to the arts and families who barbecue salmon and maybe even ship in soft shell crabs every once in awhile and......oopsie daisy!.....there goes Betsy!

There went Betsy!
Why?
We don't know why.
But where'd she go?
Uh - - we can't answer that.
Will she be back?
Maybe.....we hope so.
No guarantees?
No guarantees.
But we're a good family. We've saved money for college.
Yeah. We know that.
So..where did we go wrong?
Who said you did?
We read it in a book in the sixties.
You read the wrong book.
Oh.

"In Anne Lamott's latest book "SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED", she is talking to her paster and she writes, "Do you think God was terrified for Jesus?"
"Well, at least concerned."
"And what do you do in the face of this powerlessness? As a parent?"
"You get to be obsessed and angry.  And they get to be the age they are, and act like teenagers if they want to.  There is a zer-percent chance you will change them.  So we breathe in, and out, talk to friends, as needed. We show up, wear clean underwear, say hello to strangers. We plant bulbs, and pick up litter, knowing there will be more in twenty minutes. We pray that we might cooperate with any flicker of light we can find in the world."

Obviously Anne was having trouble with her kid at this point in the book. He was nearly a grown-up and he'd gotten a young -- and wonderful, as it turned out - - girl pregnant - - and she'd had the baby - - and he kind of jumped ship and Anne, his mom, was hurt and pissed and - - hurt and pissed.  Because, see, mothers have these expectations of their kids.  Hell, I had Enormous Expectations of my biological son.  Gynormous, as my dear friend Christine would say. I thought he was going to become the most famous Russian Pianist in all of history.

Never mind that he had no Russian in him.
Never mind that I couldn't afford piano lessons.
Never mind that his Dad (not Jim, this was a different man, to whom I was married for one year) was a drug addict and I lived inside one gigantic panic attack and it was the nineteen-sixties and my mother was at her craziest and one evening managed to single-handedly tip the entire ward of women in the Lakewood Hospital Maternity Ward over onto it's (their) knees, me included, until the hospital's security guards ran in, grabbed my mother by both arms and bodily (bodily!) dragged her out of the hospital but not before several of our breasts (our breasts!) had dried up rendering us unable to breast feed our babies and my husband (ha!) got drunk and fainted and then woke up and wrecked the car although I'm not sure it was in that order and the next thing I knew I was sterilizing bottles like crazy and feeding formula to this baby I had wanted with all my heart to breastfeed and the washing machine I had counted on to work had developed a kind of quirk and the wringer part had stopped working and there were no paper diapers yet and even if there were I was probably too much of a purist to say "yes" to them so that I was washing diapers all day and wringing them out with my bare hands and sterilizing bottles and battling my panic disorder all the while trying to deal with the fact that my mother (my mother!) had come to stay with me for five days but she said she had forgotten how to bathe a baby that small and so although he was perfectly healthy (but he fainted every time he took in enough air to begin to cry) and his weight was good and we had the bath temperature just right (although it became cooler and cooler because neither of us could bare to lower him into the water), there we were, passing this baby back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, to each other, "Here, you do it,"  "No, here, YOU do it,"  .....in the big, beautiful house we rented, Tom and I, from the PostMaster General of Tacoma, Washington, with it's ornate furniture, it's beautiful carved oak dining table for the many, may dinner parties we never gave, the fabulous sitting room we never sat in, the magnificent huge bear-claw bathtub I would have loved to have taken a bath in but was so afraid I wouldn't be able to hear my baby cry if I really let go and relaxed in that tub, that I took small, quick spitz baths instead........

     Of course it must be true that, any time a woman begins to write about her own mother, she must end up writing about her own self as a mother; that is, if she has been a mother.  Surely it is inevitable. What else can one do?  Where else, on paper, can one go?  My mother died when she was forty-seven.  I am sixty-six. The only memories I truly trust reside inside my nervous system, which will never be healed.  The rest of me has done a fine job of healing, and I give thanks to my mother for her great gifts she has given me, along the way. Humor. Creativity. Warmth. Music. Language.  A certain topsy-turvy outlook on life which grew as much out of her Canadian Indian background as the poor North Dakota soil my mother and her siblings emerged out of.

                                                           The Uses of Sorrow
                                               (In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
                                          Someone I loved once gave me a box
                                                            of darkness.
                                                     It took me years to understand
                                                        that this, too, was a gift.
                                                                 - Mary Oliver

My mother was a gift, often a terrible gift, but a gift.  Often a magnificent gift.  Sometimes, when I think of the "things" she gave me, I can not imagine how fortunate I was, as a child.  Her voice! Her shine!  Her imagination (how many children have a mother who says, "Okay, we'll pretend this cardboard box is a TV camera and we'll set it here, on top of the fridge, and we'll pretend we're doing a daily soap opera called 'The Mildred and Mildred Show" and you be Mildred and I'll be the other Mildred, and we'll both be married to two brothers named Joe and Joe, and we'll just make it up as we go along!")  She was a lover and she was a terror and she was a gift.  She made herself a part of me.  I was a part of her. For many years, we loved each other. We nagged at each other. We harmonized with each other. We read to each other. I read "To Kill a Mockingbird" to her. She read "Peyton Place" (!!!) to me. 

                                             "Child, born of joy and mirth,
                                                    Go live, without the help
                                                     of anything on earth."
                                                                -William Blake


    But I had it.  I had it all.  I have it all. I am the blessed, blessed one. Thank you, Charles D., I've had the best of times and the worst of times.  And I grew up to unoffically adopt two daughters who have given me some of the absolutly greatest yearsof my life.  Not to mention the grandchildren.  Not to mention Angela, who has given me her and my son's son, Aleister.  So, whatever I said at the beginning of this blog (it's late, and I'm fading fast), Happy Mother's Day everybody, and thank you for reading this big fat probably-filled-with-at-least-one-hundred-typos-blog.  It was meant, somehow, to be solely about my mother when I began, but, like all my writing, which is not for "Publication-publication", and is not for academe, I sniff my way through several paths simultaneously and always  for my own pleasure, not your's.  Sorry about that.

Never-the-less, Happy Mother's Day to all you Beautiful Mother's out there, and you know who you are, but I'll name you: Mel, Kelly, Christine, Erin, Angela, Kathy, Susan F., Susan W. , Ruth, Robin, Sherry, Jane, Jennifer, Bonnie, Brooke, Mary, Fran, a different Kelly (not my daughter),  Alys.....ALL OF YOU!  It's HARD!  It's TOUGH!  LOVE YOURSELVES!  YOU DESERVE IT  THE EPISTIMOTOMIES (sp) ALONE WERE ****AWFUL!****  I LOVE YOU ALL!                       
                                             

What Is This Thing Called DOG?

With apologies to the great Cole Porter:

What is this thing, called dog?
This hungry thing, called dog?
It eats, it poops, it sleeps like a log,
What is this thing, called dog?

Oh, what is it I am supposed to do?
It doesn't speak when I most want it to!
It gets me up at the crack of sweet dawn,
And tries to pee on my mean neighbor's lawn.....

Gosh, what is it I've done to deserve
This four-legged sheer bundle of herve,
It thinks I am it's servant, I know,
It wants to go wherever I go.....

If you can find me out in this fog,
If you can empathize with this blog,
Please send poor me a wise word or two
And help me out with  my new poochie-poo.

Well, we moved my friend Magge into a beautiful home where she will spend her final days in a peaceful and loving situation and, after a year's worth of crisis management, personal life adjusement, shopping, medical visits, Hospice arrangements, breaking through denial, getting relatives over here from Germany, not to mention finding friends to walk the dog in the a.m. and the p.m. because I've been too fagged out to do it all.......as of two days ago, I found myself ending up with The Dog.

Her name is Tess. This situation is nothing new to me, it has not been dumped on me, I volunteered.  When the question of, "Who will poor Tessie go to?" came up, I practically jumped up and raised my hand and exclaimed, "Me! Me! Poor Tessie shall go to ME!"  Well, okay, I wasn't THAT enthusiastic, but I was affirmative, by which I mean,  I was kind.  After all, Magge and Tess had lived with me for nearly a year in my old house in Bremerton, after Jim died.  Tess had sat in on hundreds of therapeutic sessions.  My patients loved her.  In my own way, I loved her.  What was not to love?  I didn't have to feed her, I didn't have to walk her, I didn't have to clean her, I didn't have to pick up her steaming poop when it hit the ground of other peoples' lawns......I just opened the door to my office, the next patient walked in and sat down, I introduced Tess, they said Oh, how pretty, I beamed at her good manners (she bites people on bicycles but not people who simply come in and sit down) and it was easy.

It was so easy.

So now I am nearly unable and practically unwilling to grasp, much less to accept, what is happening.  In the present tense.  Because here I am.  With Tess.  And, at least for three and a half days each week, I am on my own.   

Jim and I had dogs, but they were OUR dogs.  WE walked them.  WE bathed them (in the bath tub, with me sitting there in my bathing suit and our black lab, Dakota, her big eyes rolled back in her head like one of those hysterical-to-the-point-of-madness horses you see in the movies) flailing about in the water), we took them to dog-trainers, we took them to vets, we put them in excellent kennels, we did it all TOGETHER, until Dakota (the last dog and the one we loved the most) got sick and Jim got sicker and finally I had to take Dakota in and have her put down by myself.  Jim, he was too sick and had gone too deeply inside himself with his Mesothelioma, to be too cognizant about Dakota's whereabouts.

"Where's the dog?"
"Gone."
"Gone as in 'not in the room' or gone as in 'not in this world'?"
"The latter."
"Oh. Well. Sure did love that dog."

Well, folks, sorry, but that's the way farmers and railroaders and cowboys talk, when they're dying and their dog gets gone-dead-gone. Which brings it back to me.  Because I feel a little scared and lonely right now.  Like I won't do it right.  Like I'm going to forget something important.  Like, walks.

Like, how many walks is she supposed to get in one day?  I've been getting up at 8 a.m. and giving her anywhere from a twenty minute to a thirty-five minute walk - - and then, in a few hours, Alan has been giving her another twenty minute walk - and then she gets a walk around five o'clock, which is a longer walk -- and then one more before bedtime.  And how much food does she get?  Magge fed her once a day.

Once a day!  What kind of a life is that?  Once a day!  Really?   That awful dry stuff mixed with, what, a half a can of that slimey-looking canned stuff that makes me want to urp?  I can  barely handle the spoon after I slide it out of the can.  God.  That canned dog food is SO awful.  Should I be making my own out of cooked chicken and rice and, maybe, chicken broth? A little basil? 

WHA'??????????

The other thing is, that Tess never looks like she's having any fun.  Magge never played with her per se,  she doesn't know how to rough-house, not that I get very rough, but you know what I mean, I mean she absolutly NIPS if I get too physically playful with her and I DON'T want to encourage the nippy-tendency - - and I DO like to be cuddly and playful with dogs - - so - - folks, I think what I've got on my hands here is a dog that just wants to sleep and eat and walk and sniff and be petted on occassion, and that's.....it. 

And that's a LIFE?  It sounds so TRIVIAL! 

I know what you must be thinking, you must be shrugging your shoulders and saying, not unkindly, "What does it matter to YOU, you're not Tess, YOU'RE not a DOG!"

Well, thank you very much, I KNOW that. I KNOW I'm not a dog.  But I can FEEL.  I know what FUN feels like.  And I know that Tess doesn't look like she's having very much fun.  And, yes, I took her to see Magge, but she didn't look like THAT was very much fun, either.  For either of them.

So there.

Okay, this is so new I guess I'll just play it be ear until I better know what I really am up against.  She's nudging me in my crotch right now, which is SOME kind of sign,  it means she wants something, surely some kind of attention.  I think I'll take her out for a pee-break.  In my own little over-grown backyard, thank you very much.  Before my Tuesday five o'clock comes.

In the meantime, DO, if you have any at all to give, send me some advice. 

That's why I ask the Lord
In Heaven Above.....
What is this thing....
Called.......
                   ..............(love) DOG?   

The Life of What I Do

It's Friday and I'm done for the week and I'm sipping on a glass of cold wine, waiting for Alan to arrive here from his bungalow on the Shelton beach.  It's Friday and my mind is still swirling from just hearing heard three different teenagers inside five hours tell me about the drug life at Bainbridge High School, the Oxy, the weed, the ecstasy, the alcohol, the stuff I've neve ever heard about. Before class, yeah, before lunch, yeah, during lunch, yeah, then down to Safeway to use and get back to class to use more before the next class and then the next and these are - - sorry, folks, but THESE are the NICE kids!  The kids who are taking over their parents jobs at raising the younger children in the family.  These are the kids who are THINKING (at least while they still have brains intact in their heads enough to think). I read their poems. I see their paintings. I hear their values.

"The WORST thing I've seen this past year was on a Nova program, when some asshole got right up closs to a mother turtle who was giving birth, and, during the MOST  INTIMIATE MOMENT OF THAT TURTLE MAMA'S LIFE, he took his camera crew threw lights all over her, and photographed the entire thing. So do you think that was right?  Do you think that was nice?  Do you think that was worth whatever kind of education we got?" 

 His words made me think, and I told him so.  Frankly, no adult in my past week has been so passionate or emphatic about any so-called "wrong" he or she's observed other than a political wrong, and politics is ALWAYS wrong, it's constructed that way. It's a given.  At least THIS kid's wrong, this weed-addicted kid's wrong is......particular. Ideosyncratic. Specific.  And goddamned right. 

But it' isn't just the drug kids I've seen all week, it's the obsessive compulsives, for whom my heart just breaks.  Let's say you are healthy in every way and you function well in every way: good job, good relationship, good enough marriage, good at sports.....but every time you lock your house, you don't believe you've done it.  You just don't believe it. So you have to turn off your car's motor and go back up to your door and try the lock.  Okay, it's locked.  Whew.  Good.  Get into your car again and get set to go, but......wait a minute.  Did you give that key a really good try?  Did you shove it in to the hilt, back and forth, right and left?  Because, look, all your life is in that place, all your photographs are in there and your Dad has just died and....oh Christ.  Here you go.. You KNOW it's crazy, you KNOW other people don't do this, but you have to.  You HAVE to.  You have to back your car up and get back to that door again.  Try that lock one more time. And then more time. And then one more time again.

But it's not just that.  If you turn off your light at just the wrong moment, something bad may happen to somebody you love. Now, THAT'S crazy, you know damn WELL it's crazy, but you also know your'e NOT crazy.  Say you go to turn your basement light off but somebody is calling you, say it's your wife, say she's calling your name and you turn off your light and.......and so what if....I mean, what IF....that moment, during which you turned off your basement light, caused....I mean, CAUSED....somebody else to have a really bad time of it?  Maybe even somebody you know?  Cause and effect. 

And it's your fault.  And you've gotta live with it.  How do you change it?  YOu've got two Masters Degrees, did THAT change it, hell no.  You go to church, does that change it, hell no.  You believe in God, does that change it, hell (sorry, God) no.  So something's gotta be wrong with me.  Something bad.  And, if something's wrong with me, that means, quite simply, that I'M BAD.

I'm bad.  I'm bad and I need to be punished but I don't like to be hurt but I need to be hurt, except that I HAVE been hurt and it didn't help.  It didn't help.  Ah, God.  I must be the dumbest, loneliest mother-fucker in the whole wide world.

And why should this woman, this Ph.D. female with her weird library-looking office in the bottom level of her townhouse, be able to help me?  Why her?  I've been to five, six other therapists.  I've even been to hospitals, begining when I was eleven!   When I was eleven I lost total motor control of my left side!  And now here's this lady saying she thinks she can help me!

This lady.
With her long dangly earrings.
And her "GONE TO THERAPY" wooden sign sitting on one of her shelves.
And her books. Oh my God, her books.  She's probably crazier than I am.

Maybe she'll just tell me I have way too much time on my hands.  Maybe she'll tell me my reflexes are exaggerated.  Maybe she'll tell me to get more friends.  Go on the newest antidepressant.  Maybe she'll tell me to get lost, get a life, get a dog, get a girlfriend, a boyfriend, take up volunterring, stop being so self-absorbed.

********************************************************************************

Oops, and now here's Alan and I need to end this thing.  What quote can I find to end it?  Each week, for the past twenty-six weeks,  various groups of symptomatic people have entered my various offices and - - I must say, I have loved these people, loved - - for the most part -- all.  I have not loved the symptoms, although I have been engrossed and, for the most part, thoroughly fascinated, even captivated..  But I have surely loved the bearers of these most difficult and often tragic symptoms.

And then, each Friday, it has been like all their symptoms - - and all my pent-up compassion and empathy evolving from these symptoms - - have had a chance to slip away.  So here, let me give you two quotes.  One from the great Charles Dickens:

"No words can express the secret agony of my soul.  Even now, famous and carressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children, even that I am a man, and wander desolately back to that hurt time in my life."
                      - C. Dickens   

And the other, spoken by the great film actor Jack Nicholson, who played a person suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder in the movie "As Good As It Gets""

"I'm drowing here, and you're describing the water!"

May I never merely decribe the water..