Losing It

It has been a crazy, crazy few months here in illusion land. I am now dealing with my mom who is dealing with my Dad's Alzheimer's disease. When he was home, I tried to warn her to get involved with a support group, try to form a new regimen, but after 61 years together, she's finding it hard to reinvent herself. Recently he went into a nursing home after a mini stroke worsened his Alzheimer's disease. She demanded that they allow her to take his clothes home to wash them herself. I could understand this, she still wanted to feel as if she could do something for him.

Finally, after some weeks, she has decided that this task is too much for her, dragging his clothes back and forth, back and forth, when the nursing home sends them out to be laundered for you. I hope this is a sign that she is slowly beginning to pull away. If she can't I fear she'll be caught in the undertow.

She's very angry at him right now, probably for what she sees as him leaving her. I spend my time trying to cajole her from two states away. "Mom, walk to the corner and sit in the library. Find out what programs they're having. Borrow some books. Eat lunch out. Her answer is always the same. "No, I'm fine."

I fear for her. I put my fear in some poems to ease the ever increasing stress. I dread calling her, prefer hiding in my poetry. These poems are about what's been happening to our family over these past months.

What Passes

TV is what passes for conversation these days
constant/repetitive/mind-numbing
my husband, sitting across from me at the diningroom table
drones words,
Did I eat today? Did I eat today? Did I eat today?
a staticky annoyance between long silences

This is what passes for my marriage of sixty years

The children come in for Thanksgiving/Christmas/Easter/
he greets them
calling them by his siblings’ names
They don’t bother to contradict his misnomers,
having been taught the art of distance by him,
they measure his increasing frailty, dole out empathy to me

This is what passes for a good education

Later, when they’ve tucked themselves safely back into their own lives
after arming me with numbers for support groups and websites for services
to gird me against the impending . . .
I make a cup of tea, sit at the dining room table across from him

Some instinctual cue compels me to look up
and I catch him staring at me,
a question embedded in his face
after a moment, he says my name
and the puzzle melts into a half smile
he quietly repeats it to himself
before returning to his newspaper

I turn on the TV to pass the time
knowing that, these days, it’s more
much more than time,
that is passing



Distance

My sister is walking distance from her house
My brother even closer
I am two states away and
two days out of the hospital when
she spews into my phone
“Now when I need you, you’re not here!”
I manage to stay civil, my neck throbbing
She has the pinched nerve but
It’s my neck that’s aching
Out of empathy? Out of guilt?
I tell her I will call her tomorrow

I don’t

I know her anger is for him because
His mind is not always able to hold her
To give concrete form to her name, her face
After a lifetime together
He is moving away from her
Farther and farther each day

She was never a woman who made close friends
“With a husband and four kids,” she’d laugh
“Who has time for friends?”
Now all she has is time
All that time left
To ruminate, to blame everything
On distance



The Old Boy

My daughter Tracey and I walk down the long light-blue corridor
that ends in a baby-blue love seat on which
my mother and brother, the doctor, sit
My father is in a wheelchair facing them
his back to us
It’s the first time I’ve been to his nursing home
I don’t know if he’ll know me but
this isn’t the thing that’s kept me away
I’m afraid the picture I hold of him will be stolen
by the person sitting in the wheelchair, his back to us
the one swallowed up in all that blue

“Hey Poppie,” my daughter says
Greeting him with a kiss
She is thirty five, still has friends in New York
gets to the city more regularly
and so has been here before

I kiss his forehead, ask him how he’s doing
He says, “Okay.”
My mother asks him if he knows who I am
The question being more about
him calling her his mother’s name
once
when he first arrived here
After the transient ischemic attack
made the Alzheimer’s worse

Tracey goes off to find a chair
as I squeeze in between my mother and brother
facing dad
He looks in my face, says “This must be Tracey” but
I see the slight twinkle in his eyes as he finishes his reply with,
“No this is Carol”

I survey the gaunt figure in front of me,
ask, “Dad are you cold?”
because he keeps hunching his shoulders
up and down, up and down, up and down
“Involuntary action” my brother answers in that clinical
voice he’s been trained to—old school medicine
In that instant, I remember the gesture as
one my physical therapist taught me,
an exercise to help me reduce stress
“Draw your shoulders up and down like this,”
she’d said, showing me how, “it’s like you’re saying,
I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know”
I hear her sing-song voice in my head
find the thought disturbing in this context
and quickly erase it from my mind

My daughter returns from her search for a chair
Plunks down next to him and in that mischievous
way she’s no doubt inherited from him, says,
“So Poppie, you have any girlfriends here,
anybody creeping in your room late at night?”
His eyes light up so brightly, you can almost see the smile
spread across his face
He’s transformed for me in that moment
A forty-something year old man, standing in
the middle of the livingroom of our old house,
His knees bent forward, his upper torso leaning so far backwards
it makes his mackintosh touch the floor
He’s bouncing
his hands shoved deep into his pockets, he’s bouncing
Back from the doctor’s where he has just learned
my mother is pregnant with their fourth child, my sister, Dianne
He is smiling the same smile I almost see in his face now
His head tilted back, the rooster in him crowing to the ceiling,
“There’s life in the old boy yet”
I see him
bouncing in that old livingroom, laughing, laughing
“There’s life in the old boy yet”

This is the picture I hold onto, the one I wrench from the blue
and take with me, pressed close to my heart
a weapon
against an ever encroaching thief

I'm Back!!

Well I'd just gotten into the blogging thing, and then my life went insane!

I found myself working sometimes seventeen hour days for the Obama campaign, so needless to say, sleeping took precedent over blogging and even writing. It was a rollercoaster ride but I enjoyed every minute of it. It was phenomenal!
I got to shake Obama's hand, and Michelle's also when she came to the small private college in PA where I teach writing. But the best of the best? I got Toni Morrison to read at the school for Get Out the Vote week, (my dream of dreams come true). She was so happy to do something for the campaign, that after the program, (during which I got to introduce Ms. Toni) I got to kick back and chill with the Toni meister, and the conversation was the best. (See photo above) I can now die a happy woman. Yes, I am a bit of a drama queen. So I guess I did write. I wrote the introduction for Morrison and some op-ed pieces for the local newspaper during the campaign. I (humbly) post the introduction here:

Introduction for Toni Morrison April 18, 2008
Get Out the Vote Rally

Some years ago, I was working in New York for an organization that sent writers into the public schools to help teachers develop effective writing strategies for their students. The program was founded on the idea that if teachers became writers themselves, they would discover that everyone’s process is unique and, in turn, they would begin to see their students as individual writers.

To aid me in my projects I read interviews of writers because I knew that when engaged in conversation, writers often divulge their views on craft and their varied approaches to the discipline. The writer whose ideas I related most often to teachers and students alike was Toni Morrison. I was held captive by her books and the information she shared in her interviews challenged me as a writer to work at perfecting my own craft. I became, for lack of a better word, obsessed.
Whenever I spoke at staff meetings it was understood that there would be Toni Morrison quotes lacing my words. Friends and fellow writers were on high alert to contact me if they heard that she was giving a reading somewhere, and they were further charged with procuring tickets to the event. During those readings, I sat mesmerized by her fiction, but it was the Q and A’s that became my classroom. Even my answering machine spouted Morrison gems that deteriorated into some poorly manipulated tagline requiring the caller to leave a name and number. Witness: Toni Morrison says, “The purpose of language is not to kill, but to [have] an intellectual and/or visceral response to the book.” If you’d like to get an intellectual and/or visceral response from me, leave your name . . . Well, you get the point.

The end of this is that my employer, as a bonus for executing a particularly difficult project, pulled some strings and presented me with two tickets to a private reception for Ms. Morrison when she was reading from Jazz at the 92nd Street Y. I was ecstatic. I imagined myself in a room of other privileged ticket holders discussing the works of this revered writer. In the days leading up to the event, I dreamed about the questions I would ask of her, considered the profound comments I would make about her fiction.
Finally, the day arrived. After the reading and the book signing, my friend and I were ushered into a room where a handful of people were gathered. Ms. Morrison entered a short time later, surveyed the surroundings, and then walked straight over to where my friend and I were standing. She extended her hand to me and as we shook, she asked, “And you are?” In that moment, I could not, for the life of me, remember my own name. My friend, sensing the distress that undoubtedly was sprawled across my face, introduced herself and then added, “This is (my name) and she’s a writer too.” I suddenly found my tongue and managed to blurt out, “Yes, yes, that’s who I am.” No doubt fearing for her own safety, Ms. Morrison hurried off to another corner of the room.

I have only experienced this reaction on one other occasion: it was the day I stuck my hand out and Barack Obama shook it and smiled. In that moment, I was again speechless until I realized tears were falling down my cheeks and a short time later I stood babbling, “I shook his hand, I actually shook his hand.” What I have learned from these two encounters, what I have since come to understand about myself is that, this loss of words, this lack of language on my part, followed by some primordial utterance, is how I respond when I am in the presence of genius.

The genius of Ms. Morrison is evidenced in her eight novels (her ninth, titled A Mercy will be released in November of this year.) In 1973 her 3rd novel, Sula, received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988 Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and in 2006, The New York times Book Review named it the best American novel published in twenty-five years. Ms. Morrison was also the first black woman to win the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She has also published several nonfiction books including, Playing in the Dark, as well as some of her major lectures. She’s also authored five children’s books with her son Slade Morrison, a short story, titled Recitatif, a play, Dreaming Emmet, and Margaret Garner, a libretto.

In her work, Morrison aims to subvert traditional western ideology, to disrupt what she defines as the Master Narrative. So too, Sen. Obama seeks to subvert the self serving narratives of special interest and corporate greed. He seeks to disrupt the stalemating practices of partisan politics and bring business as usual in Washington to an end.

When Morrison speaks of endings, she asserts that the end of a book, should not be like a curtain falling or a door closing, but rather an ending should be the opening up of possibilities. Barack Obama is opening up the eyes and hearts of all Americans to the possibilities of what we can be, of what we can achieve when we work together.

In her endorsement letter to Sen. Obama, Ms. Morrison writes: “. . . this is one of those singular moments that nations ignore at their peril. I will not rehearse the multiple crises facing us, but of one thing I am certain: this opportunity for a national evolution (even revolution) will not come again soon, and I am convinced you are the person to capture it.” She goes on to make this observation: “In thinking carefully about the strengths of the candidates, I stunned myself when I came to the following conclusion: that in addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.”

I feel extremely honored and privileged to introduce to you tonight, a woman of keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity; a wise woman who couples a creative imagination with brilliance. Understand this evening, as you listen to her words, that you are in the presence of genius. Please join me in welcoming Ms. Toni Morrison.


A bit pretentious of me to post this, you say? Well heck yeah! I count it as a ticked off item on my bucket list, right up there with driving up the Pacific Coast highway, and just as exhilarating! Now that my life has returned somewhat to normal (not counting my 84 year old mom dealing with my 92 year old dad's alzheimers) I will be blogging regularly, so stop by and holler when you can.

Why I'm Here

Finding myself in the hinterlands of America and desiring a dialog with like-minded individuals, I begin this blog to connect to those who consider writing a passion, a calling. This is not a blog for the hobbyist, the some-timer or the little engines who mutter, I think I can, I think I can. This blog is for those for whom writing is a necessary appendage, an appendage whose amputation would cause severe hemorrhaging, and if survived, would leave an obvious limp. Having said that, I welcome you into this conversation concerning all things writing: the craft, the life, all of it--the agonies and the ecstacies.

This summer finds me finishing off a novel. For me personally, this means beginning a new one that is different enough to catapult me out of the world I've been living in for too long while generating enough excitement to make my mourning of the old project bearable. Distance is everything. I will probably try to get away to the mountains for a week or so, for some--one less bell to answer, one less egg to fry--time, to jump start the new work. My first love is short stories and I just popped one for a reading I had in NY this past week. By writing it, I don't know if I was prolonging the end of my novel or preparing for its end. There's a thin line between procrastination and procrastination, sometimes it can look exactly like productivity. Anyway, the piece was well received and I was happy and isn't that the point? Each summer I also pick a writer and read as much of their work as I can. I just finished off Kiran Desai, but I haven't made up my mind about a choice for my summer reading. If anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears. I thought about David Sedaris, (he's as funny as all hell) but I don't know if I can devote a whole summer to him. for my tastes, there's not much of a range from piece to piece. I started Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, did I make the wrong choice? I also started Joan Didion's, The Year of Magical Thinking (mainly because I'm teaching it next year). I've done the Didion list (she's one of my favorite nonfiction writers) but I mention it here because perhaps I'll want something lighter after I've finished this one.

Enough about me. If you happen by, I hope you'll share your thoughts, your passions, your pains (about writing), ask questions, provide answers, tell me what you're up to or not up to. I've started the dialog, please continue.