Little Birds

No one reads this blog but me. And I don't read it, at least not more than the sentence preceding the one I'm typing right now. There's something sort of lovely about this, but also something sort of lonely.

Talen is back from Brooklyn. I didn't ask him why... or what happened...he just gave me a hug and asked me "#3? With raisin toast?"

I didn't even know I missed him.

Wow, I'm lonely.

Today I got sent home on call (hooray). It's funny, you know, the hospital forgot to put my overtime in my last paycheck (nice) and that was a loss of something like $2500--and I am facing the last three days of the month with exactly 92 cents in my checking account--and $11.88 in outstanding checks--and I'd still rather have the time. Money be damned. You can never get a day back.

I'm worried about my patient, though. A little old lady. I've been taking care of her for the last month. Little old ladies always get under my skin. Farmer's lung. She has a year to live.
Husband's a trucker. He just loves her, loves her. She's tiny and funny and cranky. True what my grandmother said--no one loves you for being easy. She's getting stronger. I told them not to accept this prognosis--I think if she got home and got happy she might live a lot longer. I don't know how to be kind to people, really. I get so scared and stiff. How do you be as good to people as they deserve without visiting your own crap on them? Without your ego and your need for approval tainting your interactions?

No one will ever love me that way. I want it too much.

Wiz loves her, too. He's usually really hard assed with patients--good--but kind of hard. But he treats her like a little child. He picked her up in his arms to move her to the chair and called her 'pumpkin.' Sometimes, I really love Wiz. And sometimes he's just repulsive, like when he's walking around with shit on his scrubs and eating graham crackers off the ICU floor just to gross me out. "Ummm--nothing like the taste of acinetobacter in the morning...breakfast of champions..."

She apparently takes in strays--wild animals find their way to her door, her family tells me. I was running with Lilly in the cool spring twilight, thinking about this, when I noticed a bird sitting at the side of the road. It didn't fly off as we ran by it.
"Do you think it's sick?" Lilly asked.
It was a sparrow. A girl sparrow. I couldn't see anything wrong with her, but her head looked a little funny, and when I put my hand next to her, she hopped onto my finger. I cupped my hand around her and stood up. The sparrow remained on my finger, peeping and trembling.
We began to walk home. I felt strangely gifted, as if I were holding a star instead of a bird, or as if the trembling hand of an ancient god was holding mine, some rare faery spirit, reaching out from their world. Everything seemed to still and come into an almost painful focus, the way it does sometimes when you are making love with someone you really love. Lilly ran on ahead back to the house to get a box. I kept walking with the little bird cupped in my hand.
As I passed under my neighbor's big pine tree--funny how some trees somehow have their own little world around them, isn't it? I mean, I'm walking on the chattahoochee in my street, past the magnolias and crabapples and forsythia, and then I'm under this pine, and all the sudden, there's this green shadow and sense of the black forest, and I'm thinking--wow--six feet of a completely different planet under this tree--and the sparrow suddenly takes flight, as if she could do it all along, and flies up into the pine.
Thinking she might be sick and fall out of the tree, I stood there underneath it, looking up into the dense green branches for the bird. I could hear her, but I couldn't see her. Lilly found me this way, when she came running back with the shoebox.
"What are you doing?"
I told her, not taking me gaze from the tree, still looking up. "I'm just waiting to see if she's okay."
Then a big splat of bird poop hit me on the shoulder.
Deadpan, Lilly says:"I think she's probably okay."
"Right."
I can't believe how quickly things can go from the sublime to Three Stooges in this world.
I told my patient this story, thinking she'd laugh, but she just looked at me and started weeping inconsolably.
Then, after about 5 minutes, she held out her little club fingered hands and mimed squishing the bird. She shood a finger at me as if to say, "That's what you should have done."
There and back again.
That's my 1/2 hour.

Rice

Did you know there's a rice shortage?

That's kind of scary.

I know things are getting tighter and tighter and that I have less and less money, even though I'm making more than I ever have.

I think we all might be getting into trouble.

I'm making rice right now. Organic short grained brown valencia. I'm going to heat it up with last night's black beans. It's the quick and easy recipe from Memories of a Cuban Kitchen, my secret weapon. I love Cuban food.

In my book, there's an inscription: "To Willow, the best husband in the world. Love, Diana and Dean.

Kids are back, I'll tell you the rest of the story tomorrow.

Jealousy breathing

I'm trying to figure out why I'm so stupid. If you have any insight into why you are so stupid, please drop me a line. Maybe it will help me figure myself out.

I found out through very devious means that I'm completely ashamed of, prompted by the usual psychic sirens that LIES LIES LIES are being told.. that Jay had sent a book of poetry to his ex girlfriend. A book of poems by Elizabeth Desmond. Then he followed it up with a sample--one about plums...except it's really about sex, and probably, in his mind, it's about sex with her, the fucking ratfuck weasel ratfuck.

She's married. They had an affair about 4 or 5 years ago. He pushed her to leave her husband and she did--and then Jay dropped her. Which made her mad. Strange girl. She called on Christmas Eve this year.

I've thought about doing all sorts of things. Like sending her husband a note, or covering Jay's car with rotten plums.

And, check this out...her name is Haley, too. Just like me and the other Hali.

I wish I didn't know the things I know. One of the problems with my practice has been that as a result of sitting all these years, I have become very good and noticing things. My ego dream has been lifted--only a little--but still--and I see things, for the most part, very clearly--except emotional realities--and I can't make strong decisions for myself. For example, I know I should leave this situation, but I'm not going to. I guess I will, eventually. But then I think of myself. I'm not married. I have male friends who send me books and cd's and visit me on vacation. My father has had close relationships with women, intellectually and spiritually intimate friendships. Are those wrong?

I want the one I'm sleeping with to think of me and me only.
The error bred into the bone is to be loved and loved alone.
My practice just falls apart when it comes to things like this.
The best I've been able to do is resolve to not check up on him and to focus more on living my life for me and mine. I'm wearing this little string around my wrist and I'm adding a bead for each day I do right. I know that's judging the day--but I'm thinking of it as a 12 step program. When my thoughts go to scenarios involving imaginary confrontations I touch the beads on my wrist and breathe and focus on the world around me. I don't think it's virtuous to spy, so I'm stopping for that reason. Things manifest at different times, when the conditions are right for them to do so.
Everyone's heart blooms when it is spring.

Mysteries

Took two weeks off.

I feel better about everything.

Went camping in the freezing rain with Jay at Horseshoe Canyon. It was beautiful.
Jay said last night, "You know, that was the best time, and it was completely accidental."
It was. We just went without checking the weather forecast, set up the tent and hoped for the best. We had some dim idea of climbing--and we did. Freezing fingers on the beautiful Arkansas rock. We just sort of arrived and made the best of it. When it was too wet, we hung out in our sleeping bags in the tent and read books. At night we drank hot Bailey's by the campfire and I got out my fiddle and played every song I knew. We ate a lot of organic cheese doodles and chocolate and I gained 5 pounds (which I actually needed to do, I was getting way too bony). We took walks through the pastures and spent about 2 hours watching baby goats. The land was a like a dream, covered with mist, greening with spring. We found an old wooden swing and climbed over boulders and harassed each other and got smelly and made shadow puppets with our hands on the tent wall. It was grey outside and in, and we totally lost track of the time. Cell phones didn't work.
Kids got back from their dad's Sunday evening. I've been having a great time, cooking, noodling around the house, bleached the basement floor, caught up on the laundry. Took Karma, my yellow lab out on long walks every day. It's been raining, but who cares?
If you're in the right space, everything feels like a pleasure.
There's this beautiful upswell of good green energy pulsing through, makes every bit of life seem beautiful.
okay, so Zen thought.....the ego judges, right, and if we'd been judging--"oh it's too cold, too wet, too this too that" to climb, we never would have gone, and we wouldn't have had the experience we had. Don't prejudge. Just show up for what's happening.
You come back from something like that and everything gets looked at fresh--you see so clearly the things that trap you!
Stupid things--like I weigh myself every day, and if I'm not where I think I should be (133 pounds), I just don't eat. Or I eat only juice. Or I eat everything I want to eat (cheese doodles) and feel guilty and crappy.
What a stupid thing to feel guilty and crappy about. I mean, I'm not out defrauding old ladies or running stop signs or jaywalking, I'm eating bad food! (Not so bad, even, I mean, nothing has to die to make cheese doodles)I'm two pounds over.
Or--I start into my old habits--"I must spend 30 minutes excercising, and 30 minutes lifting weights" I don't know. I guess that's the world of form--and, admittedly, form can save your ass. Form are the lifesaving practices of culture, they keep us from the wind and wolves. The artificial scaffolding of timekeeping keeps us reaping and sowing, managing our energies effectively--and in the Trauma Unit, form is sometimes all I have to keep me from losing my mind and throwing myself weeping over my patients broken bodies (drama!)but I guess the key is detachment--to recognize it as form and form only and not get trapped into thinking it's anything else, and to let form serve you, rather than the other way around. One hand or the other, because there have certainly been times when form was all I had, when zen has only been habit and not heart. In the space of a half hour, it will fluctuate 300 times between heart and hand.
I think I solved my koan, by the way.
What is this?
This is what.
3 years. What is this? What is this? What is this? What is this?
Then I just started giggling.

So, Tuesday, at Ernie's, Lilly and I were sitting there--and we couldn't figure out the time. All the clocks appeared to be working, but they all showed slightly different times. Lilly had ordered almost everything on the menu--french toast (which they're famous for), sausage, poached eggs, hash browns...and couldn't eat it. The check was $9.82 for two people. Only at Ernie's.
"Is it time to go?" Lilly asked.
"I don't know." I don't wear a watch because something about my electromagnetic field just screws them up, and I'd forgotten my phone.
I got up to ask April, our waitress. April's maybe 5 years younger than I am, has been working at Ernie's since she was a freshman in college. She's a little overweight, but pretty, strawberry blonde hair. She's smart, but can't seem to decide on anything to do with her life. She was getting her Ph.D in political science, then took a leave of absence, then went back, then took another leave. Then she became a realtor for like two seconds, she's got one of those voices--a whiskey voice--she's what you call a great girl. You know? Maybe 2 generations removed from the farm, hip but grounded. She's going to be the same at 50 as she is now, but it's not like that'll be bad or that she's old before her time--just consistent. So, anyways, I ask her what time it is, and she tells me--8:00. "I know," she laughs, "none of the clocks show the right time around here."
I've spent a lifetime with malfunctioning clocks--it was a lot worse before I had kids--the energy was out of control then--so I understand.
"The place is haunted," she says.
"Really?"
"Really. Clocks have not worked here since that waitress disappeared in the 70's."
"What waitress?"
"Becky Doisy." April leans back on the counter, eyes sparkling, she likes to tell a story."Becky Doisy was a waitress here, and one morning she just never showed up. They never found her, or found out what happened to her. And ever since then, the clocks haven't worked at Ernie's. Haven't you ever noticed the graffitti on the wall in the bathroom?"
Of course...I always notice it. I just never thought about it. I thought it was some movie reference or something. Ernie's graffitti is pretty erudite.
"Who Killed Becky Doisy?"
"Yep. No matter how many times we repaint the bathroom, it's always the first thing to show up. And, check this out, it comes up through the paint. Right where it was before."
"You think it's her?" I ask.
"Yeah--there's some weird shit here."
"If it's her," I muse "she's probably haunting you because whoever killed her is still showing up at Ernie's."
April stops smiling.
"You think so?"
I feel like we're in a Nancy Drew mystery all the sudden. Like a story has started that is going to take us all over and that we have suddenly become actors in something bigger. Ernie's was just a setting before, a place for lost souls to get the 3.79 breakfast special. Now there's another player.
"Well, of course. She's probably trying to let us know. You're probably still handing him biscuits and gravy."
"I never thought of that."
We look at each other. We look around the restaurant, at the regular faces we both know so well. The rain falls outside, cold and grey.
Who killed Becky Doisy?

That's my 1/2 hour.