Category Archives: Beloved

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Thank the agates

I thank the agates that I’ve found at the beach. They teach me. I butt my head against things over and over and the agates say, we are harder.

At last I agree: you are harder.

We don’t change, say the agates.

My feet are in the sea. The waves laugh in and out softly. They don’t argue. Sometimes they are not soft at all: when there are many stones, the stones crack together rolling as the water washes back into the sea. Stones sounding like coins, like bells, like music.

The waves and I. We are mostly water. The sea and I change, slowly. The deep part of the sea changes, slowly, while the surface weather is sunny or stormy. The sea may throw up huge waves on the surface, but the depths change slowly, deep currents.

The agates change too, whether they like it or not. The stones are smacked together, cracked, smashed. If they don’t crack in half, they still are worn smooth over time. The rough spots are changed. Sometimes they break. We don’t change, say the agates, but they lie.

The sea changes suddenly when the earth opens and molten rock rises in the sea. Piles up, fire and rock, pouring from the earth and building a mountain until it hits the air: a new island, a new idea, a fiery sudden change. The waves spread from the fiery center, smacking the stones harder, further.

Thank you, agates. You say you don’t change, but you lie. Water wins, always. Water flowing, evaporating, floating, falling, freezing, sublimating. Water changes and water wins.

Don’t be afraid of change, stones. It does no good to resist. You can be knocked together by water until the rough edges are smoothed, you can be melted in the burning core of the earth, you can be crushed into a new form by the movement of the world. Don’t be afraid. Thank you for teaching me.

______________________

Are the stones trying to be aquadynamic?

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Songs to Raise Girls: The Humpty Dumpty Blues

This is Malcolm K. Ottaway, my father, singing the Humpty Dumpty Blues in 2009.

He made them up when I was two. Here are the two stories that my mother would tell and that I finally linked.

In the early 1960s my parents married at age 21 and were both going to the University of Tennessee. They married in June and I was born the next March. In a tuberculosis sanatorium, because my mother started coughing blood at 8 months pregnant. She thought she was going to die. She didn’t die, but after I was born she did not hold me again until I was nine months old. I was suspicious of adults by then, because they kept giving me away.

My parents had music parties, where my father played guitar. My mother had a prodigious memory and would remember every verse, so she was the last one singing. My mother said, “At one party you wanted your father to play Humpty Dumpty. He wouldn’t. You were the only child there. You kept asking. Finally he made up the Humpty Dumpty Blues. You were so angry at him that you stomped your feet at him and everyone laughed.”

And the second story: “One morning after a party, your father picked up his guitar. It RATTLED. It had 17 beer bottle caps in it. We checked and not one person had seen you pick up a beer bottle cap or put it through the strings. It took your father hours to slide the bottle caps out from under the strings with a butter knife.”

Well, that will teach him to not sing a song for the two year old. At any rate, he sang the Humpty Dumpty Blues my whole life. I don’t remember the original party or sliding bottle caps through the strings. I must have done it after the party was over, right? Did I go during the party and pick up every cap I could find, or did I already have a hidden stash? Two year olds can be sneaky, apparently.

At any rate, I am very happy to have the recording now, even though the original made me stomp my feet.

The photograph is of me, in about 1963 or 64. I don’t know who took it, but it was taken at Lake Matinenda, in Ontario, Canada.

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Songs to Raise Girls: three songs

The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is memorize, and oh, what I have memorized! I saw a t-shirt at the Nowhereelse Festival in Ohio that said, “My memory is 80% lyrics.” Yes, me too, a mix of songs, poetry and books that I have read. My sister Chris and I were busily memorizing songs as soon as we could. Here are three very educational songs for young girls. The last one we learned from our cousin, who was a girl scout and a girl scout leader. She was in the calendar one year, making cookies. I was very very impressed and a little jealous.

I bought a four hour recording session at a silent auction and the recordings are me and my sister and my father. We did them in two sessions. We made a list of songs and lost it immediately so we all took turns suggesting songs. My mother had already died of cancer. My sister died in 2012 and my father in 2013. I am so glad to have these recordings. We called it Mocoko for Malcolm Ottaway, Chris Ottaway and Katherine Ottaway. We sang most of them just once and so they are not polished, but I still am happy to have them.

Bridget O’Flynn

I sang Bridget O’Flynn to my daughter when she called me about dancing. “Mom! I love to twirl!” Um, well, yes, your parents met at a contra dance at Glenn Echo Park in Maryland. We love to twirl too.

Late in the evening

A cautionary song, an old barbershop quartet song, that we sang.

Fascinating Lady

I wonder if the girl scouts still sing this.

The photograph is my son scaring me. Ok, that boulder is sitting there balanced BUT! GET OUT OF THERE! Taken in Palm Springs in 2011 up on the mesa. Beautiful.

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always on your mind

This is a compilation poem from more than one song and more than one person I’ve dated. A friend and I really dislike a song her husband sings that has the “I wish that you had told me” line. We make faces at each other and whisper, “We wish that you had listened.”

Sometimes I am treated as an admiring audience by a male. At least, that is the role he would like me to play. I get pretty bored pretty quickly. If he doesn’t give me reasonable floor time, if he doesn’t listen, well, goodbye. Find another female slave. One male tells me that my poetry doesn’t matter. I think, oh, I guess it doesn’t matter to YOU, but it certainly matters to ME. There is a certain wicked enjoyment in writing poetry that references his words, heh heh. Enjoy!

October 8, 2022

________________________

always on your mind

the songs you sing
I was always on your mind
you wish that I had told you

isn’t that a lie?
you told me never to ask you
to do anything. Ever.

what was always on your mind
you told me many times
you could read mine

what was always on your mind
you said you could read mine
I wish you had. Even once.

what was always on your mind
was your fantasy me
who obeyed your every wish

what was always on your mind
was that I would wait at home
available to listen or for sex

what was always on your mind
your terror of the ball and chain
that I’d entrap you into marriage

what was always on your mind
had nothing to do with me
I tried hard to tell you

what was always on your mind
had nothing to do with me
I tried hard to tell you

what was always on your mind
was a fantasy. Not me.
How can you be surprised I’m gone?

you wish that I had told you
you say I was always on your mind
I wish that you had listened even once

_______________________________

I took the photograph on Marrowstone Island a few days ago.

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Boa Black in dishabille

This is my beloved cat who died in February 2020. She was named Boa Black or Feather Boa, depending on the situation. We got her as a tiny kitten at the pound. She had the softest fur and purred the instant I picked her up. She was 17 when she died.

For the Ragtag Daily prompt: dishabille.

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Civility is not dead

I am attending parts of the online Collective Trauma Healing Summit, led by Thomas Hubl. This morning I listened to two speakers, each about an hour long. The first was by Rev. angel Kyodo Williams, an African-American buddhist teacher and the second is by Tristan Harris, who is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

Mr. Harris gives me hope about humans learning to live with social media without continuing to be polarized and angry. He speaks about the way that many platforms work. We tend to click on things that worry us and that we are traumatized about, and the platform immediately starts feeding us more of that. In a way, Facebook and other platforms gas light us: the algorithm figures out what makes us upset and agitated and promptly feeds us more of it.

He advocates moving to more humane platforms, that aren’t built on feeding us trauma, and especially for schools and parents to do this collectively with children. He co-hosts the podcast “Your Undivided Attention” each week, so I will be looking in to that.

However, I have a second reason to be hopeful about social media. I am in more than one group now that has rules and that has administrators that enforce them. Kindness. An insect group that forbids people saying “squash it”, because it’s a group of people that are interested in insects. A physician mom group. A pacific northwest rock group and a women’s pacific northwest rock group. I am now one of the administrators for a local group and am fine with it.

Even though Facebook is still feeding us more trauma and horror if that is what we click on, people are starting to see through this and refuse. They are forming groups where insects and people aren’t squashed. Rural farm groups. Music groups. In these groups I feel that people are coming together and are working to be supportive and help each other, identifying rocks, discussing child behavior, singing together.

Each time that technology makes the world smaller and more connected, we have to relearn how to get along. With our family, then our small tribe, then a larger tribe, then cities, countries and now we can see each other the world over. If all we see is what we fear and what horrifies us in our feeds, then we need to turn it off, breathe, and look for something to calm us down. Knit. Silly cat pictures. Flowers. What gives you a feeling of peace and hope? Whatever it is, do more of it and share it.

Blessings and peace you.

I don’t know who the person in the tintype is. I think that it came from a box from my Great Aunt Esther Parr, when I was in my early teens. My sister and I divided the tintypes and used them as portraits in our china doll houses.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: obituary.