Category Archives: Beloved

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the problem with angels

the problem with angels

the problem with angels
is that they aren’t grey

nor do they have color

they are black
or white

sort of boring, really

pick one side
good or evil
night or day
male or female

I would rather be fluid

I want to be able to transform

liquid to solid
solid to gas
gas to solid
gas to liquid

flow around things

seep into the earth

always always
return to the sea

keep your wings

project black or white
as you choose
on me

while I flick water at you
and go for a swim

also published on everything2 today

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Painting Angels

You were an artist
You are an artist
You said that you’d have to live to 120 to finish all your projects
And died at 61
I keep wondering
what the art supplies are like
and if you work on sunsets
or mountains
or lakes

Trey, 9
made a clay fish last summer that I admire.
He said grumpily “It’s too bad Grandma Helen died before I could do clay with her.”
He tells me he’s ready to make raku pots for fire in your ashes as you wished
I ask what he’d make
He considers and says, “What was Grandma Helen’s favorite food?”
I can’t think and say that she liked lots of foods
At the same time wondering squeamishly if maybe
he should make a vase and then being surprised
that I am squeamish and thinking of blood and wine,
too, I wonder if my dad would know. “Maybe guacamole.”
I need to find a potter to apprentice him to.

Camille, 4.
asks how old Grandma Helen was when she died.
I explain that she died at 61 but her mother died at 92.
Camille asks how old I am.
40.
When are you going to die?
I say I don’t know, none of us do, but I hope it’s more towards 90.

Camille studies me and is satisfied for now.
She goes off.
I think of you.

I perpetuate
the Christmas cards you did with us
upon my children
They each draw a card.
We photocopy them and hand paint with watercolors.
Camille wants to draw an angel
and says she can’t.
I draw a simple angel
and have her trace it.
She has your fierce concentration
bent over tracing through the thick paper
She wants it right.
The angel is transformed.

My kids resist the painting after a few cards as I did too.
Each time I paint the angel
to send to someone I love
I think of Camille
and you
and genes
and Heaven
I see you everywhere

published in Mama Stew: An Anthology: Reflections and Observations on Mothering, edited by Elisabeth Rotchford Haight and Sylvia Platt c. 2002

written January 19, 2002

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Hard 

It's hard to let go of you
and stay present

I don't know why
The Beloved set me this task
I argue and struggle
a fly in Her web
But I hold still when She bites me
Paralyzed by love

You connect me to Beloved
that's what I want
Like a spring
Like a stream
Like a geyser
Like a tsunami
Like an ocean
I am lost in the depths

It's ok really
I am used to pain
I am used to the air hurting like knives
When I draw breath

Oh Beloved
The sky is crying hard with hail
while I write this

It's hard to let go of you
and stay present

Luckily I have so much to cry about
That you can't tell which tears
are about you
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The Introverted Thinker and the Extroverted Feeler play

I am an introverted thinker by preference on the Meyers Briggs test and my sister was an extroverted feeler. My kids each have one of those preference patterns. This story first appeared on an obscure writing website in November 2014.

_____________________________________

When my sister Chris and I were very little, we went on long car trips each summer to a lake in Canada. This is a small lake north of Lake Erie and one of hundreds in Ontario, but to us it was “Canada”.

This was before seatbelts. My father was in graduate school, my mother was an artist who was not making money at it and they were “independently wealthy at a poverty level.” Our cars were always used and tended to break down. My father favored old Peugots and once he and a friend put a new engine in the International Travelall right before we left. We were living in Johnson City, New York, so it was either one very long day’s drive or two days to the lake.

Chris and I had the back seat, often piled with camping gear. She was three years younger. When we were very small we played “Red eye, white eye.” I don’t know who made it up, but I remember my father’s voice. The eyes were tigers. “White eyes” meant that there was an oncoming tiger and we had to duck down behind the seat until it passed, so that it wouldn’t get us. “Red eyes” meant a receding tiger or a tiger in front of us going the other way, so we could pop back up. It also meant no tigers.

“White eyes,” said my father, and we hid, scared. Then there was such a feeling of safety and of not being caught when he said, “Red eyes,” and we could return. We knew that he would protect us from the tigers.

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Dream: Get real, Girl

I dream that I am a prisoner and being tortured. The torturers are indistinct and shadows. They cut slices into my flesh and put me back in my cell.

I am out of my cell again and I am seen from the back, naked from the hips up. The torturer cuts slices in my back with a cutlas. The previous slices have healed and scarred. I am done. I turn, grab the cutlas and slice off the torturers hands at mid-forearm. His hands are visible as they fall away, but the rest of him is still a shadow. I will win, I know.

I have a new vase. I take the white china vase out of the base, which has brass wheels and a support like a coach. Like Cindarella’s coach. I use the vase as a template to carve the base of a pumpkin to fit. I carve it into a coach sitting on the base. I find a plastic horse and the “Get real, Girl” in her hiking boots. I photograph it and caption it: “After she smashes the glass slippers, the coachmen and horses revert to mice and rats and run away. She steals a horse from her father, puts on her hiking gear, skips the ball and heads for the hills for good.”

Then I wake up.

As you can see, I haven’t carved the pumpkin yet, nor found the horse. But I will.

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without reason

without reason

my cat worries
as I pack the bug out bags
to hide in the woods
if food stops arriving on trucks

she hates it when I pack
and the other pound kitten of nine years ago
was killed by a car two months ago
so she is lonely

I stop packing
I hold my cat
I say, “We will not go without you.”
I hold her
She relaxes
Believes me

I get the travel cage from the garage
wash it and get my pink silk scarf
it’s been in a bag and she has been hiding there
just her face in shadow when I walk by

I put the scarf in the travel cage
leave the door open
and feed her there intermittently
I will take her in the travel cage in the car
so that she is prepared

I’ll take the fish too
somehow

I plan to put plants outside
some may survive

some say animals and plants
have unstinting happiness
but not my cat

she worries that I will leave without her

and is reassured
when I say I won’t

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Teamwork

The photo is of a synchronized swim trio.

Only one swimmer is really visible. She is being lifted by the other two. They are not allowed to touch to bottom at all. It is all done lifting their own or each other’s bodies out of the water by swimming.

Sychronized swimming is a shrinking sport in the United States, because it is such hard work. My daughter started at age seven and had to swim three laps. She made it one length and then had to hold on to the lane divider to rest during the rest of the laps. She went under three separate times during that first practice. I nearly jumped the divider all three times, but she came up each time.

“How was it?” I asked when she got out.

“I nearly drowned three times.” she said, stomping past me in a rage.

She says that she hated it for the first year and that I made her keep going. If I did, I would feel guilty, except that she loved it so much after that. Seven years of synchronized swimming, until our very small town team folded, and then swim team. She is now a junior. What she wants most in college is to continue to swim on a team.

Back to the photo. To be lifted straight out of the water that far, you must be in the right position, you must have very good core strength, and your two partners must be in the right position underwater and lift correctly. You must practice and practice and practice and practice.

And you do this in time to music.

We need to work as a team in the world to deal with infection, to deal with ebola, to work together. My daughter loved synchronized swimming because it is so challenging and because it is above all, teamwork.

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Taking care of Ebola is hard

“We may never know exactly how [transmission] happened, but the bottom line is that the guidelines didn’t work for that hospital,” said Frieden. “Dallas shows that taking care of Ebola is hard.”

From the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/20/ebola-hospitals-us_n_6018372.html

And for me, a lowly rural Family Practice physician, from the American Academy of Family Practice: “The first steps in preparing your office for a possible Ebola case are to make sure you have all referral contact information ready to go and that you educate each staff member on his or her role should a case present.”

There is only me and a receptionist. We don’t have hazmat suits. Actually I’ve been off sick, lung and vocal cord problems, for all of October.

We have masks, gloves, I do have a white coat that I almost never wear.

Also from the AAFP:”Appointment clerks and front-desk personnel taking calls for appointments should inquire about African travel history in patients calling for appointments for fever, headache, weakness, diarrhea, vomiting, muscle aches or bleeding,” said Mahoney. “Anyone with a positive travel history should be contacted by a provider to gather additional history and determine if public health authorities need to be involved before a patient even presents to the physician office.”

http://www.aafp.org/news/health-of-the-public/20141017eboladisprep.html

We are both going to get our influenza shots this week. Please get your influenza shot. There is a lot more influenza around than risk of ebola in the United States, and influenza kills many many people every year. And even if you “never get colds” and “have a strong immune system”, you might get a mild case of influenza and pass it on to someone who then dies of it. If you tell me “I got flu the last time I got the shot”, excuse me, but that is hooey. First of all, it takes two weeks for your immune system to respond to the shot, so if you got symptoms the next day it could be influenza but not from the shot. Maybe from being exposed to someone with influenza at the grocery store or your doctor’s office. Secondly, people say “flu” and often they mean stomach flu. Stomach flu is not influenza. Third, influenza changes all the time, so about 80% of the vaccinated people are protected most years. That’s right: two weeks after my influenza shot, I am about 80% protected. Not 100%.

Why are we getting vaccinated? For one thing, we are health care workers and we get exposed. And for another, the initial symptoms of influenza are the same as the initial symptoms of ebola. Actually the United States is really rather lucky that the ebola case happened before influenza really hit, because they look too much the same initially. Suppose that three of the quarentined people had come down with influenza….. confusion and panic initially.

So please get your influenza vaccine, because you not only help to protect yourself, but protect others and prevent panic.

Blessings!

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Don’t panic, prepare

We need to help people with ebola in other countries: or else we won’t deserve and won’t get help when the United States is the center of an epidemic.

I am a member of a doctor website called Sermo. I rarely write there, especially after I found advertisements to medical equipment and drug companies saying that they could pay to put announcements and articles on the site and “reach doctors”. Also, apparently some doctors on the site think that it is “safe” to write things. Ha. It’s the internet, silly, the opposite of safe. Your words could get back to your patient, ok?

Anyhow, there was a survey and 75% of the doctors on the site who took the survey (I didn’t)  said we should stop flights from Liberia. I think they are wrong, are not compassionate, and I would cross them off my referral list as discriminatory “I’ve got mine, everyone else can go to hell.” selfish gits. I disagreed and said that the United States could be the center of an epidemic, easily. Could be. Will, some day. We need to treat our international neighbors as we want to be treated.

That being said, I am pleased to see the CDC and United States hospitals now stepping up and getting their hazmat suits on. The rest of us need to NOT PANIC.

If you want to do something, think about your communities emergency preparedness. Are you prepared?

1. Do you have a weeks worth of food, water, medicines, supplies? Do you update the supplies (ok, I have food from 2009. Time to update.)

2.Do you have a weather radio? (http://www.emd.wa.gov/publications/pubed/where_to_get_weather_radios.shtml)

3. Do you have a family meeting point? Do you have an out of state person that the family is to call to check in? That everyone knows about?

4. Have you subscribed to emergency notifications? (http://www.emd.wa.gov/publications/pubed/noaa_weather_radio.shtml)

5. Consider buying your community a shelter box. Or teaming with friends to buy one for the community and another for a disaster area. Our Rotary group buys at least one a year for international disaster relief. (http://www.shelterbox.org/   and http://www.shelterboxusa.org/)

6. Do you have skills? Can you set up a tent, cook food, do medical care, start a fire, build shelter? What skills could stand brushing up? Have you taken a first aid class recently? Have you taught your children these skills? Do you have neighbors that would need help? You would want someone to help your grandmother, who lives four states away. Adopt a local elderly person or couple that you would help……

The picture is my daughter and niece in 2009 in a 19 pound canoe that is very tippy. They only tipped it over on purpose. They both have a lot of skills, some learned at cabins in Ontario, Canada. The cabins are one room and could also be described as shacks: but the kids get to use tools, paddle canoes, start fires, sleep in a tent……

My parents taught care of the tent so well that I have a kelty tent that my sister and I set up, took down and used, and it still does not leak. It is more than 40 years old! Aluminum poles, no shock cords and a fly. Excellent.