Windmills

I'm supposed to go to Summerton with Jay today. He's got a film opening tonight. I decided not to go to the library this morning. I'm trying to download software (unsuccessfully so far) for my printer. It's taking forever.

One of the effects of the synthroid I just started taking is that at 5am I wake up wholly. No sleepiness, no cuddling the pillow. Up and out. I feel like I'm on fire. Bam. So up I went, took the damn little pill and, since I have to wait 30 minutes after taking it before I put anything in my stomach, sat zazen.

The sun rose while I was sitting. Purple and wine and gold. "Oh my goodness," I said, staring at it through the cobwebs framing my kitchen window, slurping my cafe con leche.

"I know!" Lilly yells from her bedroom. "It's wonderful."

"You're up?"

"I have to get to school early to finish my lab. I need every minute, mom. So we have to get out of here on time." She admonishes.

Back home, I decide to take a walk. I walk through the meandering black-topped streets of our neighborhood. It's overcast, but it's beautiful. The dogwoods are in bloom, they float like laughter. The redwoods line the streets, armfuls of lilacs. I love lilacs. When I was little, I used to climb out of the bathroom window at the lab school and sneak out and sit under the big lilac bushes in front and read. Hello, you've arrived, the lilacs say. You're on shore. You're safe. Welcome to life. Summer's coming. School will be out soon.

I walk through my old neighborhood, where I grew up. Down by the creek and over onto the trail they made out of the railroad tracks. It's the same walk I've taken for 35 years, rails or no. During my walk, on the way home, I become convinced that Jay is going to blow me off. He won't show up. What a bastard! I think. Four years and he just blows me off like this. I want to cry. But I won't, I tell myself. I'll just never ever speak to him again. I feel so wronged, so scorned as I walk. This beautiful spring--how could he treat me like this? The lilacs smell like regret now and betrayal.


April 23rd's a hard day for me. 3 years ago, Jay did break up with me on April 23rd. He just stopped calling. I didn't do anything. Just stopped speaking to him. "We need to talk" he said finally, after not calling for seven days. He left a message on my voicemail. "I'm just not ready for a relationship. When can we meet?" But I wouldn't meet him. Wouldn't return his calls Why talk about it? It was done. Then we ran into each other a few weeks later and started dating again as if nothing had ever happened. We never mentioned it. But, man, that was a hard three weeks.


That same day, an ex of mine, Lewis, someone I'd fallen really hard for, called. Out of the blue. "I have a new bike," he told me. "Want to try it out?" Well, of course. I'd been lying face down on the bed crying. It was colder on that April 23rd. But still just as beautiful. He showed up on this beautiful cherry red Victory motorcycle. I hadn't seen him in two years. I'd grown up with him. He's a few years younger than me. The fat kid. He's a detective now. We rode around all afternoon, barely speaking. Over the blacktops throughout the county. My fingers were numb after the ride. We sat on the rickety bench in my front yard under the redbud with him rubbing my hands between his, still not talking. While we were sitting there, my cat came running across the yard with a baby rabbit in its mouth. I yelped and rescued it. "What do I do?" I asked him.

He shook his head. "It's not going to make it." He said.

"It might make it."

"Always taking in strays, Haley," he said, shaking his head. Then he left. Last time I ever saw him.

On my walk today, I found a whole robin's egg in the gutter. I picked it up very carefully, cradling it in my hands to keep warm. Maybe there's a baby bird still in it! The rest of the walk was about the egg, warming it, wondering about whether it was possible to hatch it, worrying about not dropping it or breaking it. I stopped thinking about Jay, I just wanted to get the egg home. I stopped smelling the flowers or listening to the creek or noticing the spring.

Home, I found some old pantyhose, made a nest out of it, and put it on top of my Baldwin Acrosonic under a lamp.

Jay walked in the door. "What is that?"

"It's a robin's egg! I found it on my walk. Do you think it will hatch?"

"It might...what on earth are you going to do with a baby bird if it does? You have to feed them like every three minutes."

"I haven't thought that far. Carry it in my scrubs?"

He just laughs. "Did you know it's Cervantes' birthday today?"

Zazen on Wednesday

Seido Ronci says today, "One of my students has been blogging about me--called me the aged poet." He laughs. I mentally run through whatever entries I've made regarding Seido--and I don't think I've called him aged.

Nice to roost for a moment up there in the room, with the other students, hands in the mudra. This thing I do every day (almost) that is always the same.

I've pretty much given up.

Seido said something today--he quoted someone (I'm such a bad zen student--I can never remember who's who)--that when you do become enlightened, you will realize that you've been enlightened the whole time. That everything is and has been perfect just the way it is.

He is so scoured by Zen. He shines like coals in an alabaster bowl. I realize that I'm a little jealous of him, haven't really appreciated the gifts he brings to us. I show up, but I'm cranky and recalcitrant. I want attention. 26 years. It's still like library story hour when I was three. I can't sit still and I want to switch cushions and be the teacher's favorite. Teacher, teacher!

When he says this, I think about my patient with his brains on the pillow and his daughters weeping over him and don't think life is so perfect.

Life can be a horror, even for the good.

Lilly's back from her meeting at church. So...that's my 6 minutes.

Choices

It's Monday. I feel scourged.

Nick is trying to choose a college. He's narrowed down his choices to Sewanee and Loyola New Orleans. My father has sent me 7 emails encouraging me to help him pick a college. Duh. My parents have called three times today.

I had 4 patients over the weekend. One was a suicide. His family was mystified. Beautiful family. It came as a complete surprise. Hard not to hope. Fine line to walk. Sometimes he had responses, some times he didn't. His daughter would grasp onto these--"He's in there. Do you think he can hear me? Do you think there's hope? What would you do?"

I cop out of these questions when I can. When I can't, I stick to the truth.

"Have you seen injuries like this get better?"

"Yes." Well, I have. I had a patient whose brains would come out of his nose when I turned him. Unbelievably, he recovered. It's always amazing how much of your brain you can actually do without and not really notice. We would joke when we suctioned him and find grey matter on the pillow--"Oh, look at that...graduation..."

His sister takes me aside. "Please try not to give these girls any hope."

You try to keep yourself clear, open, present. It's hard.

"I'm so sorry," his sister told me at one point. "I'm sorry I tried to take over."

"Designer death," snorts Wiz. "Everyone wants control over everything. "

Wiz has taken a second job, he won't say where. He is clenched like a fist. Short. Exhausted. Noncommunicative and brutal when he is. No joking, no singing, no weird aphorisms or flights of philosophical soap-boxing. Work. He's checking off his tasks. He acts like a prisoner, like a cart horse.

"You have limits, too," I say to him, after Friday's shift.

"Thank you for your opinion." He says, giving me his back as he walks down the hall.

"Sauce for the goose."

"Go tell aunt Rhodie." He can't resist.

"Don't forget your medication tomorrow!" I call after him cheerfully.

He's a little better Saturday. At least he engages in banter. And he's nice to Marcy. I am submerged with my suicide.

Sunday, we have a care conference to discuss palliative and withdrawal of care. It's perfectly awful. I had a flat tire on the way to work, didn't get my cafe con leche. I also found out this week that I have some sort of growth on my thyroid I have to get biopsied. I worry about telling this to Jay. Somehow, I don't think he's the type for the long haul through sickness. My shrink disagreed with me on this point. "Look at his history," he pointed out. "the more screwed up you are, the better."

"How are you holding up?" Wiz asks me, Sunday.

Oh, good. He's back.

Someone leaves a funeral wreath in the ICU waiting room. One of our crazier family members goes screaming about this all the way to the CEO. It's our fault some lunatic leaves a funeral wreath? Now we're supposed to police the waiting room?

I admit a patient from a car accident. Miraculously all right. His buddy who was in the car with him walks out of the emergency room AMA and up into the unit. He has a gash on his head pouring blood and as he walks, you can see that his right leg is clearly broken, because the bone is torquing the skin. "I want to see Ed!" He screams. "I got to see Ed right fucking now."

"Could you please go back to the waiting room. You also might want to go back to the ER."

"I'm fine. Those fucking doctors don't know what they're doing. I want to see Ed." The same woman who screamed about the wreath screams about this, too. "He's upsetting people!" she tells Wiz. "Make him go to the doctor."

"I can't," Wiz tells her, holding her hands, "it's his choice. People make their own choices. He's not threatening anyone, and he has a friend here. If he becomes disruptive, we can call security, but otherwise, there's really nothing we can do."

"He's disrupting me!" She says.

The family decides to withdraw care. We page the palliative team. Everyone wants a piece of this death. The wife and daughters are under siege. Is there anyone out there who knows what it means to really support someone? There's a doctor in the family who goes on and on about what will happen when they remove the vent. There's a friend who keeps interrupting the wife and saying "What she's trying to say is..."

I'm so glad to get out of there. Finally the shift is over. And then at the end, one of the daughters says, "Will you be there, with him when they withdraw care?"

"I'm not working tomorrow." I tell them.

"Oh, that's too bad. Do you know who it will be?"

"No." Shit. So I went today. Put on my twin set and rode my bicycle over. The bike lock's rusted. Couldn't find socks. Is there anything that makes you feel more poverty stricken than not wearing socks? The crazy wife notices. "You're not wearing socks!" She says, pointing at my feet. I wonder if she'll complain about this, too.

"I know. My kids did the wash."

She laughs. "I have socks if you want them," she tells me.

That's my 1/2 hour.

Happy Tax Day

Tomorrow is tax day. I sent my cousin Sara a DVD of Milo and Otis.

Sara is a year younger than me. She's apparently having a nervous breakdown. My Aunt Esther, who lives in Seal Beach, in a house on beach tells my dad that this is worse than when she (Esther) had cancer and didn't know whether she would live or die. She says that Sara stands in the middle of the living room and sobs, for hours.

Esther is really an amazing person. After getting kicked out of Stephens College for inappropriate behavior, my nana, never one to admit defeat, pronounced her educated and sent her on a world tour. While circumnavigating, she met Stuart, a marine. They got married. Stuart was really good looking but a complete hick--from the Tennessee backwoods. Grew up without electricity and running water. My family, being the sniping pretentious pretenders they are predictably treated him like crap.

Stuart got even.

The only job he could get was as a gas station attendant. He worked and worked and worked. He bought the gas station. Then he worked and worked and worked. And bought another gas station. And another and another. He became a tycoon. He wore loose net shirts with big gold medallions nestled in his curly black chest hairs. He was a complete embarrassment and he could buy and sell every one of us. He and Esther had a good time, but unfortunately, Stuart was also having a good time at his office at the top of some LA High Rise. He hired pretty girls just to walk around naked and have sex with him--while he was at work! Then he fired his accountant--big mistake, because she drove right over to the house and told Esther all about it. Esther, distraught, took off to Kansas City to stay with me for a few days (I was 21). She took me out on the town--unfortunately, when it came time to pay the tab, we discovered Stuart had canceled all her credit cards and I had to pay our ginormous bill with the traveler's checks my mother had sewn into the waistband of my 501's.

They got divorced. Esther got 14 million dollars, which is ok. She married Ted, a sober decidedly unglamorous mechanical engineer who used to fly missions in Viet Nam. She finished her mental health degree and takes in disadvantaged children to foster. She also ran the guardian ad litem program. She became a mennonite. She is the most tanned, surgically altered, millionaire California girl mennonite ever. But she's so sincere and good.

So Sara. Her daughter. My cousin.

Sara was a physical therapist. She made great money. She was good at it. She has the best sense of humor--sly and dark. When I got divorced, she came down to Florida to keep me company. Worked as a traveler. Went to kickboxing with me when I was in love with my teacher and he'd rejected me and I was too proud to stop going (what an idiot. I should have stopped going. I didn't want him to think I had feelings for him.) Drove all the way from Fort Lauderdale every Saturday afternoon to do this! Then we had a fight over something silly. I can't remember what it was, and we stopped speaking. Xavier. She wasn't very nice to Xavier. Some other stuff,too, I think. I guess if I can't remember, it must not have been that important.

She went back to LA. Had a bad relationship. Quit physical therapy and became a teacher in an inner city junior high. She won best teacher her first year there. She was a great teacher, but she wanted to get married. She joined an online dating service, met a geologist and married and had three kids with him. They live in a house by the redwoods. Except something went wrong, and she packed up and left him and the kids and is now standing in my aunt's living room, sobbing. She says she doesn't know how to be a mother.

When we had our fight, after not speaking for a few months, I sent her a happy tax day card and we started getting along again. So, for the next 10 years or so, instead of a Christmas card, we would send each other Happy Tax Day cards. Then our lives got crazy--well, then she got married. She bought the kids a VHS of Milo and Otis, so, there it was at Gerbes--that's my 1/2 hour.

Gifts

Nick didn't get into Dartmouth.

But he got into Sewanee! And Loyola New Orleans! Big stuff. Unimaginable changes. What will we do without him? He's happy. He has a girlfriend who loves him and he's the district champion in Lincoln/Douglas Debate.

I'm not really surprised. He had the scores but not the grades.

Lilly went to Italy over spring break. She took 1029 pictures. She showed me all of them. They are all good. It's funny about Italy--any shot which includes the Pantheon is automatically a good shot. Very few pictures of her. 4 or 5 of her, standing in front of a fountain, looking out to the sea in Capri, hands in the pocket of her navy raincoat, auburn hair blowing around her face. Looking solemn and bemused and happy. A traveler. She told me people kept thinking she was Italian, and that only one Italian boy flirted with her. She sounded a little disappointed.

She brought us all presents--spent all the Euros, which she wasn't supposed to do--they were for emergencies, but, oh well. I now have beautiful red kid leather driving gloves and a cameo.

The cameo is of a mother and two little children standing by the sea. The mother is wearing a big hat. "See," Lilly said, "It's supposed to be you."

She also gained 4 pounds. Which made me ecstatic. "Maybe" I said, "you'll have to keep taking regular trips to Italy! Can they write a prescription for that?"

She didn't think it was funny. I always screw up. Now that the weight is finally coming back on, she's getting nervous again.

"Don't tell me I look healthy," she tells me in the car on the way back from the doctor's office. "Healthy means fat. Don't tell me anything. Are they going to let me get fat? How do we stop if we gain too much?"

We.

"Okay, Lilly," I tell her. "By healthy, I mean that hospitalization is not imminent. Is that okay?"

"Better."

But she does look healthy. All that pasta and gelato!

Thank you, Italy.

I had a dream while she was gone. I dreamt that Lilly was about 11 again. For some reason, we were in the hospital, in our Sunday best. This housekeeper, Jan, was also in the dream. She was wearing church clothes, too, along with a little sky blue hat with a veil and a round gold pin on a matching blue skirt suit. The place was flooding--the whole town was flooding. And we were trying to escape. "We need to pray the rosary," Jan said. So, in the dream, I started praying the rosary. Jan and Lilly joined me. We took turns saying hail marys. Then I woke up.

One of the things I don't even try to reconcile with my zen practice is my love of the Virgin Mary. My practice has been constant for the last 26 years, my marianism is sporadic, like a rain storm. I go a few weeks or months lighting candles and praying the rosary, then it dies down.
Our Lady of Charity is the Mary I got to know in Miami. Cobre de caridad. I used to have a candle lit to her all the time.

I think she appeared to me once. But I'm not sure. That's another story. That's my 1/2 hour.

Baxter

I haven't sat yet, today.

I woke up at 5am. Had a nightmare that I was in a reality show and one of my tasks was to be a waitress. Seido was the host of the show. It was a nightmare. I used to be a waitress. I was an awful one.

Worked the weekend, but not Friday. We have only half a floor full of patients. It's like a ghost hospital. My theory is that when people are careful about one thing, they are careful about everything. And everybody's being very careful about money right now. Everybody's very, very worried. Me, too. I think everyone feels that they were betrayed. It's hard to fix the blame, reasonably, and it probably falls squarely on our shoulders for adopting a set of values that leads basically to financial ruin and the grave. Smoking, overeating, bad nutrition and overspending on things you don't need. I mean, what did we expect?

But they, whoever they are, argued their case so convincingly. They seduced us.

I watched the Oscars last night with Lilly, and in the middle of it, they ran a spot for Master Card about a dog named Baxter. It was really cute. But what was it trying to get us to do? Go into debt! Hi, the economy's in the pit right now. Look at this cute dog, finding his way home. Debt got him home! Save cute dogs. Go into debt. Owe us.

They don't want your money. They want your time and soul for the next 30 years.

I have about 16,000 now in credit card debt. It wasn't obviously frivolous (ok, maybe some of it was). I've been paying it down steadily. Every month, there's a little less. It should be gone in 5 years.

Lilly's anorexia has been hard on us, but one of the things it has done has woken us up. It woke us up to the lie of image. You know, the images in the media work on such a subtle level, I'm almost not aware of making a choice to buy in. Cutting it out of our lives has been a blessing. But it's like the blinders have been lifted on everything else. It seems that I look at everything now and think, "What is this? Why am I choosing it?"

What builds actual power and stability in a family, in a person? The ability to be self-sustaining, right? The ability to feed and shelter oneself without being dependent on someone else, right? What does our culture do? It promotes a climate in which everyone is encouraged to mortgage their futures. In essence, it keeps us all slaves. Then they raise your rates, shorten the pay period, ruin your credit, so you can't get more purchasing power. They own you.

Part of the reason for all the foreclosures, I think, is that everyone was encouraged to borrow money to pay off credit card debt using their house as collateral. Bad idea, tying up the house.

Here's what I think we should do. I think we should all rebel. Quietly.

I think we should form credit clubs, and pay off each other's debt. We could work out some arrangement. Pay it, never get more. Put these people whose customer service centers aren't even in the United States (so we can't think, well, at least it's keeping us employed) out of business. Let these pikers who've so carelessly squandered our money and seduced the poor into debt fend for themselves. Then I think we should concentrate on making sure everyone has a clean roof over their head and the food pyramid to eat.

Ok. That's my 1/2 hour. I'm going to go sit now.

I'm thinking of getting a wood stove.

Learners Permit

Yesterday, at Wednesday afternoon zazen, which I barely made after an afternoon spent out at the administration learning "how to be The Man" (listen, they really have classes on this! Management training they call it. I feel like a spy for the peons). Making it involved Silva Mind Control acrobatics, frantically visualizing convenient parking spaces, as well as illegal u-turns performed right under the nose of campus security. Very exciting. The temperature dropping, the wind cutting through my beautiful wool Talbot's plaid skirt. Saw Seido, coming across the brick plaza with his bags of zafus, wind blown crow skirts swirling around him, like something from a dream. Met him half-way to help carry them. His new book of poetry just came out. Here, let's plug it, to the two people who ever read this--Seido Ray Ronci--This Rented Body. I haven't read it yet. But I read Skeleton of the Crow--I forgot that was the title! That's funny, because I always think of him as this big wind-blown tattered crow--like the ones who used to hang out in the pine trees in front of Sanborn Library at Dartmouth.

The day had been full of poetry. Literally. It really began the day before. Lilly had the day off from school and wanted to get her learner's permit, so we drove out to the drivers license building, which is this terrible low brick building built in the 70's when people had the bright idea to get rid of windows. So it feels like a prison--fluorescent lit rabbit warren corridors, dirty gray carpet. I used to go there for food stamps. It feels poor and dirty--institutionally poor and dirty. The worst it gets. I hadn't brought a book, I realized, sitting in the windowless waiting room while Lilly was in taking her test, so I went outside and got the only book in the car, the anthology for the Poetry Out Loud competition. Outside in the parking lot, I looked around--beautiful gray winter views of the power plant, belching smoke and the trailer park. Acres of asphalt. How do you redeem this place? I wonder, shaking my head. I go back inside.
Suddenly, a girl appears in the hall, running barefoot on the filthy carpet as fast as she can. She's about 16. Her hair is dark red and wet, and she's wearing a white silk chiffon dress with silver spangles that floats behind her as she runs like a spray of foam. She turns a corner and disappears. I stand still, wondering if I've really seen her. No one else is in the hall. The feeling rises, that strange bubble I call the tummy smile, and which is probably a little free delight. I go back to the waiting room, sit down, open the book. The first poem is Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold. I read:
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

As I read this, it seems that I can really hear the ocean. I finish, the sound of the sea still in my ears, and I realize that it's the ventilation system, ebbing and flowing, creaking its stale air out. The dusty vent is right above me. I had noticed it when I first came in, and it seemed just to be one more horrible thing about the building, but now it was a stage effect provided by the good fairies (or the ghost of Matthew Arnold) to bring the poem home to my soul. It's funny how the most unlikely things can suddenly turn magical. It's funny how everything is in everything else. I was going to write more, but that's my 1/2 hour! You know the rules...