Life In Ordinary Time

Best Seller

I wonder how many people know that Rumi is the best selling poet in America?  I wonder how many people care?  The latter is not a facetious question if you consider the low sales books of poetry reportedly bring in.   We are not a nation of poetry readers.

Be that as it may, I just found out myself about Rumi being the best selling poet in America a couple of weeks ago.  I was surprised.  The last best selling poet that I am aware of was Rod McKuen, whose many little books were popular  in the late 60's and early 70's --quite a different kettle of fish. 

I first discovered the poems of Jela'luddin Rumi, the Sufi mystic and poet, about 20 years ago.  I was already familiar with other kinds of poetry that you might call spiritually oriented,  like Chinese lyric poetry and Japanese Haiku.  I also had a little knowledge of mysticism, if one can say that, from a Buddhist and a Christian perspective, with maybe a little Hindu thrown in.  So when I read the poems of Rumi, some of the shorter quatrains, I leapt (or leaped)  where Rumi took me. 

What do I mean by that?  I'm not sure I can explain it.  There are things that you think about, and things that you read, that you try to understand by way of reason--a chain of logical thoughts where you go from step 1, to step 2, to step 3 and on till you reach a coherent conclusion.  But there are other things, certain spiritual truths and certain poems to name two, that can't be approached in this linear fashion.  For those, logic will only take you so far, and once you've gotten to that point where logic leaves you stranded, you must take what I have called a "leap" to achieve understanding, or to see.  The "leap" as I have experienced it, and as at least one other friend of mine has, feels like an act of will in which you "open" up your mind so that an intuitive flash of insight can come.  Does it come in through the chinks you've opened up by silencing your reasoning brain?  It also feels a little like you relinquish something--the death-grip of logic in your brain--for another kind of knowledge.

If you've ever read a Zen koan and appreciated it, you've probably experienced it.  The famous one which asks "We know the sound of two hands clapping, what is the sound of one hand clapping" comes most immediately to mind.  A koan should "jolt" you out of your  established thought patterns as well as your complacency and allow something new to enter your experience. Interestingly enough, sometimes the Zen Masters used an actual physical "jolt" on their students, whacking them physically with whatever was handy if they'd been hovering too long on the edge of achieving "satori" but never quite tumbling into it.  Some of Rumi's poems are definitely "whackish" in this way, it's what I love about them. 

I mean, what a gift and a joy it is to be shown something different, a different perspective, a different way of being in the universe.  That doesn't happen every day, we are comfortable in the grooves our life has settled into.  I know I am.  But then Whack! here comes a poem by Rumi and everything has changed, but, mysteriously, it is also somehow as I've always known it was.

I don't know if every one of those thousands of people who are said to be reading Rumi today get exactly that from him or not, but I'm sure he wouldn't mind.  A tiny chink of light on the wall of your room can be a beautiful thing in itself.

Toni

I just learned today that a friend of mine whom I had lost contact with over the years, Toni Kilpatrick,  died of a brain aneurysm in her sleep almost 13 years ago.  She was only 43.  We had known each other since we were kids, we lived next door to one another, our families celebrated many holidays together, and she taught me to drive.   We kind of weathered adolescence together.  After she married, she moved out of state and we lost touch.
She was a character.  Just the other day I was telling my sister a story of a trick she played on me when we were teenagers.  It wasn't exactly a trick, but I'll just tell it:  at that point in my life I was a heathen or a Buddhist (I forget which) and she was a Christian.  We talked about religion, of course, and I know she felt a real obligation to talk to me about God, evangelicals call it witnessing.
However, one night her impish sense of humor got the better of her.  I was spending the night at her house and we had probably talked recently about hell, and whether it existed.  She said it did, and I probably said it didn't.   Well, Toni couldn't let me labor under that false delusion.  So in the middle of the night, when I was sound asleep, I awakened to a noise, and there was Toni in her pajamas, holding a foil pie pan that she'd gotten several lit birthday candles to stand up in somehow.  She was waving the flames in front of my face  and crooning in what was supposed to be a spooky voice, "You're in hellllll, you're in hellllllllll!"
Well, that woke me right up.  We laughed and laughed.
It didn't convert me at that time, but no one could ever say she didn't try.
Rest in peace, dear flame-waving girl.

Old Dogs

 I've always known how old two of my dogs are, they're about 13 and 14 years, approximately.  But I've never thought of them as old, because they've never acted old, until this last year.  Or maybe to be more accurate, I never noticed anything until I moved here.  And now I'm coming to realize that I have two geriatric dogs on my hands, and caring for them, for two at the same time,  might be difficult.

Molly, the oldest at 14, began having problems going up the stairs, which is something we have to do several times a day when I take them out.  I tried carrying her when she balked a couple of times, but she didn't like that very much either, and she's really too heavy and too big for me to be able to do that on a regular basis.  I suspected she had arthritis, but before I could find a new vet and get her in, she began to have another problem.  She developed vestibular disease and eventually could barely walk without falling, and didn't want to eat or drink. 

She was at the emergency vet hospital for a while, and then she stayed at my sister's for a few days because she could be there without having to negotiate stairs.  In the meantime, I bought one of those doggy slings some smart person invented, which I thought would help me support and steady her without the two of us tumbling down the stairs together.  I'd already hurt my back when my sister and I had to carry her down the stairs to get her to the emergency vet.

That sling is just the cleverest thing.  In effect, it gives Molly a handle.  I could think of lots of things that would be better with the addition of a handle, but dogs were never one of them.  It's  made out of strong canvasy material, and I lay it on the ground and she steps into it.  Then after I fasten the two straps across her back, we're ready to go.  When we go up or down the stairs I can either give her more support by carrying some of her weight, or just steadying her, depending on what I think she needs at the moment. 

She's mostly recovered now, but can trip easily still,  and she lists to one side, which is a  normal outcome for this problem.  I decided I would continue to use the sling most of the time, since she's 14 after all--in people years that makes her almost 100. 

At first I took her out by herself, as I didn't think I could manage one dog in a sling, and two other dogs on leashes, and one of them being live-wire Noodle, but now I take them all at once except at night when it's dark.  I think we make a strange procession, Chloe and Noodle in the fore, but only moving in fits and starts, because that's what I do, lurching along with my left hand holding Molly's sling, Chloe and Noodles leashes looped on my right arm, and my right hand maintaining some contact with the banister,  just in case.  So far it's working.

However--I've noticed that at night, Chloe is not seeming so sure of herself on the stairs, hesitating quite a bit before starting down....

I don't know, I can't really see myself going down the stairs holding the handles of two slings,  with two 40 to 50 pound dogs in tow, I don't think that's going to work.  Then I'll have to take them separately, and I'll surely get my exercise.  Only, it's actually too much exercise as I am now having trouble with the stairs, I have arthritis or bursitis in my right hip that's developed since I've moved here and have to go up and down the stairs even more then the dogs.    I can't seem to win, can I?  Geriatric dogs?  Geriatric me--well, semi-geriatric me, anyway.

More Murder

On Sunday, after our tour of the murder site, etc., my sister and I went on our own little tour before setting out for home.  We drove to Pico Rivera by way of the old bus route on Whittier Blvd, and went by the old house, the old school....  I call it ground zero.  Then we went on to Whittier and La Mirada,  and did the same there--a real trip down Memory Lane, as my sister calls it. 

Periodically, I have to do it--visit the scenes of the crimes, as it were.  Everything looks so ordinary now, the houses and streets so small and nondescript.  We stopped in front of the old house in Pico so my sister could have a cigarette.  I wonder how anyone could live there.  But they have, continuously, for all these 46 years we've been gone.    It's hard to believe that our unhappiness there didn't leave some sort of indelible print of misery on the house.  I wrote a poem once about being a prisoner there, and I remember this line: "Our fingers write dark messages on the walls".  They should be there, those messages, the suffering of five souls should seep from the walls in a thick miasma.

On the way home, after we finally got on the freeway, my sister and I talked about whether we thought we had behaved acceptably in front of the writer and her friend.  We decided we had.  We both thought we had handled seeing our grandmother's death house well, at least in the short term.  We hadn't freaked-out, at least.

Somewhere along the way we got silly, which was bound to happen, and I really don't know in what context, but I began to imitate the child in the film version of Steven King's, The Shining, as something made him try to warn the others of impending doom.  It's somewhat of a running joke between my sister and I.  Anytime we're bored, or idle somewhere, say in the car or at home, for entertainments sake either of us might suddenly burst forth with: "R-e-druuum!".  Like the kid in the book,  I tried to sound spooky but only managed to sound like someone with seriously sick vocal chords, "Re-e-edruuum!", and then with more excitement, "Redruum! Redruum! Redruum!  Re-e-e-e-ed-Ruuuuuuuum!"  My sister giggled.   So did I.  We always do.

A Murder

This brick building on Union in Los Angeles, very close to downtown, is the place my grandmother, my mother's mother,  was murdered in 1929.  It's been there all this time, and I had never seen it or even really knew it still existed.  We never bothered to find out,  and our mother certainly never showed it to us.  Maybe she never bothered to find out, either.

It's within viewing distance of a Catholic bookstore I used to frequent, and for some reason that fact dumbfounds me.  I can't believe I was so close to the place and I never knew.

We went there this weekend, in the company of a person who says she is writing something about the murder.   It was a very famous  case in 1929--it made the headlines, huge, sensationalistic headlines, all over the country. 

My sister and I did a little research on it a while back, we found some of the newspaper articles and photos, but that's as far as we went.  And more than 30 years ago while doing genealogy research I figured out what my grandmother's name had been at the time, as she had remarried, so I could find the rest of the info.  I actually talked to an LAPD detective in Homicide who had found a description of the case in a book he had with unsolved cases in it.

The writer's grandfather was my grandmother's chauffeur at the time.

We also went by the Asbury Park Apartments which was where she was living at the time, and it

apparently was a very ritzy place.  It's a massive building, about 12 stories, and the outside looks as if it's in great condition.  The inside isn't too bad either.  Someone let us into the building and we prowled around,  wanting to get inside the apartment where she lived.  We knocked on the door, but no one answered.  The place has what used to be a beautiful view of what was then called Westlake Park, later it became the famous McArthur park of the song.  The view isn't so beautiful these days as the park is always crammed with people, many immigrants live in the area now, and they take full advantage of the park.

I remember going there once, to the park, with my Mother and Mac and a little friend of mine, Joanne.  We rode on the lake in a paddleboat, and I remember I was  bad and didn't want to give my friend a turn at the paddling.  Mother and Mac's relationship was pretty new at the time, and he was still pretending with me that he was a nice guy, a nice normal guy. He acted as if he had a right to say,  with all the affronted innocence of an Alfred E Neuman, "What, me crazy?"

But I digress, as they say.

Did my mother know we were so close to where her mother used to live? So close to the place where the  chauffeur would drop her off  to see this woman who had given birth to her, so incidentally?  Did she care?  I don't suppose I'll ever know.

I don't think she could cope with any of it, thinking about it, knowing it.  Best to pretend she'd never had a mother,  much less had lost one to murder.  There's no coming back from murder,  it cancels out all chances,  most especially the chance that someday the scales would fall from her mother's eyes and she would see,  and love,  the daughter who had the misfortune of loving her.

TV or Not TV

Just for the record, I'm not reading or listening to anything these days.   I can't seem to read since I moved, and my computer is not set up to play any music.  I didn't even have a computer the first two weeks, and I can't believe how much I missed it.  I felt very isolated without it, like I used to feel without a phone.

I can't knit or crochet either, or do anything much other than working to put my new place together.  And I'm not being a fanatic about that, either.    I can't seem to concentrate on anything.

Hey, but I'm doing great watching TV.   Yes, that's right, the Idiot Box has been capturing most of my attention in the last couple of weeks.  The reason that is, of course, is that I now have cable.  I haven't had it before, I didn't want to spend the money, and the times I tried it, I really didn't watch it so I canceled it.  I have it now because of TV going digital etc so I thought cable would be the easiest way to take care of that.  The problem is if I have it I watch it and it eats up my time.  I thought I watched too much TV when I just had network TV and the few independent stations and PBS.  Now, it's even worse.

The other day when I didn't have a car I stayed home and watched about five episodes of Law & Order, or CSI or one of those shows, one right after the other.  I felt dazed afterward.  Cox Cable has the built-in TV guide (maybe they all do, I don't know) and I feel compelled to check and see what's "on" at various times of the day.  I wouldn't want to miss anything wonderful.  Do I really think that would happen frequently?  How about infrequently?

Well, I think I'm still going to spend the money and get a digital converter box or two for my old TV's.  Just in case I decide to be deprived again and cancel the cable.  When I first moved in, I didn't have the cable and I got all of two stations on my TV.  And I was pretty okay with that,  as long as one was PBS.   

                                                                                            

After Trauma

It is a truth universally acknowledged---no, wait a moment, that was my last post.  Jane Austen, books, etc....

But it is a truth--universally acknowledged or not-- that survivors of trauma tend to react to the normal troubles or stresses of life as if they are repetitions of trauma, at least initially.  It's a knee-jerk reaction.  I assume that it will happen, to some extent, for the rest of my life. 

So when something goes wrong in my life, like car trouble, or losing my job,  I go spinning into a state of panic first of all, and a feeling of helplessness shortly follows.  The helplessness doesn't really reflect who I am these days, but harks back to being a helpless child in a world with abusive adults calling all the shots.

When I'm in the stage where I'm feeling helpless,  the entire weight of it all falls onto me--the weight of living in an evil world that has no good to offer anyone, especially me.  I have to run and hide, if only for an hour.  Sometimes I actually go to bed and pull the covers over my head--which strikes me as pretty pitiful, as it never worked then, they plucked me from my bed routinely--but I still do it.  Somehow, thinking the worst makes me feel better.  Nothing's going to sneak by under my radar.

Then I get up and figure out how I'm going to deal with the situation, and do whatever I have to do.

 

A Book is a Book is a Book?

Re that last post:  I heard them talking about e-books on the radio last weekend and I was trying to imagine what it would be like.  I was thinking, well, it might not be too bad, trying not to poo-poo it automatically and left it at that. 

Then earlier today I connected it up with what I was writing at the end of the last post.  If all books were e-books I wouldn't have an object to be all smarmy and sentimental over.  I can't imagine cherishing the particular computer or cell phone that I happened to read an e-book on (unbidden a picture of a person trying to cuddle a computer comes into my mind).  There would be nothing tangible to cherish.  There's just the air, or the phone lines, or however it works....  But maybe you'd say with a regular book what we cherish is not the object itself, but the world the writer has conjured up, with our cooperation, or that we cherish the writer, and the vision he has shown us, the truths he has helped us see.  All that may be true, and there's nothing tangible there, either.

But.  I'm a person, I have a body, I move it around in space.  I not only think and imagine things, I also see,  touch,  hear, taste and smell them.  And,  actually,  the seeing, touching etc. informs what I think.  I like my tangible objects.  I like my books.  I can hold Jane Austen's  Persuasion in my hand, feeling the cloth of the binding and the smoothness of the page.  I can feel connected to Jane for some mysterious reason, with that book in hand.  Those are her very words, her very thoughts expressed in words on a page.  That I am holding.  In my hands.   How could anyone improve on that, on books?  A compact, portable object, that I can take with me almost anywhere, that's not at all dependent on technology to read.  Just my eyes and my brain.  I'm thinking I'll rest my case right there.

Moving, Part I

Well, I'm in the middle of it.  Moving, that is.  The first part of moving which is the horrendous task of Packing.  It's awful.  It looks like a cyclone has moved through this apartment.  A cyclone that's packed some boxes and then strewn everything else randomly about the room.  My sister could barely stand to spend two nights here to help me out, she doesn't do chaos.  I say I can handle the chaos if I have even a tiny corner of order:  like keeping my bed free of junk so I can drop in the midst of chaos and take a nap, or the couch free so I can sit and watch tv when I've done enough packing for a bit.

Part of me has this desire to throw away more than ever actually makes the trash bags I've been filling.  Who needs decorative items:  Native American pottery or Chinese enamel or Blue Willow porcelain?  Who needs 15 boxes of books and CD's?  Who needs a stash of 10 boxes of yarn?  Who needs a jewelry armoire full of jewelry and several boxes of jewelry too ugly to sell  &  jewelry making supplies  as well?  Who needs boxes and boxes of knit and crochet patterns tucked away in magazine racks?

Apparently I do, and I have the boxes to prove it.  But I can feel the specter of old age getting closer and I'm not sure whether I'll be glad or sad when it actually arrives and says "You're too old to be lugging all this crap around!  Ditch it!".

I can't get myself to throw or give away books, unless they're total trash and I didn't connect with them in any  meaningful way. 

My sister was packing books for me, and she came across my coverless paperbacks of The Lord Of The Rings, one of which was from 1965, the others from '66 or '67  and I still remember it as the best Christmas present I ever received.  She said, "You don't really want to keep coverless books do you?" and I said "Yes" without explaining.  I have a sentimental attachment to those books, to those very copies.  I have newer copies to read, but I have to keep the old ones, too, I just do. They were so important to me as a child. 

More later.  I have to go---pack.

Families

I was thinking about the reasons why I liked The Incredible String Band when I was young, when I was a teenager and in my twenties.  I remember hearing them for the first time on a famous LA FM radio station, when FM radio was just beginning to be the medium for non-commercial, or progressive rock and roll, as opposed to what was called "bubble-gum" rock.  For some reason, I can't remember the station, maybe KMET or KPPC.

The song I heard was The Water Song, and it wasn't really rock music or folk music, it was in a category all its own, as was most of the group's music.  The lyrics are a little mystical, "O, wizard of changes/Teach me the lesson of flowing", and they incorporated the sound of falling water in the song, which was a very 60's (or early 70's) thing to do.  I loved them dearly--I graduated from Donovan to them, and never looked back.

And then I thought of how much I loved The Lord of the Rings, which I first read when I was 12.  I remember when I was talking to Sue and telling her how much I loved the books, she had said that she hadn't really ever gotten into them, that they had seemed too simple to her, too black and white.

I hadn't seen it that way, but if I had I wouldn't have cared, for that was how my world was.  Well, it wasn't black and white--it was just black.

Reading those books gave me one of my first inklings (no pun intended for all you Tolkien fans) that the world could be something besides sordid.

I also thought of Richard Thompson, a lonely, skinny  extremely bright kid, who stuttered, with (by all accounts) a strict, domineering father, taking refuge in his music, in his guitar.  I thought of some of his darker songs, and there seem to be more of these than anything else.  It makes me wonder about the things that shape us.

Families can be pretty scary things.  Would it be safe to say that most of our anguish comes from there?

They can be twisted, and no one on the outside can see it.

An artist will use it as grist for his mill--and I think I'm fairly safe in saying everyone else will bring it to the new family they create with whatever partner they choose (and that's a whole other can of worms).  It just perpetuates itself like that through the ages.

I've broken the cycle merely because I'm not part of a new family.

Well, and one also would like to think  that the ton of therapy I've had would help if I did have a new family.  We may never know....