How terribly strange


I remember lying on my mother's bed, looking out
the window at the snow falling, listening to Bookends
and thinking only about how sad the music was.

I didn't even know exactly what those boys
were singing. How could I know or imagine ever being seventy?
But I thought, even then, what a rare thing it would be
to have a friend with whom you'd spent years together,
sharing a park bench with you at seventy.

So, I guess that means I was thinking about what those
boys were singing after all and not just about how sad
the song was or how much it made me feel better to feel
sad like that. Melancholy. Filled with longing. Filled
with an aching. Oh, those boys.

My radical wild moon woman friend and I once talked about
a picture a friend of hers took of two old women walking the beach.
She said, That's us. We'll be doing that.

I hope we will.

It does seem so terribly strange to be 50 (will be in just a few
weeks). Everyone on staff is so much younger than me.
The oldest person is 14 years younger than me and the youngest
is 26 years younger. I wonder if they see me as an "old" woman.

So many changes for me. So many things to be grateful for.
So many other things that sadden me and are heavy on my heart
tonight. The death of a young man. The losing of friends.
The passing of years.

I hope I can hang with it all. Fatigue wants to claim me.


I think the loss of my job took so much out of me on a
cognizant level, an intelligence level, an emotional level,
and certainly on a physical level.

Gotta regroup and hang with it.

Get busy livin' or get busy dyin'. I want to get busy livin'.

Can you imagine us years from today...

When the broken-hearted people living in this world agree/there will be an answer

Back to me

Spent all day yesterday in a nonviolent crisis
intervention training. Very interesting. Helpful things
to know. Today was more on-the-job work. Tomorrow
more training. It's all been interesting and exhausting.

We really do start to stagnate in so many ways when
we aren't engaging on a mental or physical level in a number
of months. I keep thinking about the "can't teach an old
dog new tricks" thing knowing that just can't be right.

Someone just didn't try hard enough with the old dog.
Or maybe the old dog didn't like the new tricks.
Or maybe the reward was not worth the effort.
Or maybe the old dog was just plain old tired and didn't
want to learn any new tricks.
Or maybe the old dog was a bit stubborn and set in his
ways and wasn't sure how much a new trick would matter.
Or maybe the old dog just lacked some confidence that
she could master the new.


I am thinking of a Sexton poem, so I'll post it.



Music Swims Back to Me

Wait Mister. Which way is home?
They turned the light out
and the dark is moving in the corner.
There are no sign posts in this room,
four ladies, over eighty,
in diapers every one of them.
La la la, Oh music swims back to me
and I can feel the tune they played
the night they left me
in this private institution on a hill.


Imagine it. A radio playing
and everyone here was crazy.
I liked it and danced in a circle.
Music pours over the sense
and in a funny way
music sees more than I.
I mean it remembers better;
remembers the first night here.
It was the strangled cold of November;
even the stars were strapped in the sky
and that moon too bright
forking through the bars to stick me
with a singing in the head.
I have forgotten all the rest.


They lock me in this chair at eight a.m.
and there are no signs to tell the way,
just the radio beating to itself
and the song that remembers
more than I. Oh, la la la,
this music swims back to me.
The night I came I danced a circle
and was not afraid.
Mister?

Update

I went off on the happiness tangent Sunday and posted the
mess below--a diatribe of sorts. Within 5 minutes of posting
it, my sister called me. Her best friend's son was killed in action
in Iraq. Her friend had been notified about 30 minutes before
I posted this ridiculous thing about happy people.

Her son was also one of my daughter's high school friends.
They didn't hang out often, but often enough that they
were good friends.

It's been days of calls and taking food and trying to arrange
travel and that sort of thing. I know his mother and father
well. I didn't know him well. Long story. Send prayers.
Light candles. Whatever you believe offers comfort.

Been in training all day and will be all day tomorrow.
I will be working, when I am on call, at a psychiatric
hospital. The training is designed to help us know some
techniques to use when we are verbally or physically
assualted. Much, much to learn.

Heart heavy. Tired. Wondering what it all means.

and so here is the Sunday post I pulled--it is clearly
so ridiculous I don't know why I am posting it.

LIfe. Ever changing. Who ever knows.

Where are the happy people?

I wonder. I know people who seem content
with their lives. I know people who enjoy going
places, doing things, their work, their families,
their lives. I know people who have a positive attitude
about life in general. And I know people who laugh
often and laugh robustly and who never seem to take
themselves or this life too seriously, but happy? Maybe
those are the happy people.

happy: Lots to read about happy. Let's try this.

unhappy: Pretty much just a matter of adding "un" before many
words under the happy definition.

Just what in the hell is happy? Is there a happiness gene?
If so, it didn't make its way into my system.

But the point of this little rambling message is not to belabor
my unhappiness. Just to wonder. About happiness or the lack
thereof.

I don't even think I can finish reading Learned Optimism. It's
boring me to death at this point. I guess if I were more optimistic,
I would believe the best of the book is yet to come, but he hasn't
given me any reason to think so thus far.

*****************************

A friend came over for dinner and a movie last night. I wasn't
crazy about the movie. She said we needed to lighten up and watch
something light. She chose Guess Who. I was largely rather bored
through the whole thing and didn't find any of it particularly funny
or even mildly interesting. However, after the movie was over,
we watched the first 20 minutes or so of SNL. Once again, Tina Fey
had me in stitches. I can say that Sarah Palin has done this for the
country--given us some much needed comic relief. Here's
what another friend sent to me about Palin in an email
I got yesterday:

Palin has revealed her real self in the Gibson and Couric interviews, and clearly knows nothing and offers only rubbery expressions and glib repetition, for all the world like a rasping myna bird, of a stream of memorized slogans that sound as though they were disinterred from a time capsule originally buried in William F. Buckley Jr.'s back yard several decades ago.

**************************************************

Speaking of Palin, did anyone notice during the debate
how many times the camera panned behind the podia?
If I recall correctly, we never had any a** shots of McCain
and Obama. Nor did we see any of Joe Biden's
backside as the camera panned only Sarah Palin's rear end. I suppose
we are to note the size of the ankles, the small waist, the perky butt.

My friend said that she could not, in good conscience, cast her vote
this November until America got the same opportunity to check out
the guys' rear ends. She suggested they wear speedos or biker shorts
for the next debate, and then perhaps, she could make her decision.

Good point!

******************************

I have only worked three days. I am having some pretty messed up
dreams. I always dream quite vividly, but these have been stranger
than usual.

There is just such a damn boatload of hurt out there
and I just can't figure out why people have to suffer
the way they do. I know on a macro scale, suffering
is rampant, and the degrees to which people suffer varies, but
I am speaking more today about the people I meet in my community--
the people who are very deeply wounded. I'm not talking about the
"worried well" (I fit that category--my name would be beside the
definition). I'm talking about stuff I'm gonna stop talking about!

Boatload of hurt, folks.

Wow. What an uplifting entry today. I'll just add some more to it
with some quotes (one of which Laurel had on her blog not too long
ago):

Then trust me, there's nothing like drinking
So pleasant this side of the grave;
It keeps the unhappy from thinking,
And makes e'en the valiant more brave.
—Diaz, Porfirio


One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.
—La Rochefoucauld, Fran c° ois, 6th Duc de


All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
—Tolstoy, Leo Nikolayevich

I'm on your side, when times get rough/and friends just can't be found

Too drained


...to write much. And I think I am still somewhat wrapped
in self-preservation mode to write anything coherent.

More later.

***************


Sometimes you choose a path and sometimes the path
chooses you. It is as if it has a life of its own.

I am walking through briars, knowing my extremities
are wounded along the walk--there is so much to take
in, so many other facets of being yet to unfold that the cuts
and scrapes and bleeding don't matter that much.

Unfolding is not such a beautiful thing. The undersides
are many times coated in slime, fragile and not pretty
to view. And sometimes, the unfolding yields an even
less attractive progeny.

I'm not sure at this point if the viewing is all that
important. I'm even less sure that the
walk matters all that much either.

I feel certain only about this: I shall keep walking.

I am lighting candles tonight. I am going outside
to view the stars. I am going to sit in the cool autumn
evening until I get cold enough to come back inside.

I am going to eat a s***load of junk. Pizza. Uh-huh.

Some wine. Most likely some bad for my lungs stuff, too.

And I am going to look at the stars.