Off the Grid - Avoid the Self Indulgence of Despair

When I hear nothing, I despair. When I hear the kind word from a random reader, I am grateful and embarrassed. When a friend calls wanting to buy art, and she's bought so much already, I am heart held.

I will miss Daniel Schorr, and I am not alone in that. Who will make sense of the week's disasters? He was the old professor, the parent who could and would explain. The voice of earnest sanity. Who can take his place?  Losing him is like losing a parent; there's no replacement. But we still need to hear a weekly analysis for without it, without rational thinking, we may well despair.

After voicing my small despair last week, I must follow it up with what always follows darkness: light. Cloudy, perhaps, but light nonetheless.

No, there is no rescue, but maybe that's for the best.
There is no reversal, no going back.

What is there?
Gratitude
For what?
Oh, for the ability to look around and see the arms of friends
outstretched. Their waving flutters, their high signs,
the communal hug.  We are all so worried
all so busy lugging our individual baskets of fret.
But see, we can each, when shifting the load, free up one hand
and waving speak:
Wait for me. Hold on. Kick a little harder. Walk a little longer.
Home is just around the corner.

Off the Grid - Week 65

With no full-time job, no benefits, a few weeks remaining on COBRA, an extension for unemployment I can't use because I now have three part-time jobs, I'm not sure if I'm off the grid or squashed against it like an unsuspecting insect.

Not an insect. A pin ball. We are all pin balls in a rough game played by a mindless child with a bad temper. I cower in the corner when no matter how hard the little wretch shakes the table, I don't shift. Not until his hand has slid from the lever, then, quiet and forlorn, I slide straight past and into the hole only to be jerked back into play the following Monday.

Like a thief sorry only that she's been caught, I want now the benefits of having had my own family without the eye-opening distress of actually having ripped my hips clear open and living with the results.

This year, when I've turned angry and emotions, spun like the arrow in a cheap board game, have landed on old friends and family, I've been silent here and in that silence seen my cowardice.

I am condemned. But I must not be silent.

Dangerous Book - Episode 44

Things found in books:

*            date due slips

*            other slips of paper

*            homework assignments

*            sheets of toilet paper (clean, thank goodness)

*            Kleenex (clean and used)

*            library cards (we scan these into the computer to check out materials and the patrons are supposed to keep them!)

*            actual bookmarks

*            a surgical clamp

*            HAIR!

*            a bobby pin

*            a notification that someone had received a raise

*            an assortment of bills and letters

*            a season pass to Worlds and Oceans of Fun in Kansas City

*            a band-aid

*            a leaf

*            wedding pictures

*            other photos

*            the receipt from a visit for psychoanalysis

*            thank you cards

*            drivers licenses

*            a packet of tropical punch flavored Kool-Aid

*            a yellow 3-inch rubber snake

*            bird poop

*            raisins

*            creepy crawlies

*            a dry flower

What’s in the cookbook?

Dangerous Book - Episode 43

Episode 43

Later, same Monday, May 31 -

I unlocked the door and the three of us, still knocking and calling entered the apartment and into the bedroom, following, I have to say, our noses.  We stopped calling when we saw her in the bed. She was doubled over as if she’d been retching.  Closer examination showed that she had.  Right near her face almost as if she was drowning in it a little pool of brown vomit rested.   Some of it had soaked into the sheets, but most had not.  The whole thing was gross and sad and disgustingly human.

            We stood around wringing our hands. I’d actually never done that before, but it almost seemed instinctive before we all jumped into 911 mode and called from the bedroom.  Mrs. Moth made the call, holding the receiver with both hands and turning her back on the bed, as if not wanting Veronica to hear her.  Phoebe fastened herself to Veronica and kept her hands chaffed. Was she dead? She was not.     

            “Get me a damp cloth,” said Phoebe.  “We can’t let her choke.”  I managed to comply.  “Then do something with the bathroom,” she snapped as if I’d messed the room myself.

      

            When I finished, I joined Mrs. Moth in the kitchen. She was busy pulling lime wedges from the sink basket, holding a high ball glass in her hand.

            “Was anyone here last night?” she asked.

            “Not after we left,” I said. “At least, I didn’t hear anyone, but when I finally came in I went right to bed.”

            The sink was littered with slices of lime.  Mrs. Moth threw them into a kitchen waste bin.  A fishy smell arose.  Probably unwashed tuna cans.

            On the counter I spied an open canister of tea and a tin box of brownies, still open. This explained the look of her vomit.  These Mrs. Moth was brushing up and putting away.  It is at these times that you take a mental inventory of your underwear.  Is it good enough for the ambulance?   Will you be embarrassed when you wake up in a hospital bed?

            “Phew” she said, lifting out the trash bag. Veronica used paper grocery bags to line her trash basket and this one was soggy.  “I don’t suppose you’d bring this down stairs for me,” she said.

            I opened the back door leaving it propped open so it wouldn’t lock behind me, ran down stairs to the dumpster.  By the time I returned the EMTs had arrived.  The guys bustled around Veronica, working her over, trying, with more good will than delicacy, to slap some life into her, or so it seemed to me   I think it was just the rush that made them seem so rough.

            They strapped her on the gurney and carried her down the stairs. Mrs. Moth, Phoebe and I followed behind in my car.

I remember

A very long time ago, I sat on the floor of a little house in Brookwood trying to impress my boyfriend's buddy that I was somehow smarter, prettier, more grounded, less rough around the edges than I was.

The boyfriend helped by having me leave my eyeglasses in the car and enjoy the evening playing Monopoly by instinct. This was a man I instinctively knew was not right for me. No, that's not how I thought it.  What I thought, when he questioned me on my background as if I were filing a job application or used the word  irregardless, which is not really a word, was that had I known him in college, when I still had a backbone, I wouldn't have given him the time of day. It was instinct and I ignored it.

I have no idea if his friend was impressed. Nothing that might have changed did change. The relationship, such as it was, ended with the sigh of a vacuum pulling from some small space the last of our complications. What did remain was the friend's quizzing eyes. These young alert men with their quizzing eyes and tallying ways...to understand them would be to give them power. I would not. But I cannot forget the look. Such a long time later I painted these eyes though until the little picture was finished I did not recognize them.

Here is the picture. Here is the memory. You really can't know which detail will stick, can you? Or how it will manifest.

Dangerous Book - Episode 42

Monday May 31 - continued

Detective Robin wasn’t a large man, but he seemed to fill my living room. When invited, he took a seat on the couch, accepted the sweaty glass of tea and downed it in three healthy swallows. Fascinated, I watched his throat at work. When he finished he handed it to me and grinned.

            “I needed that.”

            “You sure did,” I said and tripped from the room to bring him a refill. When I returned he was busy playing with Juniper. I set the glass on a coaster and sat nervously at the end of the couch.

            “Juniper, come here,” I said, but my faithless mutt ignored me for the next half hour preferring, as usual, the company of a male.

            “Can you tell me if you heard anything unusual this morning?”

            “No. I mean, I can tell you I heard nothing unusual. In fact, it was pretty quiet. But it’s a holiday and I slept late.”

            “When did you wake up?”

            “Around 7, which is usual. On a work day, I’ll walk Juniper a bit, but this morning I just let her pee.”

            “Did you hear your neighbors?”

            “Professor Sergeant lives across the hall. I heard him leave around 8. Oh, and Noah, upstairs, went out around 7.”

            “When you were waking? Did he wake you up?”

            “I don’t think so, though he might have woken Juniper. She jumped on my bed at 7.”

            “I take it you looked at the clock?”

            “I did. Oh! That clock is set 10 minutes fast. So she woke me earlier. Then I went to the bathroom, then the kitchen to start my coffee and let Juniper out the back door. I heard Noah’s kitchen door open and his footsteps on the back stairs.”

            Robin rose and walked to the kitchen. I followed, showing him through the small screened porch. We listened to the sounds of police footsteps on the stairs.

            “It’s pretty audible,” I said.

            “Did you see your neighbor?”

            “No. I was busy with the coffee pot, but it sounded like him.”

            “Did you hear anything from Veronica’s apartment?”
            “No. But I usually don’t. She’s up earlier than me and leaves the front way when she goes out. But she wouldn’t be going to work today, either. It’s a holiday.”

            He nodded.

            “I’m not sure when I took Juniper out for a walk but when we got home Phoebe and Elizabeth were outside Veronica’s apartment, knocking and calling for her to open the door.

            “When I came in they leaned over and asked me if I’d seen her leave, which I hadn’t.”

            We walked back to the living room and I opened the door to my hall, showing Robin where I’d stood.

            “What did they say?”

            “They said they all had appointments at DCH (Druid City Hospital) and were supposed to go to the mall and where was she. Of course, I didn’t know but I looked under the radiator for her spare key, found it and went up and unlocked her front door.”

We are not fiction

Are we all living our own romance? Our own hero's journey?
On which hot afternoon, perhaps while stepping off a broken curb, does my fortune change and doom shift roles with fate or, dare I say it, destiny?

At night the helpful gnome enters stage left with the brilliant observation
I've been waiting for and I reply yes.
I say YES and proceed to make my fortune
with tools honed subconsciously all these years.

Rip van Winkle never lay beneath a tree
but worked instead in a grey felt cubicle
until the day he woke ready
for a new haircut and an eyeful
of change.

A shift in point of view is all the waking I require.