Sunday, November 10, 2013

                                     

                                                                  COMFORT

 Today I went to buy a goose down comforter for my bed but I didn't know what size. Full size? Queen size?  How much my life has changed since I used to have a King size, since I used to know what size my bed was. In between then and now, so many pieces of knowledge have fallen off or away or have collided with other bits and scraps of awareness or understanding.  I tell you, there is always something.

"What's the difference between the full size and the queen?" I asked the woman with the furrowed brow standing behind the counter at Macy's.  And then I gave a little giggle because my question sounded so ridiculous, as if I were asking something about proportional variations of the female   English royalty.  "Well," said Miss Furrowed Brow, "the queen size is larger than the full size, which is smaller."

"Ah," I said, nodding my head. "I see." 

Live big, I thought to myself. I bought the queen.

                                                                                 *

 Comfort appears in odd places. Last week I read Donna Tarrt's masterful book, "The Goldfinch, (the inside cover flap said the book is "masterful" and indeed, it is, in three days. So good was it that I wouldn't allow myself to drive to the grocery store for food and instead chomped down a stale bagel and a can of green beans for dinner. This was last Sunday.  That last night of reading, the book's words comforted me as few books can and and no food could and, when I had finished with it's seven hundred and something number of pages, I dove right back in and began reading the last two chapters again. Sometimes food is comfort, other times, words.

I think my mother's words were a great comfort to me.  Well, her words and her vast collection of song lyrics.  Well, you musta been a beautiful baby, 'cuz, baby, look at you now/buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jacks, I don't care if I never get back/Hey, good lookin', whatcha got cookin, how 'bout cookin' somethin' up for me/You say tomato and I say tomato, you say potato and I say potato/And He walks with me and He talks with me and He tells me I'm not alone/And they thwam and they thwam all over the dam/cuz today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic.......and on and on and on.  Her lyrics, her songs, stunned me, moved me, pinned me to certain rooms, to the big brown and red tweedy couch, to the kitchen table and chairs, to the linoleum floors, to the bright blue Plymouth we drove around in.

Once, my father drove the blue Plymouth over an embankment, leaving the three of us in a precarious position, with the car stuck, as it were, stuck and nearly teeter-tottering in mid-air between earth and waterAs my father gingerly moved his way out of the car and began attempting and successfully so, to push the car back towards full, solid ground again, my mother jabbed me in the ribs and said, "You know what we can do about this?"

"No," I said, "what?"  I was very scared, I remember, as it didn't seem as if either she or I had the power to do much of anything.  "We can sing!" she said and began at once, seeing a chorus of that song that went something like, "Or would you like to swing on a star, carry moon beams home in a jar and be better off than you are....or would you rather be a mule?" 

Singing. Okay. Now, that was comfort.
                                                                         *

Sometimes I put movies on.  Some people have comfort foods, I have comfort films, new ones and old ones and in all sorts of categories.  There's Bergman's Fanny and Alexander for the "Happy- family-Christmas scenes" but for those scenes only, and then I shut the whole film down.  There's the Marx brother's songs and dances, there's Woody Allen's Husband's and Wives and Hannah and Her Sisters and Midnight in Paris, most especially for the scene in which the young writer from Pasadena, who is transposed each night at midnight into the early Parisian scene which includes Stein and Toklas and Heminway and the Fitzgeralds.....sits down for a drink one night with Luis Bunuel and Salvadore Dali, played by, Adrien Brody, rhapsodizes about "the rhinoceros".  I love that scene. 

                                                                           *

There are clouds.  There is having the New York Times delivered right to your doorstep every single day of the week (as I do).  There are good, funny, entertaining neighbors who cook good, yummy, food.  There are new thick towels.  There are old, dear friends.  There are ferry boats that don't sink, even when the wind is blowing like all get out. There is music, of course, Gershwin and Cole Porter and Kurt Weil and the blues and jazz and rock n' roll and more than that, too much to mention, really. And there are old screenings of tap dancing by Astaire and and Gene Kelly and Ann Miller and those  African American tappers who were so incredible they could tap your eyeballs out.  There is an attitude I will call "Mutual", meaning common, shared, together, both, as in mutual hope, mutual interest, mutual likes, mutual beliefs.  There is pizza. Ice cream, most especially pistachio.
There are eyeglasses.  Bathtubs.

There is my ex-patient, who studies voice.  Her job is a very serious one, her level of expertise and responsibility is extremely high.  Many people depend upon her.  Many of us depend upn her.  When she isn't doing her job, she studies voice.

"I find it comforting," she says,"isn't it wonderful."  
                                              

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

You Must Remember This

Introduction I

The blog before this, or, I should say, the "look" or "appearance" of  some kind of "mutilated" blog before this, is not the result of some crazed series of moments in my life; it is the result of what happens what you write a perfectly good blog and hit SAVE but forget to hit PUBLISH.  I hit "save" several times throughout the piece, as it was a longish piece; I never once managed to remember to hit "publish" at all.

Introduction II

As psychologically healthy beings, we are not finished in our development at twenty-five or thirty,  we are never finished, ever.  While it is true that what we take to be our personal identity often appears to be linked to early developmental patterns and models, it is also true that we are always in the process of trying to feel alive, safe, comfortable and in movement,  and that, through these efforts, we are endlessly altering our own capacities for growth.

Even if we are full of suffering or major impairment, most of us try to restore our connection within whatever large (or small) areas of available emotional, physical or neurological motility so that we are also moving towards connection and safety.  As Leonard Cohen writes in his song Anthem,  "There is a crack, a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in/ That's how the light gets in."

We are adapting all the time, no matter what our age. I have been thinking about this process today, most probably because today I took four of Jim's large framed photographs which had previously been lovingly lodged at Bob and Mel Dietz's home, to the local UPS store, in order to send them to my daughters, Kelly and Erin, two to each.
                                                                

                                               You Must Remember This
                                                             

"I feel as though I am sending my children off to school," said Mel, as she accompanied me to my car as I carried the photographs out of their home. I don't remember how it was that they acquired the pictures: did they acquire them all at once?  Did Jim gift them to our beloved friends, did they buy them, did they acquire them one by one or all at once? How did any of this happen?  All I remember is that Jim's photographs, the Bird on the Wire, the picture of the ship in the puddle which won a fairly large contest, as I recall, the picture of the yellow ladder leaning against a wall, the picture of the red door, which became the cover of a book published by Knopf,  had seemingly always hung there in the Dietz's stairway between their living room and their upstairs, in that order, in that way, so that if you entered Bob and Mel's home, there they were.

I nodded at her words, my own eyes welling up with tears.  Ours' had been a long friendship and Jim had been an enormous part of that friendship for forty-three years. His matter-of-factness, his intelligence, his humor, his various and sundry talents and capabilities, his many interests, his kindness, his  gentleness, his cowboy-lonesomeness, his creativity, his steadfastness, his interest and ability in food and cooking, his ability to love.....well, let me stop here,  Death doesn't end one thing, friends. I am smiling as I write these words, but tears are very near the surface.

And still, there are the pictures.  How Jim loved to take pictures!  What stories I have about Jim and his brother Neil out there in the blasted hot Eastern Washington desert, trying (and ultimately succeeding), to take one damnedly decent photograph of a rattlesnake striking at their camera.  What danger! What joy! What nonsence!

But it was not nonsense to them.  Nor was it dangerous.  It was simply, "How do we get to the truest truth of this?"
                                                                  *
Photography equals truth.  Jim equaled, for me, truth.  "Love,"  says the author Julian Barnes,"is the meeting of truth and magic.  Truth, as in photograph; magic, as in ballooning."  Well, Jim didn't "balloon," whatever Barnes meant by that, but he did nearly everything else. He wrote, he translated, he built pots, he directed plays, he photographed, he discovered a "link animal between this one and that one" and the "new" animal was named after Jim - - that is, Morganis-something-something,  he learned Latin and wrote two scholarly papers which were published in definitively scientific journals.  And, one dark night, among friends, namely, Steve, Katy, Bob and Mel, he sang, slowly and evenly, all the lyrics to The Red River Valley, while we sat, spellbound.

Why were we spellbound?  Did we not know he could sing?  Really, he couldn't.
 But, really, he could.  Fact is, he did.
 In the unfolding of memory, all this comes back to me.
                                                                  *

Since Bob and Mel returned Jim's photographs back to me I have dreamed five dreams about him.  In each one, Jim has died but is now returned to live again.  He is to die again, so the dreams
say, but not yet, not yet.

In the first dream, Jim says, "I think I should feel guilty that I'm back."

In the second dream, Jim asks, "My own death? Are you kidding me?"

In the third dream Jim is married to somebody else and won't look at me.

In the fourth dream, Jim asks me if we had any curry and chutney.

In the fifth dream Jim is being carried around by Obama.

                                                                       *
I put the photographs in my office closet and I shut the closet doors. Grief  hit me again. "Grief is a human, not a medical condition, and while there are pills to help us forget it  - - and everything else - - there are no pills to cure it.  The griefstruck are not depressed, just properly, appropriately, mathematically sad," says my friend (well, I have never met him, but so far he makes the most sense to me of all the many authors whom have written about the loss of their wives or husbands since Jim died, including Joan Didian,  Joyce Carol Oates and others - - so many others, and therefore, he IS my friend!!)

I found Jim's little old Cannon camera,  took pictures of the photographs, found somebody to help me send the pictures to the girls, and asked them which ones they wanted.  They told me.  And so.  A few days later, today in fact, just this morning, I loaded them up in my car, the way you would load up anything, and drove them to the local UPS store, where I had to ask a man if he would kindly open the door for me.  I didn't want to make two trips.  I only wanted to make one trip.       
                                                                         *

I gave the UPS lady the four large framed pictures, each signed and dated by Jim.  I addressed the labels.  How odd this feels, how odd, I thought, but I couldn't figure out what was so odd about it.  Jim has been dead now,  (Dead! What a word to use! So coarse!  Coarse!  What a word to use! So
middle-class!) --Jim has been dead now - - five years! And then I say to myself, "Five years, next to forty-three years, is nothing. Nothing! You see patients who are dealing with their first five years! Give yourself a break!"

                                                                         *

Many things have happened since Jim died, some good, some bad.  Many photographs have been taken. The photograph of me in Times Square.  The photograph of me at Lambeau Field.  The photograph of Aleister, now thirteen, and me, dancing, in my kitchen,  The photograph of Aleister and me at the Seattle Aquariam.  The photograph of me and Katy at Etta's restaurant. The photograph of me and Bob and Mel.  The photograph of me and Steve and Katy. 

"Life goes on," said Bertold Brecht in his play, The Good Woman of Setsuan. I didn't like that play overly much, but I played the lead.  Sometimes you just keep trying to get close to something you love even when you don't love the direction you're going, the vehicle you're driving in, the frame that's surrounding you.  You're doing your best.

It's hard to never hear from him. Sometimes I'll just take any reason at all just to write about him even a little bit.
                                                                           *

Well.  As I said in the beginning of this somewhat (or very) disjointed blog, no matter how isolated or lonely or withdrawn we become, we all have an impulse to keep moving towards the light. Homo sapiens are, if nothing else, persistent. I am, if nothing else, persistent. As a therapist, trained in  grief therapy,  I am amazed at how much we don't know.  I know we don't know it, because I have seen, since Jim died, at least ten people, all sane, well organized individuals, who had "lost" their partners of over thirty-some years (and, in some situations, over fifty years) to death - - and who, like me, were not at all quick to "pulling on their boots".  One does it for one's social life, for one's friends, for the decorum end of it, sure, yes, we all know how to do all that - - but, really?

And yet, there is, there is always,  "the light."   In one of Jim's photographs there is the image of the moon (among other images), having been taken in a puddle. The entire photograph is blueish.  The moon, in the photograph, while not the most important image, is not the least important. Nor is it blue. It hangs there. It cannot, as the lyricist says, be denied. It is round and sensual and there. It says, I may not be the most image here, but without me, this photo would be unbelievable. Hang on to me. Hang on.
      
                               

                                                                          *      
 Sometimes I think that's the best we have.





        
  

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Friday, September 27, 2013

Oh, Americans, Americans

I have spent the last few hours trying to think about what I think about those in the Republican party who want to shut down our government. It's difficult for me to remind myself that these men (and women?) have been elected by the people. It's equally difficult for me to understand that, we the people, when told that our government has been shut down, are likely to simply rant a bit inside our own homes or places of work (if we still have places of work) - - and -- that's it. Mad at you all? Hell no, I'm mad at me. 

We came here. We came here with fire in our bellies. We came here with hope in our hearts. We came here with more courage than fear. We came here because it was better than there. We came here because we did not want to be oppressed. We came here because we were drug here. We came here because we had a vision.  We came here because we were hungry.  We came here because we wanted to make a living. We stayed here. We made a living, a big living.  We made a living, a little living.  We fed ourselves. A lot. We fed ourselves, a little. We more than met our vision. Our great-great-great grandparents came here. We became Americans.  We never met our vision. We were brought here by our parents.  We remained oppressed. We found a way to beat oppression. Americans, that's what we are. We elected people like us, other Americans, real Americans, to represent us. Represent. To be an authorized delegate or representative of.....us.  We believed the people we elected would have us in mind.

I have health care.  But if I didn't have health care, I would most deeply want the person I elected to represent me to find a way to procure for health care for my family and me. That's a good thing. That makes sense. Rich people all have health insurance. Middle-class people used to have mostly have health-insurance, but it's getting real dicey out there, and nobody knows where the line is between lower and middle class anywhere.Yeah, where is it? Nobody knows.  Can we find it? No. How come? Dunno. Somethin' real bad's happen' out there.

 Obama-Care. Is there anyone so out of it out there that they don't know why it is called "Obama-care?"  Does anybody not get that? Because it has to do with him. You know. Him. That black guy. Ohhhhhhbama-Care.  Yes sirree. We will shut down the government. We will shut down medical research. We will shut down payments to our soldiers. We will shut down..........(take your time, fill in the blanks, it's late here).......because we do not want bad extra stuff like affordable health care and not attached to uh-huh.

So I believe what they are  saying or at least feeling, on a symbolic or unconscious level, (those agents of shame, hatred and chaos, like Ted Cruise), is that they really and truly want to hurt (use whatever word you like here) Obama. There's a black man who's president of these United States of America and we hate him so much.

Oh, God. We Republicans hate him so much.

You can call me naive, you can call me a race-monger, you can call me late for class but it smells bad out there. Just now I remember once having seen a bit of film showing Carl Jung saying something like, "People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls," and I think there's a whole lot of Republican soul-negation goin' on. Shame on  you, Ted Cruise. Face your soul.  

Thursday, June 06, 2013

                                                          




                                                                Today


                                  Rereading letters from an old friend, I remember who I am.
Talking with this old friend, I experience the feel of who I am. Slowly, slowly, I become me again.  Over this past five years, I have forgotten. I have been a leaf, curled up and darkened, desiring nothing more than to take on any other color than my own.  But today, on the day I fly off to my granddaughter's graduation, I go with my own blaze of color and a feel of well-being.

     "We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same." Good old Carolos Castaneda (probably older than old, by this time), said that sometime in the sixties, inside one of the Don Juan books.  It's true.  Like stress, whether it's bad stress or good stress, it's still stress. But the results are different. Expressions, happy or sour, make wrinkles. But the wrinkles are different. Our efforts and attitudes can make for different life circumstances. But the circumstances and situations often can be happier or at least richer. Fuller.

     I'll choose that.

          I once had a wonderful patient who had lived, as a little child, in Berlin, during the Second World War. I saw her the other day and she told me she is reading Victor Frankel's beautiful book, Man'S Searach for Meaning, wich Jim and I once read aloud to each other. Being a child while your world - - no, while your  family is being bombed, is a terrible thing. You can not look to your parents for safety. Your parents can not clear their faces of fear. Their voices change. Their nervous systems change. And you, the child, your autonomic nervous system is never allowed to adequately develop.  This is only one of the many extreme examples of what can happen to a child who is brought up in a war zone, whether it is an actual war with fighting soldiers, or a family war zone, with fighting family members. 

"We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us."  - V. F. Wow. And, yes. What does Reality expect from us? To stay present. To stay real.

And, when you fall off the path, to get back on it. More than that,to become, yourself, the path.

This is a tiny blog, written so that I do not forget this hour.  I have only a few moments before I leave for the ferry so one more quote I've been keeping for myself forever. Itt's from the ancient Jewish philosopher Philo.  Philo said,  "The true name of eternity is Today."

So, see you around. From Today.  And that's a long, long time.

        

Tuesday, May 28, 2013



                                                                Now and Then

   
If only I were younger, thinner, richer, more widely published, with somebody. If only I didn't have this physical pain. If only I were less impulsive, more matter-of-fact, more serene.  If only I had known then what I know now

But, of course, I have been younger, thinner, richer and completely without pain.  What about those days, what about then?  What were my "if only's" way back when?

What I desired then is not what I want now. Then, I wanted more patients, one more degree, way more excitement.  Now, I want a lot of what I do have....but I am still capable of nudging myself into what the Buddha would call a life of (relatively small) suffering by looking past my present to the uncharted future, to whatever is coming around the corner. Oh, then, then, then.

"Chronic anticipation", said aurhor Theodore Rubin, "is an attempt to control all of life's possible confrontations and makes it impossible to be peaceful or easygoing."  Well, I know that, and so do you. We all know that. But that doesn't keep us from anticipating more, more, more, or other, other, other.   Nor does all the literature, from the Greeks on up, that tell us to "Be here now", or --newer still - - tell us the importance of Mindfulness - - really get to one of the singular problems of being human. 

When Jim was reading Krishnamurti, he would often comment how Krishna would say that, while we call the past "the time before", and the future as "the time after", we can only go through it in time present.  "Truth," said Krishnamurti, "has no future, so path, no continuity."

If only I had been Krishnamurti. How glad I am that I was not.

When I think of the past, I realize how much change my friends and I have been through! Indeed, I notice that change is the predominent state.  If one arrests the flow for too long, the arrested moment is no good, is ridiculous, stops being remarkable. The rythm is destroyed. Change is the only territory there is.

I am in my late afternoon of life.  Carl Jung wrote about this state when he said, "Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as thierto. But we cannot live the afternoon life life according to the program of life's morning: for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will by evening have become a lie."

I don't have any great tips for stopping the kind of suffering that takes up so much useless space in our minds. And, as a therapist, I've rarely met anyone who is exempt from this type of thinking. Certainly, therapists are not. And neither, for the most part, is anybody else. maybe my Uncle Neil with the lobotomy. Maybe not. Every decade a new book is written about The Now and every decade each new book's author about The Now is congratulated as if they have discovered a brand new concept.  Stop comparing. Stop wishing. Stop thinking about the past. Stop worrying about the future.

Yoga? Meditation? Drugs? Bad habits? Healthy habits?

Forget going bra-less. Maybe we should go brain-less for awhile.  If only that would help.    
 

Saturday, May 25, 2013


                                                  Two and a Half Years

Mountains shift, and so do relationshps. How is a relationshp lived? Month by month? Two and a half years is not a long time, not to me, who once was married for forty-three years. In a long term relationshp, there are so many two and a half years. No erosion, only differences and development.  Growth. Setbacks. Turns. Twists.  The years of lust and infatuation, the years of ecstasy, the years of not knowing, the years of coming to know,  the political years, the child raising years, the photography years, the academe years, the years filled with friends, the years losing friends and making new friends, the theatre years, the beach years, the years of being closed off, the years of opening back up, the years of turning to others, the years of returning to ouselves, the years of the bones, the years of writing,  the years of the body, the years of conversation,  the years of drama, the years of serenity, the years of solace, the years of youth, the years of aging, the years of family, the years of creativity, the years of building a business, the eyars of devotion, the years of illness, the years of flesh, the years of joy, the years of tears.

This is what a longterm relationship is like.  It is like Life. It IS life. And, it is time. In the end, Time is all we have.

How is two and half years lived?  In the body, in the fit of the body, in the feet, in the breathe,  in the sound of the voice, in the fit of the hand.I learned a new time to awaken and a new time to sleep. I learned a new type of sound. I learned new people: Star, Cousin George, who was inestimably well read and bright and enthusiastic about the life of the mind: who knows?  perhaps George is what the two and a half years was ultimately about.  George died, but so does everybody else. George died and the mountains shift.

Sometimes it only takes an instant.  Sometimes a day. Sometimes months, Sometimes, years.  In 1880 Edison patended the light bulb. In 1945, we got the Slinky and the bomb. In 1946 we got mobile phones. In Oklahoma last week, there was a tornado.

Books on relationshps talk about stability but there is no stability, only the ability to sustain uncertainty and change. Only the commitment to seek balance. Only the commitment to commit.  Ask the mountains about change. You can not push back the mountains and you can not redo a relationship. You can try (and I have tried) but mostly, barring a few wonderful couples I have known and still loved, it doesn't work.

Songs are filled with lyrics about time, change and regrets. Even two and half years can contain tons of Proustian bit of Time Remembered. When we went to New York. When we went to Jersey and walked the Boardwalk. When we attended his reunion.  When we saw the Broadway shows, when I had an anxiety attack in Times Square, when we heard Woody Allen play live, or Leonard Cohen sing, or Kris Kristofferson, or Bonnie Raitt or Mavis Sataples,   or we saw Alvin  Ailey's Revelation.  When we........when we.......when we........When we went to Lambeau Field and tears came to his eyes. And the Packer's won. And we couldn't find a decent green salad on the menu. 

Alan Ginsberg wrote an entire poem with one word: gone. Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone, gone.

 And more "gone's".So, if so much is gone, what lasts? What does one keep? The body doesn't know how to overthrow it's memory. It simply does not/can not. We are memory. Without our stories, we are not us. Even if we do not speak our memories, they remain, esconced in our muscles, in our unconscious,
A certain type of memory loss is always happening and another type never occurs.

Time.  "Sometimes I knew it would work out that way. Time is the great author. It always writes the pefect ending."
         - Charlie Chaplin, in the film Limelight

Is that true?  Have I just lived through another prefect ending? How come they all seem so incomplete?  What am I missing, some sort of Zen-ned out practice I don't care to spend the final years of my life learning?  My Uncle Neil didn't remember anything. He was given a lobotomy during the Second World War and he never looked all that happy to me. Was his a perfect ending?

Ah, but back to relationshps. Two and half years.  What is it?  What of it?  I can't speak to the person. I can't touch him. He is, as Ginsberg said it many times, gone. Many people in my life have been gone: my mother passed when I was twenty-five, my father when I was thirty-five, grandparents, of course, Jim -- my life, or so it seemes and now this.  And here I stand.  Neither a victim nor a soldier.  Repair takes place over time.  Nature hates a vacuum. Repair will take place.

And I will be old.

Still:  I hold out hope for me.

"And then there is the spring park,
damp as if freshly peeled, sweet
greenhouse, green cemetery with no
dead in it - - except, in some shaded
woods, under some years of leaves and rotted cnes, the body of a warbler
like a whole note fallen from the sky - - my old     
love for him, long a songbird's rib cage picked clean."
    -the poet Sharon Olds