Too Young to Lose My Best Friend

 I'm listening to my Cocteau Twins Pandora station. It was one of the groups she'd introduced me to, along with the Bush Tetras, Hazel O'Connor, the Sugarcubes and Bjork, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Violent Femmes, and dozens of others I've forgotten in the ensuing decades. 

I don't remember our meeting but I have an approximate year: 1982 or 83. I was a tutor and she was one of my students in for writing help. I don't remember what her issues were beyond misspellings and the occasional missing punctuation, but somehow we bonded beyond the needs of Composition 1 and our friendship took on greater importance as the years passed. She was the first to get me drunk. It was my 25th birthday and we celebrated with several of her housemates with Melon Balls, Kamikazes, and, in a final booze-filled marathon chess session played among a half dozen sleeping bodies, Malibu Rum. 

We attended a half dozen Rainbow Gatherings together, and at the Nantahala Forest Gathering, the 1st for both of us, she managed to dodge the dysentery that laid most of us low. After, she told me how she accidentally avoided getting arrested 60 miles inside Babylon, by absently reaching down to pet the head of the drug-sniffing dog that was about to find the stash in her pocket. The grateful animal, as she said it, "just looked up into my eyes with her tongue out and such a look of, 'Oh, hi, do you want to play?', that her handler yanked her back hard and that was the end of that. They had to let us go." 

I'm unsure which of us graduated first, or if she graduated. Those years, graduation wasn't really very important to any of us back then, although we all expected to. What was important then were adventures, the sorts of events that happened and you talked about them later. We attended a couple weekend workshops but didn't have the money to stay in a motel. So we slept in my car. At one, after we'd finished for the day and had some dinner, we found an out-of-the-way road, mostly dirt track, and figured it was remote enough to safely sleep there. Along 1 or 2 o'clock I was woken by her insistent, "Someone's at the door" next to my ear, not so much whispered as said in amazement. It was a cop. 

Windows rolled down in cars then so I rolled the one closest to me and said, very quizzically, "Hi?" He said, "Do you know the owner of this property? Has he said you could stay here?" I said, "We didn't even know it was property, we thought we were out in the woods." He said, "Well, you're in someone's driveway and he's not around apparently, but if he comes by you'll have to move." That seemed reasonable to me, the having to move part, so I agreed and he got back in his car and we went back to sleep. In the early morning as the fog lifted, we could dimly see a house at the other end of the drive. The owner had either never come home or he'd never left. 

Another story, this one not involving me, one she told me. She'd been walking through the Student Union on her way somewhere when she'd got a whiff of someone's patchouli as he walked by. The tribe we hung with loved patchouli but found it hard to locate. She walked swiftly beside him and asked, "Is that patchouli? Did you get it around here? I love patchouli and..." He stopped suddenly, looked down at her--in her story he was over 6 feet--and announced, "It's obvious you want to engage me in  conversation but I don't want to." And he strode off, leaving her open-mouthed in his wake, incredulous when she told me, as if it was impossible someone wouldn't want to talk with her. I could not imagine why not. I was honored by her friendship. 

We attended more Gatherings, went more places, did more things. Most everyone wanted to talk with one of us everywhere we went. Somewhere in there we became lovers, although never exclusive, in defiance of everything we'd thought we were to each other. What she became to me, I'm sorry to say, was the human equivalent of home, someone that when you go there she has to take you in. I told myself that's all I was to her as well. Of course, that was wrong, both factually and morally. When she stopped talking to me after I married, my wife encouraged me to contact her. "You're too young to lose your best friend," she told me. 

That's a lousy story to end on, so here's a better one. Another Gathering, we had dropped acid together (when we talked about this last week while she was in hospice and I'd driven 1500 miles to spend time with her she insisted it was her first time, a possibility her sister later doubted, so we'll let it go) and then found ourselves at night at a jam session where, for some reason, she'd needed to take medicine. She dropped it and the two of us bent in the shadows, heads down, rummaging around among the leaves and twigs and loam for the pill. Suddenly, something dropped on her head, bounced, and landed in her open hand. It was the pill. We laughed because the universe opened a rift in time below our hands and another above our heads. It had decided to fuck with us and that was all right with us. That is how I will remember her, laughing. 

My Life Has Become a Less Freaky Memento

 

For several years I have had issues with short term memory--recent conversations, for instance, plans I've made with others--as well as  with dizziness and, sometimes, fainting. Since moving south I've attended a memory clinic suggested by my doctor, and have taken tests.

One such test was an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), a nonsurgical procedure that produces a detailed image of an organ, in my case my brain. This was intended to see if I was suffering from traumatic or other brain injury. In the results I was given before my diagnosis, it was noted I had a ganglia on my left hemisphere. I knew this already, having been given the information from a previous MRI from a few years ago. I had even mentioned its existence to the technicians in relation to their questions about anything I might know was already there (e.g., lesions, metal plate). 

Now, my big fear was that I was experiencing the first symptoms of the sort of dementia from which my father died (in fact, when I had been told about the ganglia's location, my wife and I understood it was in the same place as one found in my dad's MRI). I was somewhat comfortable with this possibility, assuming that my dementia, like his, would be fast-acting but otherwise peaceful. My father was one of those people for whom the dementia made him more himself, in his case, more patient and calm most of the time. 

My appointment for my diagnosis was postponed for a day because the Nurse Practitioner in charge of my results was ill. As a result, my anxiety, already heightened, became nearly unmanageable for 24 hours. I woke early, did some stretching and tai chi to ground myself as best I could, but went in with a blood pressure reading almost off the charts. The NP and medical social worker, once they found out why I was anxious, told me right off that dementia was actually off the table. I had done much, much better than I expected on the memory test: the top score was a 30 and I had reached 27 (I never found out what those were points of), a score reached by people who had, at worst, "some" memory issues. "Where have I left my keys?" "Why did I come to the kitchen?" that sort of thing.

This is not my brain or MRI

So I was relieved until the NP turned back to her notes and said, "But now, tell me about your stroke." 

I don't recall saying anything although I might have because my ears were stopped up by the sound of blood pumping through my veins. When I did answer, I gurgled something along the lines of "Stroke? I had a stroke?'

The ganglia on my brain, she explained, was a holdover from an "old stroke" that I might have had decades ago. (It was later explained to me an "old stroke" is any over two years, and isn't to worry about because whatever damage done had happened long before.) Had I ever had periods of weakness on one side, or face-drooping, or long loss of consciousness?

No, never, I said. At least not that I remembered. 

I was the only one who thought that was funny. 

Over the course of the next hour and change, and over the next couple weeks, I would find that a) it is not unusual for someone to be unaware he or she has had a stroke; there are about 11M of us. And b) unless doctors have a pre-stroke MRI to compare it with, unless symptoms occur, there's no telling when the stroke happened. I do not have a pre-stroke MRI handy, so I'm left with racking my brain for memories of stroke behavior. I find none. 

And c} the fact that I had no indication I had a stroke means that the brain area affected was not "important", it wasn't responsible for motor skills or balance or speech; the duties of whatever was affected were easily taken on by another area. Something like a full professor falling ill and a teaching assistant filling in for a class.. 

However, my doctor pointed out to me that I had suffered a loss; the effected area was in charge of short term memories. Like recent conversations or plans. 

When I was teaching writing, I used to show the movie Memento to classes. Because it's filmed "backwards", it's a perfect way to teach cause and effect by stopping it at different points and asking "Why did that happen?", letting them guess before running the "previous" scene that explained why Leonard, the protagonist, reacted the way he did. My life is currently a less extreme version of Memento. I don't need Leonard's "freaky tattoo" directions on me, but I do have to make notes about where I go in the future and why. 

My Old Man

Twenty years ago, in an obscure regional magazine, I published a story about my dad. It was called "My Old Man" and it was funny and affectionate and my wife calls it her favorite piece of mine. I am, I think, rightly proud of it.

My old man, as described in that story, is a different old man than the one I come here to visit. There remain some indications he's the same man. He's funny and has the same goofy grin widening his cheeks when he says something he knows people will laugh at. He still sits with his arms folded or purses his lips, steeples his fingers, and puts them in front of his mouth when he's relaxing, often after a meal. He still doesn't want to be seen without his teeth in and a "nice" shirt and pair of slacks on. With shoes, not slippers. He's a favorite of the nurses and aides at his nursing facility, partly because he rarely complains and partly because he will spend days smiling at nothing.

In a deeper, more important way, he is a different person. He's like the hospice patients I visit. When I see him and he's asleep, I sit quietly in a chair next to him, touching his shoulder, holding his hand. When he starts to make sounds, like my dogs when they dream, I gently rub his shoulder, his hands, and he has the same reaction as them. He remains asleep and settles, calmed, relaxed, his breathing that of someone sliding into a warm tub. The flecks of dead skin on his cheeks or the dried milk on his lips remind me he has joined ranks of the elderly who have either forgotten to wipe their faces after eating or no longer care. He loses control of his emotions, on occasion, possibly as a result of his strokes, possibly because of the UTIs his body collects like stamps. It rarely lasts long, a flash of fear and hopelessness, tears, and then he's forgotten it. He's smiling again, at nothing again.

It took me decades to come to love the Old Man I grew up with. He was a good man although like most children I wasn't always aware of it. Frankly, it wasn't until my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and he became her primary caregiver that I realized just how good he was capable of being. When I began to visit him in the nursing facility, I was faced with a different Old Man, one who was more frail and, at that time, not even certain of who I was. He has improved, partly physically and partly mentally, to the extent he can occasionally use a walker instead of a wheelchair and he usually recognizes my face and voice. But he tires easily and I can't spend more than a couple hours with him before he's got to sleep, and doesn't want to see me until the next day. He is, in some ways, the same Old Man I've loved, but in a more profound way I've had to come to love a new Old Man.

258 candles-day 62

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: I've written elsewhere about one way I've seen my work with hospice patients. This is another.

an almost empty house

I'm beginning a new job in a new hub city in two weeks and toward that end, and because my employer gave me a month to prepare, I've been reading essays, articles, listicles and books about my new profession: chaplaincy to the dying.

One book I've struggled with the entire time but stuck with because I'm determined to get through it all, is The Grace of Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort, and Spiritual Transformation by Kathleen Dowling Singh. I've noted many passages that I've thought to mark or write down, but they were portions of thoughts, ideas, parts of sentences, and sometimes a full sentence. Until today I haven't seen a full passage speaking enough to me to merit putting here. At this point, Singh is writing about Kubler-Ross' famous stages of death and explaining how even the most advanced among them are a part of Chaos, "what is experienced when an accustomed order is first suspended or destroyed." Lately, I've been thinking about what it is a hospice chaplain goes through when she herself is in the dying process. I suspect it will be something like this:

It was once my privilege to know a woman who had been uncommonly raised, in the Theosophical tradition. This tradition, sprinkled with names like Leadbeater and Blavatsky, attempts to outline the special conditions that engender consciousness evolution. This woman was disappointed in herself when she found herself caught in the powerful emotional undertows of the period of Chaos. She "would have hoped to have been a bit father along than that," she said. She thought perhaps she had already evolved to the point where she could have "given up the body more easily." She entered a profound depression. My visual memory of Geneva is of a woman of dignity sitting alone in a recliner in her living room surrounded by meaningful mementos of her travels: woven tapestries from Tibet, Japanese screens depicting Zen teaching stories, shamanic masks from New Guinea. As the weeks went by and her depression wore on, she began giving all these things away, piece by piece, to relatives and old friends from the Theosophical community. Eventually she sat in an almost empty house. Her depression lifted and she proclaimed, "I've come out the other side." She surrendered to the process of dying and died with great openness and courage. Indeed, she was an inspiration.

loudendum

Laurie Anderson, for whom I have had great appreciation since the 80s, married Lou Reed several years ago and published a letter in their local newspaper about his death. It's not heartbreaking, although that's how Spin terms it, but heart-affirming. Would that all of us can have this said about us after our last days. Namaste, Lou.

spiritual homelessness 1

I've been busy writing this past semester, although little of it has ended up here.  But as a final requirement I've taken a course called final integrative seminar which is meant to pull together many of the threads of my years at seminary.  The exam for this course is what's called a "statement of ministry," and while it may be precocious to call it that--I don't have much of a statement to make about something unless I've been directly involved in it for a long time--it's somewhat accurate.  I'll publish it in 4 sections starting today.

Spiritual Homelessness

My Statement of Ministry

Introduction:  What is my understanding of God?

Like all stories about God, this is a story about loss.  I knew an artist named John Wolfe back east in the 80s.  He was one-legged, had had the other blown off in Vietnam, had a family, a wife, a little girl, and an awfully big talent.  One of the few New Paltz artists to have his own studio, separate from where he lived and not on campus.  He worked in oils primarily.  He didn’t want an artificial leg but hobbled around on two metal canes that ended in cuffs on his forearms, his good right leg, and his stump. 

            He told me a story that took place in the 70s.  He’d just gotten out of the service a few years before, after losing the leg, and was down and out New York.  He couldn’t take it anymore, he said, drinking all the time, angry as hell, in pain when he wasn’t high.  He was sick of people, sick of life, and sick of people in his life, so he decided one night to just get out. 

            “I wanted,” he said between puffs from his Marlboro, “I wanted to be away from people, but not away from people.  You know what I mean?  I was tired of civilization or tired of the people in it.”  He took another drag and stared off into the distance, even though all he could see across the street was the library and the bar.  “People shot at me, they took my leg.  I didn’t blame people, I blamed civilization, or what civilization done to them.  I hated that.” 

            He stubbed out the Marlboro and shook another from the pack into his mouth.  He was fair-haired, wispy bangs blown across a boyish face that was too trusting to live for long on the streets.  His eyes pincered up.  “I got together a lot of money, I don’t know, couple hundred.  Be honest, I don’t remember where I got it from.  Saved it, borrowed it.  Might have stolen some, who remembers back then?”

            He lit the Marlboro, took a long drag, and handed it to me.  I took a single toke—that’s all I did with cigarettes—and gave it back.  He stubbed it back in his mouth and talked around it.

            “I’d heard about this place, down on the Yucatan Peninsula.  Tiny town, no one goes there.  I took a flight to Mexico City, took another flight east to another town.  Had to rent a burro take me up to another town where I caught another flight.  Caught a helicopter from there, one of those passenger things, got a fat belly and room for thirty.  Picked me up from one mountain top and took me across to another mountain top.” 

            He was off in another world by then, watching people come in and out of the library and either head for their cars or the bar next door.  We were sitting in front of the bank, the nicer one in town, but the people inside had never seemed to mind anyone leaning against their wall so we leaned.

            “Whole other air up there.  I could feel like, like my lungs were filling up with something else, something I’d never breathed before.  Something people were really supposed to breathe.  I couldn’t wait for them to open the door.”

            A guy we knew came out of the bar and waved at us.  We shrugged back.  “I was standing on the ledge when the dude opens the door.  What do I see directly across the tarmac?”

            I grinned.  I knew it wouldn’t be good.

            “McDonald’s arches.”  John took a final drag like he’d sucked all the bitterness out of the Marlboro and flicked it in the street. 

            “Did you stay anyway?”

            “Course I did.  I’d put a lot into this place or what I thought it was going to be.  But it ended up it wasn’t nothing.”  He grabbed his cuffs and we headed up the street.  “I came back, started doing some reading, some meditating.  That’s when I started reading Buddhism.  Started painting.  That was the only way I could find that place.”

            John’s canvases were landscapes or cityscapes, sometimes abstractions.  He took life drawing classes on occasion to keep his hand in, but his real work was depopulated, places where people had been and gone.

            I said, “No people?” 

            “No civilization.  People I can handle.  It’s what being around other people does to them I don’t like.”

a bird in the hand

the summer we moved here to the rim 10 years ago my father-in-law and I fenced in part of the side yard off the deck leading from a 3-season porch in order to let the dogs roam free. as a part of that, we put in a dogflap on the original screen door, and when that flap eroded after the 1st winter, we just left the hole open, and when the door itself started falling apart, I replaced it with a heavy wooden windowed door which, because it isn't the right height and won't sit right on the jamb, remains ajar about 6 inches, wide enough to let the dogs through and held to in the wind by a bungee cord.

naturally the gap doesn't let in only the dogs but an assortment of insects and flies and, about 1ce a day in the summer, birds. this is a common phenomenon here. when the dog flap was covered birds were always hopping in under the material and soon we'd see a whispy, fluttering shape darting from 1 side of the porch to the other, the dark movement brilliant against the white paint of the inside of the porch and the multiple windows that let in the afternoon sun.

generally my wife calls me to let the bird out. I am the official bird-letter-outer since I've got the patience for it. my 1st act is to open the door wide and herd the intruder toward it so he or she will make a dash for freedom. but birds are not apparently very good at seeing the difference between an open and closed door and continue to smash themselves against the brightness of the windows instead.

after a few minutes, worried that they'll hurt themselves by braining their noggins against the glass or snapping their own necks or exhausting themselves in vain until they suffer a heart attack, I'll catch the bird and release it. this isn't as difficult as it might sound. again, it's a patience game. I follow the bird from window to window to corner to floor, walking slowly and lightly, cooing reassurances all the while. the tone and words aren't really intended to affect the bird, who probably thinks it's all threats and bluster anyway, but reassure me that I can do it.

sometimes this takes 10 or 15 minutes. I have the time. when the bird is against the window or on the floor or in a corner I cup my hands around it gently, muttering all the while, and grip it as tightly and as loosely as possible. the feeling of bird-heart against my palms is indescribable. it is like holding a beating heart must feel. sometimes the bird pecks against my hand, sometimes drawing blood, and that's okay. don't go gently, I tell it in my head, if you think this is the end fight it. life should fight.

I step to the open door and fling my hands open and the bird flies like a shot into the trees and beyond. if birds have the equivalent of religion I like to think of myself as somewhere in it, not a savior but a boddhisattva. I've caught and held dozens, maybe a hundred or more birds like this, even hummingbirds which feel like holding a tiny buzzing cell phone. then I close the door and wash my hands.

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

out here on the rim, when it's cold like this there's not much to do beyond read and drink. drinking is easy. surfing the intertubes comes close enough to reading to qualify, but for real sport it's the good old fashioned solid material that cuts best. the latest issue of newsweek arrived yesterday, or it may have been monday, and the writer I first spend time with is lisa miller.

her religion column this week (www.newsweek.com/id/228722) ends with a blanket statement that I think encapsulates a whole range of thinking, not only of the homeworship pre- and postmillenials she's writing about, but of most everyone born in the past 50 years: "they're yearning for a church that's more homemade." my experience both as a seeker and a religious leader has been that ity's some sense of the real that turns people on, even more than routine or veracity. when I was eating with the krishnas, our conversations didn't revolve around the truth as much as around the authentic.

the questioners of brad roberts' "god shuffled his feet" (http://espanol.video.yahoo.com/watch/2853050/v2152554) aren't looking for absolution or ultimate truth. they're asking what their experience is going to be like and will it be anything like what they're already familiar with. that seems to be what we respond to best, the sincere and the real. if not ultimate reality, then the closest we can understand to it. for most people, the homey is the most familiar and the center of our lives: it's here we're anchored. that's why dorothy wants to go back to kansas and charlie pride wants to leave detroit city.