The Wonderful Chair

On the street outside the antique store called Pastiche, I found this wonderful chair. To prove that it was such a wonderful chair, it wore a sign saying "WONDERFUL CHAIR". The chair cost two hundred dollars and was made in the late 1800's. You can reach down under and feel the straps, which apparently is something very good to feel, in terms of late 1800's chairs.

I put it in my living room and it didn't look right.
I put it in my bedroom and it didn't look right, either.
I hauled it downstairs into my office, and it looked just right.

So here is a picture of me and my new wonderful chair.

Sometimes you just don't know how a piece of furniture is going to look until you get it inside your house. My living room area is relatively small and so I have a few pieces of regular size furniture and then some little things, like a tree stump for a table and a bright yellow footstool for a little "bookchair", which is a chair I sit on when I'm choosing which books to read from my living-room stash. If I had the children's desk which I used as a child, I might use it, too, somewhere in my house. Not as a children's desk but as a viable little working-desk.

I bought a big oak beautifully carved chair from Pastiche, drug it upstairs into my livingroom and lived with it for two months. It was a definite No. It would look sensational in somebody else's livingroom and I have a place in mind for this chair, but it simply darkened my livingroom and made everything frown. I don't blame myself for making mistakes, I just learn from them (at a cost) and give them away or sell them. Well, I've never sold one of my mistakes yet, so I guess it's more honest to say I give them away. To me, "giving" is a form of practical exchange, since you always get something back, in the end. It may be a smile or two cherry pies or a deep cleaning of the house, but it will always be something.

Anyway, I just wanted to show you all my new Wonderful Chair with me, the lady in pink, sitting on it, or is it "in" it - and smiling at you.

One Thousand Words Per Minute

I grew up in the generation where , when kids turned eighteen years old, they weree expected to obediently leave their parent's house and go find a job, something place else to live, and a life. To say this was a horrifying situation for me is to say that pig is pork. I had never cooked, never had a job, never even baby sat, never even touched raw meat. I couldn't manage a cash register or even a ruler. The one thing I could do, because I had taken one typing class, was type. That's it.

The year I took typing was one of the year's when girls were instructed NOT to take typing, because all they might end up with was a secretarial job. The reason I took typing when all my friends did NOT take typing was that my father thought I would be an absolutly wonderful secretary. Oh! The places a SECRETARY might go!

"Just THINK of all the wonderful things a secretary can do!" my father would rhapsodize. "Why, they can meet the general public, they can meet mighty smart people, they can answer phones....and they can TYPE! And so can YOU! And iIf you can TYPE, you're ALL SET!" I don't know why, but my parents never thought it might be a good idea for me to go to college. I think they thought maybe I just wouldn't be able to "make it". Little did they know that the more higher-level thinking I could do, would be practically the ONLY thing in the world I COULD do.

My first interview was with the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. I was eighteen, fresh out of high school. I took a test, passed it, got an interview with a big man with sticky-out eyebrows, and did my very best at convincing him that I, who knew nothing about anything but reading books and playing piano by ear, should work at his establishment. Finally the question came. The key question. The one I had been waiting for.

"Do you type?" the man asked. "I can," I answered. "And approximately how many words can you type per minute?" the eyebrow-man asked. I looked him dead in the eye and said, "One thousand." His head gave a little shudder. "ONE THOUSAND?" he said, "is that an approximate number?" "One thousand." I said again. Firmly. Resolutly. I sat there, hands in my lap, just staring at him in the eyes. I must have scared him because I don't for a moment think I convinced him. But I got the job. One week later I was a key pumch operator for the Supply Department. I wasn't lying when I said "one thousand", I simply hadn't bothered figuring it out. But the amount of words I could type was a big number, I knew that. And one thousand words per minute was a big number. So. I should be hired.

I told this story to a friend the other day and he laughed. Then he laughed some more. He said that the more he tried to think of typing one thousand words in reality, as if it could actually be done, the more hilarious the entire situation was for him. He figured out the numbers - how many words I'd be typing per second if I - or anyone else - could type one thousand words per minute. He couldn't fit them all in. His face and neck turned red. He covered his mouth with his hand and laughed. Then he took his hand away and sputtered all over the table. I laughed too, because I guessed it must have been funny. He said even Bach couldn't type like that.

So I just have this to say to all job applicants - be clear about what you mean and what you say. Be friendly, be determined and plunk yourself down into that interview-chair as if you are a chunk of dead weight that will never be able to be removed unless they give you the job. If you answer something in a ridiculous way, stick to it. Don't apologize. Just look 'em in the eye and dare them to disagree or make fun of you or oppose you. It's not lying I'm talking here, because I wasn't lying. It's simply a kind of voracious plan of Self-Attitude that takes stands up for itself so firmly that nobody dare dispute you. It can be done. I have done it many, many times in my life. And it can help in places other than the interview situation, it ca help in the market place. In the strawberry fields. As a parent.
Believe in yourself enough to snag that "whatever-you-want" attitude. Then just sit there and wait for them to crumple first.

KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON

During World War 11 people looked at the above words until their shoulders straightened up again. It's not a bad thing to remember. Under any circumstances. For instance. The other evening I became....engaged....in an argument. I became SO engaged that I forgot what I was arguing about, but I kept on with my side of things becauseI couldn't find any distraction meaningful or fun or significant enough to drag myself out of the argument. HOW engaged was I? Well, I jumped up and down, THAT'S pretty engaged. I broke a CD in half with my own two hands. THAT'S pretty engaged. I said (shouted) things like, "This isn't just STUPID, this is EPICALLY stupid!" Epically stupid? And I didn't even know what the subject matter was? I said things like, "Grrrrr, you are JUST like a goldfish! In one ear and out the other!"

Goldfish? Ears? Wha?

And then, quite suddenly, the argument died down on both sides, and I felt a deliciously cozy feeling. As if whatever gristle and stone I had been eating had just turned into a fabulous homemade flan with custard sauce. And I thought to myself, "Gee, that was kind of FUN. It actually felt pretty GOOD to argue and now it feels really good to NOT be arguing." Then, this morning I was reading a book about the Male Brain and the book said that couples who argue together stay together longer than couples who DON'T argue. And I can understand that. I really can.

I think I probably contain many ideas and beliefs which other American therapists just don't seem to hold that dear. I'm probably wrong on most of them. Unless I'm probably right. Because, between you and me, my "Happy Couples" rating is as good as any other therapist's I know. Go figure.
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My parents didn't argue. I think my father was terrified of my mother. She had a wicked tongue and (sorry, all you Indians out there) was part Indian, which, she liked to say, made her more prone to rage than many other people might be. I'll say. She was a real doozy. She used to like to say, "I'm not a f-----ing American Indian, I'm a f-----ing CANADIAN Indian! Most people would think that a Canadian Indian would be better bred, at least mellower than an American Indian, but my mother swore they weren't. Much of the time she behaved as if she were born with a silver Tomahawk in her mouth. I once watched her - and this was during one of those years that she lost her hair and turned brown and was very near death from an as yet undiagnosed case of Addison's Disease - I once watched her throw a jar of fish soup at the local Lutheran Pastor's wife and her aim was dead on. DEAD on. My mouth opened in wonderment, which is probably the only time my mouth has opened like that. My mouth has been open many, many times, but never from sheer wonderment. Except for that day. Because the jar BROKE on Pastor Randoy's wife's back and all these little Scandinavian fish drenched in cream poured over the poor woman's suit jacket. The back of her knit suit jacket. At which point my father walked into the bedroom (the Pastor's wife had come to BRING my mother the jar of that awful fish soup) and immediately began to charm and give solace to the Pastor's wife. straight.
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My Uncle Charlie and Aunt Rose, though, they won the trophy for fighting. It wasn't arguiing, which is mostly comprised of words. It was RAGE. One day, as we were driving to their house, my mama said to me, "Do you know that your Aunt Rose ocne tried to SCOOPO out one of Charlie's eyes with a sharp spoon?" A 'sharp spoon"? Indeed, I hadn't known that. I couldn't get it out of my mind. For the first time ever, I was glad that, although we were actually going to visit Uncle Charlie and Aunt Rose, I wouldn't be allowed inside the house. I had to stay outside with the twenty or so chihuahua dogs, each of which I hated. If I want to pet a dog with no hair, I'll pet a hairless duck. ....but now I have to go.....Maggie has come spend a few hours and nothing is more important, my dear dears, than a friend.

The Last Conversation

.....so I have to blog about this one and then that's the end of the "community conversations", at least for now.

I return to the Kitsap Federal Credit Union, where Jim and I had a joint account. I was attempting to take some money out, but they wouldn't let me because Jim was the person with the primary account. Never mind that he is dead. In the computer he's alive and vital and running about tossing his money around.

ME: "Hi, so here I am again, I brought in my husband's death certificate yesterday and I want to take out a bit of money."
CASHIER: "Oh, that's right! You brought in the death certificate yesterday but our computers were all down!"
ME: "Right."
CASHIER: "So....do you want to take your husband off the account?"
ME: ".....What?"
CASHIER: "Do you want to take your husband off the account?"
ME: "Well, I think HE did that."
CASHIER: "He DID? Because we don't have any record of...."
ME (interrupting): "Well, you know, he's.........dead."
CASHIER: "We KNOW that, but it's another matter to take him off the account."
ME: "It IS? I mean, what do you think he's going to DO?"
CASHIER (blushing): "Well, you're right of course, but his account is still a viable account on our computers."
ME: "Oh."
CASHIER: "So.....do....you....want...to...take...him...off...the...."
ME (interrupting) "I....I think Jim would want to be off the account, yes. Let's take him OFF the account. Because he doesn't want to BE on the account anymore."
CASHIER (looking at me like I'm the kid from THE EXORCIST) "Certainly, Mrs. Morgan. I will be glad to take him off the account, then. If you will just step over to the middle chair over there, over there in front of the desk, we can begin the procedure."
ME: "The procedure?"
CASHIER: "Well, we will have to create a NEW account for YOU."
ME: "But I already HAVE an account here. I've had an account for nearly forty years."
CASHIER: "Yes, but it was a JOINT account and now that we are taking your husband OFF the account, you will need a NEW account."
ME: "Oh. I can't just use the account number we had and you can't just, like, erase his name?"
CASHIER: "I'm sorry, no. That just won't do. We can't just 'erase his name". We can't give you your old account number. We are going to make you a NEW account!" (She says this like she's saying, 'Cinderella SHALL go to the ball!")
ME: "Okay."
I sit down in the middle chair. I pick up a paper clip. I unbend it and stick both points into the palm of my right hand until it hurts. None of this makes me sad. It makes me crazy. It makes me so crazy that I can't tell who is crazier, them or me. I am given the new account number. I am given a smile. Two smiles. Three smiles. They just want me out of here, I can tell. I am upsetting them.

The higher the resistance and the larger the ohm, the slower the flow.

CONVERSATIONS FROM THE COMMUNITY

The Psychic said I had powerful eyes. The psychic said my son was eating a tuna sandwich and playing pool in somebody's basement, she didn't know who's. The psychic said Aleister was sent to earth to protect us all. The Psychic said my long-deceased father was holding my hand and beaming. When I asked why I didn't feel his hand holding mine - or my hand holding his - she said, "Who knows?" The Psychic said I maybe need to get a dog. The Psychic said I will either meet the man of my dreams or that perhaps I HAVE met the man of my dreams. The Psychic said if I am tenacious enough my chronic pain will go away. The Psychic said I am "indelibly tenacious" but that I may need to be even a bit MORE tenacious. Like a tiger. Or a lion. The Psychic said a book is in my future and that it could become a bestseller. The Psychic said she felt just a little bit of resistance coming from me. The psychic asked if, sometimes when I wake during the night, familiar objects in my room appear to be"other things". I asked if that included men. The Psychic sniffed.

I never have any luck with Psychics, nor do they have any luck with me. The camel always has a great deal of difficulty passing through the needle.
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What the cashier at SAFEWAY said. Hello! How ARE you! Oh, THAT looks good, pointing to my Breyer's peach ice cream. MMMMMMMMMMMM, she said, about those long Belgian rolled cookie things. She read the headline of my New York Times out loud and said maybe she should read the whole paper one day. If only it weren't so expensive. Do you have a SAFEWAY card? Good. Okay, Mrs. Morgan! You saved $4.25. Have a good day!
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What the cashier at TOWN & COUNTRY said. Hello! How ARE you! Pretty flowers! Oh, look, this matches with this. What kind of glasses are these? The carry-out young man stepped in. He said, they're martini glasses. My Dad made me a martini in one of these glasses when I turned twenty-one. When of THESE glasses, I asked. No, well, you know what I mean, he said. I smiled. I said I did. the cashier said Oh good you brought your own bag, you get five cents off. Have a good day!
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What the client said. Oh, it's nice and warm in here. Well. It's getting worse. And there's a piece of me that knows it's going to get even worse than this.
I'm so glad I have you. Do you really mean it, I can e-mail you? I'm going to e-mail you. I keep making movies in my head. Keep making up dramas. I wonder what a Real-Life drama would be.
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What the art guy said. This would look GREAT in your house? You don't think it'd fit? Sure, we could make it fit. I'm a genius at making things fit. And it matches your other one. In a way. She's great. Yeah, she gets it. She really gets it, I think she's going places. Well, think about it and get back to me. Yeah, great, great, sure. Hope to see you soon!
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What the lady at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts said. Let's see your jewelry today. Oh, today you've tamed it down. I like it when you wear, you know, all that stuff you wear. It's wonderful. You know, you are the fashionista of our complex. I ran into Christine the other day and I asked her if she'd ever been in 135. She said yes, when it was for sale. I told her Well, you need to go. Now. Now that Kay has it. It's light, it's airy, it's got all this great art. I told her she really has to see it!
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What the man at Eagle Harbor Books said. How many books a week do you read? Sometime we'll have to get together and tell each other our experiences while studying up at Centrum. You taught up there for YEARS. I remember. I was in your class once and so was William Stafford. I didn't know who you wee. It's sort of great to get to know you. Not that I know you. There's one time I especially remember. Either something a big male student said to you or something you said to the big male student. But it brought tears to my eyes. Because I couldn't stand him. And you were nice. Okay, need a bag? Sure, sure, good for you! Bye, now!

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What the lady at Kitsap Federal Credit Union said. Here she is! Did you bring the death certificate? Oh good, NOW we can make that change! I know, I know, it's just the way it is, we need the death certificate, it's like......well, of course he is deceased, but not officially, not with the computer. Let me make a copy of this and I'll.....Here we go! Oh, no, our computers are gone. How much did you want? Sorry, I can't do that today, can you come back tomorrow? I'll just put this copy in a file and......no, no, I'll remember. Here. See, I'm writing myself a note. Sure, you can get it tomorrow. No problem. Sorry for all the mix-up! Okay, then, see you tomorrow!

THE CHRONIC "I-NESS"

I was born on September 22, 1946. The plan was to name me Sharon, but out of my mama's mouth came the words, "Her name is Katherine, we'll call her Kay" and there you have it. I looked like a little Eskimo baby, no doubt from my mother's Assiniboine Indian features. My parents smiled at me. Their smiles and their frowns seemed to match up with my physical movements- or my physical movements - and later my oral abilities - seemed to match up with my parents' smiles and frowns...and before you knew it, or before I knew it,....another little "I" had been created. A being who was aware of herself. A cooing, yelling, smiling, pooping, peeing, little "I". Why was I not born a panda bear? Or an owl? Or a whale? Or Helen Mirren, who is pretty much my same age? They are "I"'s, too. Even a bug or a bee might be an "I", who knows, although I am stretching it here, because one requires a certain type of awareness to become an "I" and I do not think a bee is capable of such awareness. Anyway, it is this belief, this notion, that each of us is "I" that interests me today, largely because yesterday afternoon I met with the Seattle astronemer who always gets me thinking.and appreciating her for her language.

"All I have to do is anything I want," she said.

"Our house looks like me but it acts like him," she says.

"When I was a young girl I had a brief affair with my parents' stero."
And: "I, I, I. The concept literally paralyzes me. I can not seem to get away from it, this minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour "I"!"

So mostly yesterday we talked about the Everlasting "I". Everlasting, of course, until the Dreaded End, at which we both alternately shudder and wink. Awareness. How we want less of it! All this awareness, self-awareness, other-awareness, roiling around our minds, our mind's eyes, our bellies, everywhere, it crops up everywhere! The door slams. It is as if our entire Life is an "I". I slammed the door. My father cried. I made my father cried. I am lucky. Or I am always unlucky. By five years old I was performing for the eyes of other people, as if that would make my own "I" more important, sturdier, shinier. "Shiney" is the astronomer's word.

It is Zen, of course, which wants to nudge us, slam us, carry us away and out of all this "I" stuff. Get rid of it, for Buddha's Sake! As children we try to get rid of our own "I" by copying others. "I would rather have HER "I" than my own "I"," we say to ourselves, or we sort of say to ourselves. I will shave my legs like SHE does. I will drink coffee out of a mug. I will say my prayers, pretend that I love daisies, which I really hate. Because she is more beautiful than me. Because if I am as beautiful as SHE is, perhaps I won't have to worry so much about this "I" of mine.

We have children. Our smiles and frowns are attached to our babie's physicality, to their noises, to the stuff inside their diapers, to their smooth, perfect flesh. Sometimes our children seem to expand our "I"s. I listen to your breathing, I watch you when you are looking and when you are not looking and I swell with love and pride. My love and my pride, they swelleth because of you and now my "I" is larger than ever before. "I" am still I, but I also become "you". In a way. In a little bit of a way.

"Oh, I am so TIRED of my self-awareness!" calls out my astronemor. "I am so TIRED of this chronic "I"-ness I carry along as if it is a shoe glued inside it's own shoebox!"

Me too, I think. Me too. Six years ago I stopped writing in my journals because I could no longer bear this notion of the "I". It tired me, it wore me out, it wore me down. Later, when Jim died, I lost my sense of "I" for awhile and I thought, "My God, is THIS what it takes? Must somebody DIE before I can let go of myself?" But of course I couldn't let go of myself at all. I didn't yet understand grief. I wanted to extricate myself from my own life but I didn't know how and besides, I didn't really want to. I just didn't want to be ME anymore. That's all. That's normal.

"I, I, I." Do you remember those sentences from Saul Bellow's HENDERSON THE RAIN KING? "I, I, I". The book is, in party, a study on how much we Americans carry around our own concepts of the "I", how we carry them and dance with them and eat with them and have sex with them and BELIEVE in them. 'How important am I!" It is not a useful notion. Not at all.

I know there are more sophisticated ways of thinking and talking about this. I've read the books. I could name some authors. But today I just want to write from my own semi-uninformed self, my own LITTLE "i", I guess.

I suppose.
I think.
I believe.
I know.

IT'S TUESDAY, OR WHATEVER

"And, like, so I said to him, like, 'Okay, whatever. I mean, don't EVEN. Don't EVEN go there. Like, what is WITH him? He's like, you know, he's like that GUY who.....well, you know. THAT guy. That guy who shows up but just can't be PRESENT. Because I can tell. I can, like, you know, I can TELL when somebody's There or, like, NOT there."

Uh.......WHERE?

And....where will the word "awesome" go when everybody under the age of forty gets done with it? Is there a black hole? Remember 'issue'? I once watched as a woman ran over at least one-fourth of a man's goot - and when my the man screamed, the woman rolled down her car window and said, "Well, I'm sorry you had an ISSUE with that."

Okay, whatever.



Issue. Like. Whatever. Present. Don't EVEN. Awesome. Cool. Yeah, no. So. SO not. It's SO you. So........I can't think of any more....oh! Except for the word "Challenge." Someone will come in and say, "My husband left me and my kid's on meth and the heat's been turned off and there are just all these CHALLENGES." CHALLENGES? Are you kidding? Challenges? How about "Really big horrible fucking PROBLEMS?" Challenges. I love that one. Like American's don't have big throbbing heartbreaking situations anymore, they have these......um, challenges. Like we're not supposed to complain. NOT SUPPOSED TO COMPLAIN? How come? Why not? What's happened NOW?

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Oh, here. I love this epigram: "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pate." That's Margaret Atwood. That's a good one.

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I've been reading Groucho Marx lately. I love the time a snooty racist posh girl's school wrote to Groucho, saying that his little girl couldn't attend their school because she was "half Jewish". And he immediately wrote back, saying, "Oh my God! WHICH HALF? Tell me which half and I'll chop it off and send you the REST!"

"Well, those are my principles," Groucho once said. "if you don't like them, I have others."
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Tuesdays. I love Tuesday because it's the day the Science section shows up in the New York Times. It means Monday is officially over. And it's one of the days I don't wash my hair (Monday/Thursday/ Saturday). My hair doesn't need to be washed every day anymore. My hair has too many challenges for me to have to wash it every day any more. Any more. And...presently. "Presently" is weird, because it doesn't mean "now". It means "soon, very soon, but not right now." Doesn't it? Now I'm not so sure.
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You're too hard on yourself. "In every city, at the same time, therapists earned their living by saying, "You're too hard on yourself."
- Renata Adler
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THE GODFATHER. That movie alone brought scads of good lingo"In Siciliy women are more dangerous than shotguns."

"I'm gona make him an offer he can't refuse."
"Leave the gun. Take the cannolis."
"It's an old Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes."
"And watch for the kids when you're backin' out."
"He's thinking of goin' to the mattresses already."
"This is business, nothing personal."
"Just when I thought I was out...they PULLED me back in!"

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Okay, okay. It is well known amongst my friends (is it 'among' or 'amongst'?) that I love THE GODFATHER movies. I once took myself to a big showing of The Godfather. Spaghetti and red wine were served. I'd been excited about this night for days. I had it in my head that there'd be all these people who'd know all the lines, just like I knew all the lines, and that they'd say them out loud and together, just like I planned to do. The movie came on. Three minutes later, nobody but me was saying the lines out loud. I slumped down in my seat. I shut up. I ate the spaghet. I drank my wine.
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Well, I guess that's it for Tuesday, or whatever. I'm going to walk downtown and pick up the new book on Graphic Arts that I ordered from Eagle Harbor Books, and get the New York Times. I'll pace my way through the proportions of my daily life, a client hour here, a client hour there, here a client hour, there a client hour, everywhere a client hour, until it's six o'clock. And then I'll put in a movie. Even though it's not my favorite, it'll be Godfather Three. And then ".....I'll never tell anyone outside the family what I'm thinking again."

WHAT? ME EDIT?

I don't know how to edit blogs, so my most recent typo, which went like this: "....I'll think of tit tomorrow....." actually goes "....I'll think of IT tomorrow". I don't yet know how to edit blogs. Yes, yes, I agree. I should learn immmmmediatttely.

Ha, as my North Dakota relatives would say.

It Was An American Tradition

We were on the ferry. I was putting my money in a machine to buy some peanuts. I was looking in the direction of my friend. A male voice came over the ferry's broadcasting system - an excitable, enthusiastic voice. "Oh!" I exclaimed, 'his voice is so enthusiastic it just makes me want to eat peanuts!" I said this quite loudly. My pronunciation was somewhat limited by a very recent swallow of Coca Cola and the word "peanuts" came out sounding like the word "penis". Everybody looked. I froze, then started laughing. Then I kept on laughing. Then I could barely hold myself upright I was laughing so hard. You know how it gets, you double over, and hold yourself in the middle and sashay back and forth. I made it back to my seat. My friend looked away, out the window.

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"I don't think I know everything I know about that."
- nine o'clock patient
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"That's the nicest worst thing anybody has ever said to me."
- customer sitting behind me at The Streamliner Diner

.....and, from the contest wherein English teachers submit Best Metaphors:
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"She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up." ...................

"He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it."
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"His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free."
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"It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools."
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"The young firefighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while." ......................

"Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do."

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In December, at The Pub: "Don't you just want to slap Opra each time she loses weight? Like, 'You're supposed to be fat, so STAY fat!"
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MOST MEMORABLY HYSTERICAL LAST WORDS About HOPE AND TIME SPOKEN IN A MOVIE

"Oh, I can't think about that now! I'll just go crazy if I do! I'll think abou tit tomorrow. Tara, home. I'll go home and I'll think of some way to get him back! After all, tomorrow IS another day!"
- Scarlett O'Hara

I Wrote It All Down Somewhere

....which is good, because it is likely I wouldn't have remembered much of it, otherwise. Memory, exports say, has to do with "that something that almost didn't happen." Which is why all our Christmases blend together into one big red and green blog except for the year that Great-Grandpa died face down in the soup. Or the year all Mama and my presents fell behind the tall hutch because we were both standing on chairs, poking around to catch a present or two as they tumbled down into our arms, on Christmas Eve. They tumbled down, of course, just the wrong way, and the men in the family had to move the hutch and drag them out, one by one. "Jesus Christ", said my mother, "I didn't think opening a few little presents would create such a big goddamn stir."

In the Greaves family, it did.

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It seems that the emotion attached to each of our memories is chemically encoded in our brain's amgdala. And each memory is changed - - chemically altered - each time we retrieve it. Retrieving a memory "means it will be 'reconsolidated', or slightered altered, by a chemical process that helps store it anew after being updated. So each time we recall something, we adjust its very chemistry and each time we bring it up our consciousness, the memory comes us as we las modified it. This and other fascinating facts about memory is from Daniel Goleman's 2006book SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE. If you order the book - - but only if you experience "fear" while ordering the book, your memory will be encoded with fear, and fear is one of the emotions that invest a memory with power. Go ahead. Try it. Order the book while your mate stands nearby dressed in a dinosaur and holding a gun. You can have fun with this memory, gradually altering its neurons, for years. No bullets, please, but your mate does not have to tell you that till later.

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"Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid."
Ugo Betti
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Me, I just write down as much as I can.A journal in my purse, another in the bathroom. Another under my bed. That way, I can write down the most commonplace things, that is, things that happened over and over, and never worry that they are gone forever, Clementine.

From January 25, 1965:

" Six-forty-five p.m. Tom is nearly home from work. I always try to be sitting in the livingroom when he show us from work because it embarrasses me to be standing in the kitchen. I have looked both ways. No Banditos out there to kill him, today. Maybe tomorrow!"


Now I remember something that almost didn't happen. The Banditos had just begun their begin of terror in Tacoma. We lived next to them in a line of cabins on Lake Steilicom (sp). Three days earlier Tom and a few Banditos and I went to a topless show in downtown Tacoma. The show was nothing. What was something was that Tom, drunk and in a show of sympathy, laid his hand on the chief Bandito's knee as the head guy tearfully spoke about his years in VietNam. Whereupon the head guy jumped up, threatened to kill Tom right there and then, and then chased us out of the place, saying that, if he happened to see Tom coming or going to work in the morning or evening or any time in between, he would murder him then and there, on the spot. We believed him. I got up extra early and snuck Tom out the door. Tom came home an hour late each night. I remember. Because, see, all of this almost didn't happen.

One other Bandito memory, this time from my 1965 journal: "I asked the head Bandito guy for pot. I think I need to relax. This morning he came to the door holding a sack. "'Here,' he said. 'Oh good,' I thought, 'the marijuana.' 'Eat this,' he said, 'it's better for you than pot.' He thrust the bag into my hands. 'Okay," I said, "thanks." I trusted him. Inside the bag was a huge HERSHEYS bar and two packages of Twinkies. Shit. SOme big tough guy. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?"
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These entries, these memories, amuse me. "The past," Emily Dickinson remarked, "is not a package one can lay away."

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"Everybody needs has memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."
- Saul Bellow

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We speak with several voices, out of several selves. Psychotherapy allows people to naturally enter - and experience - the power of poetic speech. Because I seek the personal, caring modes of psychotherapy as ooppoosed to the "scientic helper" modes, I could easly make poems out of patient talk. It's raw, crude poetry, and not one of my patients would claim it for its infectious spontaneity, but like Ray Bradbury said, "Oh, it's limping crude hard work for many, with language in their way." The passionate, the dramatic, the mysterious,- - so many individual elements lend themselves to that moment of truth called poetry.
Here is a"found poem" taken directly from one of this week's patient notes:

"Last night I dreamed
I lived a time called Dogtime.
A giant emerging eye asked,
Have you received your dignity?
Stabs of memory
Always come for me
That way, at night.
Today I believe myself.
Open windows.
Bathroom doors.
Grandma and Grandpa.
Every night one of them
Comes to kill me.
I am tired of running away.
Come home, come home.
Yo are the lonely blossom.
If I stand half in your light,
Half out, you invite the silence
That follows silence."
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Why have I recorded so much of everything that has occurred or been spoken in my life? Delight, dismay,passion, love, joy, curiosity, fascination, fear of loss. My case is not unique. I am afraid of dying, puritanism, obedience, authority, and, shameful and mundane of all, boredom.

Stalking The Wild Poet

Port Townsend, May 12, 2010.

I must have spent years here, taking classes, walking slow and closely enough behind Howard Nemerov or Carolyn Kizer so that I could hear there talk about where they each wanted to be buried, which happened to be, at least on that grey day, on top of each other. Howard Nemerov, who, after having read a diminutive older woman's diminutive poem said, "My Dear Madame, there is nothing I can say after reading this poem other than the following old Marine saying: 'You can not polish a turd'." The older woman smiled softly and said "Thank you, Doctor Nemerov." I stood up, left the class and never went back. Instead, I wandered into the poet Marvin Bell's class, which seemed to be filled with clean air and sunlight and that is how I began out ten year friendship with Marvin Bell.

Before I walked out, Nemerov went around the room, asking each of us to come up with oen, "Just One, for Christ's Sake," phrase or line written by any great writer. My brain flooded; we were all afraid of Nemerov with his big head and nose. He turned to me and I burst out with something from Bertold Brecht's GOOD WOMAN FROM SETSUAN, "A decent man is like a bell. If you ring it, it rings, and if you don't, it don't." Nemerov smiled broadly. "How OLD are you?" he asked me. "Forty," I replied. He dismissed me. I was too old to be his poetry workshop girlfriend.


Port Townsend was where I heard Milo, the then-cafeteria chef say to someone nearby, "Oh, these poets! Some knucklehead writes one poem and thinks he's a regular Van Gogh!"

It was in Port Townsend where I sat in a cafe behind two construction workers who said:
A:"Oh Jesus, the writers are back in town."
B: "Oh, wow."
A: " Yeah. They're all crazy, you know."
B: "Really? Wow."
A: "Yeah. EXCEPT for Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Gunga Din."


I kid you not.


Port Townsend was where I watched a pretty blonde woman's face and breasts grow larger right in front of me, she puffed up like a blow-fish, it was a severe allergic/anxiety reaction to her workshop leader, the handsome poet Robert Hass. He has just come by and laid a hand on her shoulder. She nearly passed out. I was one of the few people with a car. The lady next to me knew the whereabouts of the Catholic hospital in P.T. We loaded the blow-fish lady, whose tee shirt, I will never forget, read BARNARD across her ever-growing breasts, into my car and drove straight to the hospital. She flew home that evening.

I studied with Margaret Atwood for a total of six weeks. She terrified me. She terrified everyone. The first time I had to have a one-on-one evaluative session with her I thought I would vomit. She sat down. I sat down. She turned her beaky nose and wild hair towards me and said, "YOU." I sunk lower, lower into my chair. "You don't think you can write, but you can," she said. "Most of these people, including the professors who teach my own work in University, think they CAN write but they can not." I began panting. "But you are scared to death," she said, "and if you want to be scared to death, go to El Salvadore. If you are simply scared because your mother terrified you when you were eleven or sixteen, go someplace where real fear is simply everywhere. You will not only have something new to write about but your illusory fear will disappear and you will have a flight or fight reaction that is worthy of your words."

She was a dynamite teacher. She got me published in a very good literary magazine, just as she said she would. The class couldn't believe it. They figured I'd be the last person in the class to ever get published. It just goes to show. Sometimes somebody says "You can do it" - or even "You're DOING it" - and that sort of acknowledgment or reassurance is the kind that runs and laughs and slides and stops right on a dime.

I Guess I Need The Eggs

It was great seeing my old patient again, ("old" meaning from fifteen years ago)....catching up on her Life and listening to her gorgeous language. Some people simply say the most unexpected things, especially when they aren't thinking ahead about whatever it is they are just about to say. When we allow ourselves to just open up and talk, the world expands.

"Don't you think it odd that my husband refers to my mother as "that animal lady" simply because she owns two dogs? And on the other hand there he goes and says words I don't know what they mean, like 'salacious' or 'excrescent'. If I went by what my friends say, I'd hate him. They think it's scary that he says he "loves me to death", they think he means it. When they start complaining too much about him I pus on my big voice and make them smaller. What do you think it means, though, to love somebody to death? I would think that when it comes to day to day functioning, it would stop you in your tracks."

Ah, Life.

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"Yes, the story I am writing exists, written in absolutly perfect fashion, some place, in air. All I must do is find it and copy it."
- Jules Renard
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I remember the morning my late husband Jim woke up from a dream and said outloud, "Oh, it is really nothing. I am just practicing my freedoms."

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Well tell each other (Jim's daughters and me) that we miss Jim more and more, instead of less and less. He was our iron bar, he was our windowpane, he was our four o'clock in the afternoon. Who knows what happens inside memory when we remember someone we loved who has died? Are we remembering how it felt to be "ourselves", loving that person.....or are we remembering "that" person? Just because one can see someone in their mind's eye does not mean they are remembering that person.....oh, but who knows? Forty-four years of marriage is a long time, although only a blip in Jim's sense of paleontologic time. In human time, though forty-four years is a rather long trajectory leading up, or rather down, down, down, to death.

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"You can't say everything, that's true enough," wrote Simone de Beauvior, in her THE MANDARINS, "but nevertheless you can try to get across the real flavor of a life. Every life has a flavor, a flavor all its own, and if you can't describe it, there's no point in writing."

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"It is not a very good life to be a dead person."
- Pip, the author Helen Bevingtn's grandson, when he was five

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And yet, for some people, it is not a very good life to be a live person. Depressed people will often say that, while they have no idea what happens after life's end, they devoutly hope it is not more Life. As for me, I want to live a thousand more years, at least as long as I could keep my skin and my hair. Well, my facial skin and the hair on my head. The rest can go. Or smooth out. Both my parents died by the time I was 34 and Jim died two years and four months ago, but I have never felt their presence after death. Well, maybe a nudge once, with Jim, but I was sleeping with his ashes, which were encapsulated (wrapped up very well indeed) inside a series of plastic bags and silk scarves, and I think I rolled over on him much too abruptly. For the most part, I think Life loves Life. At least, that is what I think, these days.
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"....It was great seeing Annie again and I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was knowing her and I thought of that old joke, you know, this, this, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, Doc, uh, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken and, uh, the doctor says, well why don't you turn him in? And the guy says, I would, but I need the eggs. Well, I guess that's pretty much how I feel about relationships. You know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but uh, I guess we keep going through it...because...most of us need the eggs."
-last lines in Woody Allen's ANNIE HALL

The Eternal Return of the Same

You who read the New York Time's Book Reviews, will have read the review about Julian Young's new book on Friedrich Nietstzche, but even those of you who read it may want to read again one of the gorgeous concepts Nietzsche developed, which was "the eternal return of the same", meaning he believed that every person contains "the need to affirm the value of one's life in every single detail as something to be repeated endlessly through time." I love that. I don't understand it yet, but I'm going to. I have a patient who is a philosopher and this individual will be glad to impart his knowledge to me. And I'll buy the book. But what mostly gets me going is that fabulous phrase...."The eternal return of the same". Sigh. Now, THAT'S language.
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So far today, other than reading the above review, and learning that the earth is slightly FARTHER from the sun in July than it is in December (seasonality is the result, not of orbital geometry, but of Earth's tilt), I overheard this small story:

"I once knew a guy who lived in Sedona and owned a little poodle. And one day the little poodle disappeared. Three days later, the man said the poodle REappeared. "And," my friend the story teller went on, "you know the unusual part of this? The poodle looked exactly the same in the before-disappearing picture as it did in the returned-to-home picture. I mean, they were both the same pictures."

"I couldn't get over it," my friend said. "You've gotta go to Sedona with me, sometime."
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Sometimes Life just happens like that. Before and after, just the same.
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Other than one morning appointment and one late afternoon appointment, I have the whole day off, today. It's a good day for going to the local Walmart and buying two new white lampshades. Even off-white will do, but not the taupe-to-brown- color I've got going in here, now. The living room area needs more light. Speaking of light, my friend Robin made arrangements for my daughter Kelly, her son Morgan and Aleister and me to get a special-just-for-us private tour of a submarine. We had to climb down two long and extremely steep ladders to get to the --I'll call it "the activity space" - the place where the controls are, where the missiles are, (whenever a missile, a sailor brings his bedding and sleeps in that empty space, that space being larger than the usual sleeping accomadations), where the eating-room is. Anyway, because of all the "lit technology", there is always light inside a sub. It would be like living with a zillion little Christmas lights every moment of every night and day, mostly white and red. The sub's captain gave us the tour. He showed us a space in the sub which looked to be a longish black curtain, like an overturned half-limp umbrella. "The space inside this curtain is called 'the cone of stupidity'," said the captain. It provides absolute darkness and absolute darkness tends to disorient all one's senses when you spend months of your life inside a sub."

The cone of stupidity. Now, there's a good bit of lingo, too.

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Finally, speaking (very loosely) of time spent in the sea, my mind once again goes to Aleister....and clams. The last time I took him to a Bainbridge restaurant for clams, Aleister looked across at me and said, butter dripping down his chin, "Mama Kay, what does it mean, 'lazy as a clam'?" "I've never heard that one," I said, "but I've heard 'happy as a clam', what do you make of that?" "That's IT!" Aleister beamed. I MEANT 'happy as a clam', but I said lazy. Although 'lazy' makes more sense than 'happy', because all clams do is lie around someplace, which IS lazy, and how would anybody know if they were happy or not?" He wolfed down a few more clams, then looked at me again and said, "I'll tell you ONE thing, though....I am as happy as a clam when I EAT clams! I LOVE clams! Clams are DEFINITELY the food of my future!"
fini

Mother's Day Words

"We keep a-comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out. They can't lick us. We'll go on forever. Paw.....cause.....we're the people.

- Ma, from THE GRAPES OF WRATH

Yep, we keep a comin'. Great mother's , good-enough mothers, strong mothers, weak mothers, mothers who cook, mothers who don't, mothers who sew, mothers who couldn't make a costume out of a sheet with two cut out eyes, lines of mothers, voyagers of hope, dismay, discovery. I am a mother....a great step-mother, a good enough mother to my son, a worthy, I hope, grandmother, a maternal force in many womens' lives. In my journals I've written as much about my children as I have about the events and situations in my life.

Yesterday, in the car, Aleister reached up and lightly pinched my cheek. "What are you doing?" I asked. "I am pretending that I am a grandmother," he said, "and this is what grandmother's do. They pinch their grandchildren's cheeks. Kids hate it."
"Do I do that to you, Aleister?" I ask. "No," he says. "You are too young to do it. Mama Kay, how old ARE you?" "Old," said. "Yes, but...how OLD are you?" "I'm not telling," I said, "ask something else." "I JUST want to know how OLD you are," he said. "Well, keep on wanting," I said. He grinned at me, waited a few moments and then asked, "Just how big a pain in the butt am I?" "Not very," I said. "Today, not at all." "But I AM a pain in the butt sometimes, right?" he asked. "It depends on who you're asking, I guess," I said. He started making clucking and wheezing noises. "Can you feel it now?" he asked. "Feel what?" I questioned. "The pain in the butt feel," he said. "Yeah, now that you mention it, I think I CAN feel the beginnings of a pain in my butt. Would that be you?" He smiled. "Yup," he said. "Yup, it's me."


The remarkable thing about my mother is that for 30 years she served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found."
- Calvin Trillin

"If evolution really works. how come mothers only have two hands?"
- Milton Berle

and this:

"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a little-son-of-a-bitch."
- the actor, Jack Nicholson

I want to tell my children that I love them. I want to tell them that their love for me brings me to my knees. Many people know that my own son and my relationship has not been easy and has very often been sheer torture. Still, I have a mother's heart and there remain at least a few lasting leaves on my Mother Tree for him. The leaves are called "Maybe Someday" and "I Think I Can Hang On a Little Bit Longer" and "I Did Adore Being Pregnant With You, So Many Long Years Ago."

THE SPOKEN FEAST

"Everyone all the time is in the act of composition, our experience is an ongoing narrative within each of us."
- E.L. Doctorow, from "The Passion of Our Calling"


Ta-da. My new blog....a repository of words, sentences, declarations, exclamations, lamentations, ruminations, poetry, lyrics etc., heard by me in my home, on the streets, in the pubs, restaurants, shops, inside cars, the open market, the closed rooms too private or secret to be revealed. A torrent of mostly other peoples' self-expressions. All my life I have been mad in pursuit of story, of oral and written narrative, of the line between actual and fabulous in the everyday radiance and the dark paradox of language. Found in a list. Found in a lyric. Found in my grandson's voice. Found in my childrens' and friends' and patients' quiet noticings, found in truth, found in lies, found in the junkyards of oral traditions, the drunkard's clattered song, the felons' whispers.

Today is Saturday, May 8th, 2010. I have just returned to my Bainbridge home after picking up my grandson Aleister and driving him to the nearby swimming pool where we swam for an hour and then drove back to Silverdale's Kitsap Mall where we stopped to meet up with Aleister's Mom, Angela, and each eat a pretzel dog. Today Aleister was entranced with the word "consumed".

"Mama Kay. What if aliens with dog heads blasted down and consumed us? Or, worse, aliens with dinosaur heads? Although, no, the dog heads would be worse because we would be less suspicious and they would be able to consume many more of us."

In the Mall, we sit with a father and his young son, who are both eating ice cream cones. Aleister looks at them, smiles broadly, nods and says, "Ah, yes. I myself have consumed many an ice cream cone. Including one double scoop. It was GOOD." Aleister's "good" rhymnes with "should". I love to hear him say his own special "good".

After listening to Eric Clapton's song about the death of his young son, Aleister says, "I miss Grandpa. I miss him every day. It is so sad to miss someone every day of your life."

This is the first time Aleister has ever brought up how much he misses Jim. I feel the tears well up beneath my eyelids. "I miss him too, Aleister," I say. This, for me, is one of those moments when I want to drink my own blood. One of those momentous moments cloaked in a car on the highway to the Silverdale Mall. And all I can say is those five words: "I miss him, too, ALeister." Three-fourths of my life lives inside those words.

Aleister. He was called Allie in Kindergarten, and is now called Alex by his home-family and school friends, but I am allowed to call him ALeister. I say his name with reverence. Each time I see him I feel as if I am collapsing beneath a weight of roses.

More? Last week's male client from Olympia who was speaking of his ex-wife and her mother. "In the buffet of my suffering, those two can split the bill. As for me, I'm still letting them both rent space inside my head."

"I am a mystery wrapped in an enigma."


A female friend says to me, "Now that we know how vast the universe is, we've just got to ask ourselves...where IS heaven? I know where it is. It is one block after infinity."

I am in L.A., at a famous restaurant in an infamous L.A. canyon. The restaurant's name is THE INN OF THE SEVENTH RAY. This restaurant only serves organic food and organic wine. A waitress says to a young couple, "Are you sensitive to meatlike consistencies?"

The person with me whispers, "You know, there are certain things that happen to vegetarians. They just seem to fall off...they just start to fall in on themselves and a certain blandness overcomes them, don't you think?"

Several of my dearest friends are vegetarians, so, no, I don't necessarily think that, but I can't help it, I love this guy's language. Is this one of my major or minor flaws? That I can love someone for saying something I basically disagree with but it's is said so well I applaud the sentences?

From my own diary, years ago: "Everything old turns new again. Today I am fifty. I didn't think I would live this long. I didn't think I would stay so short. I didn't think I'd own so many earrings or books. I didn't think my need for love would form such a sustaining theme in my one hundred or so diaries, in what Thomas Mann called, "The prayer'like communication of the diary-story."

See? I can even include myself!

On the phone just now with my friend Katy Warner, I heard about how she and Steve took their granddaughter Bailey to see the Brementown Musicians and how, in the car on the way home, Katy or Steve mentioned to Bailey that "in the end they all lived happily ever after" , to which Bailey replied something like, "I don't think so, I mean, didn't they all "pass on"? To which Steve or Katie persisted in their fairy-tale ending of "well, yes...BUT...they all DID live happily ever after," , to which Bailey backed up her original statement/question and repeated, "yes, but.....I believe they ALL PASSED ON?"

What does one do when a child comes up with a favorite concept or phrase and wants to use it, wants to carve it, wants to encode it into everybody's soul? Today, Aleister's word was "consumed". With Bailey, the lingo/concept was "Passed on". Whad'ya'do?

Yesterday I saw a woman I'll call Camille (but remember, this is all confidential, and Camille could well be a man)..... Camille is in her eighties, mother of five, grandmother of seventeen, great-grandmother of four. Camille has cancer of the thorax, so we work our sessions around her chemo and radiation treatments and side-effects. Yesterday we talked about religion. "You know," said Camille, "Jesus never said He was GOD. In fact, it wasn't until He came out of that cave that....." she paused, then began again. "I hope you won't be offended, but what if there had been a really big snow storm the day Jesus was crucified, and He froze. He just...froze. One of those cryogenic things. And they dragged Him off the cross and plunked Him in the cave and when He thawed and came back out to get warm, everybody sort of went.... nuts?"

"I ate, drunk, and was hairy!"

"Giraffe born to a farm family."

"Brainy, widowed sexpot, raises hell, kids."


Okay. You get the idea. The deep seriousness and astonishing versatility of language. It's free. It's gorgeous. It's stuff that humankind always has had difficulty noticing and putting a value on.

SMITH MAGAZINE writes, "When Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, 'For Sale, baby shoes, never worn,' he proved than an entire story can be told using a half-dozen words." My own experience backs this up.

"The great thing about human language," Lewis Thomas said, "is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."