Category Archives: activist

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Content

I never do know where a poem is going when I start it. Usually I start in the dark. To my surprise, those poems will end in the light. Apparently the reverse is true too.

Content

At the moment I am feeling content
deeply content
with monsters

At the moment I don’t need more
then this
me
a few friends
and all the monsters

I can’t fix the monsters
healer, right
the people come
over and over
and won’t admit
their monsters

the monsters sit on the floor
of the exam room
clinging to the person
chained to the person
the monsters wail and cry
while the person
ignores them

It has taken me all these years
to let go of anger
fury
rage
that almost no one
admits to monsters
or tries to heal them

Except the addicts, drunks, crazies
they see them too
many try to destroy their vision
with alcohol or drugs
or persist on telling others
about the monsters
until they are drugged

Yesterday I look on line
for local music
not bluegrass
thinking that I would like
to find a place with grown ups
quiet

I think, how silly I am
to look for grown ups in a bar
and then I try to think
of where to find some grown ups
and I think THERE AREN’T ANY GROWN UPS
it’s all just children
who’ve grown big

I do not like drama
there are no movies
that I want to see

I like clinic
where I try to help a little
sometimes a lot
sometimes a person might remove
one knife
one chain
one arrow
from their traumatized
terrified
bleeding
monster

And really
that is why I am here
and that is all that I can do

__________________________

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: journey.

Meanwhile, rat joy: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241128-i-taught-rats-to-drive-a-car-and-it-may-help-us-lead-happier-lives.

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Vision

What will peace look like? People
will still disagree often
but like my parents they will appreciate
evidence and science. They will listen
to each other with interest, with respect.
They will bet a penny or a quarter or a million
imaginary dollars and one will go to look up
the correct capital of Azerbaijan, while
the other argues that they MEANT back in 1478,
really, so they do not owe one million imaginary
dollars and they both start laughing again.

_______________________________

The photograph is of the ice in Echo Canyon, two days ago. Or maybe it is angels, waiting.

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Authenticity and masks

The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is identity. Yesterday I went to work an hour early so I could attend the Friday morning Continuing Medical Education. It was about adult ADHD and the positives and negatives.

I do not have a diagnosis of ADHD. I have one friend who insists that I have it, but I don’t much care. However, the speaker started talking about masks and authenticity. She said that we are told to be authentic at work, but that people with ADHD often find that their authentic self is not welcomed and they learn to mask.

I asked, doesn’t everyone mask somewhat at work? She said, “Good point, and yes, people do.” It got me thinking about identity and masks. I pretty much clammed up in Kindergarten because I was too much of an outlier and culturally wrong. We did not have a television and television was pretty much what the other children talked about. I knew songs and poems but these did not interest my peers. I was interested in science, too, but that was also not popular. I think I was a geek before it was named and as soon as I learned to read, I became a bookworm. I am not sure if having a television would have made any difference, either.

Fast forward to after high school. I went to Denmark as an exchange student my senior year and then needed to make up credits to graduate. Another high school student was in my Community College classes. After a bit, she said, “I thought you were shy in high school.” I said, “No, I just didn’t talk.”

Currently I am more authentic in the room with patients than with the rest of the staff. Corporations are very weird hierarchical places. My authentic self always questions authority but I am trying not to do it all the time. At least, not out loud. The patients seem to be fine with it. I had a very difficult conversation with an elderly couple this week about memory and planning, now, before they can’t. I got hugs at the end of the visit even though we’d gone into frightening and difficult territory. They did very well. Yesterday was my last day at that clinic and next week I am in another one. Even after just four months in this clinic, I will miss many of the patients and hope they do well.

Yesterday I really did Urgent Care. My schedule only had a few people and then six more sick ones were added on. We had to call an ambulance for one, the first time I’ve had to do that here.

What is authenticity and what is our identity? Is the work mask less real than the self in our minds?

I took the photograph at a small hot springs resort. A friend that I’ve known since high school and I met there. I love the bookworm rabbit. I think she represents the happy bookworm part of me. I read about 7 novels a month, haunting the library here. Maybe I will get to know some more people over the next 6 months.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: identity.

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Love gently

Honey is older, nearly thirty years since that first feeling of being bitten by ants. She is back in corporate medicine, as a temp. Temporary, short term, maybe that will work better.

It is a joy to go in a room and be alone with a person and their monsters. Theirs and hers. Sometimes the younger ones haven’t experienced it, they are terrified if one of their monsters becomes a little bit visible, they hate seeing them. Honey tries to be gentle. If they only want to talk about the sore shoulder and not the stress and violence, well, she leaves the door open a crack. Sometimes the monsters cry.

Older people may be stiff to start with, but when they realize their monsters are seen, acknowledged, this isn’t another robot doctor in to say increase your diabetes medicine, lower your diabetes medicine, tell them a plan without ever connecting, the older ones lean back, sigh, and relax. The monsters play on the floor, Honey’s monsters playing with theirs, happy, engaged.

The hard part is the clinic staff. Honey is with them daily. The medical assistants are young. They kick their monsters aside as they walk down the hall. It is terribly hard and heartbreaking to work at her desk, with the medical assistants’ monsters cowering under their desks, kicked, abused, silent tears and holding bruises. Honey’s monsters mind. They climb into her lap and hide their faces in her shirt, under her jacket, peer over her shoulder. They don’t understand! Why can’t she be nice to THESE monsters?

Honey whispers to her monsters when the medical assistants are rooming patients. “I am so sorry, loves. If I acknowledge these, the monsters of the women working, I become a demon. It is very hard to share an office, no wonder I worked in a clinic alone for eleven years.” Honey has been through that. It is still inconceivable that some people don’t see the monsters at all. Is it learned blindness? Or just not developed unless someone had to learn it? Unless someone grows up in terror and seeing the monsters is the only way to survive.

Honey thinks some people learn to see them as adults, at least their own monsters. Hard enough to do that, without seeing the monsters clinging to other people.

Honey is tired of her monsters crying in sympathy with the staff’s monsters. She thinks maybe there are small crumbs that she can leave for these demons. Little gifts. Her monsters can creep under the desk when she is the only one in the room and leave something. A flower. A dust bunny. A crumb of a crisp. A small rock. A little gift to let them know they are seen and loved. A poem. A prayer. Just a tiny bit of love.

_____________________________

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: crisp.

The photograph is me all dressed up for the 1940s ball.

______________________________

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Matter

If something doesn’t matter, is it anti-matter?

Lily’s person moved two days ago, much closer. Supposedly to a place where Lily the cat can go, but instead of a private room, there is a roommate. It took me a month to get Lily cat to let me pat her, so the roommate won’t work. We are all very very frustrated. And next week daily treatments for Lily’s person start, thirty minutes away, without enough warning to get volunteer drivers. So it will be me. I am tired. But I suppose it’s anti-matter, right? We were given 24 hours notice by the nursing home and by the physicians about both the move and the treatment and they wanted to start the treatment the same day that she was moving. Whether we can provide all the transport seems to be irrelevant.

The stealthie is from Whidby Island. Right, I’m just an irrelevant shadow as far as the medical dysfunctional machine is concerned.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: irrelevant.

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Envy

I am supposed to write about envy
but what I am feeling is grief
I walked five miles yesterday
and it was fun, talking, a group
but then a nap from 2 to 5, three hours
and to bed at seven pm and up at five
so 13 hours sleep in response to exercise

It is time to downsize what I think I can do
I still have my mind, but the energy is halved
I can’t work full time as a physician
and I am not sure I can work half time
Do I try it? The risk that I crash again?
Pneumonia and death? Or do I curl into the grief
and find something else to do.

Even the thought makes me tired.

Not envy of other doctors, oh, maybe a little
but the truth is, my survival to date is something
of a miracle. Babies with mothers with active tuberculosis
usually die very quickly, infected, overshelmed.
My mother kindly coughed blood so the doctors knew
before I was born, from the protection of the womb
to the protection of the family, away from my mother.
She is dead, my father is dead, my sister is dead
so even if I cannot work half time
it’s still miraculous to be here at all.

I hope that each and every one of you
feels the miracle of not being dead and gone
some days. And that you do not envy
your dead.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: envy.

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BIRGing in Memories

Let’s see, I am thinking of famous people, not just that I’ve seen (from a distance) but that I know or knew:

Frankie Manning, one of Whitey’s Lindyhoppers who danced lindyhop at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. He came to teach at the Savoy Swings Again dance weekends in West Virginia in the 1980s. He came to Port Townsend, too, for the dance camps here. I got to dance with him years ago and took classes and watched demonstrations. Hooray for him!

Bernice Reagon Johnson PhD, both for being an historian at the Smithsonian and for being the leader of Sweet Honey in the Rock for 40 years, and it’s still going! Ok, I don’t know her, but she is from my Washington, DC stomping grounds and I love that group.

Darryl Davis, for being an African American man who made appointments with KKK Grand Dragons to talk to them to try to understand. And some have quit! And he’s a fabulous Baltimore blues man and he and his band played at our wedding in 1989. He ran the Centrum Blues Fest for years too.

Ted talk here and music website here: https://www.daryldavis.com/.

Musicians and activists and dancers, that seems to be who I want to BIRG about!

And the photograph is from our wedding.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: BIRGing.

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Lose the chest strap

After my fourth pneumonia, I couldn’t stand the chest strap any more. Chest strap? say the guys. “What chest strap?” Dudes, bra, brassiere, whatever you want to call it.

It made my lungs hurt. My lungs already hurt. I thought, ok. I am 60 years old. I am “small” and don’t need any “support” unless I go running or something that really makes breasts jiggle. Don’t need a bra for dancing. And anyone who stares at my tits, well, gosh, thought you guys didn’t like “old” ladies. I don’t care.

Let’s think about that chest strap though. Guys, have you ever tried a bra on? What exactly is a bra for? Well, running or soccer or pole vault or football or all sorts of other heavy athletics, yeah, it can be really uncomfortable. Strap those babies down. But the day to day bra is to enhance support, stop jiggle and hide nipple action.

Uh, and meanwhile guys can take off their shirts in public. I think this is unfair. They have nipples too and breast tissue, just less.

Also, what is wrong with jiggle? The breast tissue drains in multiple directions, through lymphatics. I think some breast jiggle may be important to that drainage. Jiggle means slut to guys? Well, go suck a lemon, guys. And if you really stare at my breasts when I am talking to you, I might not sock your eye, but I sure as hell will lose all respect for you. All. And why are nipples evil in women but not in men? Because they are functional in women and men are jealous? Tit envy.

Now support. Yes, there are women who are so well endowed that they have back pain and may choose a breast reduction. This is covered by insurance if the clinician documents that pain over time. And breasts do change with time and age. But when is our culture going to accept and even celebrate aging! We do congratulate people turning 80 or 90 or 100, but otherwise older women are often ignored. I am delighted by the older actresses and musicians who are now finding parts and are still out there and dancing. Go Tina Turner, the legs go last!

I also think the chest strap is not nice for the lungs. Certainly not after four rounds of pneumonia, but bras have to be tight enough that they do have an effect on a deep breath. I’ve retired my bras. Ok, if I am in a Madonna mood and want to wear a lace see through white shirt, then I might pull out the scarlet one for the evening, but otherwise, no way. How good are bras for people with asthma, with emphysema, with post covid?

Lose that chest strap, ladies, and take a deep breath. Breathe free.

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Daily Evil: Q is for Quiet

When is it evil to be quiet? When you are witnessing bullying or injustice or someone being harmed. Have you witnessed bullying and stood by and does it bother you?

I am at a dinner, invited. It turns out that the agenda is to talk a partner into staying, because she has quit. Partner one wants partner two to stay. Partner three and I are horrified and don’t want her to stay, but we do not want to say that to her. We frankly can’t wait for her to leave.

The dinner turns in to partner one and two bullying partner three. I am the newest and don’t know what to do. The next day I am ashamed and think, why didn’t I take partner three and leave? What is the matter with me?

Part of it is that I revert to childhood. I survived a complex household with people who were loving sometimes and horrid and drunk at others. Clamming up and being quiet was how I survived. But I am an adult now and I can leave. I can also speak up and say, “Stop. This is not fair. This is an ambush.”

Today’s watercolor is flowers. My mother loved flowers, had a wild and delightful garden, and painted them often. This is a small watercolor, 7 by 10 inches, no date.

I am thinking about the latest shootings. Aren’t we supposed to welcome strangers, for they may be angels in disguise? What did you stock up on during the pandemic? A gun didn’t occur to me. I bought more water filters and wished I could buy for the whole county. I bought seeds. I bought rice and beans. You can’t eat bullets and they aren’t good toilet paper either. I studied local edible plants. What did you buy? So many people are so afraid.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: nothing. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.