Something Left to Lose.

One of the best friends I have ever had is dying. These words seem to colour everything I do, everything I think, make me numb, swirl a cold, opaque fog around everything I usually enjoy. She is dying and there is nothing - nothing - that I can do. Nothing that will change the fact. Nothing that will make things easier for her. Nothing.

Her doctor has said that three months will be a long time for her to live. She has already gone a long way away from us. Some days she will not talk to anyone, sometimes she cannot hold a cup, keep her balance, focus her eyes. Other times she becomes something like her old, feisty self. She checked herself out of her palliative care room at the hospital last week and went back to her seniors' residence. She is 'doing better', her brother says, the last little while. I think she is angry and the anger is carrying her - she does not want to be a helpless lump in a hospital bed any longer than she has to be. She does not want her daughters' anxious hovering, trying to do for her what little she can still do for herself. She doesn't want anyone's sympathy or pity. She's still the fighter she has always been, even when so much else is lost.

Her daughters are trying so hard to help. I remember my mother's last illness and how hard I fought, coaxing a little food into her, planning to make her hair look better, blinding myself to how fast she was fading. One night my husband said to me 'She's dying, Mary. You have to face it.' How stunning a blow those words were as I did have to realise that I was failing. I couldn't keep her. Now I watch my friend's daughters, her brother, her mother (so fragile herself) trying to come to terms with the same hard truth. I see her daughters fighting, as I fought, to bring her back, just a little, to comb her hair, get her attention, support her. I remember the bewilderment. The stubborn denial. The pain.

The words of 'Bobby McGee' keep running through my head. 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.' I've learned that when the person you love has gone, when you have nothing left to lose, the pain is different and finally it too fades to a dry, sealed scar. You are free of concern, of obligation; you also lose the connection although not the love. But it isn't the same love. It's a bowl of pot pourri, not the scented, living rose. I already know that survivors feel guilt, anger, regret. For many years I fought to remember my living vital mother, not the pitiful little ghost she became before she was finally gone.

I love it that my friend is fighting. She may drive her family nuts, she may do things that hurt all of us, but it is so like her. I want to shake her and tell her to let up on her daughters, her brother. At the same time, I want to cheer. She's still herself, aggravating though that self may be.

My friend has always been there for me for more than forty-five years now. Looking after my kids, going with me on escapades, always ready for lunch full of delicious gossip and highly sugared dessert. A provider of advice, of sympathy, of camaraderie, of fun. Vivid, colourful, opinionated, a blazing bonfire at which to warm my hands.

I'm already cold. But I will fight to remember her outrageous hats, her warmth, her real self, to hold her in my heart. And I will try to be there when she needs me until the end.

The Penultimate Travel Post

We're home. I have the dust conquered, the laundry mostly done, JG has cut the lawn twice, once in the rain and I'm........... tired. I need a vacation to recover from my vacation. I want to write up a trip diary and the pile of maps and mementoes is more than daunting. I'm right back into the Board schedule (I am off to Toronto for a three day conference on Wednesday) and I feel burned out. Not motivated. All I want to do is sleep in my own bed, where I can get the knee comfortable enough to allow me to snooze for at least four hours at a time, catch up on my reading and stare at the sky. No energy. No concentration. I'm a sad mess. Obviously, holidays are bad for me.

It doesn't help that once you point my husband's face in the direction of home, he just wants to get there. We drove from Colorado Springs to Fort Erie in two and a half days, trading the actual driving every few hours. We stopped at Fort Erie to visit my MIL, who is just adjusting to her new nursing home, and then we put the foot on the pedal and came the rest of the way. Long days and lots and lots of trucks on the interstates. More than I ever remember seeing in past trips. What recession? Commerce is alive and well in the US of A. But trucks make the driving tougher, for me, especially when they pay no attention at all to the speed limits and play leap frog with one another. Uphill. Lovely.

The holiday was made easier in one way by our time staying at the YD's condo. Normally JG wants to be on the move every day when we take one of these marathon trips and so it was nice to have a few days at a time where we did not have to pack and load every morning, unload and unpack every evening, after trolling for a suitable motel. And we had Effie, who is a great help with finding accommodation. Effie is what we named JG's nice new GPS (a Garmin, for those of you interested in these machines), for her efficiency (my father once had a marvellous executive secretary of that name) and so that we could tell her to Effie Off when she tried to make us drive through city cores instead of taking bypasses. When you tell Effie to look for hotels, she comes up with a list by location; I would find a location where there were three or four places listed and we would go there and look for a good spot. Worked beautifully.

Even so, Effie is not an unmixed blessing. I would not rely on her totally as she has some quirks, the most annoying being this desire to have us drive down town. She has some choices you can pre program, fastest route vs most Interstate being one, but she has a low opinion of bypass routes and babbles on trying to persuade the driver to turn off the bypass until you shut her off. Her screen is not really big enough to show the detail we wanted on secondary roads and scenic drives, either. But she is a wonderful help with a lot of stuff. In the USA she shows speed limits for almost all roads (her Canada info is not as detailed, alas) and gives you a countdown to turns with warnings that correlate with the speed you are driving. I also use state maps, an interstate map of all of the USA and touring books (the National Geographic Scenic By Ways book is excellent) and find that this combination gives me everything I need.

More than I want, sometimes. Unfortunately I married a man who thinks it is lots of fun to drive a road that crosses the continental divide three times in two hours. He combed the maps in search of places we could see snow and did we ever find a lot. He's picky about his snow, too. The snowbanks in the Rabbit Ears Pass in Colorado was dirty, he thought, and he was all for driving Independence Pass between Aspen and Colorado Springs to get clean stuff for a photo op. Luckily it was still closed. I am not a happy passenger when I am ascending to 11,000+ feet on a road with no shoulder or guardrail. And I could not drive such a road if my life depended on it. I get dizzy, short breathed with sheer terror and tense to the point of pain from holding on to the car so it will not fall over the edge.

And no, logic has nothing to do with it.

All worth it, for the sheer glory of the scenery in the mountains and on the plains. We drove along with John Denver's Colorado Rocky Mountain High ringing in our ears, stopping at every view point and pull off we could find, taking huge numbers of photographs or just looking and listening. There were some joys that were entirely unexpected. One, for me, was finding tiny villages in New Mexico lush with cottonwood and lilac all in flower, ringing with bird song, tucked into the crevices of the dry and harsh plateaus in places where the rivers ran. Another was a high mesa just east of Raton where there are constant small ponds again alive with birds, dotted through the sere land.

I think it is contrasts that will stay with me the longest. The huge rock formations in their many coloured striations. The equally huge sky. The creeks, swollen with snow melt, rushing down their stony beds. Driving from summer to late spring to early spring as we climbed a pass and dropping down and down to summer once again. The roar of the wind at the top of a pass and the eerie quiet of the inland plateau below it. Black cattle against a green, green hill. The sight of the huge dome of the state capital at Jefferson City seen across the flats as we drove toward it. So much land and so few people.

And, a silly thing, many many squashed raccoons on the highways in the Midwest. Until, as we reached western Kansas and the high plains, there were no more and the roads were clean. It's strange, the things you notice and will remember, sometimes.

At some point I am going to sort and cull my photographs and probably do one more trip post about them. And then I'll be done. Sometime after I have a few more naps.

Missing -- a Few Brain Cells

I was slated to drive into the city today to go to a meeting that I considered quite important. I could have hooked into a telecast of it, but I really like to have the paper documents in my hands so that I can write on them. (Old habits die hard.)

When I woke up to news that the school buses had been cancelled and that a major snow dump was forecast, I decided to forget the hour+ drive into a city clogged by bus strike traffic and enroll for the podcast. And so I phoned the contact number and asked to be included.

After a short, polite delay, I was informed that the meeting was yesterday. And when I looked at my calendar, there was the Tuesday circled.

I think I need a cup of coffee and a new brain.

The Moving Finger Writes....

When Hillary Clinton made her gaffe about running the gauntlet of fire in Kosovo, there was a lot of editorial comment in the press about memory and how a person edits it. I got interested in the discussion and went and did some research, culminating in reading a book called White Gloves, How We Create Ourselves Through Memory, by John Kotre. This book turned out to be a bit off the topic I was looking for, but is a marvelous read for anyone who doesn't have basic psychology training but is interested in how memory works to form character in young children.

And so I started thinking about memory forming my character and that of my daughters. And how I edit memory myself. The premise of the book is that we form memory in different ways at different ages, and that memory is stored and accessed in layers. One of the major things we do is to stretch memory to cover more than the original event – leading to, for instance, a clear memory that it was always sunny in the summer at the cottage. Or the conviction that your sister always got the first chance at something and you got second. These convictions shape your perception of reality as an adult – causing extra misery if your week of vacation is rainy or colouring your reaction to your sister's success. It is possible, according to Kotre to deconstruct these memories and influence how you react to things, although he is very sceptical about accessing childhood memories (regressing, I think is the term, but I took the book back to the library).

A lot of our childhood memories are, in fact, not ours but are picked up from the adults around us and incorporated as if they were real. We tell our children stories about themselves and they internalize these stories. Or, at least, my family did it that way. My grandmother and my mother told me stories about myself as a baby or a two year old or whatever. I can identify some of these stories as dramatizations when I think about them. Or at least as edited versions of an event that was probably a lot more shapeless when it took place. As an example, my mother would tell, repeatedly, a story about taking me to the House of Commons public gallery at the age of three and being embarrassed by my saying in clear and ringing tones 'there's the man who wore Daddy's pants' about an MP who was my father's friend, causing all the MP's to look up at the gallery. This story was supposed to illustrate my precocious command of clear speech and, I suppose, that I was an extroverted toddler. The tale has become part of my mental furniture. I have no clue how it really happened, but I think of myself as having been a confident and extroverted child.

I think we all do this to our children to some extent. My grandmother relied on her memory; my mother did much the same. When I do what my daughters call 'telling baby stories' I tend to pull out photograph albums to illustrate things, or I tell stories from the photographs. Because although my grandmother and my mother did have photographs, they were far fewer and mostly static poses. I have maybe half a dozen images of my mother as a little girl. I have more of myself in my first three years because my father was in the navy during WWII and the family sent him photographs; it was much more expensive, relatively, to take and develop photos in the '40's and '50's. Even in the '60's, colour photographs were an item that most people had to budget for. Today's disposable cameras and $.19 prints amaze me; even more astounding is the digital photograph revolution, making still and live photography available in quantity immediately. And so, where my mother relied on her memory, my daughter will have not only still photography but also video to discuss with her daughter.

And there is the mommy blog. Unless your mother kept a diary or a baby book, your stories, like mine, rely on the spoken word backed up with still photographs or even the occasional grainy 'home movie'. Mommy bloggers' children will have the stories preserved, in their original form, backed with copious illustrations in living and sometimes moving colour, put together as the event unfolded. You will probably still retell seminal stories to your children. But your blog will be there to give them a different look, a time frozen reference, to these stories. And to the woman who was telling them.

I wonder a lot about how that will unfold. I picture my granddaughter remembering, say, planting flowers with grama. And there will be the story, with photographs of her in her bug shirt lining up the plant pots. Not raw data, certainly. All of us necessarily edit the stories as we tell them, shaping them to fit the time and space we have to get the story down, emphasizing the point we want to make about what happened. Even bits of dialogue get edited for coherency or chosen to fit into the thought thread as it is spun out onto the page.

I wonder, as I write this, how my mother would have blogged about her day at the House of Commons with her daughter. Or how she felt about raising a child alone when her husband was out sailing around in a corvette in the North Atlantic, in constant danger. I have these stories as she told them recollected in tranquility and, I am sure, smoothed into a pleasing shape by time and repetition. I know that the stories I tell to my daughters are, in fact, partly constructions formed by time and retelling. The stories about Little Stuff, on the other hand, are immediate, although shaped. I almost wish I could live long enough to understand if there will be an appreciable difference.

I won't. When Little Stuff is, say, forty, I would be 101. I'm not hoping to be that old; don't much want to be, tell the truth. And so I write this blog, a message sent forward into the future with hope and love, and try my best to make it a true record, even though I know it can't be perfect, of who I am, what I think, and how we were together.

And I had better get myself back to the sewing machine and start on dress #6, green spangles and all. Tempus is fugiting.

Monday Mission -- My 'When Pigs Can Fly' Award

Painted Maypole's Monday Mission is to write an acceptance speech for an award you have been given.

When I was in my mid forties I went back to school, to my local Community College in fact, and took a two year diploma course in Creative Advertising, as it was then billed. The majority of my classmates were the same age as my children; the next oldest in the class was all of 25. There were about forty of us that started and most finished and came away with a diploma and a job. We had a party at the end to celebrate; I did not get there because I was looking after my mother, who was very ill. But my classmates gave me an award in absentia, a humorous one, a certificate that said, in effect, that Mary was off to conquer the world, as soon as she had made JG's lunch, ironed the napkins and taken her father to the dentist.

I loved that piece of paper. I thought I had it safely stored somewhere and was going to scan it into the post, but a short hunt in the obvious places has not turned it up. I wish I had been there to make an acceptance speech, but since I could not do it then, I am going to do it now.

Thanks, you guys. Thanks so very much. I am honoured that you think I have the right stuff, even if I don't have much time left to work on it. And I would like to point out that I have found time to attend pub night (sorry I worried you about my ability to drive home after a few beers; I made it just fine), hang out in the smokers' den and teach most of you sorry lot how to use a word processor.

I know that having a very mature student in your midst has not always been easy for you and that you found my split second schedule and preoccupation with housework a bit weird. I didn't 'get' housework when I was your age, either.

But to get serious for a minute, I hope you get some benefit from hanging out with me these two years. In the classes on demographics I know I sometimes annoyed you when I hissed and complained that the age categories only went up to 60 years old. But you are going to be working in a world where the baby boomers will reach that age, in 2005 and following, and the + 60 category is going to be worth courting. When you have to write copy for 'golden years' seniors, remember me! And don't try to sell the old folks nothing but face cream and power lift recliners. They are people, with a thirst for adventure and fun, love and laughter, just like you. Wrinklies just look old, they don't feel that way.

I came into this program very worried that I would not be able to keep up with you, to learn fast enough and well enough. When I got that sociology paper back with 100% on it, I was very, very relieved and happy, no matter how humble I tried to look. I know you got some amusement out of my fight to memorize terminology and patterns. My short term memory is not so great, these days. But my associative memory is a lot better than it was when I was your age, and I think I found the theoretical stuff easier than most of you. Keep it in mind, when you think your middle aged boss is all wet, that he (or she, not that that's likely) may have a broader view than yours. This means that while you can make a wax doll of him and stick pins in it, do it in private. But listen to him. You may also find that your parents have improved.

It's been a lot of fun, being part of this group. You have all been very kind to me, and thanks, also, for all the help. And I love the certificate, especially the flying pigs, which are very cute. (I have a very good idea who is responsible for those pigs. Prepare to die!)

When our twenty fifth anniversary rolls around, I hope we will have a class reunion and a big party. With beer, hmm? In 2012 you will all be in your forties, as I am now, juggling what I hope will be splendid jobs with a spouse, a family, a mortgage, elderly parents, cars that need servicing, community work and not enough time or energy. I intend to be there, with or without a walker. I might even apply some wrinkle cream in anticipation. And I will come armed with a bunch of certificates that say "Welcome to the sandwich generation, and congratulations on your well earned gray hairs!"


My Grad picture. This is the proof. For reasons which should be obvious, I did not order one.

And on the way I lost it!

Julie Pippert at Using My Words has put up this topic for the Wednesday Humpday Hmm. I've never tried a Hmm topic before, but this one reached out and grabbed me.

"It's made me think about loss, what we value, and potential gain. Let's write about that. Imagine losing all your material possessions (except the few you can carry)... Or, tell us a story about some sort of loss. If you can inspire through hope, and tell us about something you gained from it, and real value, please definitely do that."

So I am going to make a list of things I have lost, some material and some not. And then I am going to go through the list again and put in things I have gained and balance that against the losses. I don't know how this will work, but here goes.

When I was a girl, I thought I would be a painter -- an artist in oils. I loved to paint, I entered my paintings in shows and won awards and my aunt the art teacher raved about my work. I thought I was The Best! It took a summer at art school when I was seventeen, surrounded by people who could really do it, to convince me that I was at best a talented amateur. It was my first experience with really looking at myself and seeing what others might see. At the time it was devastating and left me dazed and lost, not knowing who or what I could become. I spent the next three years trying on different persona, floundering a lot of the time, and finally settling on a life choice that was the very opposite of my aunt's, much as I still loved her. And I never again thought I was The Best, at anything.

Looking back, I think I must have been a really repellent teenager, convinced I was a Gift to a Waiting World. Finding out I wasn't has made me tolerant, and able to look at other people and see what they are about and enjoy them for what they are. I have learned to look for and celebrate talent of all kinds in others and in myself, too. I've made myself into a tolerable graphics artist, a competent photographer and a life long student of art in all its forms, whether it's a glorious oil or a really clever advertisement or a beautifully made quilt. I love to sew and knit and to make my house a warm and welcoming home. Small talents, but I've used them for other people and for myself. I probably get more joy over Little Stuff's delight in her furry cat costume than I ever would have at winning a juried show.

As a young woman I was slim, athletic and strong. I swam, I did winter sports, taught myself to ski, did a lot of work in the outdoors, lifting and hauling in the sugar bush. Even into late middle age I did a lot of hard physical labour. My husband took early retirement and we built ourselves a retirement home. And I mean, we built it. I lugged floor joists and rafters, hauled knee wall forms up ladders, lifted and carried 12' sections of drywall. Well, now I am a senior citizen, with arthritic joints and am no longer either slim or athletic. My knees swell, I have no grip in my dominant hand and ladders are agony. I'm terrified of falling if I ski. I have lost, almost entirely, the confidence and the willingness to try things, lost the sense of myself as a useful worker. People offer to carry things for me, to pull me up steps. I'm not a helper any more, I thought; I'm someone to be helped.

Sure, when my body started to fail to obey me, it felt at first as if the walls were closing in. But being unable to slug stuff around the woodlot left me time to explore other activities. I've joined several organizations and groups that help other people, whether in co-ordinating group activities (a local syrup makers' association, for instance) or managing an organization that helps others (the board of a non profit seniors' residence). If I can't do the heavy lifting, I can make posters and phone calls and take minutes. I found out that I'm good at fundraising. I can wash dishes at the local hall dinner and put face paint on kids for the Santa Claus parade. And I'm not giving in, that's for sure. I can still use snowshoes. I can swim just fine and I find I can step dance. At half speed, but who cares! I can look after my granddaughter, even if I have to tell her to climb up herself because I can't lift her.

It didn't matter to me a lot, even as a teen and young woman, to be pretty and to be admired. But I did enjoy having beautiful, smooth skin. Not any more. I have wrinkles, skin tags, sags and the discoloured spots that age brings. I get rashes and itches and my skin is getting thinner and papery and sort of soft, like tissue paper. Yuck. And there is no lotion or potion that will change any of it much. I just have to put up with it and wonder how much worse it is going to get.

I suspect most of you know the poem 'When I am an old woman, I will wear purple.' My colour is red -- or pink. I really enjoyed Andrea's posts on colour in clothing, and some of the comments, because I've always loved colour but working in an office is not the place for yellow trousers and three coloured shoes. Thankfully, I don't have to worry any more. No more sensible business suits and blouses with little bows at the neck. I haven't had to put on tights for ten years. The YD buys me lovely Christmas clothes, to smarten me up I suspect, and they are much admired. I buy clothes for colour and texture and comfort, and I don't really care what anyone thinks of them, unless I have to go to parties of my husband's associates. For these I have a black dinner suit but I wear a silver turtle neck with it. And red shoes.

Through sixty five years of living, you lose a lot of things. I've lost my babies (they grew up!), homes I have loved, my parents and aunts. I've lost track of friends, lost jobs, lost skills I didn't practice. Pieces and bits fall out of my memory from time to time. I've lost confidence in some ways. I've also lost my cocky, insufferable teenaged self and the hard, unsympathetic woman I could have become. I hope I've lost the path to becoming a whiny, querulous old woman, although it is hard to think so, rereading three paragraphs of whining. Although I have lost some friends, I have made a lot of new ones. My babies have been replaced by wonderful women with whom I am well content and a cherished grandkid. I have a home that my husband designed just for us, and I love it. I'm certainly not lost for things to do and places to go! And if I have to lose, as they say, my marbles, I am going to have fun while it's happening.

Eight Things Meme

Momnos (Mom - Not Otherwise Specified) just did the eight things meme and left it open for anyone who hadn't done it. I must be one of the few.

So, first the housekeeping. The rules of this meme are:1. Let others know who tagged you.2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

1.) I'm walking around on ground glass crumbs today. I have a nice home office out of which I run a part time graphics business and on the wall, until today, hung a beautiful picture my daughter gave me that was mounted expensively behind no glare glass. A big picture. This morning it fell off the wall. I crab walked around and picked up the big pieces, causing my back to tie itself into a knot in the process, vacuumed, revacuumed and came back to my computer. After all this, the first time I stepped onto the tiles in the hall, my moccasins made scraping noises. I will have to revacuum again and then wet mop as this is where the four year old Little Stuff hangs out when she stays with us. I am not happy.

2.) I do a lot of graphics stuff as a volunteer and today I should be doing posters and a press release for a raffle. Since the husband is away, I spent the morning blogging instead. Minus glass shard time, see above. My husband does not know I have a blog, although he knows I am doing something for more time than he wants me to spend at the computer. If I told him, he would be very caustic about it and I am not ready to put up with this, just yet. I'm not sure whether this is a 'discretion is the better part of valour' decision or just plain cowardice. JG being caustic is not a one off item.

3.) I love science fiction and fantasy. JG thinks it is a waste of time and tells me so. Often. Also sods law is often in operation because I do read worthy tomes but the one he asks me about usually has a dragon in it somewhere. I can get through a book a day and haunt my local libraries, buy books on-line and hang out in used bookstores, looking for the good stuff. Next to sci fi I love historical fiction. And next to that, juicy and salacious biography as long as Kitty Kelly didn't write it. And I hate, hate (hate!) to throw out books.

4.) I talk too much. If you were to meet me in person, within a very short time I would be chatting away, making jokes and telling you things about myself and my family. If you share an elevator with me, I will strike up a conversation if you so much as look at me and grunt. But what I talk about is all silly, surface stuff. You would have to know me a long time before you found out what I really think about much of anything serious. Point one about the glass is a pretty good example of the persiflage with which I inundate all and sundry. Strangely enough, if they can break in long enough, people tend to tell me secret things about themselves and talk about things that trouble them.

5.) Country music, yes. Also folk music. And some classical music -- Handel, for instance. I despised the Beatles whose early career took place while I was a young mother, didn't think much of Elvis (yeah, I'm that old!) and don't have any tolerance for singers whose words I can't interpret. The folk music thing was really big while JG and I were undergraduates and I learned the words to a great many obscure songs: the Eddystone Light, for instance. Tom Lehrer. I have the kind of trick memory that retains verse, lyrics and aphorisms. Don't ask me about the car keys, my passport or my daughters' phone numbers. And I can't sing. This is really sad as the rest of my family can, and they suffer while I murder Christmas carols, but they need me to get past the second verse of anything. It's nice to be needed.

6.) I'm on my third wedding ring. Same husband, but three rings. The first one got too small, so I stored it in my jewellery case with my mother's. They both got stolen. I have seldom felt more violated. JG bought me a bigger ring, with carving on it, for our 25th anniversary. I had to have that one cut off when I sprained my finger and so I got the jeweller to put a hinge and click clasp on it. Last year I was digging out shoots and weeding and somewhere in the yard it unclicked and I lost it. I am now wearing JG's, since he doesn't, but I had to have it enlarged to get it on. Arthritis.

7.) The only sport I'm any good at is swimming. I love to swim. I love the feel of the water gliding along my body, the buoyancy, the layers of different temperature. I love swimming in the ocean best, lakes in summer next and pools least. Chlorine, yuck. I love scuba diving where you seem to fly over an alien world, free from gravity and sound, living in an extra dimension. I love watching surf roll onto a rocky shore, smelling the scent of salt water and feeling the pound of the waves as they break. I love body-surfing when the water takes you and hurls you forward in a burst of foam and cold. I love water. Sometimes I wish I had gills.

8.) I'm a procrastinator. Big time. I started doing the weekly laundry at 7:30 this morning and right now there is a huge basket waiting to go out onto the line and if I don't get it out there soon it won't dry. The reason it all has to go out together is hummingbirds. They love to sit on the clothesline, and where they sits, they poops. So the clothes have to be out for as short a time as possible. But they need to go out. Right. Now.

They're out. I'm posting and I'm out of here. Oh, if there is anyone left who hasn't done this thing, Tag!, you're it.

Prose Poems

I have some clear time to work on the computer this morning, and instead of getting on with the myriad editing and writing jobs I have stacked up on my desk I have been playing on the templates page of Blogger. Herewith the results. I like neat layouts, with plenty of white space and muted colours, and this template has that. I am not rising to the heights of glory of Attack of the Redneck Mommy, whose new dress you should really go and admire, nor have I done much template editing. But I guess I am slowly making my page reflect my taste.

I've put a book link in, as well, because the premises and the way this author tells his story really impress me. I've always been fascinated by social anthropology; I probably misidentify a lot of what I read into that category. I took a degree in English Language and Literature with a minor in (wait for it) Latin. I've always thought that the best parts of the course work were the linking of what the authors said into the lives they lead and the communities they lived in. This in spite of the fact that some of the professors demanded that we read the texts in isolation, unsullied by biographical chaff. Snort. Ever try that with something like Shakespeare's Henry plays? Or Dickens? Or Scott? The best course I had was a self directed reading course in the English novel. Mind you, by 'English' my university meant 'England' -- we had in our last year an optional half course where we could choose between Canadian literature and American literature. Which is why I know more about historical London than I do about any other city and why Johnson's research on cholera in Victorian London is so real to me.

This started me thinking about how the (exclusively male) poets treated babies -- from Shakespeare's 'infant mewling and puking in his nurse's arms' to Wordsworth's

not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing
clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home;
Heaven lies about
us in our infancy!

Note the 'nurse' who looked after Will's kids -- whom he left behind in Stratford -- and WW's quick glance into the nursery at an obviously sleeping baby.

Well, people would say, is there anything more satisfying and adorable than a clean and sleeping baby? Yes, there is. The wide awake one who graces you with her first smile. The triumphant one who finally gets the spoon into her mouth instead of her ear. The delighted one who manages a stagger across the room into your outstretched arms. The sophisticated young miss who greets you after her nap with the welcome words 'I dry grama'. The sober young scholar who, after hearing it only ten times, reads an exciting version of 'The Gruffalo' to her stuffed animals, holding the book carefully upside down. ('I will read it myfelf, grama') And last, but not least, the rapt and pink cheeked Birthday girl, with the light of four candles reflected in her shining eyes.

There isn't much classic poetry about moments like that -- no mommy poets. One of the things I really like about this part of the blogosphere are the prose poems written about children, their ways and their days. As far as I know, it's a first time ever record by women actually doing the job, while they're doing it. Unique and wonderful.

Grey matters

I had an aunt who really believed in the 'Sleep on it" theory -- that if you thought about a problem and did not come up with a solution, if you had it in your mind when you went to sleep, you would wake up in the morning with a solution. Well, some of her decisions were downright strange, but she was convinced it worked for her. It happened to me today; I was thinking about a story plot when I went to sleep and woke up this morning with a possible fix for it. As I was stumbling around making the morning coffee, there was this answer. Normally I don't think of anything until the coffee has worked its magic. Heaven help me if I have to find a new package of filters or anything.

Probably it's the imminent sixty-fifth birthday that is prompting me to be so aware of how my mind is working or failing to work. Someone said in a post not long ago that her mother does a daily crossword puzzle to ward off Alzheimer's. That's me, too. My morning is up or down depending on whether I can get the references I don't know by filling in the blanks the other way, and this is very much a matter of luck because my knowledge of geography is (and always has been) abysmal, and I don't know the titles of modern singers' songs and CDs. In fact, my memory for proper names has always been purely awful.

If you ever had me for a teacher, you sat in the classroom in alphabetical order for the first three months of the school year while I painfully put names and faces together. I can still wake up sweating when I remember introducing my husband to my grandmother (who had not been at our wedding due to illness) and blocking on his name. I was twenty. You can imagine how much worse this quirk of the memory is now that my short term memory is shot. Little Stuff has to tell me the names of all the characters in her videos every time we watch them, and I can tell she thinks I am pretty feeble about this. The only reason I went to my high school reunion is that my best friend from back then can remember names -- I stuck to her like glue for the whole weekend, and she covered for me, bless her.

There is nothing more terrifying than having your mind melt down on you. It happened to me after my first child was born -- mood swings, inability to concentrate, the whole thing. There wasn't much, if anything, going on with the mental health of new mothers in the early sixties. 'You've got a case of the baby blues,' I was told. 'It will pass off,' I was told. Yeah, right. But what am I supposed to do now, today, tonight? The baby wasn't gaining weight well -- I used to walk around the house with the baby in one arm and a can of powdered formula in the other, weeping, because I couldn't decide whether to keep on breastfeeding or switch to formula. The fact that this same baby slept for six to seven hours at a stretch, and had a father from a family of attenuated ectomorphs did not enter my mind. Here's a shot of the same kid, age seventeen. Skin, bone and a lot of muscle from gymnastics.

One morning, when our second child was a few months old, and I had started to climb out of the slough for the second time, my husband drifted downstairs from where he had been lolling in bed, listening to CBC, and informed me that he had heard a program about something called post partum depression and he guessed I had had quite a case of it. He was sorry that he hadn't been more sympathetic at the time. I was too busy to strangle him.

Since then I have learned to deal with the periodic bouts of depression that I think are purely genetic and based in brain chemistry, with my memory when it acts as if one of its tires is flat, with the fact that I'm not the student my mother wished I would be, that my husband and kids will always be able to beat me at Trivial Pursuit, that sometimes I won't find the words or the energy to be the grandmother or friend I would like to be. I know I have to write down passwords, names and other necessary facts, 'cause they just don't stick to the grey matter.

The head doesn't work too badly most days. Some mornings I can just wing through the crossword, dial the phone without looking up the number, come up with the right word at the right time. Only, if you're a former student of mine, don't pop up in the soup isle of the grocery store and say "Mrs. G.! Remember me?" Not while I have access to a whole row of heavy soup cans to bean you with.

It's not a river

I have three lines of a song from a CD running through my head: three lines of Joan Baez' The Lily of the West, to be precise. Although she swore my life away, deprived me of my rest, still I love my lovely Flora, The Lily of the West. It is driving me nuts that I can't block it or distract myself away from it. This is actually a fairly respectable sonic haunting. At least, I know where it came from. JG was playing Joan Baez on Saturday, for most of the dinner hour and early evening. Yeah, I know that it's Tuesday today. I'm not sure how long it's been ticking away back there. It could go on for days, too.

Listening to something else doesn't always help. Damn it!

I also do back of the mind counting. If I count in my head to keep track of something, especially the 'one thousand and one' cadence, sometimes my mind will keep on going after I consciously stop. Hours later I will find myself *still* counting in the same sequence -- 'three thousand, two hundred and ............' ahk!

Very disconcerting to have your, what, subconscious, doing its own thing.

There's a really fascinating book about how this works for poets called 'The Road to Xanadu' by John Livingston Lowes, I believe. And if you Google the title alone, there's a neat article here about web writing.

One of the things that has reconciled me to growing old is the fact that my associative memory has improved while a lot of the rest was going to hell in a handbasket. I'm pretty darn good at crossword puzzles and I wasn't when I was younger. And my passive vocab. is huge. Now if dear old Joanie would just quit singing inside my ears.

Spongehead!

Does anyone else have the kind of absorbent mind that holds on to words and expressions and phrases like a sponge full of soap? I do crossword puzzles, and if I don't try to remember something, but just write what my mind turns up, I am frequently correct. (If I try to remember someone's name, a big white blank turns up, but that's another problem.) My mind is like my grandmother's button box; a huge jumble of things with no provenance. I can recite multiple verses of nursery rhymes I learned as a child, pop songs from when I was a teenager and jingles from products long vanished from the shelves.

Wow, I hear you say. How marvellous! Well, not entirely. You see I often do not remember where I got a particularly nice set of words. Dysfunctional associative memory. Up comes a lovely phrase, and if I don't watch it, I think it's mine. This is all by the way of prefacing an apology to Bub and Pie, whose caption for her link list I repeated with a small variation when I set up mine. The words I remembered were: 'Oh, the places I've been, oh, the people I've seen". I think it should be 'Oh, the places I go, Oh, the people I know.' From 'Winnie the Pooh'? Robert Louis Stevenson? Oh, rats! I have embarrassed myself far too often by failing to attribute something, or taking it as my own. Sorry, bubandpie!

And on the subject of memory -- little kids have a fantastic ability to remember something they've heard and come out with it, word perfect, on the worst possible occasion. Or they call you on something you said way back when and you think, "Whoa, you're only three years old, you're not supposed to remember that!" This is your kids. Your grandchildren have you on toast, because when they tell you that you promised them something, you can't remember whether you did say it or not, so you end up going along with it.

And Little Stuff also corrects me when I recite nursery rhymes that do not quite match the version in *her* book. She may have inherited my spongebrain, at that.