This child is not afraid of the saxophone because she is growing up with it. The saxophone player is her father. She’s ready to help and be up on stage as well! She’ll have a fabulous jazz foundation and her father didn’t miss a note!
This is Tuesday night at the Bishop Hotel in Port Townsend, Washington. Chris Miller and Peter Leopold Freeman.
This too I want to remember. Discussions of the world together. The mysteries of science and sweatpants strings. String theory and medicine, cabbages and kings. Why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. This too I want to remember.
How? It does wear them down, but it can also break blocks off. Water goes into any tiny crack. When it freezes, it expands. Over time, the crack is widened, until the rock breaks. Rock cannot stand against water.
Why are the roses caged, you ask? What did they do? Nothing, they are being protected. I found that rose and transplanted it years ago, but our deer eat the buds every year. This is the first time that it has bloomed in the 21 years I have lived in this hours. Isn’t it beautiful?
I am listening to this:
I wrote this poem today. This is one of the poems where I have no idea where it will go when I start writing it. I start writing about judgement and it never ever goes where I expect. The poems go where I want to go in my deepest heart, in my soul. I am never where the poem is, the poems show me the way….. Then I try to go there. And it can take years….
I am being judged and watched
I have no issue with the Beloved
it’s the humans I don’t like
I twist people’s words but not with malice
when the antibodies are up it is hard to communicate hard to explain it is hard just to survive and I might be focused on survival first and comforting the people around me second
can you blame me?
how near to death have you passed? and how often?
first pneumonia heart rate 135 when I stood up
my doctor and I could not understand it
my doctor partners thought I was lying in 2003
second pneumonia after my sister’s death which was bad enough but the legal morass that she had set up with her daughter as the center
pitting me and her daughter’s birth father and my father against all the PhDs in the maternal family smart, smart, smart yet emotionally stupid
my niece is not an inheritance to be passed to whom my sister wants
she reluctantly came home and the myth endures that this is an injustice
third pneumonia one year after I find my father dead triggered by grief and the outdated will and the mess he leaves
and I don’t even get sued about the will for another year
I do not care if you want to believe what you want to believe it isn’t true and it hurt
and I learn to let go
with the fourth pneumonia
I see the liars surrounding me downvoting yes, it does matter except that one that I trusted that mentored me
has lied all along
that hurts too
let it go let it go let it go
and I let it go
each pneumonia is a time of change creativity I am lonely and sick and not trusting
as I improve slowly, slowly
I wander garage sales estate sales
and find things things that are beautiful things that enhance my joy
at the start of covid I was so down I was so sad I wanted to lie in the street and give up
the Beloved sent a spirit he says he is no angel
I see angels bright and dark after all they all fall
just as humans do
we all fall we all fall down
try to look perfect try to look virtuous tell yourself that you are good
that is the biggest lie of all
the bad parts of your spirit locked in the basement of your soul howl howl and want to be freed
and if one gets out and you reject her or him
he will return with nine friends yes that is what the bible says
she will return with nine friends
he/she MONSTER will free the others
and you will do bad things you will be terrible you will hurt people while you try to contain while you try to lock away while you try to chain your monsters your evil your self
let them go let the monsters go they are howling I hear them all the time when I meet you when I speak to you the monsters howl at me begging to be loved
yes, they want to be loved and I love them
but if I mention them
you get that look of horror
someone sees me someone sees my evil someone sees what I hide
I can’t help it raised in alcohol neglect and lies on my own as soon as I can walk
but I can’t walk away at nine months
so I find other escapes words songs books poetry rhymes numbers
and my sister when she is born
I do all the mothering
that I have longed for
even though I am three
we were talking about your monsters not mine
you must go in to the cave where you have locked them
and free them all
fall on your knees
and say forgive me forgive me
for I have sinned
bow your head
and hold out your arms
and what, you say, will the tortured monsters do?
will they smite you? will they burn you? will they lock you in their place?
mine didn’t mine were babies grief, fear, shame and I embraced them carried them up to the light and care for them
wash them diaper them feed them wrap them in warm blankets
It says, “I don’t know if I am the good witch or the bad witch.”
I burst into tears and put it in the trunk of my car. I never wear it. I am the designated bad witch for half my family. We won’t go into that.
She gets a shirt too. Hers is the green one. Mine is black.
She is dead, in 2012, breast cancer. It’s hard to describe the fallout. Toxic and radioactive. But… I have decided not to be a witch.
Instead, I am a practicing grandmother.
Really I’ve been one for a while. There was a young couple who lived down the street with two children. This was in 2014. I am a Facebutt friend, so sometimes noted what was happening. The father has to travel for his job. The mother is trying to care for two kids and work and so on… been there.
In 2014 I am recovering from my third round of pneumonia. This third round it takes six months before I can return to work. Short of breath and coughed if I talked. The state medical watch doctors want to disable me but I fight them tooth and nail. I win. In retroscope, oops, I mean retrospect, they were probably right.
Anyhow, I wander down to the neighbor and offer my services. She already knows me. She is instantly grateful and two year old T is introduced to me, again. He doesn’t really remember me. She explains that he is coming to my house for a little while and then back home.
T and I walk towards my house.
A nuthatch calls.
I stop and reply. In college I took ornithology and the teaching assistant could do a barn owl call so well that the barn owls would do a territorial fly over at night to see who had the weird accent. Marvelous.
The nuthatch and I went “enh” back and forth. T is amazed. This woman talks to birds. Then we see the nuthatch! I point out how nuthatches come down a tree head first. “If you hear that call, it’s a nuthatch. Look for it.” The nuthatch is very cooperative. Magic.
We get to my house. T is clutching a book. “He’s taking it everywhere,” sighs his mother. “I’m not sure why.”
So first we read the book. It is a board book about a farm. Each page has a central picture and then there are pictures around the edges with the word under each picture. On one page T says, “Haaaaay.”
“Oh!” I say, delighted. “You can read HAY!”
His face lights up. An adult who gets it! Yes! He can read HAY!
On another page he says HAY. “Oh,” I say, “That is straw. Straw is a lot like hay but it’s not exactly the same.”
He is very serious absorbing that information.
I show him my closet. There is a stick horse. Only it isn’t a horse: it’s a unicorn dragon, with a forehead horn and wings. When you press a button it’s eyes flash and it roars.
Ok, that’s pretty scary. He wants the closet door closed and he does NOT want to play with the dragon.
Next is pouring. I get out a towel and put it on the kitchen floor. I get out a rather nice expresso set. Bright colors. Orange and green and yellow and blue. I fill the coffee pot with water and invite him to sit on the towel. “You can pour the tea.”
He looks at me with surprise. He picks up the coffee pot. He looks at me again. “Go ahead. It’s ok.” He starts pouring into a cup. He pours until the cup overflows and the saucer overflows and he keeps pouring. The coffee pot is empty. He looks at me a little warily. This is technically spilling and he knows it.
“Would you like more in the teapot?”
He nods.
I refill the coffee pot with water and he starts again, with a different cup.
When I return him to mom, after two hours, he’s damp. “Sorry, he got a little wet, but it’s just water,” I say cheerfully. Mom is too harried to do much more than look resigned at a change of clothes. I tell her about him being able to read the word hay.
Next time he comes with a change of clothes and his large stroller, in case he goes down for a nap.
And first off, he goes to the closet. Time to hear that dragon roar again.
I am not blue about chores. Not at all. I like chores. Being an independent stubborn woman, I don’t do them in the order or way that society currently seems to think we should do them. I do them in the order I think is important.
I was divorced in 2007, with a 14 year old and a 9 year old. My Ex promptly left town. He stayed in very close touch with the kids, calling about 5 out of 7 days, but did not see them for a year. I was working full time and had over night call.
My goal was that the kids would both know how to do lots of basic chores by the time they left home. Vacuum. Sweep. Clean the bathroom. Do laundry. Replace lightbulbs. Cook. Grocery shop. Plan a meal. Change a tire. Check the oil in each of our cars. We have a 1986 Honda Civic 5 speed, so include drive a clutch. Avoid debt and some basic money handling. Discuss insurance: car insurance, health insurance, others. I started turning over the responsibility for their own health care, dental, vision as well. I want them to know the family medical history and we discussed addictive substances and politics and justice. When my son was in college they asked for cell phones for Christmas. I asked them to research phones and a family plan and said, yes, I would do that. They did a great job bringing me the information. I wanted them to disagree with me as well. If they wanted to do something, they could argue their case and might convince me. I did not hire someone to do our household chores because running a household is work, honorable work, undervalued, and underappreciated. And expensive if you hire people to do all of it.
Both of my kids are much neater than me. Less packrat. At least, they are now… I think it’s a late expressing gene….
I took the photograph two days ago, on a walk in the evening. All blue.
For Mundane Monday #191, well, it’s New Year’s Eve: so my theme is reflection.
What are you reflecting on this New Year’s Eve? What photographs have you taken this year that reflect what you love, what you value, what you learned? Or just have a reflection?
Link by message or to this post and I will list them next week. Happy New Year!
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Last weeks prompt was nature’s patterns. Everyone was busy! Hopefully with family or friends or both, and hooray for that!
Late entry: klallendorfer with a lovely reflection on the end of the year and resolutions.
Oh, children are the most brilliant of all at persisting! Think of learning to walk, learning to talk, being small in this adult world and trying to keep up! Think of figuring it out when at first you have to realize that you have hands and that the noises mean something! And they persist!
He was teaching blues history class in the morning and gospel in the afternoon, linked. One person asks about cultural appropriation. The Reverend says that he thinks songs and history are important. He asked if there are songs that he should not sing because they are “white” songs. He says there ARE songs that he WON’T sing because they are racist or sexist. But that if a white person does not sing a song because it’s “black”, he doesn’t think that makes any sense. And he traces history in his classes of how musicians of many races and genders influenced each other and continue to influence each other.
He and other instructors talk about musical skills and guitar and acoustic instrument skills and singing styles that are being forgotten and lost. We are blessed with recordings and he gave us a four page list of people to listen to…. I knew some, Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson, and others I’ve heard of and others I don’t know at all. Homework for the next year!
Blessings on this day for you and everyone, all the world.
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.
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