The Obituary

was of a person
known
yet now
unknown to me
who seemed to
live
a solo life
until
that magic meeting
with a childhood friend
all memory
of decades
between
erased
enveloped
in a sea
of tears
and waves
of sudden
separation
flotsam forgotten

Distracted Hiking

I trudge up the trail, inhale crisp spring air, admire deep green fields below. I feel the crunch of gravel under my feet, hear the squawk of a blue jay. How amazing to be alive!

I’m also amazed at how many fellow hikers wear headphones or earbuds and spend their hike in conversation with someone invisible to me, someone not here!

On my descent, a teenage boy passes, eyes down, glued in admiration . . . to his iPhone!

Near the base, I meet up with Jeff. He hikes here nearly every day, usually by himself. Everyone knows him; he calls each by name. I’m pleased he remembers mine.

He reminds me to accept the choices made by others – everything from the redesign of Hayward Field (for the next generation) to my recent choice to continue hiking alone. You’re an athlete, he says. You need to set your own pace.

Yes! Keep my focus on my experience: this morning, this day, this life!

Thanks, Jeff.

House of Mirrors

Mirror, mirror on the wall . . .

My condo was built in 1978. I bought it in 2016 and have made numerous updates since. But the mirror in the master bath was original until now.

I found a round mirror in the right size and asked a friend to help remove the old one. We both laughed at the wall beneath – still the original mustard yellow! I couldn’t wait to cover it with the soft gray of the rest of the room.

Sometime during this project, I started counting mirrors.

Let’s see. I have a full length mirror, two medium-sized decorative mirrors and a couple smaller ones in the master bedroom. One is hung to reflect the painting of Simone, my precious last cat.

The guest room sports one full length mirror and a round wall mirror with weird wire framing.

The master bath has an oval mirror in addition to the one over the sink; the half-bath, a rectangular mirror with double beveled edges.

An antique round mirror with elaborate gold frame provides my out-the-door check point. It used to hang over my parent’s fireplace.

My computer space has two decorative mirrors, though I rarely look into them.

A large mirror pretends to be a window in my living room.

There are two mirrors in my kitchen – part of my attempt at feng shui.

And finally, even my laundry room has its very own mirror!

Have you been counting? I had to do three passes through the house to come up with the correct number (17) and even then, missed the tiny mirror in that ‘sun/moon’ from Mexico!

Why so many mirrors? I mean, I have south-facing windows across the living room. But much of the rest of the house gets no direct light. Mirrors give depth. When we took the mirror out of my bathroom, it felt as though the wall had moved in two feet, the room made eerily smaller.

And light. Mirrors give light – or the illusion of it. While I’m not constantly aware of all those mirrors, I believe they lighten my mood and expand my vision.

Mirror, mirror. Maybe I have enough. Or maybe just one more . . .

RATS!

I stopped mid-sentence, mouth agape and watched it race down the hall, dash into my bathroom.

Yikes! A rat, I said, and clicked end on my phone.

I scurried to my neighbor’s in need of moral support. We’ve known there are rats around since her dog alerted her to one on her patio. We live next to the Delta Ponds. But inside?!

In a way, though, it was a relief. For several weeks I had ‘seen’ movement in my peripheral vision. But each time, when I looked - nothing there.

Well, at least I’m not losing my mind. Or my vision.

My neighbor loaned me her trap and some peanut butter. I set it in my kitchen that night.

Next morning, the trap was sprung, empty . . . and the peanut butter devoured! Clever little beasts.

Thus began a campaign to block all potential entry points. Steel wool and duct tape over the obvious spots. A few days went by. Then one morning there were two piles of confetti – one by the kitchen sink, one by the cabinets opposite. I was puzzled, because this wasn’t paper and I couldn’t think what I might have dropped there. I vacuumed it up.

Next day, a smaller pile by the sink. I peered under the cabinet doors and saw the gnawed plastic baseboard molding! There’s a gap between the bottom of the cabinet and the baseboard. They were making a new entry!

Oh, rats! I exclaimed, feeling a bit like Charlie Brown, bamboozled again - and by actual rats!

More steel wool. More crannies stuffed. More duct tape.

My neighbor and I share a wall and the crawl space. Fortunately, we’re good friends. And she hates rats. We needed a Rat Patrol and it wasn’t going to be us.

Her daughter recommended a company.

We scheduled an inspection. They sent a guy to set traps and seal the holes in foundation vents and other entry points.

He checked the traps a week later. I asked if they caught any.

Nope, he said. They’re smart. They bump the trap, it springs. They eat the peanut butter.

Somehow, I felt better. And not about the rats. Even professionals fail.

Footnote: eventually, five rats trapped, no more gnawing or scurrying inside! Yay!

LITTLE WHITE DUCK

Christmas Day at the Delta Ponds

I hear them and quack my response from the path. They float to the pond edge: a small white duck surrounded by mallards. They follow the little white duck who waddles toward me on a well-worn duck trail up from the pond. They peck at its tailfeathers.

It stops in the middle of the trail just feet from me.

I scold the others. Duck discrimination, I say. Fowl prejudice!

They turn, wobble back to the water – all but the hefty hen, the lead bully. She eyes me, assesses my reach. In slow, matronly steps she descends toward the pond. The little white duck follows.

Near the water, a male emerges from grassy hiding. An ambush? Then he, too, scuttles to the water.

This little white duck will never grow up like the Ugly Duckling – no swan in this one’s DNA. It huddles by the reeds until the mallard flotilla drifts off.

white feathers
orange beak
sail away safe

Burying the Squirrel

Thanksgiving Day, 2019. A sunny afternoon. I took a long walk by the river. The last of the geese huddled in the cold – a great mass of feathers in the ‘rest area’ beside the ponds. I’m amazed that they find that spot twice each year, once in late fall, once in early spring.

In the street a few yards from my drive, a squirrel lay on his back, feet in the air. I knew I couldn’t leave him there to be further flattened.

I trudged to my house, retrieved a shoe box and my gardening gloves. The poor little guy! Hit in the head, probably dead in an instant. I carried the box to my small garden area. The soil here is clay; I hope I dug deep enough.

When finished, I turned to the grassy area under the oaks and admonished the other squirrels not to cross the street. I hope he isn’t the one that often hangs upside down on the trunk of an oak and appears to watch me through the window.

I’ve hit animals in my own car twice.

The first time, I was not yet twenty, driving on a highway from Riverside back to my parent’s home. A beautiful drive between rows of eucalyptus trees. I saw the critter but couldn’t avoid him. What a sick feeling! There was nowhere to stop, so I drove on, apologizing over and over.

The second time, I was in my sixties. Driving over 30th Avenue – a 55 MPH zone - from Eugene at night, a large cat dashed in front of my car, hit smack in the middle of my front bumper. I pulled over, unsure what to do. I called the non-emergency police number. “Should I move it? It’s in the middle of the lane.” They said “No, too dangerous. Thanks for reporting.”

Before I left, another car hit the poor beast. I expected the police to remove the carcass but they didn’t. That sick feeling recurred for weeks each time I passed the spot until the piece of fur was flat and shifted to the center of the road. Eventually, it disintegrated, absorbed into the dust and dirt from passing cars.

And so, on Thanksgiving Day 2019, I had the opportunity for small atonement to the animals I’ve harmed.

Up Against the Wall

Our beds were always pushed against the wall, tucked into opposite corners of the room I shared with my older sister.

Even when she moved to her own room, my bed remained snugged into the corner. I remember slipping my foot between the mattress and the wall, comforted and cradled by tight envelop of sheet and wall.

And later, away at college, beds always clung to the wall. In dorms we had no choice, no room to re-arrange. My bunk on the sorority sleeping porch – a lower one – huddled into the northeast corner. Had I chosen that one instead of an open bunk in in the middle of the room?

My first apartments were no different. Shared bedroom with twin beds in the familiar formation.

And then. My own apartment, a single bed, centered on the wall. I could rise from either side. The openness new, exciting, disorienting.

And then. Big beds, shared. How did we choose sides? Did we choose?

And now. A decade of sleeping in a bed centered on the wall. Nights alone, sometimes sleepless, adrift, vulnerable.

But in my guest room a single bed snuggles tight up against the wall. Just the look of it brings comfort.

Country Music

“He was a creep,” she said, startling me. I had just claimed to appreciate his music.

I’d engaged in a spontaneous conversation with two women – strangers to me – in the library bookstore. We’d been discussing the PBS special on Country Music, the things we’d learned or learned in depth from the series.

I said, “I read two biographies of him and hadn’t gotten the impression that he was a creep.”
I quickly excused myself.

Later I wished I’d said that one was written by an admirer, one by someone who was dismissive of his talent. And I wanted to go back and ask what she meant, what defined him as a creep. Did she know him personally?

Her comment seemed odd since we had already noted the prevalence of alcohol and drug abuse by many country stars – the early deaths, destroyed relationships, legal problems.

I’m a recovering alcoholic. I know how strange we can seem, how our feeling of unworthiness can goad us into pomposity, how our moods can turn quickly. When under the influence our personalities warp and we take actions that appall us later. People judge us. Stars who are alcoholic suffer the same erratic traits. They live in the fishbowl of public scrutiny. He was no exception. He had a big ego and, when drinking, an unpredictable temper.

He’s been dead for years. His career had faded before he fell out of the sky that day. Was he a creep? It doesn’t matter. I still love his music, his voice.

RIP John Denver.

Family Fotos

1963, November.

Grammy sits erect yet at ease in that wingback chair, ankles crossed, arms draped over the armrests. Her hands dangle, open and relaxed. She looks to the side, faint smile in her eyes. My sweet, patient, calm Grammy.

1964, July.

Grammy perches on a wood bench, a flowered hat pinned to her hair, purse clenched beneath the arm supporting her great grandson. His head flops over her other arm. She braces her feet apart as though straining to keep his 2-week-old body safe.

2019, May.

I cradle my great grandniece, my arms posed exactly like Grammy’s. At nearly three months, Caroline is heavier than I expected. Though I am ten years younger than Grammy was, I understand the effort it took to appear at ease with that precious new life.

THE NATURE OF MY DAY

August 25, 2019

Morning.
A gnat joins me at the kitchen counter as I read my meditations. It leaps backward, scrambles forward, turns in circles. It slips under my book, pops out and whirls again, a dervish seeking ecstasy - or protesting invasion of territory by a stinky human.

In the bath, a tiny spider – barely a speck – wanders the edge, skirts blobs of water in which it would surely drown.

Afternoon.
On the patio, a whir of wings brings me eye to eye with slender, neon bright hummingbird. It breaks hover when I speak, darts and guzzles from orange trumpet blossoms, then zings to the sky.

Beside the river path, geese yank and tear at grass, their plump bellies threatening to tip them over. Maples edged in crimson foretell approach of autumn.

Evening.
The shy tuxedo cat next door has been alone two days. Though her owner claims she won’t approach humans, she trots over and rubs against my leg. Her eyes glaze as I pet and soothe her with kitty talk.

Memory Cafe

I talk to my world as I pass through it. I greet dogs and their owners. I tickle pink peonies and exclaim over burnt orange rosebuds that burst into yellow flames. I question squirrels and reply to bird calls. To those eight turkeys wobbling and weaving on the road ahead, I suggest they choose a lane and stick to it.

Not surprising, then, that the song I Talk to the Trees began spinning in my head. A group I belonged to in college (!!) performed it at a choral event. I love the tune and the arrangement they chose. I can recite the first verse perfectly right down to the echoed phrases:

I talk to the trees
but they don’t listen to me
(listen to me)
I talk to the stars
but they never hear me.
(never hear)
The breeze hasn’t time
(hasn’t time)
to stop and hear what I say.
(what I say)
I talk to them all in vain.

Memories. Unique. Personal. Entertaining.

A friend told me he once misread a sign he passed daily. Interesting, he thought. A Memory Café. Months later, he finally saw the second word. Care. Memory Care.

I like Memory Café better. We get to choose our memories, combine them creatively.

My brain understood the intent of the second verse of that song, but the words had slipped away.

Luckily my Memory Café menu allows à la carte selections and served me a verse from Blue Moon:

Suddenly you appear before me
the only one my arms will ever hold.
I hear somebody whisper please adore me
and when I looked the moon had turned to gold.

Memories. How puzzling the pieces remembered and those forgotten.

I remember a concert by the Divine Miss M (aka Bette Midler) at Red Rocks in Colorado. It was 1974. I had never heard a single song by her before that. I had never heard of her before that.

She swept onto the stage hurling F-bombs against the walls, ranting about the amazing setting, obscene expressions of awe that echo in my memory. I cannot tell you a single song she performed, but I remember that dramatic entry.

It must be surprise that embeds certain fragments, discards others. Like the elevator that burst into open air and scaled the side of the building; my sister’s dismay as I sank to the floor in fear.

Or that creepy foreboding on a Montana highway when a green-and-cream El Camino overtook my Ford pickup for the second time, then hung beside me in the passing lane. The driver honked to ensure I got full view of his exposed equipment.

Ah, yes. The Memory Café. Some items more appealing than others.

WHAT’S HE UP TO?

I encountered racism yesterday. It was so subtle I could have missed it.

The watering system in my section of the complex hasn’t functioned yet this year. The landscape and irrigation supervisor was walking the property searching for the cause.

As I went to the mailbox, a car pulled into my neighbor’s drive. My neighbor does massage as a second job, so this was not surprising.

When I turned back toward my unit, the person from the car was still standing beside her car watching the landscape guy. I was startled when she asked, “What’s he up to?”

I probably don’t need to mention that the man is black.

“He’s the grounds crew supervisor,” I said. “He’s trying to find out why the water system isn’t working.”

She said nothing and proceeded to my neighbor’s door.

I wanted to follow her, pound on the door and ask if she would have been bothered if the man had been white. I wanted to ask if she felt threatened because he wasn’t white. Had she thought she was protecting something – me, my neighbor, the complex – by watching him?

The man never heard her question, thank goodness. But I felt shame for the many times he has undoubtedly been confronted in similar situations.

Blackface

Blackface. White people painting themselves black to portray African Americans. Scandal after scandal inflamed by photos dredged up from years ago. And I’m guilty, too, though I don’t worry about being ‘called out’ now.

You see, I once painted my face and legs black, covered my lily-white arms with long sleeves and hid my dishwater blonde hair under a red bandanna.

I still have the photo. My best friend Christina and I look at the camera, unsmiling. We’re nine years old, dressed for a May Day celebration of Stephen Foster’s music. At school. Public school. In Whittier, California. At the time, Whittier was a Sundown Town. No blacks lived within the city limits. I had never met a black person.

By the time I was a senior in high school (1961), Whittier had repealed the Sundown Law. One black family lived in the city limits. Their son was in my class, a daughter a couple of grades behind. And yet that year, in an all-girl dance show, one group wore blackface and titled their act Pickaninny Paradise! They may have used a Stephen Foster song.

I did a little research on Stephen Foster. He was not from the South. He was from Pennsylvania, an anti-slavery stronghold. He did write songs about the South, about black people, sometimes seeming to mimic their speech. He died in 1864, just before the end of the Civil War. His biography states:

He made it his business to study the various music and poetic styles circulating in the immigrant populations of the new United States. His intention was to write the people's music, using images and a musical vocabulary that would be widely understood by all groups.

It goes on to note:

Foster sought to humanize the characters in his songs, to have them care for one another, and to convey a sense that all people--regardless of their ethnic identities or social and economic class--share the same longings and needs for family and home. He instructed white performers of his songs not to mock slaves but to get their audiences to feel compassion for them.

My participation in that long-ago event dancing to Stephen Foster’s music, or watching without protest that group of white girls in blackface – does that mean I am racist?

Over the years, I have had friends who are black. I hope they would feel free to stop me if I speak or act offensively. I can only acknowledge the inappropriateness of my actions and make amends when I become aware. But I must make those amends with sincerity – and change my behavior. That is what is wanted in the current swirl of revelations.

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.

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.

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.

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'

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.

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.