A plant’s leaf. In North Carolina. At Biltmore. May 2007.
Today’s photograph has about nothing to do with today’s topic, but I’ll try: some folks think (or rather don’t think) about how some things don’t belong together in all cases. Red and green for instance. On this plant it’s a natural thing. At Christmas it evokes the symbolism of holly and green leaves and all that. In July it says, “Who’s this freak that thinks it’s Christmas?” Today we’re going to talk about people putting words together which don’t belong together.
For newcomers to this blog: Once upon a time I taught English to 8th graders. Once upon a time I took a graduate-level course in grammar, most of which consisted of diagramming sentences. I killed that class–most of my fellow students were returning teachers who clustered around me after the final to learn how I had diagrammed the sentences on the test, even though these were sentences which we’d already diagrammed in homework assignments. I’m not bragging, merely establishing my credentials for the next paragraph.
There’s a grammatical distance between “on to” and “onto”. The latter one is a preposition. The first one, however, is an adverb followed by a preposition. Or some would say it’s a compound preposition. I disagree, but it’s debatable. What’s not debatable is when you put them together as if they’re one word but they shouldn’t be. Here:
Ken wants to turn his audience on to prepositions.
The turtle hauled himself onto the log.
“Onto” indicates position. In the first sentence you can see I am not trying to physically turn my audience and put them “onto” a preposition. Children, pets, and occasionally a frisky adult will get onto the furniture. A lace hem might be sewn onto a dress.
Prepositional phrases usually come in a three-word format of preposition-article-object/noun, and they’re often strung together one after the other. Here’s one: Susan got out of the bed, put her pajamas in the clothes hamper, and made her way to the shower. I boldfaced the prepositions. (If you’re really into the stuff, that’s a compound predicate where the subject “Susan” has three verbs to go with it, “got”, “put”, and “made”. It has direct objects, “pajamas” for the first verb phrase and “way” for the third. This looks really cool when you diagram it, but let’s hold that thought for now.)
Why am I doing this? Who gives a rodent’s rear? Here’s the deal: I see at least one writer who doesn’t know how to use prepositions, homophones, or those tricky complement/compliment words every morning when I read my news. I read (in this sequence) MLB.com to see if there are Phillies stories; The Athletic for Phillies stories and general baseball news; the Washington Post, primarily for the comics, but some headline always snags my attention; and the New York Times. All of these sites command highly respected writers. One assumes there are editors, at least a few. How is it something as basic as this can’t be understood by some of the top writers in the country? To wit:
She turned her father into the police. Perhaps she did, but only in her mind (parents behaving like cops sometimes). Dad never joined the force, though, and she has no magic wand to turn him into the police. She turned him in. To the police. See? Separate words.
Note to grammarians: yeah, I know this isn’t grammar. It’s not even usage. It’s mechanics and those are a slippery thing. Fifty years from now what I’m saying will be as anachronistic as railing against tomorrow because it’s supposed to be to-morrow indicating the link to its linguistic past, to the morrow. I don’t care. I will hasten e-mail by typing email wherever I can, which I did in the 1990s and 2000s. I will type awhile even when the algorithms in the software says “no-o-o-o!” I’ll even type alright because I think it’s alright. (And I wonder if anyone under 50 or 60 wonders what the heck I’m talking about.)
I will not give in to compound prepositions. (See what I did there?) There is meaning contained in the words the heathen are stringing together, and those meanings change when you join the two into one. I hope you’re turned into frogs. Or is it turned in, to frogs? I hope the latter, and that said frogs will thwwpt! your face with their tongues for eternity.
Look, I’m all about breaking rules. You need to know the rules before you can break them, though. Picasso said that, more or less. If you just ignore the fact rules exist, you’re just a hellion-without-a-clue.
And now for that diagramming I promised. I’m afraid that nearly 42 years later I have not kept every assignment but I kept the quizzes and the final. Below is the last page of the final. It’s a ditto, so the questions are faded quite a bit. (“Ditto”–look it up. They were as much fun to make as it was typing on a manual typewriter: every mistake basically was uncorrectable.) We can discuss this below in the comments. The little blue zero means no mistakes. Grant Smith, the chair of the department and teacher of the course (Eastern Washington University) graded this stuff like golf is scored: mistakes were 0.5, 1.0, and 1.5 point mistakes, and the more you got, the lower your grade. Thus, the highest score possible was “0”. (And another day, children, we’ll discuss why I put the period outside of the quotation marks. You may background yourselves by reading William Safire.) By the way, at 28 years of age I already exhibited the anal qualities which now circumscribe my life. Those lines look nice and straight because I used a 6-inch ruler on all of my assignments and on my quizzes and tests.
I took my tumble into poetry when I returned to college in 1981 for an English Education degree after four years spent writing and editing weekly newspapers. We were required to pick one of three concentrations: Literature, Composition, or Linguistics. While we were expected to take classes in all three areas, the majority of our coursework would occur in the concentration we chose for our major. I already possessed a degree in Communications (with a concentration in Journalism), so I chose Literature. It seemed to be the most useful choice between that and Linguistics. I don’t recall how many courses in poetry I took; I presume it was two plus I had a class in Shakespeare. (As part of my Communications degree I also had taken a course in Medieval Literature which is as much poem as prose, in my opinion.)
I remember my poetry professor as a grandfatherly figure: white hair, thick glasses, dressed always in a button-down shirt and a thin cardigan sweater. He wasn’t pedantic; rather he sought to lure us in to the beauty of poetry, slowly instilling an appreciation for the nuances which one poem achieves perhaps a bit better than another. He taught the meaning of the word “scansion” and how to do it. He taught us the formal structures of historic poetic forms, such as the various forms of sonnets. I distinctly remember he appreciated but ultimately relegated to B-status the poems of Henry Reed (“Lessons of the War: I: Naming of Parts“) and A. E. Housman (“Terence, This is Stupid Stuff“). He attempted to relate a continuum where doggerel existed on one end and truly sublime, great poetry existed on the other. “There is a difference between verse and poetry,” he insisted.
A while back I wrote a poem about why I don’t often write rhymed poems. Too many of the poems I read online from those who fancy themselves poets barely nudge the needle from where it pegs at “doggerel”. It’s down here at this end of the spectrum where we read “cowboy poems” and such. Rhymed poetry doesn’t have to be doggerel or its cousin, trite whimsy. I hope my poem might exist in the middle ground, somewhere between a clerihew and Housman’s “Terence”. Here’s the beginning of the latter:
"Terence, this is stupid stuff: You eat your victuals fast enough; There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear, To see the rate you drink your beer.
My barely informed opinion about rhymed poetry? Look to Shakespeare who crafted his poems to specific rhyme schemes, with specific metric schemes which must scan appropriately. Another, more modern poet who understood how to write a poem which rhymed is Robert Frost. Here’s an example, to be discussed below:
Locked Out (As Told to a Child)
When we locked up the house at night, We always locked the flowers outside And cut them off from window light. The time I dreamed the door was tried and brushed with buttons upon sleeves, The flowers were out there with the thieves. Yet nobody molested them! We did find one nasturtium Upon the steps with bitten stem. I may have been to blame for that: I always thought it must have been Some flower I played with as I sat At dusk to watch the moon down early.
(as transcribed from Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays [The Library of America])
Is this a great poem? No, but Frost tells a small tale easily, conversationally, with rhymed words. He warns us in a sense by titling it “as told to a child” and keeps the central thoughts of the poem simple. And what’s this? He chooses not to rhyme the very last line? Doesn’t that just punch it up all the more? Great poets reveal their hand even when the poem isn’t truly great. Looking deeper, I’m reminded how just as adults get nuances out of ‘children’s cartoons’, we gather meaning in passing from lines like the first three lines. A child would take it simplistically, but we consider the symbolism of locking up all that is natural outside of ourselves, of shutting ourselves off from beauty, of starving the fair flowers of our existence from the light of our presence. Frost uses the tenth line (“I may have been to blame for that”) to zing us with a perfect iambic (dah-DAH) tetrameter (four of ’em). To my mind, it hurries us through the line as if the narrator feels a bit guilty that his inadvertent playing with a flower has been used to invoke a threat of thieves to a small child.
Those are just a few thoughts which occur to me in looking at this poem again after first reading it about a week ago. Look, I understand we’re not all four-time Pulitzer Prize winners. But can’t we at least try? Must we succumb to “My boyfriend left me/I’m feeling blue/I’ll leave the country/Now that we’re through”? Just as a prose thought can be made meaningful by converting it to poetry, consider if your poem isn’t so mundane it ought to be simply stated as prose. Making four lines rhyme A/B/A/B shows about as much skill as photographing a sunset and thinking you’re a great photographer just because you captured a glorious sight made-to-order.
I applaud the poets I read online who use blank, free-form verse yet hew to ideas of tune, rhythm, compression, precise word choice, and who frankly have something worthy to say. We can’t realistically dream we’re rhymers like Frost, or poets laureate like Stanley Kunitz, or poets-for-the-ages like Dante Alighieri. But…we can try.
Five days after a funeral. Lake Lynn, 07 November 2019.
Warnings & Notes: This post contains a few graphic depictions of death, some examples of socially unacceptable behavior, and is just generally a downer if you look at it a certain way. Also, some of these observations have been made before. If you read this blog regularly (there’s only a half dozen or so of you), well, sorry….a little.
This year All Souls Day, November 2nd, marked the fourth anniversary of my mother’s funeral. It’s the day I most think back upon her life and death. The anniversary of her death, October 24, I barely note. Sometimes it even slips by me before I realize it. The funeral symbolizes my mother’s love, her life, and all those influences we spend a lifetime unraveling. In contrast, the date of her death represents thoughts I acknowledge but do not celebrate, and her passing is hardly something to celebrate in and of itself. I would rather focus on the entirety of her life and death: the funeral marked that, not the death.
My mother and I lived more than 2100 miles apart at that point. My profession had taken me to the eastern United States; she remained in Spokane, WA, from where she had encouraged me to follow my dreams wherever they led. Her parents had, my father’s parents had, they had themselves, so why shouldn’t their children? Still, it didn’t reduce my guilt much for not being more available to her in that last year, indeed that span of a half dozen years when she lived on after my father’s death. My brother lived nearly ten times closer in Tacoma but it took me only a few more hours to get there by plane versus him taking a drive across the state. He encouraged her to move to Tacoma. I half-heartedly supported him. She refused, saying her friends and neighbors were in Spokane. I strongly pushed that she could move to a “retirement community” there in Spokane where some of her friends lived. She demurred, then refused. Her best support network were the good neighbors she had. She was right. We were wrong. I saw one of those retirement homes at the end of her life. I was really wrong, and–
But I’m not going to rehash that whole period. I’ll just note this: I watched her steadily decline during the five years after my father died, visiting her more and more frequently. (The Fates blessed me in several ways when 13 months after my father died, I started traveling the country for work. It became just as easy to fly to Spokane as to Raleigh.) In December 2018 my mother learned she had Stage IV breast cancer. At 89 years, she recoiled from and declined chemotherapy, threw her lot in with hormone receptor treatment (a pill, nothing more), and for various reasons was in and out of hospitals, convalescent homes, and her new apartment in a “retirement community” through the fall of 2019. She celebrated her 90th birthday in that apartment.
I visited my mother a dozen days into October 2019 as she lived her final days. I returned home only to receive The Call two days later. It was a Thursday. Knowing my brother could drive there quickly, and emotionally exhausted from watching her exist in a morphine-induced stupor, I rolled the dice, told him I wouldn’t come until Monday, and I let him spend Friday through Sunday with her. I flew back on that Monday, and sat beside her bed a lot until she passed away on Thursday. My brother had returned to his home and job. Thus it fell to me to handle the first round of details.
From the moment a loved one dies, those closest to them experience a bewildering whirlwind of details thrust upon them which must be handled immediately. As the elder of two children, the most controlling of us, and frankly, just because I was the one there, it fell to me to make those arrangements. Again, I shall refrain from a step by step accounting of it. This is supposed to be an accounting of All Souls and a celebration, not a macabre dwelling on those days of death. One example shall suffice: on Thursday morning, the day she died officially at 10:22 a.m., I had to leave her to be at the bank when it opened at 9 a.m. The instruction manual entitled “What You Will Have To Do When Your Second Parent Dies” never made it into my mailbox, I guess. If it had, maybe I would have been better prepared than to learn in her final hours that her investment accounts would be frozen for disbursement when she died, and that as her executor I would be paying bills with whatever sat in that bank account for the foreseeable future. The bank account had less than $3200 in it when I dumped a huge amount in there. Take note if you’re ever in this position: for the next year, I had to pay bills from that account. If I hadn’t done that, my brother and I would have had to agree on splitting the bills. Really, take note.
My mother’s death came as a relief. I’m saddened to admit her death came as a relief. I know many have said this, but I feel as I feel. She had suffered with increasing pain from the breast cancer for a year. I doubt anything can prepare you to listen to your mother slowly drown and die, to realize the fluidic sounds of her breathing come from her lungs as they slowly fill, to watch from a removed perspective as your voice sharply criticizes the health staff which insists on turning a patient even when this obviously makes the breathing worse. Beyond prayer, I simply endured. I carry with me that immense relief I felt when I re-entered her room after a short phone call from her cousin and discovered my mother had died. I also carry with me the commensurate load of guilt for not being there at that moment. The part of me formed by social mores scolds me perpetually; the accepting, independent side of me simply says, “that’s the way it happened. There’s nothing which could have been done at the time, and there’s no shame in feeling relief.”
In contrast to the anniversary of her death, which represents a smorgasbord of feelings, few of them good, even fewer comforting, the anniversary of the funeral represents a day of love. It’s the day remaining friends and family gathered to mark how much they loved your mother and how much they would miss her. It’s the day you created all the little remembrances which would afterward become powerful symbols in your life. It’s the day you got to reminisce about all the times: mostly good, some bad, some funny, some sad. It’s the day when many told you “You did a good job by your mother,” even if they were lying a little bit. And it’s the day you closed the door, for just a bit, on all of those things which just have to be done. It’s the day when you looked forward to a few days where nothing about your mother’s funeral and estate needed to be accomplished: those things would wait a few days–with luck, a few weeks.
Each All Souls Day since that time refreshes all these memories. It’s the stem that gathers all the roots of remembrance and supports the branches of What Has Come To Be. For me, it’s inextricably bound up with my decision two weeks after her funeral to retire. Those twin events, her passing and my retirement, have become tied to those crazy years when a pandemic changed our society, or perhaps, when it revealed who we had come to be. All Souls Day, which exists quietly in the immediate shadow of its more important sibling, All Saints Day, and is heralded by All Hallows’ E’en, tells us it’s important to mark the passing of those we loved and to pray for them, to remember them, to honor them. By its existence, it says to ignore the ones who have been declared important, and that we must instead recognize the importance of each of us.
Mostly, though, All Souls Day reminds all of us of the death of those we loved. It picks at the scab of a wound which will not scar over and which has become part of who we are.
what my latest poem looks like on my desktop computer monitor. October 2023.
Something perhaps has changed with WordPress. I’ve been irritated to see that choosing the “Verse” setting for a block, which I thought yielded the above, doesn’t even come close on some devices. Here’s what my friend received in his email:
what my poem looks like on an Android phone, as delivered in a Gmail message. October 2023.
I knew that WordPress converted poetry to a monospaced font, rather liked it actually, because I follow a couple of poetry blogs which deliver the entire poem to my inbox. I’m pretty sure in the past that I saw the same thing on the WordPress website when I used my phone. Ah, but now there is Jetpack, newly changed for the…better? This is what appears on my actual blog when using an Android phone:
What my poem looks like on an Android phone using WordPress/Jetpack. October 2023.
That’s not “verse,” WordPress, nor is it “poem.” That is called “paragraph” and “prose” and perhaps “simplistic crap” unless one makes a living as a stream-of-consciousness author, and even then one must establish a certain cadence and structure to ‘musically’ signal to the Reader that yes, this is something beyond prose. (Unless one is James Joyce, then nevermind.)
Canadian philosopher and communications theory god Marshall McLuhan invented the phrase “the medium in the message”. I’ve perverted what this means. He meant that content doesn’t really matter, that a children’s cartoon or a vicious slasher movie is all the same when broadcast identically on television. To me he meant the message of any communication effort takes its ultimate meaning from the medium by which it is delivered. Spoken words in a living room conversation take on new meanings when sung in a concert hall. More familiarly, books turned into movies tell a different story and cannot help do otherwise. Even if Peter Jackson had managed to control every reference in his Lord of the Rings movies, visual, aural, or what-have-you, the story still would have been just as vastly different than the books as they turned out to be.
For these reasons, it’s deeply unsettling to oldsters such as me to watch the different devices reformat and repackage the content of what purportedly is the same thing. I see this nearly every day as I follow Major League Baseball. MLB.com presents a side-by-side box score for both teams, but on the phone you must select one team or the other–never can you present them at the same time on your phone’s screen. Baseball-Reference.com displays a wonderfully useful tool when looking at any particular season for a baseball team: a histogram of green and red bars which tell the tale of the entire season, game by game, read left to right. Mouse over any bar and it tells you the date of that particular game, who this team played (and where), and what the score was. It also shows what the team’s Won-Lost record was when the game finished. On a mobile device (tablet or phone) this histogram tool disappears. It makes me wonder if certain features of a website are completely unknown to a majority of the younglings who stare into their phones for 90% of the time they’re awake.
Thus, we come back to my dilemma/consternation and the question posed in the headline. Have I delivered a poem at all when it looks like a short paragraph raising an offhand question? Does the trivialization effected by the mobile presentation indicate my poem lacked substance and can only stake a claim to poetry because of its window-dressed arrangement? (Believe me, I’ve thought some unkind thoughts about other’s postings which, if returned to a more prose-like arrangement, look like the musings of a teenager in a diary. Am I just as shallow?) Did McLuhan not go far enough? Does the message ultimately get defined by how the technology delivers it, even when it lives simultaneously in different media formats?
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.
Marshall McLuhan from Understanding Media (as quoted in Wikipedia)
Ultimately I think McLuhan would argue each device configuration represents a medium. But I never signed up for this, WordPress! My understanding of the matter was this: you give me the tools to put my message together, and I pay for it by giving you ultimate ownership of my content (which I cannot believe I did, but there ya go). I expected a bit more, though. I expected a very nuanced difference to my content. Sure, I’ll accept McLuhan’s theory that those who read my stuff on a phone get a different message than those who read it on a big desktop monitor, but I would prefer to be left out of the “definition changing” part of the equation. You’ve made me a partner to it by changing my content not just the medium.
Which leaves me little closer to answering my question but has given me an excellent opportunity to rely on that first college degree and to prove yet again that old age clothes old men in curmudgeonly behaviors as surely as dogs become grizzled and oaks gnarled.
This month LibraryThing provoked me with its monthly newsletter. It contained a link to an ongoing discussion topic (months-long): “What is the most disturbing book you’ve ever read?” (If like me, you find library cataloging software and sites lacking, you might want to look at LibraryThing which offers a version for running small libraries. For a control freak like myself, who also needs much more data than a site like Goodreads can provide, this has been a godsend.)
When I read that question, I immediately thought of One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta. I read this book in the first half of my 30’s; it came as part of a four-volume set of Latin America writers from Quality Paperback Books. I enjoyed them, great works all: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa; Dora, Doralina by Rachel de Queiroz. But the fourth one, One Day of Life by Argueta haunted me then and haunts me whenever I think about it, and that’s more often than you would think despite its detailing the lead up to the El Salvador Civil War in the 1980’s and despite the fact I never re-read it.
The book’s matter-of-fact, simple prose details horrors the same way any war-zone child would. It just happens. It is what has happened. It is their life. Though it covers a single “day of life”, the flashbacks offer more detail, all of it disturbing. This was the time of the death squads where people were tortured and executed at the hands of faceless men.
[SPOILER COMING UP]
Though I haven’t read the book since the mid-1980’s, it’s seared into my brain. All I had to do was read this synopsis of the end of the novel, about the central character, Guadalupe Guardado and the novel came back to life. Guardado’s granddaughter, involved in the protests of the time, is Adolfina:
At the end of the novel, the authorities bring a beaten man to Guadalupe and Adolfina who had said the name “Adolfina” after being severely beaten. Adolfina does not recognize the man, but Guadalupe recognizes her husband José. On his previous advice, she denies knowing him, and he is taken away.
Wikipedia entry “One Day of Life”
There’s a horrific beauty contained in vessels such as this which exquisitely contain the pain, the despair, the sadness, the very twisted ways of life which the mainstream hopes to avoid. Argueta’s novel reminds me of another version of the same thing, a song by Rubén Blades, “In Salvador” on the album Nothing But the Truth released in 1988. (I’m unable to find a YouTube video of the song although you can watch a “complete album” video of the album. It’s the 7th song.) Although Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, and Sting contributed songwriting efforts to this album (Blades’ first in English), this song is not one of those. Critics have knocked the fact that Blades sings with an over-enunciated English but to me, it makes the album more honest. We’re hearing his description of what life is still like in El Salvador, and we’re hearing someone from Central America (Blades is Panamanian) speak to us. We wouldn’t expect to hear someone speak fluid English when it’s a second language. The refrain:
“No one can protect your life in Salvador. Judges that condemn you have no name. Could it be the gentleman who lives next door? Or the guy who goes with you to work?
transcribed from the album Nothing But The Truth
There are several other disturbing songs on the album in varying degrees. “The Hit” describes how a young Hispanic male violates the main law of the street that “you don’t double-cross the ones you love”. He’s gunned down. “Letters to the Vatican” describes a woman who’s lost a good chunk of her mind, but finds support in the bar scene where the patrons remember how she was “before she got this way”. In “Ollie’s Doo Wop” Blades sings about the cultivated ignorance of Ronald Reagan to Ollie North’s nefarious doings. I get a very personal meaning from “Hope’s On Hold” where Blades sings of all the things that inhibit falling in love, which leads to “hope’s on hold”.
If we go into the beauty of ugliness, of disturbance, I would offer up Lou Reed’s Berlin which has a semi-rock opera construction. It’s about speed freaks living in Berlin. You can imagine the seaminess of it.
Raw emotions of any type remain more true to me than than the equivocal nature of living in polite society. For this reason, I rarely tell anyone, even my wife, what is going on inside my head. As a creative, we entertain the un-entertainable, the unappreciated, the unapproved. We shed the mundane memories which frankly hamper our movement in polite society. We accept all, winnow it, and feed it back to our world, hoping that if we do it in a meaningful manner, it will illuminate rather than obscure.
Read Argueta’s book. It remains pertinent because the horror merely moved to different countries. It’s the same visceral, hateful viciousness which fuels America’s cultural and political battles. It blossoms in central Africa, in Singapore, in India, in the Europe. It sustains all ideologues on right and left.
Or if you need the short course: listen to Rubén Blades’s song.
Fog at the mouth of the Columbia River sets a standard for fog. Fog defines where Oregon and Washington share its outlet to the Pacific. It also defined my nascent and up-to-then non-existent career as I drove to Ilwaco, WA, and my second job interview of that early weekend in December 1977.
Car-less at that point of my life, my folks loaned me a 1968 Ford Galaxie 500. Though only nine years old, one could see already why it had been handed down. I piloted this coffin on wheels toward the southwestern tip of Washington through a typically drizzly early winter day in the western part of the state. “Man, talk about wet!” I muttered. At the same time I thought this, I drove my 1968 Ford Galaxie 500 into a fog bank. Until that point of my life–all 23 years of it–I don’t think I had ever realized what the phrase “bank of fog” meant. Within 100 yards I drove from a gray, drizzly day into a shroud of bright nothingness. I could barely make out the highway signs along the shoulder of the road.
How had I gotten here?
Simple. In mid-December 1977 I found myself in imminent need of a job. The University of Washington School of Communications planned to foist me on society with a degree. I had trained, in a mediocre fashion, for a job as a reporter. I realized I wouldn’t get any top-tier jobs at the dailies of Washington State, Idaho, Oregon, and I wasn’t plugged into destinations further away. (No Internet, no networking skills, no time spent learning about how to get jobs pretty much anywhere.) The state association of independent weekly newspaper publishers had to do. For one thing, the association headquartered itself in Seattle just a couple miles from the University campus. I figured, correctly as it turned out, they would be desperate (in a relative sense). Our corner of the US hadn’t experienced the stagflation of the Carter Administration, and talented graduates don’t seek jobs with weekly newspapers. Neither do most graduates want to head to the hinterlands to report about social teas, high school sports, and local city council meetings. It sounded easier, and I was all about easy, then and now.
Shortly after finishing my final final, I traveled to my parents’ home in Spokane. Once there, I gorged on home cooking, spoke to them as little as possible, and grabbed their old Ford for some serious job hunting.
My first stop that early December weekend was in Moses Lake, afairly strange place if you’re from outside of the state. To us it merely offered a respite in the cross-state drive. I met a married couple who owned and managed two newspapers. One was a weekly in Ritzville, WA, which is a small farming-oriented community at the northern edge of the Palouse wheatfields where it enjoys a location on the main east-west corridor through the state, I-90. They also published a paper in Cle Elum, but I do not remember if it was the Miner Echo or the Northern Kittitas County Tribune. I tend to think it was the former.
The owners were salt-of-the-earth, don’t-give-me-shit small business owners in a small community, a class of person I soon was to become deeply knowledgeable about. They didn’t make the job sound attractive. And they offered $125 a week. (Keep that figure in mind.) I told them I was interviewing elsewhere, and I would let them know. Notice they offered me a job on the spot. My alarm was sounding, but not loudly: I had kinda figured this wouldn’t be extremely difficult. A theme of my life to that point, and for a goodly part of my life from thereafter, was to flow into the path of least resistance.
This was a Saturday. I continued after the interview to drive westward, arriving at my dorm sometime in the late afternoon. (What a “thrill” to park a car in the student garage like all the kids that had more money than I did!) On Sunday I got myself up at a non-student, responsible hour, got in the car again, and headed to Ilwaco where an interview at the Chinook Observer awaited me.
My encounter with the fog bank said, “Welcome to Ilwaco.” It continued, growing more dense as I got into town. I found the office and parked outside. Upon knocking on the door, I was met by a pasty-complexioned man who owned the paper. He seemed ill at ease, hesitant, insecure. I immediately wondered how a man could own a weekly newspaper, the klaxon of any community, the polestar of community ire, and have a personality like this. We had a milquetoast interview and he offered me my second job in two days, also at $125/week. He seemed upset when I said I already had one offer on the table and another interview pending.
The Skykomish River near Monroe, WA, at dawn. There is a river there. And trees on the far bank. Almost as foggy as the mouth of the Columbia River near Ilwaco. Sometime in 1979 or 1980.
On Tuesday two days later I headed to Monroe, WA. Only 15 miles east of Everett and about 30 miles from my dorm in Seattle, Monroe was the gateway to the North Cascades via US Highway 2. Tuesdays, I learned later, was publication day which meant that the paper was being “put to bed” while I interviewed with the owner. I omit his name in case I say something which might get me in trouble.
This interview started out weird and stayed weird. The antithesis of the Ilwaco publisher faced me. He’d served as motorcycle courier in World War II in Europe, and he carried that hard-bitten attitude with him. He revered John Wayne. He kept Cutty Sark in his desk drawer. He ended the interview thusly: “So…I can start you at $150 per week. When can you start?” I trotted out my now-practiced “well-I-have-other-offers-on-the-table” speech and he said, “Well, call them and tell them you’ve accepted this position!” I was caught off guard. He asked, “Do you want this job or not?” I thought (quickly) about $25 more per week. He was offering $7800 per year. In 1977 more than 25% of Americans earned less than this. I was young. Earning less than the median American ($13,572) didn’t sound that awful. I would be working as a reporter. I told him yes, I would give those others a call. He said:
“We’ve got phones, I’ve got an extra office. You can call from there.”
So I wound up on a Tuesday in mid-December sitting in what was definitely not an office but more a glorified cube (and would soon become my cube), calling the other two publishers and telling them that I had accepted an offer elsewhere.
Because we were at this point looking at the issue which would come out right before Christmas, we agreed it would make the most sense for me to arrive right after Christmas and start work on Monday the 27th. I got in the old Ford Galaxie, drove to my dorm, cleaned it out, and drove to Spokane. I celebrated Christmas with my family, including my brother, home from a separate university in the state.
On Sunday the 26th I drove across the state for the fourth time that month, the old Galaxie towing a U-Haul trailer with all my possessions. I got to my mother’s childhood home in Seattle very late afternoon, when it was dark. There my grandparents bequeathed me a chair and some other odds and ends, some of which–like the chair–I own to this day, more than 40 years later. I pulled into the parking lot for the Monroe Motel later that evening, checked in, and reported to work the next morning.
Fog defines my entire job interviewing process and my newspaper work thereafter. I’d no idea what I really wanted to do other than write. I couldn’t discern which job sounded better until the last publisher just plain told me. I stumbled through my first year until I managed to trust that all those empty inches would somehow be filled by Deadline Day. Less than four years later I drifted into something else.
This isn’t the opening to a 12-step, I’m-so-ashamed program. The act of quitting bandages the abrasions earned by scraping your metaphorical knees as you learn what you shouldn’t do. Bandages shouldn’t be applied unnecessarily; so too don’t apply quitting without need. At best it looks stupid; at worst, it hampers your movement, just as an elaborate bandage hobbles you and can lead to permanent restriction.
We’re conditioned to abhor quitting. “Don’t be a quitter!” and “Winners never quit and quitters never win!” But what if you’re not in the right contest? Quitters may never win, but the untalented never win either, and there is no shame in realizing you’re in the wrong game: a five-foot body isn’t going to cut it in the NBA.
I’ve quit many a race. I regret few. I much more regret the months and months of anguishing about whether I should quit as I languished in a situation going nowhere. After the fact, I realized that I perversely reversed the thinking process, making the decision (without consciously acknowledging it) then searching for a rationalization to get to it.
Quitting can force itself on you. What blessed relief when something like an emergency appendectomy absolves you of all personal responsibility! Just lie there and let others administer to you! Or maybe a Tyrant-Disguised-As-Your-New-Boss suddenly makes the exit look exceedingly attractive. Or the ultimate quit occurs–your significant other stabs your heart by quitting the relationship. Take a moment to cry, then notice all the windows that opened when the door was slammed shut.
I can’t remember all the times I’ve quit, but I do still remember clearly one of the first when the 13-year-old version of me spent a couple weeks on the track team in junior high, a very round peg in a very square hole. I talked myself into a poor 880-yard run performance by saying things like, “don’t worry if you’re losing; someone has to finish last.” No surprise then when the last-place runner passed me and gasped, “why are we doing this?” before he made me the last-place runner! That was a Friday. I quit Monday. Sorry, Coach Skilstead, but I’m sure 57 years later that I made the right decision. Before I got out of high school I had quit vocal music, despite the fact I was good at it and it comprised one-third of all my classes as a sophomore. As I entered my senior year, I quit taking math classes despite being one of the best students in every class I took to that point. I mentally quit thinking I would be a journalist when I returned to creative writing as a senior. (But then I “quit” on that idea when I realized I needed the discipline of a deadline to get myself to the typewriter. [Typewriter! Look it up younglings!]
A good runner, way out front. Not me. This is my brother. Fall 1973. Spokane, WA.
Once upon a time I quit a college class called Introduction to Political Science. I sat down for the mid-term examination and found I couldn’t answer any of the questions–a Friday again, naturally. I caught up with the professor the following week and told him I wanted to withdraw from the class. He whipped out his gradebook, registered surprise, and said, “But you’ve got a B at this point and that’s one of the highest marks in the class!” I referenced the midterm and insisted.
I’ve quit church choirs. I’ve quit jobs, sometimes even without having another job to go to. I tried to quit a job for over a year in 2004 and 2005, but the company laid me off before I could line up something else. I indulged in The Big Quit, a.k.a. Retirement at the end of 2019, answering firmly the question, “What would you do if you won/inherited a million dollars?” I had always equivocated when the question seemed theoretical. I told my co-workers I would keep working “unless I felt I was depriving someone who needed a job”. Yeah, it wasn’t a million dollars, but that didn’t matter. I was outta there…but that’s another story for another day.
Recently a person whose work I admire here on WordPress said something about quitting, subtly invoking the tropes our society attempts to get all of us to believe in. Apologetic notes crept in. I hurt for this person, yes, but I enjoyed seeing the acceptance of quitting and the benefits it could bring.
Lately my brother ran into a mental wall which made him abandon his plan to visit us today (April 22). These enforced ‘quits’ don’t always sit well with a person, but I hope he can embrace the possibilities quitting can bring. I hope he can become a Good Quitter.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to absolve myself when I set aside books which fail to engage me. I’ll feel little remorse for giving up on all the gardening I thought I would do when retired. I’ll try to let myself off the hook for all the home repairs which haven’t been completed. I’ll give myself the freedom to pursue what I want when I want to. It’s been about seven decades–I’m still learning how to do this quitting thing. I’ll let you know how it works out.
People telling you about their pet cats and dogs can bore one more efficiently than even those who haul out photos of their grandchildren, worn from months of friction in back pocket wallets. Singular tales do exist, however. John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley leaps to mind, and of course Jack London made his name with a tale about a dog, though certainly not his pet dog. More recently I choked up when I read Gwen Cooper’s Homer’s Odyssey very accurately subtitled A Fearless Feline Tale, Or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat.
With this in mind, I viewed a recent comment on this blog with trepidation. It can be summed up as “more cat photos!” and my initial reaction somewhat remains: this space isn’t for memes, political screaming, or cute cat photos. But there was one singular cat…and so the author succumbs…
This is a story about Wolf the Cat, as different from most cats as her name: companion, roommate, best friend, zen master, and a being who made the most of a physical challenge for most of her life.
At the beginning of 1978, having pried a degree from the dons at the University of Washington and snagged a newspaper reporter/editor/photographer job in the foothills of the North Cascades, I began to live in responsible society. Two months in, I adopted a gorgeous white cat with blue eyes. Natasha’s pelt could have been marketed in a high fashion boutique. She demonstrated an independent nature, spending large amounts of time outside. (Times were different then; most cats went outdoors.)
Natasha at rest. Sometime in 1978, probably April-June. Monroe, WA.
Natasha, or Tasha as I came to call her, only sets our stage for the true star, her daughter Wolf. After a few months of frequent sorties to who-knows-where, Tasha began to show the swelling belly of pregnancy. Six months after she arrived to live with me, she littered. She obviously had consorted with a similar solidly-colored cat, but black. Three of the five kittens were white like their mother, with one black smudge on the tops of their heads in varying amounts: one had just a few hairs, one had a small fingertip’s worth, and one had more of an adult’s thumbprint. The most purely white one was delivered three months later to a friend in Walla Walla, who called her Powder…because, well, The 70s. Of the final two, one was all black, striking, and mischievous. I called him Shiva the Destroyer based on his habits, and gave him to my brother about a half year later. Shiva promptly revealed he was a she, littered on the middle of my brother’s matrimonial bed, and Shiva soon found herself and her litter at the local animal shelter.
And then there was this nondescript gray tabby, a commoner among the gorgeous and highly born. Because this kitten had a fuzzy overcoat of lighter gray and looked a little jowly, it reminded me of a wolf, so I called her Wolfrydda, a completely made-up attempt at Norski-ness. It was Wolf on the vet records and in my mouth–so what indeed was her name? Wolf showed a precociousness that captivated me. She always wanted to be with me, climbing up the side of my couch to get to me even though she could barely walk.
Wolf and her siblings deeply annoyed Tasha, whose maternal instincts were minimal. When Tasha had weaned her progeny, they didn’t leave–so Tasha did. I saw Natasha every four or five days until I found her weeks later, dead on the side of our country road.
Wolf and Shiva, Fall of 1978. Monroe, WA.
Wolf proved every bit as companionable as she first indicated. By the time she died almost 20 years later, we had been through a lot together. She had advised me, entertained me, put up with me, and shown me through her quiet approach to life how I probably should have lived myself. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Wolf calmly accepted life as it came at her, much like the zen masters I read about later. If a chest of drawers had one left open, she slept there. Or the waterbed was good, and being covered up seemed even better:
Always aware, always calm. Wolf the Zen Master. January 1980, Monroe, WA.
At one year she gave birth to a litter of four anemic kittens who all died. Wolf spent the week crying in the bathroom where I had put the kittens in a box directly under the ceiling heat lamp. By February 1980 she had littered again, four again, a black one, two gray tabbies, and an odd beige one with caramel-colored tabby markings. The two tabbies stayed, but one, Noko Marie, died. I suspected the vet who had spayed her. (Hold that thought; we’ll return to it momentarily.) The other tabby grew into a big lug and into his name: Frank N. Stein.
About six months later Wolf disappeared for three days. I spent mornings, lunchtimes, and after work hours standing on my apartment’s little patio, whistling the special Wolf whistle, and scouring the large rocks a few feet beyond the edge of that patio which prevented erosion on the steep slope lying below. On the third day I saw her, hopping oddly from rock to rock as she laboriously climbed the hill with what turned out to be a broken right rear leg. She had gone across the road at the bottom of the hill, perhaps to get to the creek on the other side. Her luck ran better than her mother’s, and with a cast on her leg a few hours later, I headed back to work. That night I couldn’t find her until I looked on the top of the refrigerator. Somehow, with a newly applied cast on one of her jumping legs, Wolf had climbed onto the seat of a kitchen chair, then to its back, balanced herself there and leapt to the counter (three to four feet). Once on the counter she had dragged herself past the sink to where the refrigerator rose and again had leapt with only the one leg to get to the top of the fridge.
Two weeks later I took her to the vet to check on the leg. He unwrapped the cast, examined her, and rewrapped the garish pink stretch tape over the casting material. In a couple of more weeks I noticed the tip of the cast was wet. Back to the vet we went. The vet discovered a gangrenous leg and admitted he had likely wrapped the cast too loosely in a mistaken effort to give her a little more comfort. The cast had turned and cut off the blood supply to the leg. The leg would have to be amputated or Wolf would need to be put down. It didn’t seem to be much of a decision. Wolf was barely over two years old, and had demonstrated over the past four to five weeks she could get around quite well dragging her right leg behind her. I figured it would be easier for her at that point not to have the leg versus the cast. The vet said he felt badly about it and wouldn’t charge for the amputation! Back then I was naïve; I would not be as nice today. Since he wasn’t getting any money for the operation, he said he was going to do it after hours and did I want to watch and/or assist? I said “sure” and found myself that evening holding up a furless leg that looked remarkably like a chicken leg/thigh you buy at the grocer’s while the vet used a large pair of side-cutters to snap through the bone.
Wolf educated me over the next year with what was possible. We moved across the state only two months later, and Wolf discovered a new favorite spot in a tree beside the driveway. This tree grew as one trunk to approximately five feet and then shot many branches straight up from there. It thus formed a natural nest. One night I came home from work and found her there, staring at me eye to eye, five to six feet up. I figured at that point she could ramble around outdoors without too much fear. She had taken to sticking close to home after the accident, and she always spent the night indoors. Smart cat. I wish I had listened to her more.
In mid-1981, six months after our move, I met a woman allergic to cats. She gave herself shots which seemed to work a bit, but extended time around my two cats (Frank was still in the picture), and she would start suffering. Wolf neither hated nor liked her–tolerated would be more accurate. Within two months this woman helped me decide to quit being a reporter/editor, go back to college, earn a teaching degree, and join her in the teaching ranks. I found a cheap apartment in Spokane, WA, but it didn’t allow pets. Pressed for time, I convinced my parents (who also lived in Spokane, just ten minutes from the apartment) to take in Wolf for a year. They had never had cats in their adult lives, and they had a dog, something Wolf hadn’t encountered before. Despite this, they agreed, and a few weeks later–after living in my car for a day while I attended classes–Wolf went to her new, temporary home. To get away from the dog she learned within the first hour to jump with that one rear leg to a small basement window four or five feet above the tallest furniture. The dog was lazy, and after his initial curiosity, he let her be. (Frank is another tale for another time, when I feel like confessing a poor decision.)
Enduring my parents and their dog. Sometime between Sept 1981 and August 1982. Spokane, WA.
After ten months I earned a degree in English Education, August 1982, grabbed Wolf, and moved in with my woman friend now living in a small lake cabin with a small dog. We married in 1983, moved to a small city in the mountains of Washington, and over eight years we welcomed four more cats into our house. In 1990 we moved to a new, bigger house, dropping Dolly with a friend. Three days after the move, Cooper disappeared. Suddenly we weren’t a 5-cat family, but only a 3-cat one. My wife laid down a new rule: cats in the basement at night. The rule lasted until she moved out ten months later, taking the dog and Petunia with her.
Four years and counting. Livin’ the lake life. Late 1982. Diamond Lake, WA
Wolf, Calvin, and I spent a year rattling around the 4000 square foot house. I met a different woman which gave me the pretext I needed to upend my life. The cats and I moved to a Philadelphia suburb.
Nearing 14 years: supervising the mover (me). June 1992. Colville, WA.
Wolf spent her time, per usual, under the seat of the Ryder rental truck I had procured for the move. Calvin ate tranquilizers and sat in a cat carrier the whole time we were in the truck. Occasionally Wolf would perform recon, hopping across the dash and then spending just enough time on top of Calvin’s carrier to annoy him, before she retreated to her under-seat abode. In Philly I intended “to become a freelance writer”. Such was not to be. I did, however, let my fling die away and in 1994 met a lovely woman who to this day keeps sticking around for no good reason I can fathom. Wolf liked her. Calvin spent most of his time outdoors and didn’t care.
Shortly after our marriage in 1995, we lost Calvin in the middle of an overnight December snowstorm when he insisted he needed to go outside exploring. (Another sin on my cat balance sheet.) My focus on the missing Calvin prevented me from noticing Wolf’s increasing lethargy. A Friday trip to the vet didn’t net much of a diagnosis; on Monday morning she couldn’t hold her head up while sitting on my wife’s lap. A second trip to the vet (and a diagnosis from a more competent vet) revealed a bad failure of her kidneys. They were flushed with large infusions of saline water twice that week, and Wolf The Miracle Cat bounced back as good as ever.
Eventually I convinced my new wife to move back to Spokane. Wolf joined us on a pillow on the middle console. We moved into a rented house complete with swimming pool. By this time, nearing her 19th birthday, she spent most of her time at the new house on top of a stack of deconstructed cardboard boxes from our move. The sun shone there most of the day.
In May 1998 we moved her one last time to a house we bought there. Wolf had been complaining of something for a week or so before the move. She worsened just a week or two after the move, and we learned her kidneys were failing again. A few tries at jump-starting them with fluids failed, and we decided to stop the pain in mid-June, just a couple months short of her 20th birthday.
Along the way I appreciated this cat more and more. She benefited by being my first real feline companion–Natasha had disappeared far too quickly and been too standoffish to claim that role. She liked rock and roll: playing one of my favorite albums, The Who Live At Leeds, at full volume not only didn’t disturb her, it caused her to climb up in my lap and enjoy the tunes! She enjoyed sleeping right on top of me (or my bed partner), which made me thankful for her light weight. She had a two-toned purr, with a high-pitched note above the customary low, growly one. When purringly happy she would drool, just one drop which would sit at the tip of her muzzle. She exhibited calm, patience, and live-in-the-moment wisdom. (I once watched her sit at the corner of the house waiting for a couple sparrows to work their way down the side of house toward her. She knew this was the only way a three-legged cat could hunt them. She missed anyway.) After losing her leg at the age of two, we moved five times from 1981-1990. I moved her five more times from 1992 until her death almost exactly six years later. She took it in stride, so much so that I’ve been shocked since then to have a cat stress out over moving. Throughout it all I never felt I was in charge; I felt I had a roommate who just happened to keep moving with me.
If I had listened to this cat, I would not have married when I did in 1983. I would have become far less upset about life’s tribulations. I would have accepted the bad with the good, and learned to not grasp either. To this date, almost 25 years since Wolf died, no other cat has quite captured her spot in my heart. I doubt that one will. I’m nearing 69. The years run together now. First time events, like meeting such a cat, become less and less prevalent. No matter how much I try, I can’t quite connect with my cats like I did this one. Maybe the right one just hasn’t appeared. Maybe they just don’t come but once in a life.
This profile seems abysmally truncated to me, long as it must have seemed to the reader. I covered a decade in one paragraph! (1982-1992) I had thought, “hey, from time to time I’ll tell tales of the others, but I’m not sure how I could. Everything would seem downhill after Wolf.
One of the nicest things about retirement occurs every morning. The alarm doesn’t go off–not that it sounded much in the past 25 years–and I lie in bed debating about getting up or rolling over for a bit more ‘driftology’ (the study of drifting through my inner time and space). Usually five minutes proves I won’t be dropping back into sleep. I quietly slide out of bed; leave my sleeping wife to her dreams; grab some clothes, my cellphone, my glasses, and the glass of water sitting on my bedside stand; and I walk to the kitchen to start the morning ritual. I avoid the weakening spot on the bedroom floor near my side of the bed, the one which squeaks loudly. Similarly, I walk closely to the wall as I pass the living room, again avoiding the creaking spots in the floor. In the kitchen I put on my morning clothes in the dark. They’re a completely inappropriate fashion statement proclaiming “hey, it’s warm.”
Sometimes Benny, one of our two nearly-identical black-and-white cats, accompanies me. The rest of the time he trots out a few minutes into my routine. I’m made aware of his presence by a gentle body slam against my calves. Despite having started the morning coffee ritual, I’ll stop and feed him. He likely isn’t hungry but why not? Returning to the ritual: coffee filter wetted, cup warmed, grounds measured, and when the water boils, a gentle dribble coaxes the coffee’s blooming. Then a steady pour fills the filter holder. After years of this I usually pour just the correct amount of water to fill the cup.
While these steps play out I’ve downed a glass of water to quench dehydrated cells, and I’ve opened kitchen blinds to prepare for the day. Regardless of standard or “daylight saving” time, very little light comes in these now-opened blinds, unless we’re near the summer solstice: on Retired Saving Time I wake at the slight lightening of the pre-dawn sky regardless the time. Birds will have just started their chirping in the spring. The sun will have become more insistently bright near the summer solstice. Nearing the winter solstice I might beat the sun to rising.
How to convey the calm of living rhythmically? Of waking at first light? Of eating a midday meal when hungry, regardless if it’s 11:30 a.m. or 2:30 p.m.? Of going to bed when tired, never caring if it’s 8:30 p.m. or 11 p.m.? The day becomes a physical meditation. Divorced from it, I can turn into a snarly bear, but being in tune with it resembles breathing at the steady, resonating rate synchronous with All Being.
In 1995 or 1996 I removed the watch from my wrist and never returned it. I turned off the morning alarm. Though I benefitted from a corporate job back then which allowed a laissez-faire approach to the start of the workday, I’m pretty sure I would have done this even had I been a shift worker. The slight tension induced in knowing there’s no alarm served to wake me with plenty of time to tackle morning matters; it proved far preferable to waking 25 minutes before the alarm was due to go off only to lie there cursing because I couldn’t get back to sleep and “why bother anyway”. In retirement this natural rhythm has extended to the whole day, but the slight tension doesn’t wake me anymore.
Coffee in hand, my day officially begins with reading. It may be the Morning Briefing from the New York Times. It might be the comics. It might be baseball, more specifically anything written overnight about the Phillies. Recently, during Lent, my morning read has been The Sign of Jonas, the journals of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. This last requires turning on a light since it is a physical book, not something on my tablet or cellphone. For that reason my reading necessarily takes place downstairs where a light can illumine without bothering my sleeping wife. Benny benefits too: when I comfortably settle in front of a fire downstairs or in an old wing-backed chair in our library, Benny gets to jump up for a morning petting session. (If I’ve happened to have decided on reading material on my computer, he’ll happily claim my lap there, too.) Reading becomes a bit challenging with a cat squirming around, kneading and delivering headbutts. Soon he settles down and allows me to continue my study of Merton, my inquisitive plunge through data at my computer, or the latest take on This Stuff Really Matters (Today).
Henry Clay Mansion, KY. July 2014.
Because I’ve moved to the rhythm of the day for nearly 30 years, I alternate between chuckling or muttering in irritation when people rant about jumping forward to Daylight Saving Time or falling back to Standard Time. Time–being but a mental ruler imposed by humans upon our perception of past, present, and future–doesn’t exist. Every day we are reminded how a group of people living through the same events do not experience it in the same way, do not remember it in the same way, and will sometimes seek to rewrite those events to suit a particular purpose. To put it in someone else’s words:
What usually happens is that, once scientists have worked out their equations [for a Grand Unification Theory], time is nowhere to be found. And if it’s not part of the fundamental fabric of the universe, how do we know it’s not something we’ve invented to explain what we don’t understand?
In most senses I don’t care if it exists or not. Hours, minutes, and the clocks which measure them indisputably resemble rulers, nothing more. Just as that tree on the hill doesn’t get any closer if I declare I’m a foot closer to it (while not moving my feet), I don’t perceive time appearing or disappearing because we move to DST. Just as retirement has brought a detached view of the working world (and many other matters), so too has it altered my perception of time. (Time as a malleable substance?) Stereotyped jokes show us older folks forgetting the day of the week with regularity. Is this any wonder when time doesn’t exist? If I stop using a tape measure to measure how far I travel, am I assailed when I lose touch of my sense of distance? I can still walk from Here to There, can’t I?
[Which sparks a possible and humorous but too truthful dialog:
“Do you know what day it is, Mr. Pilcher?”
“Yes.”
“Would you tell me?”
“Yes.”
“What day is it Mr. Pilcher?” (a bit of exasperation now)
“It’s today.”
“And what day is ‘today’, Mr. Pilcher?” (more than a bit of exasperation now)
“It’s always today. I don’t understand your question.”
“What DAY of the WEEK is it, Mr. Pilcher?”
“Gee, I’m sorry if I annoyed you. I have no idea what day of the week it is. It’s a day between Sunday and Sunday; I go to church on Sunday, and I didn’t go to church today.”
(lengthy pause while Mr. Pilcher’s treatment plan is revised to indicate he is losing his marbles)]
My paternal grandfather spent many minutes and hours staring out of windows in his later years. He at times seem befuddled. He also showed he was sharp as a tack when it came to philosophical and existential questions. He had studied theology and led congregations for decades. Staring out of a window came with the territory, especially when composing this week’s sermon. While the need to write sermons disappeared in retirement, the window-staring did not. Did this indicate a dissociative mind? Doubtful. More likely old habits outlived their usefulness. So too my need to keep track of every hour of the day, every day of the week. I never did, much. Why should I be punished for that? I wouldn’t be punished for a deteriorating sense of distance; why a deteriorating sense of time?
I would argue my rising with the predawn light, moving through the day totally in touch with what needs to be done Now, whether it be eating, my taxes, planning meals, pruning shrubs, reading books, attending a doctor appointment on time, or going to bed when tired keeps me in a meditative state. Retirement provides extra incentive to be in touch with the here and now. I shouldn’t be penalized because I’ve approached a more natural state of being, I should be admired or at the very least respected. Instead, I feel the need to document how my memory of many things has been tenuous throughout my supposedly ‘with it’ years. I have never been able to tell you what I have to do today. As a reporter in my late 20s, I would drive to work oblivious of what stories I had to run down that day. As a teacher in the years that followed, I had only a fuzzy idea of what I had to teach that day, usually because I had planted the seed in my brain the night before: “you have to get to school quickly to print that test you’re giving today.” Ask me on Monday what the lesson plan for Thursday will be, and you would have received a panicked look. In the corporate world where each day’s list of to-do’s varied quite a bit, I had no idea what I would do that day until I looked at the task list. (Bless you Franklin planners for focusing me the idea of A, B, and C tasks.)
And now? How do I prove to those who will judge my mental competence that I have never been able to remember what I have to do today? That I’ve marched through many a day thinking it was Thursday, only to be reminded continuously “no, it’s Wednesday”? When my mother neared the end of her life, she was subjected to many a judgement like this. When she microwaved a throw pillow because she thought she could warm it up and use it on her sore neck, her dramatically shocked visiting nurse felt that Mom was ‘losing it’. Well, somewhat, yes, I concurred. “But Mom has always had a tenuous grasp of the physical sciences including those which govern a microwave. Just because it wasn’t marked “microwavable” on the throw pillow shouldn’t totally count against her. After all, she had several microwaveable neck pillows which she did put in the microwave each night–and they didn’t have “microwavable” on some tag attached to them, because they were handmade by the good ladies at her church. Should she have responded to the smoke filling the room? Yeah, probably. Then again, my wife should have reacted to the smoke filling our house that night in midwinter 2002 when the furnace’s chimney had decomposed, and I came home to a house filled with smoke and a wife merrily preparing my dinner. Losing your marbles doesn’t occur when you misplace the bag of marbles. You lose one here, one there, never noticing the slightly lighter bag you’re holding.
Our perception of time varies from person to person, and time’s but a human construct. Our perception of reality–whatever reality is according to the popular philosophers of the day–varies even more. We should be judged on who we are and who we were, not on who someone wants us to be. Want to scare yourself? Pretend you’re the plaintiff in a court hearing to prove that you are mentally incompetent. My guess? You can’t prove you’re competent right now! Good luck when you’re 80.
God forbid I should be denied my mornings with Benny, coffee, and reading material simply because someone says I need to stay in bed longer, or get into a shower, or do anything else I don’t want to do. “Oh Lord, I pray my ability to perceive how I’m being treated matches how I’m being treated.”
True creatives relax the fierce grips most of us place on sanity, societal norms, orthopraxy, trends, and well-meaning advice from friends and acquaintances, even relaxing the grip on having acquaintances. Foremost among these, the creative accepts insanity, allows it to dwell inside: allows the voices to speak, to be heard, to take over, voices which suggest new and totally different ways to think, to do, to sing, to view life, to write, to design that building.
I may learn a set of rules which seek to bind me to the doctrine of electrical engineering, biochemistry, pedagogy, painting, poetry, investment banking, mapmaking, archiving, heavy construction, medicine, the law, or managing a grocery store, but as a creative I use this knowledge as a springboard to think, to act out, to say, “well that’s all well and good, but what about this?”
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
all the voices in my head 