Paradigms...where shift happens!

Wish I had thought of this...

...but I didn't; I found it on line this morning:

Having the love of your life break up with you and say "We can still be friends" is like having your dog die and your mom saying "You can still keep it."

Talk about shifting paradigms...

imagine what's going through the little guy's mind in this shot I got at my coffee hang out yesterday afternoon. The big guy is Angus, a mastiff,  who is an absolute door mat when it comes to small dogs. His admirer on the right is Pugsley, apparently a cross between a flea and a gnat. Click on picture for a full size  image.

Additonal thoughts on the Now What post

I chatted with my good good friend Alain late yesterday and after I told him about my mother's passing he just happened to have this poem at hand.

Promissory Note

By

Galway Kinnel

"If I die before you
which is all but certain
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star's
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too until you
too lie down and erase us
both together into oblivion."

Now what?

My father died when I was eight years old. Fifty-four years later my mother’s heart stopped. That was Friday night at about 6:30. She lived with my sister down in Birmingham, Alabama but has been in a nursing home for the past 6 months in what was a nearly vegetative state I think. Try as I may all those memories that I feel obligated to have at a time like this just won’t come…the cookie baking, the Halloween costume making , the warm motherly moments like when I had the flu or a cold etc. My mom wasn’t a bad person or an inadequate mother or anything like that. I know there must have been times like that. It's just that in my memories of my childhood we were never a particularly close or demonstrative family. That now comes back to haunt me and a better writer than I could probably turn this into something vaguely Shakespearean….”The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

None of those moments present themselves right now and I think I feel almost as badly about that as I do about her passing. It seems one is obligated to have those warm and fuzzy thoughts about one’s family at a time like this, should feel a more piquant sense of loss. I suppose that’s just one more little hash mark on the guilt side of the ledger for me.

Finally, I am now the eldest in our immediate family and I can’t help wondering if that means that I am next. Will my children and grandchildren have the same feelings of insufficiently defined loss that I have? Will they have to struggle for the good memories? If I can offer anything of any earthly use to anyone else at this time it’s the same question…will yours? 

Divorce party? Signs of the times?

 

I won't start with the old cliché about "just when I thought I had seen it all" but it did run

through my mind when I saw this car this morning in front of my office. I checked the web

site on the decal out and it seems to be a business selling a wide variety of party supplies.

Granted it's somewhat of a niche market but it seems to me that if the statistics we see

reported are accurate half the adult population of this country are potential buyers.

Can't help but wonder if those super-civilized modern folk in California would invite

their ex-spouses to the party?

If so would it be OK for them to bring a date or would that be pushing the limit? 

How would one deal with mutual friends on the invitation list?

Is a divorce party just a flimsy and lame way to announce that you are back on the market

and would like to get lucky?

Should you schedule your party on the weekend that your ex has the kids?

Can you register for divorce gifts at Target?

If not, why not…it is a party after all.

The man behind the curtain

Most mornings I stop off at a place called Hyperion Espresso for coffee on my way to work. As I drive up Princess Anne Street from Route 1, I see pretty much the same scenes every day. Someone is always coming out of or going into the 2400 Diner and at Little Tire they have the first couple of cars up on the lifts while one of the guys is usually outside with a clipboard talking to the next customer about whatever repair is needed.

 

A bit farther up the street several people looking for day work are waiting outside Labor Finders and then there are the two little kids who live next door running around the side walk on their Big Wheels. There's a young lady who walks her dog about the time I am going by.

 

And then there are the homeless or nearly so, at least that's what I am presuming. They appear to be starting a daily routine of heading towards downtown as well. There is one man whose stolid face seems not even to register his surroundings and I know he will shortly round the corner from Princess Anne onto William Street and with a practiced glance check the ash trays and plastic bucket outside the Hyperion entrance for discarded smokes. Sometimes he finds one and sometimes a sidewalk samaritan will hold out one or two or three cigarettes to him as he walks by their table. He'll reach out and take the proffered gift without breaking stride and with the slightest of nods to acknowledge the giver.

 

One of the things that puzzles me about this man and his compatriots is their faces. They always seem expressionless and I wonder if there is any hope behind the masks they wear and if there is, hope for what. Is it for a quickly found cigarette, a meal, a little relief from the heat, what?

 

Hope has to be there somewhere doesn't it? After all they are human beings and that's one of the things that sets us aside from other creatures. I keep telling myself that at least they have that; they have hope.

 

They do, don't they?

Sunday was Father's...

Day, in case you missed it. Both of my young'uns came to visit along with the grand young'uns. We went to the "fimmin pool" and had a grand time with a cook-out (hot dogs on the grill, three kinds of mustard,  potato salad  and watermelon) and the weather was just what perfect summer Sunday afternoon weather is supposed to be. We had to drag both of the little ones out of the pool to make them eat but by the time we got to the really nice watermelon Wendy brought they were seriously conflicted over water vs watermelon.

The kiddie pool was beneath notice to Rachael (nearly 6) and Abbie (2). Both of them got themselves in over their heads in the shallow end of the big pool and had to be snatched out by adult hands Both came up spluttering but more surprised than upset. After clearing her eyes, Abbie, the youngest at a bit over two, immediately proclaimed to all interested by-standers that, "Abbie fimmin, Abbie fimmin!"

It was great having them all here and it was a great time in a quiet Southern small town way and then Gwampa needed a serious nap...

The devil is in...

...the details I think, when it comes to discussing opposing points of view on religion or the issues of the day. Listening to the other guy seems to have become a lost art except for the need to identify when it  is your turn to talk by the silence coming from the other side of the table. Even less often do you hear one person ask the other to "Tell me more about that." Constructive dialogue seems to have given way to a kind of rhetorical ping-pong where each party looks for the killing shot, the slam that shuts the guy across the table down.

The next time you are in a discussion like this, ask to hear more. And while we're at it, tell me more about your point of view on this....

Another Time, Another Place

AnotherTime, Another Place

 

Could we bend time to see behind,

Shift space from far apart;

How might have lives like yours and mine,

Touched shoulders, hands, or heart?

 

Repeated dreams by hope are sired,

Spin brief and fleeting bliss;

Dawn nudges light where none's desired,

Dream smoke conceals the kiss.

 

We speak in hints of shadowed care,

Of thoughts we must deny;

Muted voices in the night,

Speak quickly then they fly.

 

Within my sight yet in a place,

I cannot reach or go;

What might have been a lifetime's face,

Escapes on ebbtide's flow.

September, 2005   

Strawberry season is here - Part 2

"Pickers, on your marks!"

Now that's what I'm talkin' about!

That's my story and, yeah, I'm stickin' to it....

Strawberry season is here!

It's a short season as seasons go, just a few weeks for the fruit and a few years for the pickers. If the weather cooperates, I'm going strawberry picking today with my daughter and my grandchildren.

The strawberries come back every year. Not so, the pickers, Ginny, Rachael and Abbie.  The wonderment of dribbling juice from fresh fruit down the chin and all over your "Winnie The Pooh" shirt lasts only a year or two. This is Abbie's year for that.
She is two now and mobile enough to hunker down in the impossibly emerald foliage and chomp a bright red juice-dribbling berry right there in the field for the first time.

My camera and I will have to watch closely because that first reaction is a micro-slice of her life that will never run down my chin again.

Yeah, it's a short season for the fruit, for the pickers...and for the grandfather.

An amputation...

...often leads to the patient continuing to feel pain in the missing limb even though it is no longer there. If you are a parent with a grown child, you understand that...

Kent Nerburn's new book

If you have ever sat by the bedside of someone who's earthly life is almost at an end, you need to read Kent's experience with his father-in-law in this preview chapter of his new book The Hidden Beauty of Everyday Life which is due out in May.

I've never met Kent but his writing in this chapter entitled "The Conversation" tells me that he is a good and gentle man whose insights are important.

Finding just the right...

...words for this relay of a comment I received on a post from back in January  is  a little difficult because I don't want to dwell on the lesson learned by a reader who made the same mistake I did. In January I wrote a post entitled Presence. Yesterday evening I received the following in an e-mail which the reader was kind enough to let me quote here:

"Jim,  I had to email and tell you something. 
A while back I emailed you and told you that I had shared your "Presence" piece with some friends and have put in my favorite folder.
Short version:  Friday, 3/17/06 was an old dear friends b'day - his 86th!  I had sent him a card - and meant to call him on Friday.  But didn't. 
His son called me Sat evening and said he had died Sat. morning.
He did have a nice birthday - and he had gotten my card.....but I wished I had called.
Took out your article and read it again..shared with some of our mutual friends, and it helped - through the tears.
Just wanted to let you know I still enjoy your site."

Nothing for me to add beyond that...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Full moon over the Burg

The moon is full here so I’m sure that’s the reason today was so weird and pissy, Two clients in the office seemed to have coordinated their efforts to be absolute jerks. By the time I left at 5:00:01 pm I was ready to chew nails and spit rust. A few minutes of good conversation at my evening coffee spot seemed to take the edge off a bit and then it was off to the grocery store to scrounge up some evening sustenance.  

The two express checkout lines were long and after I looked to see which checkers were working I got in the line for the one that was fastest. There was a guy who got in line behind me and spent about 5 minutes grousing out loud about the wait. Finally he slammed his small basket down on the top of a display and stalked out of the store. I’m thinking to myself that he too is a jerk. As annoying as the wait was I realized that if I let myself sign on to his bitching and moaning, I was going to give someone else the kind of day I had.

 I put on the happy face I didn’t feel like wearing tonight and got myself to the car without spreading the gloom. I’m so proud of me….it felt pretty good…smug and self-righteous to be sure but at least I didn’t pass it forward and now my pissy day had a decent end.

I guess I could moralize on this theme for a bit but I won't. I just made the choice to not be a jerk and screw up someone else's day.

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it…

Brokeback Mountain

 I don’t believe I am homophobic, at least not as I understand the meaning of the word, but until this weekend I just couldn’t quite make myself go to see Brokeback Mountain. Having finally seen the movie, it would be much easier if I could say that I came away feeling relieved that it wasn’t as graphic as I was afraid it would be or that I was immediately at ease by the story. Neither of those two is true.

The movie did confirm my feeling that there was an important story to be told by the movie, a story that I probably will never fully understand at least in the superficial context of it being a story about two men in a relationship. The movie, though, is about more than just these two men. It’s about a lifetime of feelings that cannot be satisfied and so must be denied even as they live on. The core issue is not a great deal different then the unfulfilled relationship in “Lost In Translation” or in any love that must be denied. If the feelings would just cooperate with us and die or fade away then closure is possible, but they won’t….and so Brokeback Mountain is more than the story of these two men who cared more for each other than the world would allow, in a way Ennis and Jack’s dilemma is the same as mine and perhaps yours, as well as that of anyone who endures a lifetime of loss or denial.

 

Susan M. Baile

We were together for a long time, Harry, Sue and I and when she stopped working with (not for) us it was as if a wheel had come off. There the metaphor, as they all do, breaks down because although we limped along, we never quite got around to even looking for a replacement for this lady who came to work with us,  practically on a whim and stayed for 14 years. Maybe we knew it would be a fool’s errand to even try to fill the hole she left.  

It’s difficult to describe what she meant, not only to our business but to our personal lives as well. She made the wedding cakes (works of art) and was the wedding director for Harry’s oldest daughter and for mine as well. We never asked her to do that. It was just a need that she saw and she stepped in and filled it and filled it with a joyful energy that few if any people could match. 

But that’s the way she was…throttle at the firewall all the time. Surely the angels spun in her wake as she arrived to grace the streets of Heaven. 

As I think of this rocket powered angel whom we will all miss so dearly, a few lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “A Few Figs From Thistles” seem an epitaph written specifically for her:

"My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light."

Indeed it did Susan and it still does.

Presence

I first met Charlotte Garrett this past summer at Hyperion Espresso, a downtown coffee shop here in Fredericksburg. Charlotte was a writer, a poet and an artist. She had lived for many years in New York City and upstate New York but was a daughter of the South having grown up in South Carolina. At age 75 she even retained the soft drawl of the genteel southern belle.

The Poetry Workshop of the Fredericksburg Center for The Creative Arts was her pet project. She seemed to like a few poems that I had written and was constantly urging me to write more which I never did. She always seemed disappointed and gently chiding when I told her I had nothing new for her to read.

Last night her daughter called me at home. She was calling to tell me that her mother had died on Tuesday the 2^nd of January. For some inexplicable reason Charlotte had taken a liking to me and had me on her “notification” list.

The last time I saw Charlotte was as I was heading for the door on New Year’s Eve at our down town coffee hang out. She came in bubbling over with the story of her Christmas trip back to upstate New York, her old home stomping grounds where she had spent the family holiday.

When I saw Charlotte that New Year's eve, I greeted her with a hug and the requisite Happy New Year greeting. Her eyes lit up as she answered my question about her Christmas trip. Instead of sitting back down with her and listening for a bit, I went ahead and left. Of course, had I known that she would be gone in a few days, I would have stayed. I wish I had. 

The point of all this is presence, being present to the people around you. We never know how much we can give with our time and sadly we only find out when it is too late. That is the sorry debt of not being ‘present’ for someone, for not recognizing their need for your presence. I’ll miss her.

En Garde!

Arrived here on the Outer Banks of North Carolina this morning at about ten. It's hotter than I can ever remember it being here. I tried to do a little coin hunting on the beach but the sun won and I bailed out after about 30 minutes. The water is calm and beautiful though. It's so nice here (except for the heat) that it's hard to believe Hurricane Irene is lurking out there somewhere, waiting perhaps to pounce on the mid-Atlantic coast.

I'm beginning to think this may not have been a great idea though....there are a lot of pot holes on Memory Lane...

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.....

Moments of Resonance

I was talking with someone the other night about this on line matching thing I am on. She asked me what I was looking for on there and I was kind of stumped for a moment. Someone to do things with, to share life days with? Was it as simple as that?

Then a phrase came to mind and I told her that I thought that what I was looking for was a person with whom I could experience “moments of resonance”…those times when everything that needs to come together for a perfect and probably unique slice of life does so. Athletes and performance artists sometimes call it being in the zone. I once heard k.d. lange sing an old Roy Orbison song, “Cryin” and even with just the sound of the radio I could tell that she had gone somewhere else and had become one with that song.

Sara Hughes, the 2002 Olympic figure skating gold medalist had that moment of resonsnce when she landed her first triple axle or whatever it was in her final routine. The instant her skates touched down on the ice, she knew she was there, knew that at that split second in time everything that followed was going to be flawless and I’ll bet money she also knew that no matter what the judging outcome, she would never be better than she was right then. You could see it in her face like the first light of sunrise…”I’m there…this moment is mine and I am going to wring every last ounce of energy and life out of it that I can.”

It can be so quiet you barely know it has happened…you feel it and don’t know it until later. As gentle perhaps as a butterfly on the windowsill or as complex as an orgasm that drains the body and subsumes the soul leaving only enough of you to lay there with your lover and breathe together .

That is the core…to find a person with whom I can experience a series of all sorts of moments of resonance….a coming together of spirits that happens perhaps without warning or preparation  but yields the improbable equation, 1+1=3 against a backdrop of a breaking wave, a shooting star, a dripping icicle…resonance…yep…resonance.

Anyway, that’s my story and I am, by God stickin’ to it….

On Line Dating Sites

A brief reference to on-line dating/match up services was in my initial post on this blog. The first time I joined one of them a thought was ambling around in the recesses of what passes for my brain. “What kind of socially bankrupt knot head ends up here, in a ‘place’ like this?” All the while I pictured the other people on there as mumbling geeks, compulsively fingering their favorite Star Wars lapel pin trying to appear as something they were not while they typing in a clever new signature line for their e-mails like “Live long and prosper.” They would have a full ashtray on their desk, a can of Coke long since gone flat and little bunches of cat hair hidden behind the door. Time stamps on their postings would usually be between 1 and 3 in the morning. Their bookshelf would feature a dog-eared paperback compendium of possible names for pets.

Oh, my God….that’s the group I have joined?

Well, I was wrong of course. There are really lovely people out there who apparently, like me, realize the on line matching sites are a great place to meet people and get to know a little bit about them without the subliminal screening based on things like bra size or a tight butt.

Now, here’s the weird part, the question that I just couldn’t get over. Why do so few people at these e-mixers use any semblance of imagination in their profiles at all? If I had a nickel, make that a twenty dollar bill, for every time I have read that a lady likes long walks on the bloody beach and cuddling by a cozy fire I would be on some Caribbean island somewhere drinking a cold Corona and trying to decide whether to bake or grill that fresh grouper filet for dinner.

Not only the narrative but the pictures they post! I saw pictures that would have been rejected for driver’s licenses by the Motor Vehicles department in 49 of the 50 states and the territory of Guam. Is this a test? “If you can overlook the fact that this picture makes me look as if I am the subject of a Central America wanted poster then lifelong true love is on the horizon.”

Put down the rocks and bottles because I’m not talking about beauty here. I just don’t understand how someone can be so oblivious to what kind of visual first impression they make.

More on this another day, if the Spirit moves me…..I’m tired of it now.

Blogs As Bartenders

Introduction 
Posted on July 23, 2004 at 02:40:05 PM
After my divorce ten years ago it had taken me a while to get to the point of being content as a single person. So much so in fact that I remember thinking that I wasn’t really convinced I needed to meet anyone and that I could live the balance of my life as a single person. I do recall rationalizing to myself that if the right person came along…nothing is etched in stone.

This is my, no doubt overly emotional account, of my thoughts during the last month or so and my ongoing thoughts as they occur. If it is self indulgent, so be it. I have to put it somewhere, tell it to someone, get it off my mind lest it crush me.

I don’t really know if anyone besides me will ever see this blog. Most likely they won’t but even if I am willing to put my feelings and fears out there, I cannot make that decision for anyone else so I’ll scrub any detail that might compromise privacy.

It should not matter if my words are published; it should be enough, it seems, to write them down. But it does matter. Maybe it’s like the guy drowning his sorrows at the bar, bonding with the bartender.

I warn you ahead of time, it is sentimental and if a critic were to read it they might well tag the word “slop” on. Read at your own risk but while you are doing that, if you begin to feel as if this is so much silliness, try to imagine the sort of feelings that are so piquant, so real that even if they are feelings of sadness or loss you are still grateful for them because they tell you that you are alive. Remembering especially the peaks that are the product of my awareness and that infuse my soul with hope such that I know that no matter what happens in the future I will still say, “It was all good!”