An old friend died this morning. She was a college friend of my parents and has known me since birth. I will miss her quite terribly.
She and I took a road trip in September. She had lost thirty pounds, not on purpose. I thought I had better do the road trip while we could. We went from Michigan to visit five households of old friends in Wisconsin. I lived with her and her family for a year during college in Madison, Wisconsin in the early 1980s. She is a beloved mentor.
She also introduced me to all sorts of groups. She has an amazing record collection.
I went with her to see Warren Zevon in Madison.
The painting is my photograph of one of her oil paintings. It is about 3 by 5 feet and gorgeous.
I am not good at stopping loving people, because I kept losing people as a very small child. I wanted to be loved and have people stay. So how to deal with people who leave now? Well, I talk to my dead in my head all the time, so if I think of the person as dead, then I can just continue on. The friendship is certainly dead, love or not.
I am also thinking about poetry forms. I am enjoying writing sonnets, but after all, I’ve written limericks and haiku for years. Not to mention enjoying the brilliant rhymes of Dr. Suess.
mad bad sad
You are dead and I am glad It makes me sad that I am glad that you are dead you make me mad when you are bad and make me sad as well as mad you sad bad dad not my dad who was bad as well except when good as I can tell bad angels fell but there’s no hell hells angels tell that heaven’s swell and you are dead and I am glad it makes me sad that I am glad that you are dead makes me so mad you were bad and made me sad as well as mad you sad dead dad
You’ve joined my silent dead: doesn’t matter whether you speak or not. You’d like this song and be jealous of the skills. I yammer to my dead, the number rising strong. At sixty I declare that I am middle aged Mom dies at sixty-one which feels unfair. My sister dies at forty-nine, cancer rage. I watched them both as chemo takes their hair. You too are dead no words across the breach. I yammer to you daily in my head. Agates gleam, treasure on the beach. You refuse to look, I mourn that you act dead. You sit stubborn in a rocking chair alone. You don’t believe your dead will call you home.
Sorrow weights my chest like lead: breathing is hard. Today I can cry for a minute or so and then that is over. Sorrow teething tearing at me from inside like a crow’s beak sharp pointed poking grabbing tearing winter break approaching everyone goes insane buying drinking drugging bearing the cost into the New Year deepening woes I miss the dead: father sister mother Read my mother’s journals when I am ten She writes about art and us and other friends dead. Her voice clear again. My mother is my age when she dies. Her younger voice: memory smiles and cries.
You needn’t worry that I will importune you. Words explode and swirl upon the page. It’s more likely that I’ll say blankly “Who?” Since I enlarge upon a fascinating stage. Approaching two years since I was taken sick, on oxygen I wrote a poem of farewell. Career ending injury: nature can be such a dick. Breathing is important. Absent it is hell. I am still healing. I hope that I can ski. I am lucky that my fatigue is relatively mild. My oxygen can go 9000 feet up where I’ll see muscle dysfunction truly makes me wild. Friends and family gather close and gather far I feel blessed beneath a lucky star.
I get a letter for my mother on Saturday, asking for money.
I am answering the request. I write: Helen Ottaway died May 15, 2000. Take her off your mailing list.
I did not sign my name and I do not fill out a return address. Here is a picture of it, before the stamp. Habitat for Humanity, the next county south. They have not endeared themselves to me.
I get mail for the dead. My mother, my father, my sister. It is the colleges and universities that hang on. Princeton and Cornell have not found me, but my father’s preparatory school Williston, knows where I live. They send me reports. My father hated Williston. My sister went to the University of Washington and graduate school at the University of Oregon. I went to the University of Wisconsin and the Medical College of Virginia and residency at OHSU in Portland, Oregon, so I get mail from all of those. I like the science reports from the University of Wisconsin best. My son went to Washington State University, but has escaped their alumni association, who send me mail. My daughter went to Western Washington and has also escaped their clutches.
I get medical mail too. The American Academy of Family Practice Journal. I do not pay for JAMA but it comes anyhow. Various Family Practice journals and then drug company propaganda. Every so often I get a box of samples. Last time it was glucerna. I guess they have noticed I am older. One odd piece of medical mail is Guns and Ammo. The back story is that we ordered Woman’s Day when the clinic opened in 2010. Then we watched who they sold our information to. The scam is that a magazine will arrive for a year and then they will bill for the next year. We got Smithsonian for a while and that creepy right wing paper all about how we’ll all die soon. Smithsonian gave up on us and then it was RV World and Guns and Ammo. We quit putting magazines in the waiting room when Covid-19 hit. People had to bring their own and anyhow, we only had one person out there at a time.
I subscribe to my local weekly paper. I subscribe to one magazine. With all of the college and university stuff, I have a large pile to donate to the library monthly. Right now the AARP is sending two magazines to my house: one for me and one for my closed office.
And I still get weird junk mail from insurance companies saying “We have changed our rules again just like we did last month! Go on line and read the 47 new pages of rules for us and the other 499 health insurance money stealers!” Makes me gloomy about the wisdom of the US populace. When will we be smart enough to vote for medicare for all? How far will the medical system have to break down? People are dying and will die, including lots of medical personnel.
Vote for medicare for all, single payer, single set of rules. It’s not socialized medicine, the only socialized medicine in the US is the Veterans Benefits, and you aren’t going to vote to take them away, are you? Vote, vote, vote.
My cousin said to me once: “We want to believe what we want to believe.”
This was right before Mr. Trump was elected President.
After my cousin said that, I was unsurprised that Mr. Trump was elected. He was elected out of fear and anger and shame and grief. He was elected by people who are afraid that people rising out of discrimination will take things from them. Lower their standard of living. They are afraid that they will have to give things up.
A friend was working on my boat. He said that if I paid in cash, it would be less. Because, unspoken, he would not report the income. I thought about it. I said, “My medical practice is mostly medicare and state insurance. That is paid for out of our taxes: yours and mine. Therefore I am giving you a check and I don’t care if it costs more.”
There is a big culture here of not paying taxes. Cheat the government. Pay cash to each other, nod, nod, wink. It is tempting, takes a percentage off what I pay. But…. the people who I know are doing this are mostly conservative. They say drain the swamp. They say the government is cheating us. But THEY are cheating all of us.
I asked my cousin why he and my maternal family believed a story masterminded by my sister. That my father and my neice’s father and I were villains. One of the villainies was the our grandmother’s money had paid for MY graduate school but not my sister’s graduate school.
But that is not true. My grandmother paid four years of medical school tuition. 21K. I paid my own loans.
After my grandmother died, and then my mother died, my father used “my grandmother’s money” to pay off my sister’s graduate school loans. 36K. My parents also cosigned on a house, that my sister walked away from. They wrote 30K off thier taxes that year selling it. My father bailed her out of 7K on a work credit card. My father called me crying when she bullied him out of another 30K for another house. And that is when I said to her ENOUGH. I refused to visit for a year: until she went into hospice for her cancer. I visited three times while she was in hospice. We made peace. But she did not tell anyone else the truth.
I said to my cousin that I could send the bank statements showing that my father paid for my sister’s graduate school. That is when he said, “No. We want to believe what we want to believe.”
I thought really? So you want to believe my sister because she is dead. We will not speak ill of the dead, so you are ok with me and my father and my niece’s father being villainized and you will not even look at the lies.
VOTE and VOTE against FEAR, SHAME, DISCRIMINATION, ANGER AND GRIEF. We have to stand up. I loved my sister even when she was dishonest and bounced 1000$ worth of checks in my small town with people I knew. My father got threatening phone calls and he paid. That was the last straw for me.
So guess which politician stirs up fear and hate and discrimination and anger and grief? Well, honestly, both sides are guilty of that, but I stand against discrimination. We all shall rise up.
Love and Blessings and Peace you.
The photograph is on one of the last three visits to my sister. She died in March 2012.
I struggled after my mother died of ovarian cancer in 2000. She was 61 and our love was complicated. Two years after she died I hit an emotional wall and had to go find help. My marriage was showing cracks too. I have written about Adverse Childhood Experiences, but there can be love too, even in a difficult household. I wrote this poem during that time.
My mom loved me
It’s herself she didn’t love
She didn’t love her anger
She didn’t love her fear
She didn’t love her sorrow
She didn’t love her shadows
She packed all her troubles in her saddlebags
and rode forth singing
When I was angry
she felt her anger
When I was scared
she felt her fear
When I was sad
she felt her sorrow
When I felt my shadows
she felt hers
I hid my shadows
I hid my shadows for many years
and then my saddlebags were full
They called me
I dove in the sea
I rescued my anger
I rescued my fear
I rescued my sorrows
I rescued my shadows
At first I couldn’t love them
My mom didn’t; how could I?
But I loved my mom
I loved all of her
Her anger
Her fear
Her sorrow
Her shadows
Her singing and courage
I thought if I could love her shadows
I could love my own
It was hard
It took months
I looked in the mirror at my own face
And slowly I was able to have
Compassion for myself
I am sad that my mom is not
where I can touch her warmth
and tell her I love all of her
I tell her anyway
I’m finding many things as I surface from my dive
Sometimes I feel the presence of angels
I was looking for something else
I found a valentine
that she made me
No date
Many hearts cut out and glued
to red paper
I am so surprised
My mom loves me shadows and all now and forever.
__________________________
My mother used to quote “Pack all your troubles in your saddlebags and ride forth singing.” Does anyone know where this if from? I have not found the source. It could be her mother or her mother’s parents.
The photograph is my father, the year my sister died of cancer, 2012.He died in 2013.
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.
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.
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - Flüchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflüchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
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