My small child self is happy Happy inside She loves who she loves Living or dead In contact or fled Distant or close She loves who she loves And I hold her close
My adult self is happy
Happy inside
I love who I love
And the world is so wide
Living or dead
In contact or fled
Loving forever
No matter what happens
I love who I love
My heart holds them close
My small child grieved losses I hold her close She loves them all I guard her from most She stays friends forever No matter the grief She is happy in loving Her loves shine as stars The ones who are hurtful Are loved from afar She’s held and she’s loved And her love sings unmarred
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For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: dogwood and for Mother’s Day. Mine died 25 years ago.
My receptionist of 6 years at Quimper Family Medicine, Pat McKinney, died on February 6th. The photograph is from October, when I was in Port Townsend again for two weeks. She and I went for a walk. Well, I was walking and she was in a wheelchair. She was in hospice for over a year.
We had fun working together. Pat played music at her desk because the patient rooms were not quite sound proof enough. One day she was playing whale songs. I hear her on the phone with a patient. “The noise? Those are whale songs.” Pause. “Oh, Dr. Ottaway insists on whale songs.” I started laughing, because she was the one that picked them. So much for MY reputation.
When the covid vaccine came out, I got mine as a first responder. A few days later we had a lull between patients. I was standing in the hall near Pat’s desk. I said, “I don’t know why people are fussing about the vaccine, it seems fine to me,” and I gave a big twitch. Pat started laughing. I could set her off all day by twitching at her.
Living in a town of 9000, now 10,000, I did not feel that my children needed cell phones. They could walk home from school. It is reasonably safe, though I knew too much about local use of heroin and methamphetamines to believe that anywhere is completely safe.
I spoke to a friend from high school in the early 2000s. He asked me to text him my address.
“I’ve never texted.” I said.
“NEVER?” he said.
“Nope.”
“Haven’t your kids taught you how?”
“My kids don’t have cell phones.”
Long silence. Then: “If I were your child, I would run away.”
I laughed. My son got a cell phone when he headed for college and my daughter got a track phone, ten dollars a month, in high school. Calls and no texting. My son ran away the same way I did, as an exchange student. He went to Thailand at age 16 and was on the Maylay Peninsula, two years after the tsunami hit. His first comment calling home was, “Mom, the world is a really scary place.” Going off to be an exchange student is a fabulous way to run away, because you learn tons and come home.
My daughter had one friend who she would go to sleep over in her teens.
“I don’t want to sleep over any more.” she said after one night.
“Why?” I asked.
“She is up texting and by midnight she and friends are having arguments by phone and she cries. I want to sleep.”
Don’t leave the phone in the kids’ rooms, parents. And don’t have the phone in your bedroom either!!!
The naughtiest postcard I ever sent was to my friend B, when he was living the romantic life of a government tax economist in New Zealand. He had been working for the US government, but went off to work for New Zealand’s government for two years. I felt rather jealous. Uprooting as a physician with a husband and two children to go work in a foreign country seemed a bit insurmountable. There was an awful lot of difficult family drama and illness going on, so that is the real reason that I did not do it.
Anyhow, naughty postcards. I sent B a postcard from Georgetown. It is black and white, a man lying prone looking up. A sheep is standing over him, so that no naughty bits can be seen, but one certainly suspects that the man is nude. He and the sheep are looking at each other. The caption is “No more sheepless nights.” Eeeeee. I bought two of that one, because it made me laugh.
B sent a letter back, along the lines of, “Cut it out, you are getting me in trouble with the postman.” I desisted. I did not have any more postcards like that one.
I have bought and kept blank cards and postcards over the years. Good thing, too, now that cards are a whopping $4.00 to $7.00 each. People must buy them, right? I have picked up blanks at garage sales too, once in a while. And the ones I don’t like can go out in the Little Free Library for other people.
I plan to make a calendar and maybe some postcards of Elwha’s cat art. He did it more than Sol Duc does. The photograph is one of the designs, from February 2023. I did see both of them adding to it. Perhaps there was some sibling rivalry going on, I don’t know. This installation is quite complex, with two toy mice, the earbuds, one of those glittery balls tucked under a mouse and the toy made of pipe cleaners.
It is time to visit. It has been long enough and it is time.
He is in a dungeon. I have to go down flight after flight of stairs. It gets colder and damper and there is mold growing on the walls and puddles. Light comes with me.
I can hear him one flight above finding him. He’s having a tantrum and hitting something.
I find the door in the dungeon. It is thick and moldy damp wood with bars in the window and a huge lock. It is also open. My friend is screaming at the ceiling and hitting the ceiling and walls with a yard long heavy pipe. It clangs and I feel a tremor when he hits metal. There is no window, we are too far underground.
I lean on the doorway. “If you go deeper in to the earth, it will be warm and dry.”
He turns with the pipe held like a bat. He is huge and muscular and dressed in rags and very threatening. The room is mostly dark. He sheds a faint light. He glares at me and then lowers the pipe. He shrinks to his child self, like me. About age three.
“You are awfully cute at three.” I say.
He drops the pipe and lets me come hug him. The cell smells truly awful. There is a drain in the floor that appears to be working, sort of. There is a visible liquid level below the drain.
He is still while I hug him and then relaxes. “Ok,” he says. Silence for a minute. “I didn’t really think you’d come back.”
“Friends forever, right? That’s what you said.”
“Yeah, but,” he hesitates. “You were mad.”
My turn to shrug. “Yes. I got over it.”
“Took you long enough.”
My eyebrows go up. “You could have made the first move.” Now he shrugs.
“How about a picnic?” I say. “This is icky. Let’s get out of here.”
He looks at the ceiling. The stone is scratched and chipped. “Yeah. No progress here. Might as well.”
We leave the cell and go up. “Damn stairs.” I say.
“Your lungs are good.” he says.
“Most people’s lungs are pretty good at three.” I say.
“You are pretty cute at three too.”
“Thanks.” I get tired of the stairs and transport us to a meadow in my garden. It is summer and full of wildflowers. It is on a sloped hill with an enormous willow tree. “This is from when I was 7, really.” I say.
“Nice.” he says.
I have a picnic basket and get food out. We don’t really need to eat but it’s fun anyhow. We can taste food, a bit. His keeps turning black on his plate.
“Cut that out.”
A shrug again. “I like bugs now.”
“Did you at three?”
“Naw, but I ate them if I was hungry. Ants are not good. Grasshoppers are better.”
“Are you making any progress at all?”
He leans back on the hill, about as relaxed as he gets. Still hyper alert to everything around us. “No, and I don’t think I will. He’s 69 now. Getting older.”
“Well, he’s expecting to die of a stroke at 80.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty much too late. There is too much to process. And wine and pot do not help.”
“Using more?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s talk about something more fun. Politics or taxes or something.”
He laughs.
We talk about cabbages and kings. Why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. The sun moves like the real sun.
He is starting to fidget.
“Time?” I say.
“Yeah. You know, it’s not fair that they need us even if they won’t listen.”
“Seems like it.”
He glances at me and away. “Yours listens.”
“You’ve seen the results of that.”
He looks down. “Is she happy?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes sad, sometimes lonely, sometimes impatient. You know, all of it.”
He nods. We start packing up and we trek back to the dungeon and the endless stairs. We have gone down two flights when the landscape shifts. A forest, dark and huge trees and overcast. Damp and cool. He is morphing. “Oh!” he says, “Asleep again! And it’s 4 pm. Must be tv. And wine.” There is a small clearing in sight with a shack. It looks run down, no vehicles. My friend has morphed and split. He is a huge bear with red eyes. And an older man who smells of alcohol and reaches into his shirt for a handgun.
“Really?” I say to the man with the gun.
“They are his memories,” growls the bear. “I have to go.”
“Well, the bear isn’t. Goodbye and good luck.” I say, patting a furry leg. “I will come back.” But he is not paying attention any more, he is focused on the shack.
I go home and he goes to try again. Wake up, my friend, wake up.
Oh, kindness. I think one huge kindness is not to listen to rumors and not to assume that they are correct. Whew. Though if you are ever the victim of a rumor, it will tell you who your real friends are. They will stay present, stay in touch, stay with you. Some will ask about it, others won’t, but they will stay. And you may be amazed by how many people disappear into the woodwork. They are staying “neutral”, they’ll say, but they don’t call, answer calls, or include you any more. Then they may show back up in the future. You will not trust them again. Ok, if they were going through some trauma of their own, but otherwise, no.
Sol Duc is keeping an eye on the neighborhood. She never tells me rumors, ever.
Here are three versions of Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out. I like the Bessie Smith one best. The John Lennon tune is different.
I have been cat sitting Lily, for my friend who is in a nursing home.
Lily is worried about her human and I am only in for about an hour and I don’t know her habits. And I am not her person. However, we have finally figured out how to play. Lily has a tent, a small one. I started scritching it one day and Lily reveals her tendencies: she is a bag stomper. She played with the tent until I get the picture above, with her sitting on it.
Next I bring a stick with line and various things tied on, including a toy mouse. Lily and I play and I don’t leave with large hand scratches. I could grit my teeth, but it was not that fun. Lily wants me to pet her now too.
I was driven yesterday. I have an ill friend. She is currently in a “rehab”, aka “nursing home”, in Sequim. I drive 40 minutes to be with her at an hour appointment. Afterwards we check in at the nursing home and then I drive her back to her house, 40 minutes again. That is where Lily is. Lily is her cat. My friend was in the hospital for six days and now the “rehab” for two weeks. My friend wants to go home. Lily is miserable. She misses her person and hisses and swipes at me. I was driven to take my friend to see her cat.
Lily let me pet her yesterday because I brought her person home. However, the whole thing was a near disaster. My friend has been trying to get stronger, but she is not stronger. She is weaker. She has three steps into her house. We were there for about three hours. She sat to wash the cat’s bowl in the kitchen sink and Lily was very very happy to be near her. My friend was then tired enough that we had real difficulty getting her out of the house and back in the car. I used a bath stool to let her stop and sit about every four feet. She was using a walker, but could barely walk. She sat in the doorway of the house and talked about crawling. However, those muscles in your upper legs? Those are some of the biggest muscles in the body, and if you can barely walk, scooting or crawling is not feasible either.
We made it to the car without having to call an ambulance. I’m pretty strong for my age and size, but I’m not strong enough to carry her alone.
Poor Lily. I don’t think I dare try to get her in a cat carrier and she’d probably cry all the way driving and anyhow, the nursing home would need a shot record.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
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 - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete 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.
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