Little Story #1

Not waiting for June because ... I need to jump in.
The stories are still quiet but for one. And it makes me a bit nervous to tell it because it's about me and God. It is true that I'm thinking a lot about this kind of thing but it isn't true that I'm getting religion. I'm not trying to inspire belief. I have no belief. But (as I mentioned in that post I was whining about not getting any reaction) there is a connection between my feelings about God and my sense that it will take some kind of divine intervention for me to find a partner.
And me and God go way back. My life story has been a religious studies program.
I put a new picture in my FB header. It's a picture of me at about six years old. I'm sitting by a small pond, holding a doll staring at a tree. I have no memory of that moment specifically but that is how childhood felt to me. Alone. Lost in revery. Clutching a simulacrum of a friend. I really used to stare at nature. I remember marveling over leaves and rocks and water. I may have been praying. I was always praying. I did the usual our-father and now-I-lay-me prayers but mostly I had conversations. My dad was absent. I think I re-parented myself with God and I think that was really smart.
But none of that is the story. The story is about a key.
My grandmother had given me a key. I don't remember why. It must have been a key to our house but I don't remember our house being locked. I think I was supposed to give the key to someone. Somehow, I lost the key. I was distraught because I knew my grandmother would be mad. She was never a violent kind of mad. At least not physically. But she could make you feel emotionally smashed. I remember frantically looking around. I was tugging at my pockets. I sat down on a stool and prayed. I begged God to help me find that key. And then I fell off the stool.
The key was under the stool.
Looking back from my current perspective I feel so much tenderness for that little girl. I wish she hadn't been so worried about her grandmother being angry. I sort of love that she believed that a deity would hear her and help her. I'm really happy that it worked out. She lives in me. I am still a little girl beseeching.
I think the re-parenting ended when I went to India to be with Baba.
I actually have a lot of stories about things working out after beseeching God for one thing or an other. There's the how I got the money to go to India story. I'll save that for another day. 

Little Story Project

I really enjoyed the month of poems. Posting something every morning took me back to the days when I used to blog every day. I looked for poems on the interwebs during the day. At night I looked through my books. I woke up every day with a poem at the ready.
I miss blogging. I just don't have the same drive to do it. I don't have much to add to the political conversation. There's so much noise and I don't want to be part of it. My life is fairly boring. When I write a post like the last one I wrote and get no feed back it makes me sad. I always wanted my blogging to be part of a big conversation and it never felt like it was.
My blog-roll is token. I don't really go through it. I scroll through Facebook and Twitter and Instagram but it doesn't feel the same.
Also.
I've been wanting to rewrite my book and ... I just don't do the work.
So.
I had this idea to write little stories every day for a month. Memoir-ettes. I had the idea because I had been telling someone a few of my stories. The minute I decided to do the project all my stories fell silent.
This is going to be a challenge.
I was going to do it for the month of June. Which is a few days away. Which feels like a stall.
I thought about doing as Tweets. I thought the constraint of 280 characters might be cool. Tamp down on my loquacious self. But when the stories fell silent I decided I should just ... do what I can do. Just do it. Just write.
Judging by how long it has taken to write this much ... how many times I stopped to make food, sing along with a song, play Pokeman, any bleeping thing ... I better not try any constraints. Not this time. The goal is just to write. Get that muscle working. I'm not looking for advice. I should (maybe) be better at hearing advice but right now I'm working with a clenched jaw. I'm on my tip toes. I trying to sneak past my ... self.
Which is not to say that comments won't be welcome and they don't all need to be hyper-positive. (Although ... um ... praise is OK.)
(Heh.)
So I'm going to post this.
And then have a panic attack.
Nah. 
I can do this.

Lament

I've been listening to podcasts. It started on the weekends but has been slowly replacing most of my news consumption. I listen to a few that aren't newsy. Ana Marie Cox does With Friends Like These on which she has the kind of conversations I long to have. Recently she had a conversation with Chris Stedman who identifies as a public atheist.
In my life I've participated in a number of different religions and philosophies. I remember deep spiritual feeling from my earliest childhood. These days I say I believe in God but I don't know what I mean by that. There is often an apt distinction made between religious and spiritual. But these days neither of those really fits. I believe in something. I believe that a butterfly flapping its wings may cause a shift in weather patterns. There are forces impacting us all the time. Political, social and probably mysterious. What I'm not sure about is whether I believe in a responsive personal force.
There's a problematic intersection in my feeling about God and my romantic longings. It's one of the saddest things in my identity. I have felt like meeting someone who could love me would require(s) divine intervention. In many ways this is about being fat but I know too many fat women with wonderful loving relationships to truly believe that. I think it has more to do with my absent father and inappropriately affectionate stepfather. Or some combination of difficult psychology and social bad faith.
I've been suffering a crush on a guy. I'm not sure how it happened. It developed slowly and is based on a physical reaction. I don't know him. The very little experience I have of him leads me to believe that we would have very little in common. At first it was just fun to enjoy feeling attracted to someone. Eros. It feels good. And then I started deteriorating. Because I do want a relationship. So I began to wish that he could be someone who he isn't. I began to write dialogue that would result in a surprise happy connection. Oddly, he doesn't seem to have received his script. I'd like to own the hurt that I am feeling because in a very real way it has nothing to do with him.
There is another episode of Friends Like These on which she talks about a column on sex robots and incels. She says something about people not knowing what incels are and ... I didn't. I looked it up. It's about feeling oneself to be an involuntary celibate. At first I thought - oh that's me! But no. It's not me at all. It's about a kind of entitlement that I don't understand at all. It's angry and violent.
Wanting something that isn't available to you is just no fun. It's no fun materially but we sort of have a place for that. Maybe we feel like if we work hard enough we can get things. Or we just feel resentful and we pout. I feel like certain things are a right. Food, education, health care, housing.  And certain things are just about process. We have a process toward realizing what we want.
Love isn't guaranteed. I don't think it should be. I never understand the - you deserve - lines. I don't think we earn or are entitled to love or any expression of feeling from anyone else. We just live in our individual process and sometimes we (pardon the expression) get lucky. Or we don't.
There have been men who loved me. There have been men who brought me roses. Thinking about them makes me sadder than thinking about the men who didn't. Why has it never felt right? Why am I always asking why? I feel like I've worked on this for years and I don't feel like I've gotten very far.
But not long ago I had a strong feeling of ... well ... I'm not sure what. Something like wholeness and peace. I don't know why it happened and I don't know why it eludes me today. It may be in part about this boy drama but ... I'm not sure that's all it is. It may be early birthday blues. Maybe it was too much poetry. It may just be a part of who I am. It certainly has been.
So.
There's no where to go with all this. No easy resolve. I know I'm not alone in these feelings. Not that that helps. I know these feelings will fade. Sort of fall back. Not bite so hard into my day. I am trying to find a way to hold them.
But.
They suck.
I'm not sure I believe in a responsive personal force. Does the butterfly flap its wings and cause the wind or does the wind call to the butterfly, asking for a push?

My Month of Poems

I don't know if I came up with this idea or if I read it somewhere but I wanted to post a poem a day for the month of April, which is National Poetry Month. I remembered kind of late on the first and went straight to the Duino Elegies. There are poems, specific lines from poems that live in me. I can grab them at will. I wasn't sure I could get through the month.
It became immediately obvious that I needed a plan. I didn't know if many people would read a whole poem but I did think they might read a line or two. I feel like many of us hold a line or two from a poem in our heads (hearts). So I carved out fragments, which ended up being so much fun. A fragment that stands alone often changes and doesn't even call out the rest of the poem. There were a few times when I posted a whole poem. I posted part of The Red Wheelbarrow even though the whole poem would have fit because if you read or study poetry you probably have your own version of that one. I was kind of hoping people might post theirs. Some poets write in long lines and I didn't even want to carve lines.  It was a challenge. Uncle Walt does not write in Tweets. I only broke one line, the line from Howl.
Awhile ago I asked R to move my poetry shelve down so I could reach it. I don't know why I put it up so dang high in the first place. A month or so ago I moved it again. Now the poetry is right beside me when I sit in my little library. The nest had poetry books scattered about all month. I have one book of poems many of which are old school. I was surprised by how many of them I knew and how much of them I knew by heart, like the Song of Hiawatha. Similarly one night I woke up reciting the Gettysburg address. I know way more of it than I would have imagined. I think memorizing poetry, bible verses and such was a big deal when I was a kid. I may get a word or two wrong.
The best part of the whole month was "meeting" Sparrow. I've been reading Sparrow for years, Mostly in The Sun. I went looking for him on the Google machine because I wanted to include one of his poems and found him on Twitter. I followed him right away and .... he followed me back!!! It really made me happy.
It was fun to see who responded to what. Jabberwocky got the most response. I'm not sure everyone saw everything because of the way Facebook and Twitter feeds move. Today, the last day I posted a poem of my own. I write so few. They usually come to me fully formed. I may work on them a little but not much. I'm not trying to be a poet. 
I never really know what to do on Twitter. This was a lot of fun. I'm not sure if I'll do it again but there were a lot of poets I would have could have used. I just liked the nightly ritual of looking for a poem.

The Tub

I just finished a book of essays by Lawrence Weschler:Vermeer in Bosnia in which he wrote a portrait of Roman Polanski. I've only ever been peripherally aware of Polanski. I've seen a few movies and liked them well enough. I've just never had a strong interest. The essay felt like vague cultural memories for me. I did know he cannot be in the USA because he was charged and convicted for having sex with a thirteen year old girl. I did not know much about the case. If weren't for the strength of Weschler's writing I might not have read the whole piece.
Polanski's mother died in Auschwitz. His father was also interred and Roman lived rough until after the war when he was reunited with his father. In the essay there is a conversation in which Polanski doesn't accept that the thirteen year old was a child. He says she was almost fourteen, as if that makes a huge difference. But Polanski had been watching people being shot in the street when he was fourteen. That must have skewed his sense of maturity.
The trial is fraught with complication. There was the character of the time when everyone was still working through the perimeters of free love. There's a he said/she said quality about the whole thing and finally a punitive judge who may have been "over sentencing." I don't actually have an opinion about any of it. It's too messy. I do feel that Polanski, seen in the context of his early life and the culture at the time of the event, comes off as more of a cad than a lech.
I've been having a lot of mixed feelings about the Me Too movement. I wrote my own story because I believe our stories bring light into shadows. But it's been such a barrage of revelations. And I have been more sad than mad about many of the men. I was really bummed to hear about John Hockenberry, who it seems is a big jerk. I'm always going to feel like Al Frankin was tossed under a bus. His actions seem like a cross between stupid frat boy behavior and a kind of obtuseness. Garrison Keeler? I don't even know what the issues were. Louis CK? I feel like his act was organized around inappropriateness. He's been asking all of us to watch him with his hand in his pants and we have because it was so funny and human.
In a recent Harper's there is a piece in which Katie Roiphe talks about an editor of the The Paris Review who "had resigned under a cloud of acknowledged sexual misconduct." He had also been an advocate for women writers in the Review. Reading a tweet that celebrated his resignation the Roiphe writes that of the many things that could be felt about the end of his era as the editor, celebration was not one. 
Years ago a friend was visiting and I asked her if she wanted to watch one of the few movies I own. She didn't want to watch it because it was a Woody Allen movie. I had been gifted the disc and didn't really know it was an Allen movie. Again, I've never been a huge fan so I've never been overly interested in his story. He always felt a little creepy and I believe his step daughter's account. But I was slightly taken aback at the idea of boycotting his work.
I feel like we've lived for so long in a world where we accepted the bad faith behavior of men. Boys will be boys. At some point in life I stopped believing that and hoped for an awakening. The Me Too movement feels like an awakening but it also often feels like a hammer. In ending the silence of women to speak about what's happened to them we've created another kind of silencing. We allow no measure of consideration. There's a baby and there's bath water but there's also a tub. I'm always interested in the tub. I want to know about the scene of the crime. What is the context? I think there is a difference in the behavior of a man who created an unsafe environment at work and a man who did some goof ball grabbing. The difference is not about right and wrong. They're both wrong. It's about context. Does it matter if a girl is thirteen or fourteen when an older man seduces her? Not really. But there is a difference between seduction and rape. And again. The difference is not about right or wrong.
I think accountability matters, I'm just not sure what the shape of it should be.
In my work on the events of my life I have sought truth and healing. First and foremost my own but also in my relationships. It's been hard for me to accept when the other person won't or cant meet me in the process. I will always feel that I paid a huge price for someone else's bad faith. But I also became who I am. None of that can be measured or accounted for in conventional terms. Way too many moving parts. None of it ends up as easy narrative. 
Awakenings are fraught. When someone has been silenced they want to be the only voice in the room for awhile and that makes sense. But we can't just disappear people. Roiphe writes that being able "to hold a lot of opposites in our minds seems to be what the movement calls for, to tolerate and be honest about the ambiguities." Holding the tension of opposites is always where I feel the truest truth lives. It feels like the place where the healing lives.

Decline

Years ago a friend of mine drove through California visiting her siblings. Since (at that time) I lived in the middle of the state, she also stopped to visit me. I asked how the sibs were and she said they were at the age when they stood around talking about their ailments. I thought it was funny. I was in the early stages of that age.
I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about and talking about my ailments. It's just so boring to be obsessed with the minutia of one's body. Organs and joints and skin all clamoring for attention. Pain usually defining what gets the attention but the effort to keep things from getting worse also absorbs a lot  time.
Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book coming out in April. There's a bit of it in this months Harper's. She writes about a man who works out before work and after work just to "keep going". It reminded me of a story from Being Mortal in which Dr. Gawande meets a man having a very difficult surgery because he believes he will be back to paying tennis afterwards. If the surgery goes well he may have less pain and more mobility but he will never play tennis again. He's reached a point in aging where there's only so much better he can get. Considering the risks of the surgery he might be better off accepting some limitation. Ehrenreich writes with her searing lucidity, her PhD in cellular immunology and critique of capitalism. The piece is titled Running to the Grave.
Heh.
In America if something happens with your health (good or bad) it's because of something you ate or didn't eat. Exercise you did or didn't do. An attitude you maintained or didn't maintain. It's not part of life in a body. It's a task list for prevention. And hey ... there's always a product to buy. 
I listen to Parker Palmer on Moyers years ago over and over. He talks about the moment in aging when you have to accept what you will no longer be able to do. And how important it is to weed through how much of what we wish for is a learned desire. My first experience of this was visiting a friend of mine in the hospital after the birth of her first child. Dad went home to clean up and Mom went to the bathroom. I sat with the beautiful boy in my arms and it hit me that I would never have my own baby. Even if I could have pushed through the problems of my age (I was 50) I didn't have financial means to care for a child. I had grown up without a father present. I didn't want to give that experience to a child. The grief that hit me was overwhelming.
I just read the Ruth Reichl memoir of her mother. She frames her mother's life in the ideas that were so constricting in her mother's time. To be successful a woman needed to be married and have children. Ruth's mother was never at home in those roles. Her anger and frustration made everyone around her miserable.  At the end of her life with her husband dead and her children off in their own lives she had the freedom to be herself.
I've questioned if my desires for children and a partner are just something I learned. I love children and I love having them around. I'm not sure if I would have loved the relentless demand of raising them. I have never wanted to be married (too obedient to the state) but I have longed for a relationship. Although I'm very clear that at this point it would be a challenge to have someone in my life, I still pine and suffer from time to time.
Most of the take away (for me) from the Parker/Moyers conversation is about holding the tension of what you want and what you have. Not being an un-grounded, affirmation, positive thinker and not living in despair. Holding the tension of what seems to be oppositional. He calls the place of that tension the tragic gap. It may sound dire but it feels so real to me. Solidly real.
I'm don't hate the white hair and the wrinkles but I'm not sanguine about the stiffness in my joints, the slowing of my mind, the limits of my digestive system. My wobbly chin bothers me sometimes. Having lived though the mommie's decline, which in many ways was surprising, I am often overwhelmed by thoughts of what will probably be the cause of my death. I find myself imaging all sorts of horrors and harp a bit on the fact that I live in a right to die state. Sometimes I feel like I just want to get it over with but then ...
I went swimming a different pool yesterday. I had a view of the river and the rolling green hills of Dalles Port. The clouds were putting on their best fluffy show. The pool was warm and soothing. Beauty and comfort go a long way. I want a lucid open hearted acceptance of however decline may shape itself. I don't want to be driven by fear. I feel I may lean too much on an acceptance of death but ... I always have.
I swim. I read. I cook. Is that enough? I think it might be. I guess we'll see.

Reread

I just finished Rereadings, a book of essays by a few different writers (some of my favorite) on rereading favorite books. I loved most of it. I balked when reading Lopate on Stendhal because I haven't read Stendhal and it was frustrating. I need to stop reading books that add to my need to read list. At least until I catch up with what I already have. Stendhal is someone I feel I should read but may never. Same goes for Henry James. Reading about them makes me feel the urge. I will admit to being a bit intimidated by them. Maybe someday.
Patricia Hampl has an essay in the book, which sent me on an often repeated quest. It would be silly to say I don't have a lot of books. I have a lot of books. It just doesn't seem like I have so many that I should regularly lose them. And I do. My books have never been more organized. Yet I'm always standing in front of my shelves looking for a book. I am very sure I read her book: I Could Tell You Stories but I cannot find it. Frustrating. I recently lost one of Fadiman's books: ExLibris. I found it on a shelf with mostly Spanish/English dictionaries. Sometimes a book is on a shelf because that's where it fits. 
I was visiting my father once. (I barely knew him.) (I spent less than a year in presence.) (But that's another post.) So I was visiting and found a copy of In Cold Blood on a shelf. His wife at the time (he had six) was a reader of sorts. For lack of anything else to read I read it. I don't really remember what I thought about it. Years later I was assigned it in a class on non fiction writing. It was illuminating to read it again in that context. AND THEN ... I was assigned it in my MFA program. When I saw the movie: Capote I felt like I was never going to get away from the story. It is a masterful book. But of all the books in the world I might reread! TWICE!!!! I mean. Sigh.
Didion wrote about the night her husband John Dunne died. She was making dinner, he was rereading a book because he was trying to understand it mechanically. Their entire relationship feels so romantic to me, right up till the end. It's the romance of reading and writing and thinking about reading and writing and having someone to talk to about reading and writing.
I'm not sure I get the mechanics of writing when I read. Maybe sometimes but it doesn't come easily to me. Rereading does give you the distance to notice things like structure. I was also assigned The Color Purple years after I read it for pleasure. Reading it in the context of a class changed the way I felt about it. Not in a positive or negative way. I remember thinking that I hadn't really noticed the epistolary form the first time. I was just caught up in the story.
I was just talking to Val (well actually writing to Val but it feels like talking) about rereading and loving books. I have friends who only read for pleasure and I am not the least bit critical of that. Sometimes I enjoy a book so much I forget to notice the writing but not often. I would blame my MFA program but it's always been that way. In fact I was dismayed by how few of the people in my program read. Or loved reading. Or loved books.
I was staying at a friend's house once. She loved Herman Hesse. She had really sweet little collection of his books on her dresser, shrine like. I don't remember her reading much else or having many other books. I had loved him in high school. Loved! Felt like his books were road maps to life. One night I carefully picked up one of her books and ... kind of hated it. I don't even remember which one or exactly why I felt that way but it was a terrible feeling. It was like a love of my life had been smashed. I intend to read something by him again just to see if I can figure it out, if I can ever stand to feel those feeling again. Vivian Gornick has an essay in Rereadings that says something similar about her rereading of Colette. She does not reject Colette but walks around feeling as if "pieces of her writing lie heavy on my chest." Gornick is "wrenched by the beauty of that which no longer feels large, and can never feel large again."
I have a stack of to be reread books almost as large as my to be read stack. When I was seventeen the mommie sent me to stay with my paternal grandmother for the summer. She was afraid of the changes she saw in me and felt I might do wild hippie things if left at home while she worked. I suspect I might have done a few wild-ish things but mostly I would have watch reruns of StarTrek (the original) and read books. I took Dostoevsky into my exile. My aunt had recently died of Cancer but her beauty shop was still in the back room. I leaned back on the chair in front of the hair washing sink and read The Idiot, Crime and Punishment and The Brother's Karamazov. I also huffed glue. Wild-ish things happen everywhere. I'd like to reread them with out the teenage angst and blurry eyes.
I'd like to reread Anais Nin's journals to see if they still feel so exciting. I'd like to reread Kerouac for similar reasons. These were the books that sent me into the world looking for wild-ish things.
It all depends on how long I live and how well my eyes hold up I suppose.

My Reading List

Years ago Kristina was reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk. I forget why. Maybe a class. Maybe just because he is a writer of note. I sort of remember she wasn't liking it much. Over the years I bought three of his books but never read them. I'm really not sure if it was something she said about the writing or just the fact that he is of note,  highly regarded and loaded with awards.
When I was in Bellingham visiting Val I went into a really nice bookstore and loaded up. Then in SF I hit two book stores one of which being Green Apple, a favorite. And then I got a lot of nice books for Christmas. I am currently in book heaven.
As I read them I reorganize shelves. My desire is to have all of a writer together with the exception of certain books that fit in sets. I love sets. I have one shelf that has most of the to-be-read books (although they are all over the nest.) I had moved the Pamuk to that shelf and as I was picking a book to read I saw them and wondered why I never picked them. It's like I felt like they were books I should read and didn't really want to read. But I had no idea if I even liked his writing. So. I pulled them off the shelf and began.
He is, in fact, a really great writer. He is also a bit of a yammer-er. He writes a lot of internal dialogue and it goes on and on. The characters from all three books have stayed with me. The stories were haunting. It's rough when you're reading translation because you don't really know if you're getting the words the writer would have chosen. I fall hard for a writer with beautiful words. It felt like work to read the books sometimes. So I'm on a fence about him. I liked/loved some things but didn't really ever get that enamored feeling I get about a writer.
The book I have in my purse is The Buddha in the Attic. It's about Japanese picture brides immigrating to America. The writing is amazing. It's like a prose poem. The subject matter is so heartbreaking. It's startling to have that beauty and horror in the same book.
I feel like reading is a great way to feel through experiences that you don't have. From the Pamuk I have felt the difference in the life of someone growing up in Turkey around the same time I grew up here. From the Otsuka I am feeling rage about the lives of women. The Pamuk experience was actually more internal.
There are two more Pamuk books I want to read but I'm going to take a break. I'm going to read Americanah by Adichie. Seems like a timely story. I read a few of her books a while ago. I really like reading more than one book by a given author at a time. You really get a feel for their style.
There are books that make me swoon. I always want to be reading them and never want them to end. But I like books that make me think and feel. I'm not really sure where these books fit. As much as I struggled with the Pamuk books I can't get them out of mind.
There are only a few of my friends who will even get what I'm yammering on and on about right now. Because it's ... just ... a little ... loopy. 

My Happy Place

The other day a woman stopped me as I was coming out of the Sports Club. She teaches yoga at the club. She offered to come to my home and teach me yoga. Very nice I thought. In a way. I said I do yoga every day. I started doing yoga years ago with Lilias on PBS. She said me too! But there was a look on her face. Like she knew I was at the club so I did some kind of exercise. She thought yoga might be good for me. Because ... yoga is good. It all might have been benign. But what would make her pick me? And why did she look surprised that I already did yoga? I mean. People occasionally compliment me for being at the club. I feel like it's so mysterious that I ... a fat person ... moves.
Of course I could be imaging any mal intent. It might all be well intended. It just feels. Off.

The pool is my happy place. I always want to be there. It isn't a discipline. I'm not always in the mood to be around people but I always want to swim.
My yoga practice isn't grand. I've focused on being consistent. Its more important to me to do it every day than to do more. It's a time of reflection. Stretching helps my joints.
If I don't swim I do a short session with some hand weights. I feel like I need to keep my arms strong. I like it least of all. For some reason I did like doing weights when I was in New York. When I'm doing it now I try to remember that. It just bores me. 
Tomorrow is the first day of the year and people are going to stop eating things they think are bad and start some kind of program. The parking lot at the club will be full and obnoxious. I just feel like we'd all be better to find a happy place. I know of at least one person who loves to walk. In this town people love all kind of out door things. Wind surfing, of course. River sports in general. Skiing in the winter. It's happy stuff. Women in the dressing room at the club often seem slouched. Resigned. There to do what they should do. And it doesn't seem to last.
Sometimes when the aerobics for people with arthritis class looks bored and a good song comes on I start dancing and sometimes they do too. We swing out.
My big push on this last day of the year is to clean the nest. It's going well. I clean for awhile and then I write a bit. I made it through the holly-daze with a few tears, a lot of time slumped in the chair under a blanket drinking Throat Coat watching Inspector Morse. It might sound dreary but it wasn't. It was subdued. I got some really nice gifts. I have a sense of what I will and will not be able to do in the future. I feel really lucky to have my nest and my friends and my books and ... my happy place.

Silent Night

There was a time in my early twenties in Boulder when I walked around taking chugs out of bottle of Triaminic. I had chronic bronchitis and was always coughing. I could have/should have been in a bed with a spoon for my medicine. Drinking it on the street felt so ... damaged. I liked that feeling at the time. I liked feeling poor (I actually was) and sick (again, I was) and ... damaged.
I might be remembering this because I've had some kind of crud. It starts with watery eyes and sore sinus. I start popping Wellness Formula and drinking Throat Coat and it goes away. It's been going on for weeks. This last week was the worse. There is a part of every day when I feel better. And then it returns.
I never used to buy Kleenex. I used toilet paper and paper towels and even cloth hankies. It seemed an unnecessary expense. When the mommie came to town I made sure to have Kleenex because she was a princess. Now I have a box in every room.
No longer romancing damage. I am warm, resting and medicated and can wipe my nose with comfort.
I just read:Where the Heart Beats. It's about John Cage and the many artists of his time and Zen. He was compelled by sound but searched for silence. He did a piece in which a piano player walked on stage, sat at a beautiful grand piano and ... did nothing. Some people walked out but many people became aware of their reactions to silence.  He was after that awareness.
I saw James Hillman years ago. He was promoting Dream Animals (which now sits on my fireplace). A young woman asked him a question. He was a very tall, lanky fellow. He sort of leaned back, rested one arm on the the other. His finger rested on his lips. He was quiet for quite awhile. The young woman stuttered a bit. The room squirmed. When he answered the question it felt like his answer came from a deep and well considered place. 
We can't really ever be silent. Our bodies make noise. Our blood pump. Our synapses whine. We can listen with awareness and a sort of distance. Or maybe we just learn to rock with the beat.
I've been looking for my copy of Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. Can't find it. I realized that I have most of my spiritual and psychology books on the top shelf where I can't reach them. I guess I felt like I was done with self improvement. Hard to imagine since it's been the ongoing theme of my life. Not so much to escape or even heal the ... damage. Rather to live with it. Attentive and sort of distant.
All of these musings have been filling my holly-daze. It's been snowing all day. Mr Berlin should be happy. There's nothing so quiet as the sound of snow falling.
The nest smells like roasted garlic and Thieves Oil.
If you're reading this I am wishing you all the best. 

Object Lessons

When I moved into the nest so much of what I had dragged from SF looked better. There's no logic to that but it was true. Things that I'd barely looked at found primary places on walls and shelves. Everything seemed new. Then the Mommie moved to the Hood and brought so many things from our shared past. I wrote about a few of them, the Grandmom's chair specifically. There was furniture, photos, bric-a-brac from the Grandma's home and the Mommie's home. It felt like my entire life was represented. There are things that transport me back in memory. This Christmas has been overwhelming in terms of objects of memory. 
DeAnna decorated the nest. I might have done 5% of the decorating. She did the things I couldn't do physically, which is most of it. Last year I wrote About the Mommie's Christmas village. It is now sitting on the shelf about my desk.

I remember watching the Mommie arranging it on the buffet in her dining room. She took so much pride and pleasure in it. I wanted her to have it out in her room at the assisted living facility. DeAnna helped me with that as well. I knew the Mommie would worry about leaving the lights on all night so I talked it over with her but she said it was OK to leave it them on. That night after dinner some of the ladies came back to her room to see it. She told me on the phone when I called to say goodnight. A short time later they called to tell me that she had fallen. She was trying to turn off the lights and her feet got tangled in the cords. She looked like someone had beaten her. My entire being hurts when I think about it. I planned to put it where it is now so she could see it on the weekends but she was gone before the next Christmas. So I look up at it and am swarmed with memory and feeling.
I was always adamant about having a tree. Usually small. Even in New York where I had none of my ornaments and the really small and raggedy tree I got blocked the narrow space, I had a tree. Two years ago I couldn't find a tree that would fit into the really small space I have for one. I did find a live tree in a pot that was perfect. After Christmas I planted it in Gayle's back yard where it is reported to be very happy. It's a spendy way to have a tree but it feels better than dragging the tree corpse out the door. So...I have another tree in a pot this year.
Many of the ornaments were gifts. Many are from the Mommie's trees. I stare at it and remember.
There's a lot of chatter about the value of downsizing. I know it's a good thing. I feel like I've been doing it for the last five years. But these objects have sentience. I'm not interested in blank walls and empty shelves. I like color and texture and things that are held together with glue.
I was just reading about a Zen master's satori. Everything (including him) went transparent. We live in shimmering illusion. Beauty is a dream. I may not be a candidate for Satori. I'll be enjoying the shimmer to much. 

One Year

I don't like euphemisms. I say I'm fat because I am and I don't need to back away from that fact. It's a simple descriptive word. But talking about death has been a study in euphemisms. I find myself squirming away from the most simple word: dead.
Today marks a year from when the mommie ... died. When I've seen people who I haven't seen for awhile and they ask about her I say she's gone. It feels like the simplest way to say it. But gone? Where did she go? I've said she passed. Also seems like way not to say dead.
I was thinking about how we say birthday but not deathday. Birthday is about a beginning. Death is about an ending. We celebrate beginnings. Deathday feels morbid. I'm just not sure it should.
I heard Neil deGrasse Tyson being interviewed by Larry King talking about death. He talked about what happens with the body. So very science like. He wants to be buried instead of cremated because he likes the idea that his body will be consumed by the earth and become part of what keeps biological life growing. He has no evidence that anything happens to his -soul(?). Might not be the word he used.There may be no evidence. It's just never made sense to me that what ever it is that animates us (soul, spirit, personality) is just gone when we die. Nature doesn't waste anything so why would that energy be wasted? It's so vital and diverse.
In my life I've had many beliefs about what happens after death but now I have none. I told the mommie a story about her husband going to heaven early so he could build her a geodesic dome and plant a garden, which would have been his idea of heaven. I told her a story about her family coming to visit and welcoming her. And I hope she had that experience, even if it was only in the last flickers of brain waves. My only wish is that there be moment of revelation. A moment when it all makes sense. But even that is really a limit. What happens next might just be beyond our imagination.
The mommie is with me in so many objects, needlepoint pillows, cross stitch pictures, photos and (of course) frogs. Memories, good and bad. Songs. But she is ... gone.
Friends get tired of sadness. I've been trying not to talk about it too much. But today I am sad. I was sad a year ago but sadness changes shape. Last year it felt dense and heavy, like concrete. Over the year I've been knocked down by waves of sadness. Sometimes it's more like a breeze. Superficial and brief. Today it's like an ache. But it feels normal, in a way. Of course I'm sad. I don't feel like I need to work too hard to feel anything else.
It's grey and rainy. Perfect sadness weather. My plan is nothing special. I'm going to make soup and read and let the tears fall when they come. I'm going to feel through it. 

Horripilation

I love dictionaries. I said that to David Meltzer once and he asked - which one? It never occurred to me there was a difference. I longed for my own OED but now they don't print them anymore. It's all on line.
There were years when I mostly read in bed during whatever amount of time I had before sleep took me. If I came across a word I didn't know I'd get up, go to the living room and look it up. Sometimes. I couldn't always push the covers away.
I just finished a book by John McPhee. His writing makes everything interesting for me. A whole book about Oranges! In the new book he writes about writing in terms of his career, editing, reasons for a given topic. He started thinking about oranges because he stopped at a fresh squeezed orange juice machine regularly and noticed changes in the color. I love that. In a sentence describing his reaction to a certain fellow he used the word horripilation. These days I reach for my phone and am always a bit surprised when the word appears after a few letters. It's one reason I might like a Kindle. You just click on the word. You stay under the covers in any case. McPhee has been gifting me new words for years.
I just watched the new documentary about Joan Didion. She's gifted me new words, specifically meliorative. After looking up the word there is the effort to use it in your life. I remember walking around with that word in my head waiting for a reason to use it. After a while the word is there whether I use it or not.
When I was in college I spent a lot of time with two young women. They made fun of my 'big words'. I didn't really know what they meant. I wasn't doing anything on purpose. Even worse was the time in my MFA program when a young man asked me why I used so many SAT words. Somehow I thought people who were trying to be writers might share my love of new (to me) words. Another person in the program felt that words that were too obscure made things too hard for the reader. Imagine the expletives that came to mind. 
Chiaroscuro was the last word that caught me. I think it must have been in something by Ferrante. I made a sticky and hung it on my desk. It's not a word that I can imagine using but it does come to mind when I look at Kristina's photos. It stuck with me because it's just so beautiful. I'm not sure horripilation will stick with me. I don't have the experience.

#metoo

Years ago a friend read a draft of my book and noticed that I hadn't written any of my abuse story. There were a few reasons. One of which was it would have hurt the mommie. I wasn't just protecting her. I was protecting me from her reaction. She was not great with emotional complexity. And when I told a favorite aunt, she didn't believe me. It ruined our relationship.
There are so many repercussions from abuse. For me there was the bolt to my nervous system when the physical act occurred. And the mad scramble in my mind trying to understand what had happened and trying to deny it. It messed with my sense of my ability to understand experience. It gifted me a nagging inner drone of self doubt. And then there was wondering why the people around me didn't know. I know my behavior changed. My doubt was augmented by the sense that I wouldn't be believed. I never regretted not telling the mommie. I paid a price for not telling but I feel like I might have paid a different kind of price if I had.
For so many years I told people moments after I met them. My feeling was that it was obvious there was something wrong with me and if they knew they would understand. I didn't have the money to do therapy but I read books. So many books. Trying to understand myself. Trying to free myself.
We're in the 'me too' moment. I think it is powerful and important but I also am not sure that it will create change. There are so many moving parts to any abuse story. Stories in the news currently focus on the work place in which it's really always about power. In my story it was about a profound lack of understanding. There may have been elements of power but it was really someone who just thought he was being playful and loving. I'm not trying to minimize what he did, or rationalize. I do not forgive him. I am however very clear that he cared about me. The way he expressed that care was confusing and harmful and wrong.
I worked in restaurants and hung around rock and roll bands. The double entendres flew and I was better at them then many of the men. The line between an inappropriately sexualized environment and an Eros playground should be drawn with care. Even in those worlds we all sensed when things had crossed the line and we often blanched together.   
It's not like there was just one abuse story in my life. There are always a million stories in most women's lives. And there was another reason I didn't write about it. I'm fat. My book is a memoir about growing up fat in the particular time in history. It was a time full of pop psychology and quick fix solutions. There is an idea that abuse and weight gain are connected. And maybe they are sometimes. But it's not useful except in very individual and personal ways. In my case I was fat before the abuse. I was fat after the abuse.
I will say that I thought someone wanting to be with me romantically would be a function of something miraculous and that was about my weight. For years I thought that if someone did want me the weight would magically fall off my body. There is an intersection of abuse stories and internalized weight oppression. But, again, it's very individual and very personal and so often overly underlined.
In some ways being fat gave me a way to pass through the world of men with out fear. I wasn't sexually important so they didn't act out around me. They confessed and confided and trusted the way I made it all OK. I didn't always make it OK but looking back I sometimes wonder if I slipped into a need to make things easy for them. And that most certainly comes from the struggle to accept the abuse.
I often feel that life is about holding conflict in a way that doesn't minimize offence and doesn't allow erasure of the offender. We have to understand each other. However, it isn't my job to do the work for my offender. The abuse had a terrible impact on my sense of self and my relationships. It's my job to hold what happened to me. At 64 I feel like I have things in a good place but I'm not really sure if that's true or if I somehow believe it doesn't matter any more.
I've been annoyed by men wanting to add their abuse stories. They need their own #. The process needs to be specific before it can be universal. And I wish I'd see some kind of # from men trying to understand how they are complicate.
For me, #metoo is about breaking silence. Would I be breaking my silence if the mommie were still here? Probably not.
As I am writing this I feel I am being too cerebral. I don't actually feel cerebral but I save my rage and grief and confusion for the spaces in which I feel entirely safe. There aren't many of them.

My Heart

The first time I saw him he was sitting behind the desk in the poetry office of my small college. He was back-lit by a window that was not exactly stained glass but had some kind of filter or color. His head was turned and he was looking up. He had an aquiline nose and soft brown curls around his shoulders. It was like a pre-raphaelite portrait. My heart stopped. It's a moment I will never forget.
He taught a class at the college, which I took. It was interesting. There was never any energy between us. He didn't even seem to want to be my friend which was not something I experienced very often at that time. I wasn't exactly in love. I was ... I dunno. Compelled. I wanted to connect.

We walked out of a restaurant in SF and my friend pointed out that he was standing a few feet away. His hair was longer and white but otherwise he looked the same. Just. Beautiful. I said his name. I said, you don't recognize me do you? He didn't but he smiled.
Right before all of that I'd heard the story of a friend who had an aneurysm a few feet from where we stood. Her partner's eyes filled with tears as she told me. Waves of memory shook me on that corner.

I don't really claim anywhere as home.  I grew up in my grandparents house being told the mommie and I were lucky to live there. We were always going to move when the mommie could afford it. We had a small apartment for a few years and then moved to a house in Maryland when the mommie married K. When I graduated from high school I rambled around. Landed in Colorado for a long time. And then New York and SF. Everywhere felt temporary. But in SF I felt home. I felt congruous and right. I didn't leave because I wanted to and ... you know. Like the song says. I left my heart.
He didn't turn out to be the love of my life. San Francisco is not my home no matter how it feels. I can't even imagine how I could be there again.
So. I'm back in my nest. I do love my nest. Baring unforeseen circumstance I should be here for what's left of my life. It feels like my home. I've made it my home. To the extent that I am able to feel at home. It just doesn't come naturally.
But my heart ...
I've always given my heart too easily. To men who didn't really want it. To organizations and beliefs in which it never fit. To jobs that barely noticed when I left. I was always willing to lay it down.
I often refer back to that conversation between Moyers and Parker Palmer. You can watch it here. It feels relevant all these years later. In it he articulates a notion of the tragic gap.

"The tragic gap, and I call it tragic not because it's sad. It is. But more fundamentally because it's an inevitable part of the human condition.

Tragic in the sense that the Greeks talked about it. Tragic in the sense that Shakespeare talked about it. The tragic gap is the gap between what's really going on around us, the hard conditions in which our lives are currently immersed, and what we know to be possible from our own experience."

He talked about it especially in the context of middle age and depression.

"I was living by oughts that weren't mine to act out. I mean, there are a million oughts in the world. There's a million ways in which I ought to be serving the world. But the ways I'm gifted to serve and the opportunities that come to me to serve are not a million. They're more like one, two, three, four dozen over the course of a 70-year journey."

We drove back into the Gorge through a cloud of smoke from the fires that were still raging. It was unnerving. I never felt at risk but it's unnerving to be so close to so much damage. We had a few days of rain and things seem to have calmed down. But now there are worries about landslides.

Two moments now. Two that organize around a man who doesn't remember me. I don't even mind. It's just my heart. It's on a corner in North Beach.
I mean. I'm here in my nest. In the chair by the window with a book. The sun making me woozy. The nest smells like peaches and tomatoes. There are dahlias and marigolds on the counter. I'm fine.
But my heart...

"Because if you don't have a capacity to hold the tension in your heart between reality and possibility then you're just going to give up eventually."

Care

The bulk of this post is the one I mentioned having finished a few weeks ago. I don't really try to match my writing with current events but this one is a personal dump and had nothing to do with what felt like very important events of the day. Ironically this week because of the flooding in Houston there is more news that connects to my post. There was on photo in particular that felt like a gut punch. In it a group of older women in what looks like night gowns are sitting wast deep in flood water. There is reporting about their eventual rescue but that photo haunts me. They look so alone and vulnerable. It was always one of my biggest fears. The mommie and I being stranded in some kind of disaster. Me not being able to take care of her.  


I think a lot about care giving. Both in terms of individual care givers and care facilities. I've been saying that I feel like my grieving process for the mommie is relatively normal. It's cyclical. Rises and falls. Sometimes a tight circle that keeps me on the verge of tears for days. Sometimes wide. Days go by. But my feelings about so many things that happened during her last few years always feel like they're right under the surface.
The first "senior village" the mommie moved into seemed really nice. She was still in great shape. Active, alert. Her husband was at first but there was evidence that he had a few mini stokes and he was slowing down. They lived in a sort of town house. Small in comparison to how they had been living but a nice size. There was a dining room in a building a short walk from their place and a hair salon. Handy men. Grounds keepers. There was an assisted living section with limited medical care but nothing for dementia or Alzheimer's. It worked quite well for a few years but I knew she was worried about what would happen to him if she passed first. That combined with boredom and a love of change caused her to move to the next senior community.
Senior communities may have assisted living and memory care but many are just enclaves for older people who are still independent. The second place was extremely expensive to enter but promised levels of care that should have carried the resident all the way through any aging process. They were new and developing. Mom's cottage wasn't quite finished when they first moved in. She loved it. She was still active and alert. Her husband's decline continued and one night, after they'd returned home from a day of doctor visits and dining out, he fell down and never got back up.
She was there another two or three years and her decline began. She made the choice to leave but not happily. As we drove away she stared at her little home and I knew she was afraid and sad. I held her hand but I couldn't really comfort her. She had to let go of so much. Furniture. Memories. Friends.
The big problem with the second place was that even though they had the facilities to care for her they didn't have a system to track her decline. She was neither willing nor able to make choices about her care needs and they weren't watching. I was but I lived on the other side of the country.
I managed to get her to stop driving by having temper tantrums when she did. I interviewed home health care so I would have them at the ready and tried to set some systems in place but that last year was nerve wracking. And when I arrived for what I thought was a visit I saw that things were not good. By then she'd made the choice to leave but I still cringe when I think of that last year on her own.
I chose the first assisted living place in Hood River in too much of a rush but I feel like I might have chosen it even if I hadn't been in a rush because the apartments were bigger. It was horrible. The second was wonderful by comparison but fraught with the same problems of all the other places. Under-staffing. Not great food. In many ways all these placed say here's a facility, here's your options. But they don't handle the transitions from one level of decline to the next very well.
To be fair, it's hard. The mommie was independent and stubborn. Determined to do things her way and not really able to see what she could no longer do. As much as I wanted her to do the things I needed her to do I hated messing with her autonomy. And institutions are rightly not permitted to mess with someone's autonomy.
Most of the individual care givers were great but there were problems. We were very lucky to have Mandy as her main care giver other than me. But she was in a facility. And by the end Mandy and I did all the care. We had very little help from the facility.
You understand from the beginning that if the care needed is more than the facility can provide you will need to move. My mother was (essentially) evicted from the last two places she called home. She was very sick both times. That is one of the things I cannot let go off. The meanness of that fact. The first place was actually mean. The second was not. I feel they just panicked. But the fact is she had no where to go except for the nest. The nest is a perfect size for me. Not as much for both of us. Twice I had to turn my small sanctuary into a nursing home. Several times I looked for a larger place we could move into. But I couldn't care for her alone and the cost of home health care is off the chart.
Most of these places are well intended but they are all a bit of a scam. It's really hard to predict the ageing process. Sudden decline is unexpected and often confusing. I always felt like I was playing catch up with the mommie in terms of my understanding of where she was at. I was there enough to notice subtle changes but caregivers who aren't supposed to spend much time with any given person may miss things. Even physical changes sneak up on you. If Mandy hadn't been with the mommie five days a week and had such familiarity with her body things would have been missed.
In the example of the second place the mommie chose they offered so much but didn't really have the resources to fulfill those promises. Despite the huge amount of money she paid to get in and the huge amount she paid every month the more she needed the longer her bill got. Five dollars for the nurse to stop by and check a bandage. Twenty for the guy who did her shopping. On and on. If you're in good shape when you go in and die before you get too sick (in mind or body) then it's all good. But the more care you need the more you pay. Which is why I will always think of assisted living as a scam.
There was one extremely difficult event when the mommie was still in her house in NC. She had fallen in the bathroom and there was a huge mess. I called for help and two of the snottiest girls I've ever met came. They did the bare minimum and left me to try and get her settled, clean up the mess and we had just returned from shopping. The car door was open and there were bags strewn through the kitchen. I remember thinking that if I had walked past that situation as a stranger I would have tried to help. The lack of kindness was infuriating. I have a long list of moments of kindness in my experience of trying to take care of her but the moments when a "it's not my job" attitude prevailed were so shocking that they haunt me.


I don't know why this gets stirred up in me. I wrote most of this before I saw the picture of the women in the water so it wasn't that. Today is just a bad day.

Words. No words.

I had finished a post a few weeks ago and was about to post when Charlottesville happened. I never listen to the president. He's never said anything useful or interesting. I also know the news I watch will pull stuff and replay it if I ever miss anything of any import. But I listened to the repulsive news conference in which he talked about "both sides." Dumbstruck. Not surprised but dumbstruck. Twitter and Facebook exploded. I retweeted and shared but I couldn't form my own words.
There are times when I am wary of being part of the noise. Opinion is the new opiate of the masses. People talk about silence being consent. I'm not sure about that. I think there are always people doing great work quietly in the background. I'm not doing anything really. I'm just always wanting to find the most useful conversations.
And. Sometimes ya just got to vent. If you come to my nest I will vent. I will prattle and sputter and spit and tirade. But I can't always form a thought that feels useful. There's so much (understandable) rage. It knocks me back. Makes me feel hyper-vigilant and wary. A few weeks went by and the storm did not abet. It just got wilder. It's hard to say it got worse because it's such a sustained horror. A dull ache.
The eclipse seemed to lighted things up. People were upbeat. And then he said something stupid. I don't even remember what. This weekend is (and should be) about hurricane watch and he drops a few bombs into the fray. It's. Just. So. Wrong.
I don't know how you stay grounded with this much fury always being stirred up.
I'm reading a novel set in the Nigerian civil war and the birth of Biafra. The stories are about individuals but the politics are always hovering. The radio is always on waiting for news. But life keeps chugging along. People get married. Babies are born. Anniversaries and birthdays are celebrated. The school year starts. Someone quits a job. Someone finds a job.  Someone gets a new car. People lose loved ones. Funerals and graduations and life just chugs along. But always hovering are the politics of the time.
Every morning I hope for the turn around. Articles of impeachment have been filed and are ignored. In Houston today nobody has time to think about pardons and rights and outrage.
I keep trying to find usefulness.
 

Roxane. Sigh.

I've been mildly obsessed with Roxane Gay. It started after the This American Life episode. (My post about that here.) But I became aware of Roxane Gay much earlier because she was on MHP a few times. (I really miss that show.) She was always smart and charming and fun. If she had reason to call out a diversity list she always included fat.
She's every where right now. On radio. In magazines and news papers. She was in Portland the other night. So close and yet so far.
I wrote a long post about her and then deleted it because I found examples of her saying things that knocked down my concerns. Really smart things. It's tough because the articles about her memoir call out the things that are the hardest for me to take in. There's what she wrote and there's how people are talking about what she wrote. It is hard for me to accept the narrative of getting raped and then getting fat. Not hard to accept that it happens but hard to have them causally linked.
Fat women get raped too. I remember hearing the story of a fat woman who reported her rape and was told by the police that they didn't believe she was raped because of her weight. Eventually, they took her to the hospital where she over heard the doctors arguing about who would have to do the exam. It's an old and worn out idea that gaining weight protects women from sexuality. But it is an idea that more than one woman has embraced. Roxane knows that the weight isn't really going to protect her but she still sees her body as a self generated fortress.
I'm not being critical of her. I'm critical of the ideas but I've held them. I was always fat so I don't have an event that caused me to become fat. But in my young adult life I believed if I got clear I'd get thin. It would just happen. And I believed that my weight was generated by bad psychology and fear. I thought true love might melt it off.
One of the words she uses a lot is nuance. She is a fan of nuance. Me too.
In a way the rape almost grants her a kind of understanding for her weight. Like she had an understandable reaction to the wounding. And her repeated acknowledgment of wanting to be thinner makes her a good fat person. I really want to be clear about what I'm saying. She was being trolled by fat haters before the memoir. I don't know if it's worse but she still gets trolled be fat haters. She isn't having an easy time of it. But there is a way in which the narrative about her is about the rape and ... that's why the fat. It's slippery and not useful.
I'm obsessed because her book and her experience is driving a conversation about life in a fat body right now and it's frustrating for me. It's her story and I can't pick it apart looking for faulty reasoning. I can (I am) but that seems like bad faith. I feel a lot of the things she does. I also think the size acceptance movement is (somewhat) driven by younger smaller fat woman. They buy clothes at Torrid and pose with pizza and it's all so ... what ever. She thinks the acceptance movement is important but she can't get there.
I hate acceptance. Why should I have to work to accept something so fundamental about who I am? My project is to up root all the internalized body oppression I've been FED all of my life including today. (Lefty news woman making sure everyone knows she's always on a diet.)
When Roxane was being interviewed by Terry Gross she was asked why she didn't get bariatric surgery. In the book she talks about having met with a doctor to discuss it and making the (very wise) choice to not do it because ... (I'm paraphrasing) it's dangerous and it doesn't work. I was taken aback by the question. I mean. Is that just the thing that people do now? Not join a diet club or a gym? Just get your body hacked?
Roxane is said to be brave because she wrote this book. I think she's brave to go through the process of thinking about her fat body in public. I want to be supportive. I want her to get to where she wants to be, not where I want her to be. And...she is thinking about her fat body in public. I could quote twenty insightful things she's said that are so important about life in a fat body. She has a great analysis of how the culture impacts our lives. And then twenty that make life in a fat body sound so horrible that you imagine people running to join a gym.  I want deeper analysis. I want surprising attitudes. I want new ideas. She's often pretty good at those things.
I wish we could uncouple the rape narrative from the fat body narrative. Always. I realize it's a truth. But it's not the truth and, again, it's not useful. I wish we could uncouple the food and exercise narratives from the fat body narrative. It's (pardon the expression) too broad a brush.
One of the things that influenced me to own the fact of my body was a line from a Frank Zappa song.
"there will come a time when you won't even be ashamed if you are fat." Startling idea. Rocked me to the core. I decided to work on getting there. I feel like Roxane is not exactly ashamed of her body. It's more complicated and ... nuanced. But when I was reading the book I often wanted to grab her and beg her to put on something brightly colored and go out to dinner with me. Let's talk too loud and eat too much. Let's be who we want to be and not have a thought about the size of our ass. And if people are asshats let's roll our eyes and smile.
There may come a time ...

Grandmom's Chair

I have my Grandmom's chair in the library. And the footstool that my uncle made. My aunt made the needlepoint cover for it. I can picture Grandmom sitting in the chair, feet on the footstool, reading the paper. In my memory she is huge, dominate, not to be messed with and beautiful. White hair and fierce blue eyes. Skin so pale and paper thin.
The other day I was moving some books around. I had pulled the chair out to get to the shelf. When I turned around I realized the top of the chair was at my waist. I have been aware that the chair is smaller than my memory of her in it but standing there it became even more real to me.
I say I am a forth generation fat woman. I am talking about my maternal lineage. The women on my Dad's side were big but not fat. Although they thought they were. They talked about needing to lose weight all the time. They also seemed to think my mother and I were fatter. We were.
Looking at the picture of my great grandmother I see that she isn't exactly fat. She's round. My grandmom was round. They had bellies and breasts and thighs. My grandfather was tall and thin. My aunt took after him, tall and thin. It was a source of frustration for my mother who gained weight eating less than her sister. Genes are a grab bag.
I am fatter than all of the women in my family. I could put Mom's shoes into my shoes. I was a head taller.
Grandmom had no shame about the size of her body. It was just part of who she was. My mother was always trying to change her body. She sat sipping her liquid diet drink while the rest of us had dinner. Grandmom did not approve and she let it be known.
Grandmom had to walk up two flights of stairs to get into her house. She had to walk up one and a half to use the bathroom. For years she went down one to do laundry and carried the basket back up and up another to hang the laundry in the yard. She worked in her garden which was all slope. We walked to the store and the bakery and post office and church. She was on the move all the time.
When Grandmom's bridge club was in session and I came home from school they discussed my weight. At some point Grandmom would grab my arm, squeeze and say, "she's big but she's solid. I was never sure what that meant but it felt like she was saying my body was OK the way it was and no one should think other wise. I know that part of why I experience being fat as just ... my body and not a disease ... is because of my grandmom. I'm big but I'm solid.
I'd be afraid to sit in Grandmom's chair. It's very low and narrow. I'd be afraid I wouldn't fit and I wouldn't be able to get out. But I love it. Mom had it recovered at some point in lovely rose covered upholstery. But I sat in it when I was young.

Year Sixty Four

If you add six and four you get ten. Ten in numerology is a really great number. In the Tarot the ten of cups and the ten of pentacles are both really great. The ten of swords and rods are a bit problematic but they have to do with the completion of ideas. I'm not all that into numerology or Tarot but I do like when things add up. This feels like ten year.
I moved to the Hood and turned sixty, which felt auspicious. This feels like the top of a really hard climb. Now I can sit still and look around. Who knows? Maybe there's a longer tougher climb ahead but for the moment ... I'm just gonna sit here.
I don't have much going on about the age thing. I'm fine being the age I am. I don't like how hard it is to keep my body together. I can take nothing for granted. Drink too much? I might fall down and it's way harder to get back up. If I get sick I get really bleepin sick. If I get tired I get zonked. It takes a sort of hyper vigilance to feel good. I took a lot of chances in my youth and I liked feeling that wild.
Eh. That was then.
I have recently begun thinking I'm almost seventy. It's not true. It's just the way my mind works.
For so many years I drove myself crazy on my birthday. And I'm a little crazy today. Just a little. I'm going to swim. I'm going to get a massage. Mandy made me a cake.
So.
Sixty Four.
Let's see how it goes.