Saturday, December 15, 2018

Precarious Life

I climb the ladder, grasping hold of the gutter at the second step, hanging on as I reach the top. I scoop leaves with one hand, careful not to overreach. I retreat to the ground and move the ladder.

On my third ascent, before reaching the top, I’m dismayed. A tiny bird in iridescent green and purple, has been driven from the sky by wind and rain. It is perfectly still, eyes closed as though in a nest. But it is on the roof, mere inches from the eaves. Nothing else, not even leaves, near.

Carefully, I cup this little treasure, hoping the warmth I feel is not merely reflected heat from the roof. I croon to it, but it does not move. I feel no heartbeat.

I’ve had to release my grip on the gutter. I descend slowly, talking to this beautiful creature.

Holding its lifeless body, I wonder – is this the one that paused beside me at the end of summer?

I had been reading with my back to the vermillionaire plant – a favorite of hummingbirds. At the buzz of wings by my ear, I turned. We stared at each other for a moment as it hovered before speeding off over the roof.

I find a small box, the perfect size, decorated with rocks and pearls and a heart-shaped design. I will have a ceremony in the spring, maybe place this small coffin beside another vermillionaire. A reminder that life is precious – and precarious.

Monday, December 10, 2018

Sunrise

For years before, and then after, I tracked the exact minute of sunrise, day by day. Not that I was up at sunrise – especially in the summer. It just seemed important to know when daylight would arrive. It fostered resentment for darker days of the year, especially during many years in Oregon.

But even in those few years in California, I meticulously tracked sunrise there – and also here.

Surprising, then, that this year I’ve paid little attention.

What changed? Is it a factor of my age? Am I losing something by such neglect? Am I becoming less Virgo and more . . . more – what? Libra? In my chart the moon is in Libra. But I have Gemini hidden in there, too. So maybe I’m finding balance and gaining ability to see more than one approach to the rhythms of life.

It feels like a new freedom. I can embrace each season. I don’t have to leave home to find sunshine in winter. I can jog with rain sprinkling my face. I can bundle up against damp foggy days. I can inhale wild scents and sights in spring and go near-naked in the summer.

I can be alive! I am alive! What a blessing.

Sunday, September 9, 2018

Perhaps Love

On Saturday, September 1, 2018, I listened to/watched recap of two major funerals – Aretha Franklin’s and John McCain’s.

After a couple hours, sinking into sadness, I had to turn the TV off.

I tried to soothe myself with music, beginning with Peter, Paul & Mary. But that tipped me deeper into the morass – not their music, but the memories stirred by it.

So I grabbed my John Denver CD. One of the songs, Perhaps Love, has this final verse:

If I should live forever,
and all my dreams come true
my memories of love
will be of you.


I spent some time reviewing my intimate relations, but none stood out as the one.

The next morning – my 75th birthday – I sat with a group of people who have chosen to trudge a particular path with me.

My eyes opened. YOU can be plural!

I shared with them that I’d grown up with John Denver, which drew a laugh.

“Well, he was born in 1943 like me,” I said, “and he sang from his heart, often breaking mine.”

I recited the final verse of Perhaps Love, pointing around the room as I reached the word YOU.

A week later, I tried to play that CD. It hitched and stopped before reaching that beautiful song.

No matter, the words are etched deep into my heart.

Monday, July 30, 2018

Wind Says (me quedo aqui)

WIND SAYS*

Wind says, Come go with me.
Tree says, No, I must stay.
Wind says, Have fun, let us play.
Tree says, No, I will stay, for
soon you shall go on your way
And I shall be here tall and strong
to give shelter to all that come.
So take my branches if you must,
but leave my roots in earthy dust.
Tree says, Wind be gone!
For I am master of this fight today.

*a poem by Emma Lou Prophet, written in February 1990. Lou died in December, 2017. Her husband, Wiley, hired me as a programmer trainee in 1970. He hired me again in 1974 when I returned from a year in Denver. He and I still get together for lunch, sometimes joined by Niki. Lou said he always enjoyed his time with 'the girls.'

I want to title it me quedo aqui (I'll stay here) because I first heard that phrase spoken by a two-year-old child. Her father had asked, in English, whether she wanted to go with us. She shook her head, removed her pacifier and said, 'me quedo aqui'

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Midsummer Dream - a poem

She labors up the trail
backpack filled with decades
of travel on two feet.

Her poles tick
in slow synchrony
with crunch of careful footfall.

She pauses often to drink
from water bottle
and from sky.

She reaches the crest,
unties her boots,
discards diminished
human form,
fastens her soul
to a passing butterfly
and floats away
untethered, free.

Father's Day, 2018

The sky is the shade of his eyes and his favorite sweater – a color that somehow made his cheeks glow with roses.

Ten years ago, he missed Father’s Day by three weeks. He died alone in his room, not discovered until morning.

It was the middle of Memorial Day weekend. Though he had celebrated his 95th birthday in March, his passing took both my sister and me by surprise. His mind had stayed sharp even as his body diminished.

That year, I kept a promise to be with him for Father’s Day and fulfilled one of his last wishes.

My sister and I had already arranged for cremation and placement of his ashes in the garden at Rose Hills when I found a letter he’d written months before. He wanted his ashes scattered in the ocean to join his parents and my mother. It made sense. My mother’s ashes had been dropped in the Pacific twenty-four years earlier. And, on his calendar, on date of their marriage, he had noted the years they would have celebrated. This, in spite of a second, less than happy marriage lasting more than twenty years!

But my sister wanted his ashes where she could visit. And I wanted to honor his request. We compromised. Before taking the box of ashes to Rose Hills, I scooped some out and carried them with me to Catalina Island the day before Father’s Day.

My friend Dave knew just the place. He took me to a pebbly beach on the east side of the Island.

I stepped ankle deep into the calm water, wished my father safe passage to his next adventure, then emptied the container into the sea.

I watched his ashes curve away, like a swimmer doing breaststroke, off in search of my mother.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

Stop Counting

I listen to a woman my age who is drowning in grief over every passing, over every misery she observes. It’s exhausting for her – and for me.

But I relate better to another friend who was revived when his heart stopped. His lifetime partner had died two months before. He was angry that they’d not allowed him to join her.

I don’t think it’s grief that fuels such desires. I believe she was reaching out to him, or they were reaching for each other.

So, I have decided to stop tracking all the people I know who die.

Am I in denial? After all, I have reached the age my mother was when she succumbed to melanoma. And in the past few years, many friends have passed.

Perhaps I’m wrong about this, but when I die, I hope to be reunited with those who’ve been important in this life. And I hope to meet other souls who have influenced me by their words and actions.

If I’m to meet them with my head up, I need to live each day here as though it were my last, by being present today, not wishing for a different past nor hoping for a perfect future – those ‘if only’ and ‘what if’ distractions. The operative word there is IF, which stands for In Fantasy or, in cruder words I'm f**cked.

Letting go of counting those who are gone frees me up – like giving up the search for an old schoolmate. If I’m supposed to ‘find’ someone, it will happen. It will happen in spite of my efforts. It will happen at the ‘right’ time.

In the meantime, I can enjoy my current life, my living friends, family and acquaintances.

Friday, April 6, 2018

White Complaisance

Years ago a man asked – if reincarnation were possible – would I rather return as a man or a woman.

My immediate answer: as a man!

He feigned surprise, claimed no other woman had answered that way.

I was young then, still stung by the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment and fresh from multiple experiences of feeling (and being) unsafe when alone.

I attempted to explain. He pretended to understand, though he seemed offended that I saw male privilege in ways he had never considered.

I’m much older now. My answer today: as a woman! Specifically and emphatically as a woman of color – Black, Latina, Asian.

Why? What changed? The Equal Rights Amendment is still dead. The element of danger for a lone woman hasn’t changed. Much progress has been made but now the backlash of White (male) Supremacy is taking away gains – one at time – reverting back to a time before I first answered that question: Roe v Wade threatened, Title IX not fully implemented, women just beginning to rise against abusive men - #MeToo.

So why would I want to be a woman again? And why a woman of color?

I admire women like Dolores Huerta, Shirley Chisholm, Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama and many others. Yet I am not them. And I’ve come to understand that my whiteness gives me huge privilege: I’ve not experienced discrimination for how I look.

It wouldn’t be necessary to be a famous woman or lead a movement. Still, I ache to join their sisterhood, to understand their experience from within.

And if there is no reincarnation? I’ve got to get busy here and now, join the fight for equality, participate in calls for justice, get out of my comfortable white complaisance.

Thursday, March 8, 2018

Comin' Round the Mountain

She’ll be comin’ round the mountain when she comes

This has been my theme song when driving long distances. It’s a bouncy tune, easy to sing, no musical ability required. It has kept me awake and alert many times in my treks from Eugene to California. After all, I have to get around a mountain or two on that journey.

She’ll be drivin’ six white horses when she comes


In 2006, I bought a small SUV - six-cylinder, white. So now I drive something white with six ‘horses.’

But one day, as I was singing away, I got choked up.

I saw my ten-year-old tomboy self, enchanted by Doris Day in Calamity Jane driving a stage coach as well as any man.

My eyes filled with tears when I remembered that photo of me – tight jeans, cowgirl hat and Frye boots, one hip thrown out in saucy pose.

I wondered – could I be the woman who, at twenty-six toured Bolivia and Peru alone? And who, at thirty-six, dared drive across the United States by herself?

I’m more than twice thirty-six now. Have I made my last run?

Oh, we’ll all go out to meet her when she comes

Oh, how I hope they’ll all be there to meet me – those folks who knew the tomboy, the girl, the woman I’ve been. What a thrill to roar out of this world behind six whites into the light surrounding those who’ve gone before.

Yes, come out to meet me. I’ll be comin’ round the mountain.

But not just yet.

Friday, February 23, 2018

Horrific History

February 20, 2018

I cringe as I watch the PBS Frontline special, Bitter Rivals: Iran & Saudi Arabia.

The subtitle: How a dangerous political rivalry between Iran & Saudi Arabia has plunged the Middle East into a sectarian war.

Horrific history revisited. I listen to analysis, wonder at the willingness of multitudes to annihilate themselves in battle against some vilified other.

Mystifying – those men, self-appointed perpetrators of destruction, who claim no wrongdoing, express no compassion for the millions of lives cut short by their swords. Indeed, they now adamantly claim those actions were necessary, vital to their cause.

But the subtitle left out the part played by the US, the Soviets and other Western powers – but mostly the US. Yes, US. Through ignorance and arrogance, we sparked already smoldering conflict in the Middle East.

Watching leaders of my own country tout such tyrants, spout their glories, twist the truth so we appear righteous, I blush in shame. Because I’m old enough to have watched many of those news stories as they happened. I’m old enough to have known September 11, 2001 would be used by US to wreak havoc on foreign shores. And on our own soldiers.

Thursday, February 8, 2018

Wait, Isn't This February?


i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes
- e. e. cummings



I hiked a local trail yesterday, one that has inspired many of my poems and blog entries. A friend had planned to join me, but life interfered. I went alone and decided to just enjoy the trek, savor spring-like weather, avoid temptations to create a poem along the way.

Smiles on every face, cheerful greetings from strangers, dogs happily panting their way to the top – what a glorious day!

Sprinkled with breaks to capture nature's artwork, the climb seemed effortless. Of course, my photos of distant peaks do no justice to those bright diamonds-in-the-sky.

Long before I reached the bench near the bottom, the one with the e. e. cummings poem, I knew the truth: the trail is the poem, the trail is the prayer. I am always in the poem, not writing it.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

All a-Twitter

Trump’s Tweets scatter like birdshot, strike random objects, force a duck-and-weave through the forest of important issues.

We’ve no time for meaningful dialog before another Tweet distracts.

Yet issues pile high:
• Elephants, wolves, our natural resources
• Net neutrality
• Tax reform
• Racism
• Sexual harassment/sex trafficking
• Free speech/first amendment
• Gun control/second amendment
• Terrorism
• Nuclear war
• Russia
• Climate change/hurricane & fire disaster relief
• Immigration and the Wall

My blood pressure rises and reminds me – health care is on the blocks, too.

Even local issues rile: $20 million offer to retain a football coach; 12-story buildings on tiny spaces; a new campus section by the (rising) river; where the heck to build City Hall.

I’m befuddled by where to put my focus, where to send my meager contributions, where my energy will help most.

Imagine what $20 million could do.