Clear Creek Girl

The Story of "Heart Bursts"!

2012-02-15T11:15:00.000-08:00

I decided to create a painting for Alan, for Christmas. A large one. It would, I figured, go perfectly in the sienna red livingroom of his bungalow on the water across from Mt. Ranier and he would, I figured, fall in love with it, immediately. I found a large canvass so big I could barely lug it around, wrestled it up onto the island in the center of my kitchen, bought acrylics and then more acrylics and then more acrylics, and went to work.

I had made a painting before, in 1973. It was a charming and sedate little thing, the subject being a room where Jim, Kelly, Erin and Kevin and I lived at 1706, Wheaton Way. We called the room "The Diamond Room", perhaps because of the old wall-to-wall diamond-patterned mauve colored rug on the floor. That room held the same table which now lives in my Bainbridge townhouse (but the table has since been stressed, as they say, ever since I took a knife and then a hammer to it immediately after Jim died, so now it has what is called a chic appearance), but never mind that, the picture has, as I said and as others have also said, great charm, but it is a realistic painting and I wanted my Alan-picture to be an abstract, a large colorful abstract, to match the feel and the tenure and the trill (??!!) of his marvelously painted bungalow.

Alan is a man of vibrant tastes and colors.

So I began. I took a huge brush and colored the canvas with sea-green, reds, white, yellow, orange....and then, having down that, stood back and stared at what I'd done. Had I had a beard on my chin, I would have stood there and stroked it for an hour or two. Because, really, with all that color, I had come up with exactly.....nothing. Nothing! A lot of color, true, but.....why? And for what reason? So, now I knew something. Creating an abstract painting is not, in any way, as easy as it looks. Of course. Well, any fool knows that. Even I could have told me that.

Except.....I thought somehow it would be easy. Because, I think I thought, I know Alan, I know his colors, and if I simply put his colors to the canvas, it will come out ..... so I painted a huge red heart in the center of the canvas. A long huge semi-droopy red heart. And then I began paying attention to the edges of the heart, collaging in three paper fortunes from fortune cookies, painting lines of back dots here and there (when in doubt, dot, which used to be one of my mottos, although for the life of me I can not now remember what it was a motto for.....) - -

Anyway, I finally got the painting to a place where I called it done, a great big red droopy heart with some fairly interesting edges and corners outside of the heart, and the word "I love you" in French, "J'Taime", in the lower left hand corner, and I left my name entirely out of it, because I wanted the painting to be a surprise.

Because the deal was, I was going to hang it in my home and, when Alan came by for Christmas, there it would be. My brand new painting, which I had somehow...procured....and he would take one look and exclaim, "Oh, my God! Sweetheart! Whereever did you get this fabulous, fabulous painting! I love it! Did you buy it here on the island? Did one of your artist friends paint it? How much did it cost????"

And I would look shyly down at the floor, and then look up at him, and maybe I'd tug a bit at one of my curls as I smiled a little shyly at him and then say softly, "I painted it, Alan, I painted it for you."

Pow! Wow! Huzza! Jazz Hands! The music swells. He takes her in his arms. Her eyelids flutter. He kisses her forehead and then her lips. He cannot BELIEVE his good fortune, all this......and she's an artist, as well!!!!!!

Not.

The Friday before Christmas arrived and the picture was hung. My last patient of the day left and my stomach was leaping about with anticipation and nervousness. It was a set-up, I knew that. I knew the risks. And yet....how could I miss? It was a heart, right? A BIG heart, right? And his favorite colors were pretty much frisking their way around the heart, right? And I painted it with love, pure unmitigated love, right? How could it miss?

He came up the stairs, as always, handed me a bouquet of flowers (as he often does, sweet guy that he is), dropped his bag as always, kissed me (this is not necessarily in order, but he did all this) walked through the livingroom and went upstairs to change. Okay, so he didn't notice it. No big deal. The human brain is not capable of taking in everything at once, give it a little time, after all, he's just driven for two hours, he stopped for flowers, maybe gas as well, he probably listened to the radio, maybe there was some anger-provoking thing on the radio news, there usually is, and he was excited about seeing me, we are always so glad to see each other, I'm the priority here, not what's on my walls..........

...........an hour later, right after I brought him his drink of gin and Hendricks, I saunter over to the painting on the wall and say, "Look what I bought at the outdoor art sale! I only paid five hundred for it!"

He looked. "Terrible frame," he said, taking a second sip of his drink.

My heart. My brain. My face. My tremor. My breathe. That stupid goddamned painting. Very very very very very much unlike me, I decided to let it go. I didn't say another thing. I mean, about the painting. Not that night. Otherwise I knew I would suddenly find myself in that place where you think you are watching a horror movie about a couple who are screaming at each other and you happen to be the female star.

The next morning, right before Alan went up to take his shower I said, "If you were the artist of this painting, what would you do to make it better?"

And he walked his tall frame over to the painting, stood there for a moment, said, "More yellow." Then he turned, went upstairs, and took his shower.

Whereupon I ran to the cupboard, got out the yellow tube of acyrlic, spurted a whole big gob of acyrlic onto the painting right while the painting was still hanging on the wall, took two paintbrushes, one in each hand, and went at it. Not in a graffiti-kind-of-way, but in an I-am-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown-but-I'm-still-inside-the-game sort of way. So that, when Alan came down, all clean and glistening from his shower, still towel drying HIS THINNING HAIR (caps are mine), his eyes lit on the painting....and then he looked at me.....and then he looked at the painting....and then he looked at me.....and then he looked at the painting...and then he looked at me....and then he said, "Oh, Baby, baby, baby, did you paint this?"

"arhgheldiejhaflghudgeraghelpdkkvcarjhg."

"Oh, my God, Kay, how awful you must have felt," he said, "I am so sorry."

Well, that just made it worse.

"Alan, it was a set-up," I said. "It was a terrible set-up. I'm a big girl" (note: ha!) "I never should have showed you the painting in that way, I will take it down to my office and work on it some more later, don't you worry, hey, listen, we're going to Seattle for Christmas, we're going to have a great time, let's not even THINK about this, let's not even SAY ONE MORE WORD about any of this, let's forget ALL ABOUT THE SILLY PAINTING, c'mon, it doesn't matter to me in the SLIGHEST, not one eensy weensy bit....."

.....and, after me going on like this for maybe twenty-five more minutes, we were able to lay the big droopy red heart to rest and not let it get to us anymore. I put it in my office. One of my patients said the top of the painting, which is all she could see from her perspective, reminded her of a pair of balls. Another patient said it reminded her of a big purple butt.

Three weeks later, I dragged the painting up again (Alan had already removed the thin black frame from the thing), lugged it up onto the kitchen island, and covered it with more paint. I walked down to Paper Products, bought some very expensive thick yellow paper, more acrylics, some high gloss stuff and some Elmer's glue. Because I simply could not remove my Self from the theme of hearts, I tore what seemed like hundreds of big hearts and little hearts out of the thick yellow paper and glued them onto the newly painted canvas. I went upstairs, found my old sewing basket. brought back down a spool of red thread, and glued red thread onto each heart, making the thread to look like veins. I covered each yellow- heart-with-red-veins with thick layers of Elmer's glue, allowed it all time to dry, sprayed the whole thing with high gloss, and this time, signed my name to the right hand bottom of the painting, which by now had become a collage.

I hung it right back up where it had been before. I liked it. I liked it so much I decided to keep it. I called it "Heartbursts". It looked perfect in my place. It fit this place to a tee. No wow needed, no pow needed, no jazz hands need apply. I had done it. I had pleased myself. I had shoved something to the point of absolute destruction and I had brought it back again.

And I was satisfied.

The next time it was Alan's turn to come to my place [our place], we now call it, he spotted the college immediately.

"Baby, that's wonderful! I love it! It'll look so great in my place! I can't wait to hang it! I'll take down the Amy Burnett and put this where the Burnett has been. Sweetheart, you're a genuis!"

Me: "This is MY painting. The other one was your's. THIS is mine."

Alan: {Laughing} "Come on, Kay, don't. Don't be that way. I LOVE this. If I saw this in a shop, I'd buy it. I couldn't even walk BY this painting on the street without stopping and entering the store. I'm not kidding, Sweetheart, I LOVE this. I love this. It's mine."

Me: "Actually, It's mine. I love it. It looks great here. I made it with you in my heart, Alan, but it's big and warm and cozy and .....really, I don't think I want to part with it. Actually."

So we went back and forth like this, for a few days. And then we made a bet on something, I don't remember what. Anyway, I lost the bet and he won the painting. He let me keep it for a month or so and just today, he drove it back to his fabulous little bungalow.

It's probably hung up by now. It's probably missing me. It's probably got a hang up.

So. Magge, who was the proprietor of the most excellent RAVEN'S BLUES in Poulsbo and HEARTS AND HANDS in Sante Fe, pronounced my painting/collage "wonderful" and Magge would never lie about such things, she has too much German pride in her to lie. And Reba Renner, who also saw my painting, called it "fabulous". And that was before she even knew I wa

s the artist! Because I have a high-satisfaction-level bu totherwise, little ego-involvement in this type of thing, I feel free in expressing my own opinion, which is this: if one plays around and around and around, with paint or words or whatever it is one is playing with, sooner or later you are going to end up pleasing yourself in some way or another {even if it's just by stopping}and if what you create pleases others in the process, well, you get to say nice things about whatever you've created if you choose to do so.

I will almost end with a rather oblique quote from one of my most favorite writers, the amazing Gertrude Stein from her such-a-great book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:

"Well, what did you think of what you saw, asked Miss Stein. When you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you, they don't have to worry about making it anymore and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it. This was a time when our walls were hung with Picasso, Renoir, Cezanne, two Gauguins, Valloton, Maurice Denis, a little Daumier, a moderate sized Greco, a Toulouse-Lautrec - and at that time these pictures had no value and there was no social privilege attached to knowing any one there, only those came who really were interested. So as I say anybody could come in. However, there was the forula. It was a mere form, really everybody could come in, but the usual formula was, de la part de qui venez-vous, who is your introducer. And Miss Stein would open the door with that, who is your introducer and the voice must answer with the name of the somebody who had told them about this place."

How charming Stein's book is, how charming to read it for the fourth time and most especially at this time in my life, after seeing Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, and, of course, after meeting Alan, who loves art way more than I do, I mean the kind of art that is the "painting kind", and how glad I am, therefore, that I was able to come up with something that he values, by which I mean "Heartbursts," which Alan actually brings up to people and brags about and, may I say, looks way better in the person than it looks in the picture at the beginning of this blog.

2012-02-08T15:17:00.000-08:00

Hospital: TheTouch of the Wounded Healter

2012-02-08T11:22:00.000-08:00

Home from the hospital is a good place to be, especially if your husband comes to fetch you with your favorite stuffed toy, a freaky-looking-purple-and-green-monster-like-guy named Calvin, held under one arm and a large bunch of purple and green tulips held under his other arm, all sealed with a smile and a kiss.

And the hospital stay itself? In a sense, hospitals are like drugs or, rather, like Life Itself....it's partly up to the patient or the person to determine whether it iwll be a low or a high. For me, hospitals are always a "high". For me, hospitals are a "high", because, hey, you're already "there". No rush to the E.R. No worrying where your next dose of pain medication is gonna be. It's right there, attached to your very own IV, stuck into your very own arm. Push the little black button every eight and a half minutes and you're sweeeeet. You want ice cream? You got it. You want pudding? A cheese sandwich? Jello? Spaghetti and meatballs? No problemo! And, if you're me, no problemo if the food is only halfway good, either, because.....I DON'T CARE! Just as long as somebody else is making it and somebody else is bringing it (at my command) I'm good. And the nurses are all, for the most part, good souls who warm up instantly if given half a chance.

The anesthesiologist was a well-tanned, silver headed dude who bragged to Alan and me that he was "only sixty-two years of age" (subtext: and SEE HOW GREAT I LOOK!) ....the nurse pointed out to him Alan and my ages, which prompted him to hem and haw and, in general, stuff his "bragging rights" back into his thorax and keep them them there for the Next Couple, because, yes, folks, WE looked SO much younger than he.

But he was fun. A zany guy, but fun, if you are into competence-with-zaniness, which I totally am. "Kay," he began his explanation of how he was going to anesthetize me, "I'm going to take you to a tropical beach. I'm going to turn on a little music, bring you a few nice Mai Tai's plus a couple of other sweet, thick drinks, and six Cabana Boys. Will six be all right?"

"Only if they all look like my husband," I said, whereupon the anesthesiologist exclaimed to Alan, "Oh, MAN! Where did you GET this one! How lucky can you GET! She actually wants all her Cabana Boys to look like YOU!"

Alan grinned. "Well, " he smiled his great big warm smile, "Who ELSE would she want them to look like?"

My thoughts entirely.

Oh, but back to the nurses. Because I'm certain I won the Nurse-Lottery, my nurses were SO great. It was as if they were sitting right outside my door just waiting.....just sitting with baited breath......just....WAITING.....for me to push that "Red Nurse Button" and give them something to do. Need help getting up to pee? Well, little lady, HERE WE ARE! Need help finding your book on group psychology? HERE YOU GO! More water? WHAT A GREAT REQUEST, you NEED more WATER! WHAT'S THIS WE HEAR? You are suddenly starting to itch from the inside out and you think it's this newest pain medication? Let us call your doctor IMMEDIATELY and SEE WHAT WE CAN DO!

So fine. So very, very, very, very fine.

And the physician, the physician-surgeon-doctor, what did he have to do with all this? Well, he performed a Diagnostic Laproscopy on me, saw nothing much, took a few pictures, and backed out with....My Appendix! Yes, folks, he went in and Took My Appendix Down! Because, with those sneakky appendix[es} (??) ....well, you just never know.

You just never know. And the doctor was/ still is..... a friend, so I think he really felt the need to Do SOMETHING. Thank God some of us still have anextraneous organ or two to do something WITH. So here I am, with a hard, swollen, aching belly, now punctuated with three or four tiny holes, as I have been pecked with a long-beaked woodpecker, and a glossy sheet of pictures which the surgeon called "beautiful". "You have beautiful insides, Kay," he said, tracing the red-melonish colored organs with his finger.

Really? Really! Well, that's.......good to know. Because it all looks like so much mush to me.

I didn't sleep, but not because I wasn't given enough drugs, enough quietude, enough darkness. I didn't sleep because the lady next to me, who was, by the way, in MUCH worse shape me, so I forgive her (NOW).... had a tendency to want to call people (who WERE these people she was calling and why were they UP at the hours she was calling them?) starting out about 2 AM and ending up at about 4 AM. She'd make a call, start out nice and sort of shy and friendly and end up calling them all "assholes". Turned out everybody she knew was, sad to say, an asshole. At least during the wee wee hours of the morning. I chocked these calls up to this woman's personal way of dealing with her anxiety. I did push the Red Nurse Button several times during this entire nighttime experience and they were able to give me warmer sheets, ice cream, an extra extra IV pain med, retrieve my television button (hey, if she was going to take me on her "Asshole Cruise", I was going to take HER on a "TV Home Shopping Cruise").

Fair's fair.

We both fell asleep for two hours between 4 and 6 A.M.

I really think you need to have a style in which you spend your time in the hospital. If you have something as strenuous as heart surgery or an aneurism, of course, you have to give it a few days before you can develope and then polish your style. But if you are in for something minor, you need to decide what kind of stay you want, and then go for it. Me, I always want to go for the best, most affectionate, most humorous stay possible. I want to fall in love with all my nurses, women and men, and I want to stay in love with myself, as well. I want to give up the idea of myself as a "Serious Being", unless I have to stand up for myself in some sort of important-advocate role. I want to be amused and I want to be amusing.

"You wanted justice and there was none - - only love," said Archibald MacLeish, in his play J.B.

So here I am at my home on Bainbridge Island, with Alan by my side. Last night we watched an old Dick Cavette show with Mr. Cavette interviewing a thirty-year-old John Lennon and his new wife, Yoko OhNo (sorry, sp). Tonight we'll watch Woody Allen's lovely movie "Sweet and Lowdown" with Sean Penn playing Emmett Ray, the second greatest jazz guitarist in all the world. Watching Lennon last night, Alan and I both concluded how awfully difficult a thing fame must be. Alan, one of Bruce Springstein's best friends when they were young, said that fame had been very tough for the young - as well as for the older - Mr. Springstein.

I don't know why I have launched myself out of the hospital and into this discussion about fame except to say that taking one's Self seriously is a thorny, thorny patch and that hospitals can be seen as microcosms of The Social Order at Large, which is why affection and humor seem to me to be the best way of burying the cultural hatchets of strata, ego and judgement.

I'll (nearly) close off by quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson and his "Three Wants", which I like to include whenever I feel the soil is at all ready, so here they come: "There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich wanting more, that of the sick, wanting something different, and that of the traveler, who says, "anywhere but here."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hospitals are big and cumbersome and clumsy places and people make fun of them all the time, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere different, not any time, not anywhere, if or when I was sick. Give me the worst hospital ever, and I know I will find one person with a pair of loving eyes and a beating heart and two hands to begin the mortal process of what we all mostly need when we are failing: the touch of the wounded healer.

What It Feels Like To Have Exploratory Surgery Tomorrow Morning

2012-02-05T18:13:00.001-08:00

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do"
Tolstoy, just before he died

What it feels like to have exploratory surgery tomorrow morning: It feels like you are going to audition for the Cirgue du Soleil without knowing how to juggle or sing or do the splits or be funny or dance or do high wire or anything other than the fact that once you told somebody something about Yourself and Performance that they believed. It feels like you are hanging from a tree branch. It feels, in other words, like you are going to be exposed as the biggest fraud ever.

Because. What if you are wrong about the "something wrong" you believe is going on inside of you, and - - therapist or no therapist....one hundred years of therapy or no one hundred years of therapy....the truth is that you are simply a classic hysteric? It could happen. It HAS happened.
Maybe not to you.........yet. But there is always a first time.

Since I have described my symptoms to other women, four other women, including the beautiful know-it-all Colonics-Woman who at first self-described herself as "the healthiest, most progressive, least-toxic" female "on island" - - is now saying that She, Too (!!!) - - experiences the Very Same Experiences as me.

Oh God. No, don't say it. The very same physiological experiences as me. I have patients who experience this, but they are heavier than me and so they don't experience the swelling. A female member of my family now says she experiences this. All these women.

So. Either my symptoms are symptoms which (hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?) of women suffer from and do not receive help for.......or we are all a bunch of.........oh God.

Oh, God. In Freudian terms, I've already said it. Hysterics.

All my tests: the Ultra-Sound, the Colonoscopy, the Upper GI, the Lower Bowel, the Catscan.........turned out as clean, as healthy as can be. The only thing they had in common besides clean and clear and healthy was Expensive.

With apologies to Shakespeare because I don't have him right hereat my computer, "It is a
tale/told by an Idiot/full of sound and fury/signifying/nothing."

("SHE is a tale/told by an Idiot/.....")

All through America, women are made to feel inept, idiotic, small, inferior, hysterical, etc. etc. etc., inside the doctor's office. There is no element of camaraderie the way males sometimes are able to institute with their doctors. At least with male doctors, women are never, or at least
rarely, "the heroes". Our reporting of our conditions are precarious, at best. We blush. We tremble. And, if we get angry, God help us! Boy oh boy, does our precious female anger, inside the Doctor's office, ever get us into trouble. But we wouldn't have to get angry if the doctor's would simply believe our own reporting.

And this, my friends, is what "my" surgeon has done for me. As well as "my" neurologist. He has, she has, believed me. When one is believed, there is no need for anger. Otherwise (and this is how it goes, so often in America, you don't really know that you're ill until the doctor tells you so.) Your own self-report? Get out of here! You are not ill until WE tell you so!

As Anatole Broyard says in his most magnificent book INTOXICATED BY MY ILLNESS, "The sick man has got there: He's at a point where what he wants most from people is not love but an appreciative critical grasp of his situation, what is known now in the literature of illness as "empathetic witnessing". The patient is always on the brink of revelation, and he needs an amanuensis."

Of course, Broyard is speaking of a "He".

I do not think I am making too much of matter of gender here (do remember, Dear Reader, that I have sat, hour after hour after hour, for twenty-six years, with females who have reported to me their accounts of doctor visits as opposed to their HUSBANDS' accounts of doctor visits, very often with the exact same doctors .......and THEY ARE SIMPLY NOT THE SAME.

So it was immensely gratifying when I met with the surgeon, who, yes, happens to be a friend of mine (if he werent a friend of mine, what then, Dear Reader???) who has agreed to do laproscopic surgery tomorrow. And even so.....even so.

You can take the person out of the culture, but you can not take the culture out of the person.

I am female. And I live within a culture that labels female patients as hysterical and eccentric and self-pitying and psychologically disordered.....but does NOT label males in the same way. At all. Not at all.

And so I face tomorrow with a great deal of hope and also with a modicum of dread , predicated, I believe, by the culture, which is not friendly to my gender. If I were male and I presented with my particular array of symptoms and, after having undergone the {extensive} array of tests which I have undergone, the surgeon agreed to do exploratory surgery and discovered....... nothing, I do not believe for one moment that the male would experience a sense of shame for having had insisted upon the surgery. I believe he would have simply experience his insistence as his right, his reportage as his right, he would shake his head and get on with it. Down a few drinks. Goddamit. What the hell. No shame, no blame.

And, Goddammit, after all, he paid for it.

But. Being a female in this culture, I expect that, tomorrow, if my surgeon discovers nothing, nothing at all, no adhesions, no dangling anythings, despite my cognitive intelligence, my {considerable, really} understanding of the culture, my understanding, as a social scientist, not to mention as a psychologist, of what happens to sick people when there is no-known cure to explain what is going on with me, I will experience at least an unconsciouse inner-feel of guilt.

"Only for you, Kay, only for you," my surgeon said to me, when he scheduled me for surgery tomorrow at one o'clock. My neurologist, the Most Very Good Dr. Linda Swartz, calls my surgeon "the best surgeon in Kitsap County".

I know he will do everything he can for me. Bless his heart. Bless his heart. He has little enough to lose and I have everything to gain. Even so. I must depend upon myself to believe in myself no matter what. After all, I am not exchanging my humanity for anything here, I am simply banking on my own good sense, on my own good reporting skills and fine noticing skills, which have gotten me where I am (I am still, let's keep on facing it, a successful therapist, without advertising, without working in a clinic with referring capabilities, without any help from anybody other than word-of-mouth assistance and the help of one or two doctors to keep me getting along in this world.....).

What I have, quite simply, is desire. The desire to feel better. The desire to get better. The desire to be healed. I have that right and I take that right. I take that right as my own. And with exploratory surgery, it may happen or it may not. It is 7:10 on Sunday evening. The New York Giants have just won the Super Bowel. Alan and I, who both own stock in the Green Bay Packers, were rooting for the Patriots. Okay, big deal, it was a hell of a game.

I was going to make us Chicken Parmesan for dinner but we ate a big breakfast at the Streamliner Diner and now Alan says he's not hungry. Anyway, the last time I fixed Chicken Parmesan, I lied and said I had made it myself. He loved it and it even seeemed, fixed with brown rice and fresh broccoli, to redeem his belief in me as a cook. Tonight, though, he just noticed the package of Chicken Parmesan from Town and Country in the refrigerator and, as he stooped down to give me a kiss (I was sitting here, typing) he commented on it. In a joking sort of way. Which made me bristle some and made me wish I had a lock and key on my refrigerator, which, really, has become, of course, his refrigerator too, as he is living here more and more and more.

We are talking about buying a house. On Bainbridge. On the waterfront. We shoulda been
some contenders.

Anyway, so, tomorrow we become The Great Explorers. Along with The Great Surgeon. We'll keep you posted, ok? You know the famous Surrealist dictum that says that, "Beauty is the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella?"

Well, think of that, for me, tomorrow.

Bashing It In Bainbridge

2012-02-03T20:24:00.000-08:00

So it's a new blog. My old blog bit the dust, not even a footprint of it left, didn't even bite the dust, it simply...........whoooooosh. Bye, Bye, Miss Bainbridge Pie, took my Mad in Pursuit down the Chimney Shoot Till the Shoot was left dry....

.......Oh, how good it is to be back in the land of BLOGGING again!!

So much has happened. Not big stuff. Little stuff. Little big stuff.

Like: I'm in Bainbridge's store PAPER PRODUCTS and it's a slow day, a snow day, and I'm talking to the two gentlemen behind the counter, one's a youngish man, one's an elderlish man, and one of us (but who/which?) mentions the movies. Hve you seen "The Artist?' ""Hugo?" "The Ides of March?" Finally I ask, I dare to ask, "Who is your favorite director of All Time?" I ask this of each of the two men. One young, one old.

I wait.

The older gentleman goes first. "I would say......Fellini," he says.

"Ah, Fellini!" I say. "8 !/2!" "Juliette of the Spirits!" Plus his wonderful wife, Giuletta Masina!" (Pardon the spelling, I have more than probably gotten it wrong). But anyway, the gentleman nods his head up and down approvingly. From Fellini we go to Woody Allen, who is a great fan of Fellini and who has attempted, in his own Allen way, to pay homage to Fellini in certain of his films.

I turn to the younger man. "And you?" I ask, "your favorite director?" (thinking, all the while, that it would be some young director, someone I likely have never heard of).....whereupon he says, "I will have to say" [and he blushes} "..Kurosawa.'

Baboom.

Kurosawa.

My own most favorite film director in all the world.

So I tell him so and he steps out from behind his cubicle and we hug and pat each other on the bat and then he says, this youngish man, "You know, years ago, I took a class on film from......from a professor at Olympic College named Dr. ..........Dr. ..........Deeeeeeeee ....well, I can't remember his name right this moment, but this man was such a powerful instructor in terms of film, he taught so intelligently about film, that I have never been able to watch a film again without A) being able to appreciate a film without thinking of this professor, and, B) without being able to "read" a film in terms of all that a film has to offer, from beginning to end."

The young man lowered his head, shook it, looked down at me and smiled.

"Could that man perhaps have been named Dr. Robert Dietz?" I asked.

The young man beamed.

"Yes! Yes! That is his name, how do you know!" he exclaimed.

"Because," I said, "I, too, have taken one of his film classes, and because he happens to be one of my oldest and dearest friends. In fact, I am seeing him and his wife, Mel, this very afternoon and I will tell him about this conversation."

At which point the youngish man exploded into a paroxysm of joy.

It was one of those Bainbridge moments that are happening to me more frequently.

How can I explain.
**********************
ANOTHER?

I was singing in the fruit and vegetable aisles of TOWN & COUNTRY. "You say tomato and I say tomatoe/ you say potato and I say potatoe/ potato/potatoe/tomato/tomatoe/ Let's call the whole thing off".............

........and yes, on Bainbridge there are lots of "non-looks", that is, people who behave as if you simply "are not there", the kind of withering "stance-look" that poor Jimmy Stewart earned in the wonderful movie "Harvey" from those poor people with such low insecurity or low imaginational-forums that render them simply unable to bear those around them who are doing something that is unnaturally (to them) foreign, such as: singing or dancing IN PUBLIC! [ahem, ahem] - - - when all of a sudden: a beautiful, stylishly dressed woman in her fifties, I'd guess, walked up to me and said, "It's so nice to hear somebody singing. May I ask what it is that you DO?" "Me?" I said. "Why, I'm a psychologist!" "Wow," she said, "it's doubly nice to meet a Happy Psychologist! WE have a lot of dance in OUR family," she said, smiling at me. I was beginning to feel that uncomfortable feeling that one feels when one has just been complemented by a lunatic, when she said...."My husband's sister is the choreographer Twyla Tharp."

To which I said, elegantly enough, "YOUR HUSBAND'S SISTER IS THE CHOREOGRAPHER TWLA THARP?"

To which the stylishly elegant lady smiled and nodded, "Yup."

To which I said again, but louder, because I am from, after all, a farm in Silverdale, but hey, I AM well read and smart{as hell,} "YOUR HUSBAND'S SISTER IS TWYLA THARP???"

To which the stylish lady once again replied, "Yes," and then she said the following: "And I am going right home and call Twyla and tell her that I have just met a Happy Psychologist who has actually heard of her, on Bainbridge Island."

So there you go. I don't know where you went, but there you do.

These things happen to me all the time.
********************

So the other day my husband, Alan, and I were OFF the island, getting me an Upper GI and a Lower Bowel, which was hilarious in itself, if you think of it, and I did. Me, the target person, in thin scrubs, and the doctor and two nurses, all in thick radiation-repellant clothing. Yeah, thanks so much.

I'm on this long board with this other big expensive piece of space-looking-equipement hovering over me and, every now and again, one of the thickly-attired-radiation-proofed-nurses would make a run at me with a thermos full of Barium with a bendy straw, while the doctor, standing behind a screen, would call out, "DRINK! SWALLOW! HOLD YOUR BREATH! LET IT OUT! BREATHE! GOOD!" And they would continue that while I, the thin-scrubbed-person, was being turned over and over on the piece of expensive {God-bless-it} equpment, as the nurse kept making runs at me with the thermos filled with Barium.

So Alan is standing there with the doctor and the nurses and he is looking at the pictures coming through, which are pictures of my intestines and stomach areas.

And Alan says, "Oh, my GOD! WHAT IS THAT!"

And a nurse says, "That's Kay's stomach."

And Alan says, "Oh my God, what's WRONG with her STOMACH!!!???!!"

And the nurse says, "NOTHING is wrong with her stomach, her stomach is a good stomach, that's a GOOD stomach, Alan."

And Alan is going, "AAAOIDHGNLOAAAAA,".....

And finally the nurse says, "I get it, HOW OLD ARE YOU? Maybe......you are used to......THE KIDNEY BEAN STOMACH."

And the nurse goes on to describe and illustrate for Alan "the kidney bean stomach" that we were all educated about, in the fifties and sixties. The nice little kidney bean shaped stomach. Which has nothing to do with the REAL Saturday Night Live Shaped stomach.

"Yeah," the nurse said, nodding sympathetically to Alan, "I used to think that all Wisconsin was GREEN, because it was green on the map," she said.

Ha. Ha. As my North Dakota relatives used to say.
I heard all this.
While I was slopping down Barium.
While being rushed at by nurses.
And, later, being congratulated by the Doctor for being his Best Patient in a Long, Long Time because: Guess What, Folks: I. Just. Kept. On. Singing.

Because that's what my mama taught me to do.
And it's not a bad lesson.

"Bash" can mean a party. It can mean a celebration. That's what I mean it to mean when I say "Bashing it in Bainbridge". Mostly, here, it can be a celebration.

The other day I overheard somebody on the street, a longtime Bainbridge-Islander, tell a NEW-Island-Islander ....that she {the old timer) didn't like Tofu. Oh my God. Imagine that. The old tim Bainbridge Islander actually saying she didn't like Tofu. "It has no taste," she said, "it has no color, and it barely has no chew." And I thought that the woman she was saying this news to was gonna faint. Oh, Joseph Conrad, where are you! The horror, the horror.

Tomorrow evening, Alan and I will have dinner with our great friend and the resplendent film professor, Dr. Dietz and his gorgeous wife {and our dear friend} Mel and our wonderful friends, Ann and Jan. At Poulsbo's restaurant, Mor-Mor's, where Alan and I said our wedding vows. We will raise our glasses high and toast to mortal love and playfulness and music and film and poetic feeling and creativity.....or maybe we will simply order and smile at each other and just dig in and eat.

Rita Hayworth and The Nature of Transcendence

2011-12-20T14:39:00.000-08:00

This past Saturday Alan and I went to visit Alan's Cousin George, who was a beacon of light for a lonely young Alan during Alan's childhood. George, some seven or eight years older than Alan, had studied at the Actor's Studio, knew Marlon Brando, had spoken with Sandy Dennis and the rest of the young actors of that age, had earned bit parts in some of television's greatest shows like The Naked City, then went on to become a librarian at Berkeley where he met the poets Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and writers like Kerouac. He translated the Tao and taught it at colleges. A strangely lovely mix of introvert and extrovert and one of the most ravenous readers I have ever met, he ended up being a janitor with ten thousand books in his head. Recently Alan and I had the task and the honor of going through his books (his apartment WAS books with only a narrow path from table to bed amongst the books) which, for me, was wildly exciting. We only spent six hours there; I could have spent six weeks.

Chinese history. Film. Music. Women. Poetry. American history. Communism. Religion, of all kinds. Books of Latin. Turkish. Books on Marilyn Monroe. Books on Krishnamurti. Books on Beethoven. My fantasy place, my pounding heart, my scent of rose.

This time, when we approached George, he looked terrible. He in living in one of those very nice You've Reached The End of the Line places in Seattle; of course that's not the place's name, but it might as well be, and if it really met George's requirements, it'd come with a huge bottle of highly potent sleeping pills. For George, these last months are lived via a" monstrous idiot's demand". He sat hunched and tiny on his bed in a room just large enough to hold a television, an oxygen tank and a sliding hospital table for meals. George's face was ashen and his eyes were nearly shut and they, too, looked grey and nearly lifeless. Our conversation, too, was without life. "And the kids? The food? That's good, that's good. You've been here how long now? And the hospice folks? You still like them? And one in particular, yeah? That's good. Oh, sure. Sounds fine."

And then. And then, somebody brought up Rita Hayworth. Rita Hayworth, that glorious hourglass of a woman with red ribbons of hair and a smile brighter than the Chicago fire. Put the blame on Mame, boys. And the moment Hayworth's name came up, George's hunched position unhunched a bit. "I'll take Rita," Alan said, for Susan Hayward's name had also been brought up. So we began talking stars from the 50's, a subject George happens to love, along with stars from the forties.

"Oh yeah?" George said, "I'll take 'em both!"

"I don't know why women today get so crazy about their bodies," George said. "Me, I always drew the line a little bit over 200. I tell ya, it's the fashion industry, they're killing women. Sophia Loren, now there was a body, and she wasn't any lightweight. Neither was Monroe. Did I ever tell you about her first picture, which was also Ann Bancroft's first picture? I'm telling ya, it was a black and white film and made before Monroe was doing any of her Marilyn mannerisms, it was great. I remember the lighting in that film. Funny how much even writers spend writing about light, you'd think more of them would write about more important things but anyway - - I spend a lot of time now thinking about light - - like in Carol Reed's THIRTY-NINE STEPS, that moment when Harry Lyme, played by Orson Welles, comes out of the darkness into the light and it's just his face, remember that? Yeah? What a great face. "Hmmmm. Where's Harry Lyme."

And now he's rolling. He's teaching us, it's a class, and we don't know it until later, which is the best kind of class of all. His eyes are open and sparkling. I'm listening as closely as I can. "You know that movie Welles's directed and also acted in, for free, I might add, where he's eating a big sausage and talking to Marlene Dietrich and he's huge, just huge, and wearing this revoltingly big old rag of a coat and he takes a bite of sausage and his slobber falls down upon the sausage and he offers a bite to Dietrich and her face, God, I will never forget that look of sheer derision on her face....." This sounds awful, of course, but one must remember what Francis Bacon said of beauty: "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion". A quote which may not fit here perfectly, but does fit EVERYWHERE imperfectly.

Anyway, ah, God, doesn't a bit of imperfection really make everything so much more WONDERFUL!

And he goes on to talk about Peter Lorre in the great film "M" which made me want to run out and buy that film and see it over again, and damned if George hadn't managed to transcend his illness and his his former mindset and me, I had even transcended mine, for listening to him talk about movies gave me the very same feeling I felt when I first read the great writer and film critic Jame Agee's books about movies, they made me feel something like a mix of adoration and mind expansion all at the same time.

Put the blame on Mame, boys. Put the blame on Mame. So when we left George this past Saturday, we all felt great. Genuinely great, like if we were lucky we would see him again and if he was lucky, we wouldn't.

And then, while I'm toying with word or notion or feel of Transcendence, I may as well go into a sort of rave about the movie HUGO which Alan and I took my grandson Aleister to on Sunday. Directed by Martin Scorsese, HUGO is the story of a nineteen-thirties director named Georges Melies, an inventor of fantasy and science fiction in cinema. Talk about transcendence, the movie's full of it. Everybody needs it, nearly everybody gets it. Certainly Ben Kingsley's character, Monsieur Melies gets it. And his wife. And the mean-silly war-injured policeman. And several of the characters in HUGO's smaller stories, for the film is completely about
story; story after story after story. And so does Hugo, the kid, receive it. Transcendence. He earns it. And, indeed, so does the audience.

By the end, when Kingsley, back to the camera and making one of those old and famous vaudevillian moves where a person slowly raises both arms up as if both arms were floating, a move so evocative of old movies that I began, softly, to sob, we were all transcended from our everyday lives into the zany, magical, exuberant, wondrous, glistening, tinted world which Melies had created and which Scorsese had recreated.

Once again, this time a man who is a true film historian, gave us a an entire class on film, in such a way that we had no idea we were being taught. We were simply enjoying, all that time.

And did Aleister like it? "I loved it!" he exclaimed. And when asked which part of the movie he liked best, the lad went silent for a moment, then tilted back his beaming face and said, "I loved the first part best - - and then - - I loved the second part best!"

Oh, well said, Aleister, well said.