My world

In my world of broken bodies and damaged brains I recently had a conversation at lunch with a young lady who was beyond silent. It is a rare moment when she strings words together to make a sentence. I asked her if she had always been so quiet. She said that since her brain injury(she was found after many hours unconscious at the bottom of her cellar stairs) her mind has slowed to a crawl. It takes her more than a "normal" amount of time before she can answer the simplest question and in this frenetic world that is unacceptable-even within her own family. She is made fun of by her family and even her eleven year old daughter has learned that she is fair game.
Tonight, after a wonderful, joyous dinner with my family, I sat in the stillness of the afterglow of the warm memory of the evening-not the stillness of a great distance that she breathed every day. This old poem of mine intruded-not the words, just the emotion of it.

Fragile Light

Pale green glow of the jaded
Wearing blue jeans that have faded
A tangled tree of curls
The life of the sidewalk unfurls
Oh my, all about me cries
All about me tries
To separate the branches from the trees
To say goodbye to the birds and the bees
To remove the rays from the sun
There! Do you see? What I have done
I've darkened the heat and the might
Leaving only the cold and the fragile light

So many fragile lights out there-one puff of cold wind is all it takes to make them feel alone.

cheap therapy

Someone asked and I said. It's just cheap therapy. Once I get an idea on paper it is out of my head. And I have kind friends who don't say "hey, I'm sending you a bill if I have to read this nonsense. Woke up early which is far better than not waking up-but it is a close second with this crazy thought still in my head. An inter-generational reality show for PBS designed to increase trust and humiliation. It is a hybrid show combining the poor unfortunates of the "Biggest Losers" It is one thing to be terminally fat (English translation of Tomanio) in private, but half-naked on tv sweating under the lash like Ben-Hur on a nightmare sea voyage. So, imagine this show combined with Sesame Street. " Elmo we are going to learn about trust today-that begins with the letter"T". Here is your new friend-500lb Leo. He is going to fall backward and you will catch him."
"Fall backward on me! May I remind you that I'm just a sock with a hand up my ***"
Ok-I feel better-head empty. Back to sleep

A ride to the ocean

Our nuclear(as in ticking bomb)family went on a ride to the ocean taking some scenic back roads. Julia came home from her lab job in Amherst, Mass. My wife Karen drove with Julia, baby Samaya, older daughter Laurel and I on rare outing together. Five absolutely disparate personalities and I suspect that holds true for most families. Look at the "Waltons" for example Jim Bob and John boy had nothing in common except a vast hatred of having "Bob" and "Boy" added to there first names. As adults they probably spent a fortune on therapists. "We would like to hire you Jim Bob to fly for our airline, but our passengers would be terrified of flying with a pilot named 'Jim Bob'. They would be fearful you would hijack the plane to a BBQ festival in Louisiana." And John Boy with his overly serious writing style-"The mermaids would often smoke corn cob pipes with a family of squirrels at the summit of Walton's Mountain." He would reminisce at the end of the episode. "I can still smell the singed fur of the hallucinating squirrel as he wobbled into the pitch black night. And I am still haunted by the sight of the tiny dope embers clinging to his smoldering tail."
So that is our family--a collection of mermaids stranded on the top of a southern blue mist mountain and wobbling squirrels with smoldering tails trying to see their way through the smoke searching for a place to have a picnic lunch on a Sunday afternoon. I do love the Waltons, but not as much as I love my family and I would not change them a bit.
P.S. I was going to write about a fantasy reality show, but will try to focus better next time.

Belief

Real reason for this blog is to preserve some stories for our grandchild (one so far-but so near to our hearts). I just can't think of all the stories at once. Some hide behind the gray hairs and I have to lull them into a false sense of security and then pounce!--throw a net over them before they elude me. It is a game with time and we all lose to its delaying tactics. This is a classic story about my mother that I hope Samaya will appreciate one day. My mother showed up in the dead of winter at my grandmother's house in Beacon, N.Y. after five years of chiropractic school with two pennies in her pocket. She went to Iowa with a GED--like many children of the depression she dropped out of High School to work help her family survive. I marvel at the belief she must have had to think that she could take classes such as anatomy and organic chemistry with only a GED. Belief in herself?That God would help her? I don't know the answer. She just knew that she would succeed. She worked in a battery factory in Cold Spring next to our home town of Beacon, N.Y. and slowly began going to peoples homes to give them treatments. Finally, she opened up her first office in my Grandmother's house. Our living room was her waiting room for years. Slowly her practice grew because her belief was contagious. She would not give up on anybody and she did not permit anyone to give up on themselves. At some point our living quarters moved to the second floor apartment and life became normal. I know the word normal and my family is like having oil and water in one sentence, but to us everything seemed normal. You would think that my mother that had used up her allotment of belief, but nothing could be further from the truth. She had become a Baha'i in college and was so overwhelmed with the belief that Jesus had returned that she had to tell the world. Her dream was to form a Baha'i community in Beacon. At that time there was only a few Baha'is in the Hudson Valley. I remember some elderly Persian believers. Wed. was her day off. Grocery shopping in the afternoon and then in the evening she would sit downstairs at a dining room table. There would be nine place settings--cups, saucers, plates etc. She would sit at that table every wed. night saying prayers and envisioning a Baha'i community that would join her. Slowly one by one the room began to fill up. Her goal was a community of nine before she left for London in 1963. It was the First Baha'i World Congress with some seven thousand Baha'is from all over the world. The day before the ninth person became a Baha'i. The point I want to get across to Samaya and others that I hope will come along is that the people you read about in the history books--the pioneers who discovered new worlds of the body, mind or spirit had belief in common. They turned their eyes inward and saw a dream and they believed in them selves and in their dream--seeing the two realities intertwined--inseparable. I don't know what Samaya will see when she looks inward. That is for her to find out. At her dining room table may be nine inventions or books or paintings or cures or a cause or a God. I just want her to look and believe.

Lousy Dreams

Once again I had another lousy furniture dream. And I'm the only poor b****** in the whole world that has long, drawn out, totally annoying furniture dreams. I woke up roaring like a fat lion with a sharp clothes hanger in my ear. "Karen! This is not right!. Most of my uneventful working life was in the furniture business. I unloaded it, loaded it, put it together, took old sofas to the landfill which I immorally bounced off Ralph Nader's head. I made it, sold it, delivered it, fixed it, cried over it for thirty years. I observed a stylish sales woman try to sell another stylish lady a beautiful oak dresser when at that moment a raccoon decided to take a voluminous leak through a a ceiling tile right on the ok dresser! What are the odds of that? Who could ever believe again that God likes furniture? If I make it to heaven there better not be any furniture there! I need to believe that Jesus making furniture is just a bad translation!
Anyway, back to the dream. Most of the night I was trying to deliver some furniture and I could not make out the address on the sales slip. I went from one house after another getting increasingly frustrated. I went up to one house and rang the door bell. This old lady tells me "You have exquisite flesh" I know no one will believe any of this, but it is sadly ever last word true-"Exquisite flesh" who talks like that-even in a lousy furniture dream! I felt like mooning her, but then I would have lousy prison dreams for the next thirty years. Big breathe in. Big breathe out. Relax...relax.. go to sleep.

My daughter's advice.

We have serious children. Correction, we have serious children who have grown up to be serious adults. I suppose God will hold me accountable for this in the next world. Is there an appeal process in the next world? Johnny Cochran is taking a dirt nap. He got O.J. acquitted. Anyway, Laurel told me this morning that there is some house wife who no longer bothers to get dressed in the morning. She writes a blog every day about family life and gets a fortune for it. Laurel says she was invited to the White House for a visit with Michelle Obama. Laurel did not say if she was wearing a ratty bathrobe (the blogger, not the First Lady) with oatmeal stains to the reception. I want to make it clear. I write my blog fully clothed--proper clothes at that! Not like Dru Cederquist who writes her blog dressed like a sailor. I suppose if I wrote my blog in my skivvies the money would roll in--well forget it! I have my principles! I had not intended to write any of this today. I was in the waiting room of my dentist sitting beside a small, narrow fish tank getting bored (no pun intended). I told the long time receptionist that if if owned this place I would put a sign on the fish tank: "Please be advised that the fish tank will be closed April 24 for the required annual dental check up." The receptionist smiled politely. Laurel would say "Dad, you can't just respond to the voices in your head and amuse them. You have to write for normal people." She has a point. But how do I know if the people who read my blog are normal? Are they dressed properly? So, we need some rules. Post a photo of your self on Facebook reading my blog. Try to appear normal. The things I do to please my daughter.

Making a Living

Here we are in what is being called the worst crisis since the Great Depression and I am gainfully employed. Even got another raise and praise for my work ethic. Any day I expect the President to make a televised speech blaming the economic woes of the country on me. I can see his grim expression and pointed finger. "This man in Eliot is unemployable yet he is working! He has no discernible skills. He swims, works out at a gym and...and...(his face turning beet red) he received a raise the same day he played chair volleyball! The ball hit his foot , knee, head and he was heard to exclaim. "I have body parts playing volleyball without my knowledge." People with severe disabilities are in his care. All they do is laugh all day long." I need to go to an LSA meeting--see ya later.