down the aisle (poem 018-2021)

bathed in this

moment's movement

swathed in sun

light on our feet

your arm in the crook

of my elbow

shepherding us 

all so surely

smiles alight

autumnal flames 

unquenched

this now

no other

but this

one

until

eternity

 

The Tell-Tale Clock

In the sunlit hallway, walking to what was hours earlier her room, I felt a coat of grief draped over my shoulders. This is going to be hard. Keep walking. Through the doorway, into the familiar room, where her stray molecules lingered and danced. Be quick. Jesus to his disciples, 'Let the dead bury the dead.' Scant days after the vigil, our shared presence and prayers, the mottled hands, her painted nails, the dry gulch, the vacant room.

A worker on the clock, I placed into a cardboard box artifacts curated from the nightstand's three drawers: greeting cards, hotel-sample-size packets of shampoo, sugar packets, a broken rosary, empty purses, photo postcards, 'rake' combs, hairbrushes, single mints in cellophane, toothpaste, skin creams, shoes, slippers, a keychain, crucifixes, an outdated page of monthly activities, an empty wooden box with ribbon and broken-seal sealing wax.

Do not tarry. The walls closing in. Trudge onward. Keep or toss. Toss or keep. Atop the nightstand, take and keep the plaster Jesus that silently kept watch with us, a family relic hearkening back to Dad and his holy rituals. Toss the shoes and slippers. Leave for donation the ones gifted at Christmas days earlier. Not as hard as I thought. Keep the exquisitely framed July portrait with her and the kids and me. 

From the closet, take a black and white sweater, a green patterned blouse, two vases, five plastic hangers. Leave the nightgowns, sweaters, pants, blouses to be cleaned and donated. Leave the incontinence underwear. Back to the nightstand: toss the dessicated red cyclamen and Christmas bouquet of cut bright flowers.

After a rapid-fire mental Ping-Pong, I grabbed the bedside alarm clock, hesitated in mid-air, and placed it in the carton. Take it. Keep it. The white still-ticking clock I bought so she could see the time, the hour and the minute, to face her as she lay in bed, sleeping, so much sleeping, or awake and awaiting a call, a visit. The alarm never used unless by accident. Why set it. And was it day or night. She barely knew. Black readable numbers. The relentless red second-hand stuttering its staccato circuit. Tick-tock-tick-tock.

From the bed, let's not forget the Creamsicle-colored luxuriantly soft blanket, a gift she cherished to no end, at the end; and the similarly velvet-soft gray pillow I got her for Christmas, which she may not have ever lain her head on. 

That clock. Why keep it. To what end. Take it out of the box and toss it. Toss it in the trash and walk out, carry the box to the car, put it in the trunk, and drive away. 

Which I did. 

Mostly. 

The box in the trunk. Drive around for 20 days. Open the trunk. Lift out the box, ride the elevator to the top, open the door. Open the box, retrieve old greeting cards to get addresses.

And the clock.

Tender time bomb tolling, o sole mio, stoic sentinel.

Tell-tale heart.

Hello, Mr. or Ms. Clock, you new resident on the Formica faux-marble countertop, the peninsula between my kitchen and living room. No man-woman-person is an island but is a peninsula, it has been said and sung. 

Which way to face it, where to place it. Do I muffle the roar of its ticking, wrapping it in a towel in a closet or in a bureau. Or under the floorboards. Or remove the battery. 

Smother it. Smash it to smithereens with a sledgehammer. 

What then.

What then. 

A silence, hollow or fulsome. A stillness saturating the sacred hours. Unsaid, unspoken. 

Inhaled, exhaled.

Hallowed.

Then sifted and settled. 

Into gentle spring rain.

Or, for now, perched on the peninsula, a presence a few yards from the ashes, across from the red-blossomed amaryllis, pattering.
 

recalculating one's bearings

My old Garmin GPS navigation device -- the one I stubbornly rarely used -- intoned "recalculating" if you made a wrong turn or if you were making a correct turn because your eyes were telling you the device was wrong and you were right. (Some apps still do that.) As if I would know. I was the last person in North America to employ the tool. Why? Stubbornness? Male stereotype about directions? A Luddite gesture? Too stingy to spend the money? All are possible, or all of the above. I don't recall, but no doubt I would have spared myself lots of anxiety if I had used one. I remember a particular incident in 2012. I drove from Syracuse to Charlotte on a maiden voyage with my just-purchased 2007 VW Rabbit. I had nearly reached my destination, the residence of my friend Denis (yes, one N; he prides himself on that). I couldn't make it to the goal line. I traversed a highway back and forth, near the airport, east and then west; or, who knows, north and then south. A boatload of vice versas. It was blistering hot. I was exhausted, spent. I gave up. Totally surrendered. I was in a strip mall parking lot. "Come and get me, Denis. I'm lost. I need your help. Help me." He did. And it was, what, 10-12 miles. Presumably a GPS would have rescued me before reaching that point. But not necessarily. I recently experienced an incident whereby the GoogleMaps app on my phone (smartphones, the death of stand-alone GPS devices) had me repeating a loop of the same streets, trapping me in a nightmarish web of suburban culs-de-sac and winding drives, lanes, and places (scarier by far, to me, than urban equivalents). 

Back to "recalculating." *

What a relief.

It's so judgment-free, so neutral. So matter of fact. You might say scientific, objective, disinterested.

Certainly not conveying coldness or scolding.

Recalculating.

Get some new data or more data and adjust from there.

Whooooboy!

This is not how my personal history transpired, either on the receiving end or the bestowing end. How about your personal history in this regard?

I'm not merely talking of family upbringing. What about education? Being wrong or in error evoked wrath or displeasure at the least. No, this is not an argument for education rooted in touchy-feely, everybody is right, let's not hurt feelings. No, not at all. It's an altogether different perspective, and practical at that. I was always struck watching my older daughter's professional ballet classes. Dancers wanted to be corrected, to recalculate, if you will, to get it right, to improve. If the teacher ignored you, that was not good. Every class was an opportunity to recalculate, which is my way of saying correct and improve. It's not a punitive process.

Exactly 139 years ago, I was a high school English teacher. If I were to do it again, I'd apply the notion of recalculating to writing assignments, such as essays. (As an aside, they're still teaching English as they did when I was young. Foolish. The world does not need more essays on Dickens or Bronte or Shakespeare or Dante. It is of no value in the workplace. I'm for the humanities; they have their place. But writing at work varies from reports to memos to letters to white papers.) In other words, I would allow as many writing drafts as needed or wanted. Maybe the whole semester would be one, and only one, piece of "recalculated" writing. I believe this used to be called mastery learning.

Parents don't tend to be recalculators, nor spouses or lovers. Friends, more so. On second thought, some people do take that approach without uttering the word recalculating. Kudos to them.

What about ourselves?

Do we tell ourselves to recalculate, or do we indulge in an orgy of remonstrance and self-recrimination?

Most likely, when it comes to myself, I'll forget these thoughts the next time I say the wrong thing or perform the wrong action.

Recalculating.

It's not Sanskrit, but it's not a bad mantra.

* Disclaimer and Credit: This notion of applying recalculation to human events and affairs is not my original concept. I heard it from someone else; I can't remember exactly who. So, I borrowed it. Or appropriated it. Imitation is flattery. So thanks, whoever you were/are.

Community Values

The TV is on in the Community Room. The community is undefined, but presumably it means the people who live in the building’s 40 apartments, and their guests or friends. The community is entitled to use of the room for family events: birthday parties, wedding or baby or baptismal or confirmation showers, graduation galas, family reunions, divorce or annulment commemorations, book signings, candidate kickoffs or pronouncements, landlord-sponsored and –contrived get-to-know-each-other gatherings with pizza, wings, and soda and coffee, and post-funeral gatherings. We’re in a basement. At the top of one wall are windows facing up at grates on sidewalk level. The opposite wall features glass walls and doors with venetian blinds. The blinds are typically closed. When the TV is on, it most often is tuned to the local Time Warner Spectrum channel with its endless, night-or-day loop of local weather, stories of death and mayhem or small-town thievery or depravity, the scores of high school teams, their success or failure in the sectional championships, the regional marching band competitions, the stray murder or rape, the drunk driver rocketing the wrong way on the Thruway, the statement from the sheriff’s office about the latest suspects, the mug shots of the young and accused with their surprised, scarred, and scared or defiant faces.  All to be repeated again after an appointed duration that viewers are trained to expect, such as “news on the nines” or “weather on the ones.” I walk by in the hallway outside the Community Room. As a resident, count me as a member of the community. No one is in the room. The blinds are drawn. The lights are off. The television is on, the newsreaders’ voices solemn and barely audible to a passer-by. I walk in and pick up one of two remotes sitting on the firm, faux leather chair. I click the O/I power button. Nothing happens. Someone once told me O/I stands for Out of Operation and In Operation. That does not seem plausible three decades later — if that is what I was truly told. Time was, we saw Off / On as the choices. It couldn’t be O and O, for off and on, could it? Too confusing. (I am pausing here to let you Google this modern-day mystery on my behalf. What did you discover? Thanks for coming back to finish reading.) I click the O/I on the other remote, and the massive screen on the wall goes blank, fades and cracles to black-but-not-quite-that-color, accompanied by a palpable silence. The local voices are silenced. The hearth is doused. No smoke puffs toward me or up a chimney. The electronic hearth with its comforting chatter and hum is snuffed out. The Community Room’s temperature is lowered by 1.7°F. I walk out. I do my laundry. When I return to the hallway by the Community Room, its lights are out, its blinds still drawn. And the TV is on again. I keep walking.

Pthe Pawline Pneumonia Pchronicles

So around 3 a.m. today one white-haired Emergency Department (ED) doctor, Dr. Seely, placidly pronounces the words "a touch of pneumonia" as the raison d'etre for my being admitted to Crouse Hospital, and minutes later the similarly white-coiffed, Brooklyn-born Dr. Kaplan sounds a shade more doubtful, using words like "infiltrate," as a noun, to describe stuff in my lungs, stuff which induced gagging, air-inhibiting, breath-obstructing coughing, which were the reasons for the trip to the ED way back at 10:15 p.m. Friday. Breathing is such a simple and effortless and shall we say natural thing -- when it works. Struggle with it for just a few moments and its currency rises faster than the price of gold during financial tumult (cf. my choking incident earlier this year). Not being able to breathe because of coughing, stamping one's feet, chasing, chasing for the unfound way to stop the spasm of repetitive coughing evokes fear and panic for the participant and those around him. To the point when it was my young daughter, crying, who insisted on some real action here, folks, c'mon! Insisted. Rightly so.

I surrendered.

Hearing the doctor's (or doctors' if you figure in the broader analysis of both snow-cropped docs) diagnosis was actually a relief. (Why a "touch" of pneumonia and not a splash or dash or stain or Everglades swamp, huh?) Even more so, being ordered to stay in the hospital provided more relief, despite the fears of structural and procedural errors and the abundance of even newer germs to be found in the place. Relief because there are worse things than hearing "pneumonia" as your problem. I shall not list those. Granted, the Big P is serious stuff, and in yesteryear, before antibiotics (the triumph of science, Ethan!) were common, pneumonia claimed many, especially the young and the old. So, I respect it and do not belittle its power. Just ask Jim Henson. But, the diagnosis could be worse, far worse. Call it the Lung Is Half-Full Theory. HAHAHAHAHA! I experienced relief also because quite honestly I was loath [corrected, thanks to Mark Murphy, from the earlier wrong word, the verb "loathe"] to return home, frankly afraid to face the specter of another violent coughing jag. Wife and young daughter and I were not going to settle for some fake palliative. So this is the right place to be.

I must report I was a little cheesed off (thank you, Beatles -- John? Paul? -- on VH1 airing of Beatles Anthology for that expression reminder) by the triage nurse in ED who had earlier remarked glibly, "You're not going to die" as I was gasping for air in front of her unable to answer her administrative questions, sounding like a drowning sailor in Leonard Cohen's plaintive ballad "Suzanne." On the one hand, I can accept that her words were meant to pacify my panic, but it came off as dismissive. Excuse me, Ms. ED RN. You are not the Big Cosmic Cheese and do not have permission to make such breezy declarations about the breezy wheeze trapped inside my chest. Melodrama may not be called for on my part, but I do happen to have a pretty good sense about my body. Shucks, Ms. ED RN, be not so cavalier as I gasp in front of you like the common New Yorker magazine cartoon of the guy crawling in the desert looking for water but who sees a mirage. In this case, I was crawling for air and it was not a mirage. So there.

That was then. This is now. Respiratory therapy treatments have helped, as well as IV antibiotics (more to come at 4 a.m. and 6 a.m., ugh), as well as the care of nurses Allison, Cori, Amy, Carolyn, Allison, Amal, Maryann, Priscilla, Pauline, and Oksana (hope no one has been omitted), and Dr. Masood, as well as the calls by caring friends and family, and the heart-warming visits by Beth, Adrianna, Ethan, Jenny, Evelyn in absentia, Warren, Win, and Timmy [sorry I missed you] (hope no one has been omitted).

I expect to go home Monday.

This from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

pneumonia
1603, from Mod.L., from Gk. pneumonia "inflammation of the lungs," from pneumon (gen. pneumonos) "lung," altered from pleumon "lung," lit. "floater," from PIE *pleu- "to flow, to swim" (see pulmonary). Alteration in Gk. perhaps by influence of pnein "to breathe."

Vow Wows

Forgive the absence, and now the exhaustedness, arising from the vows taken by my first and only son with his betrothed.

So, here goes, some rambling reflections 'pon it:

Friday after two trips to the aeroport, I successfully greet and meet and welcome Grandma, my Mom, 90, on a hot October day, also nearing 90, delayed by flight changes and a sweltering runway plane, which she dubs a school bus, then onto the rehearsal dinner, a misnomer because nothing is rehearsed, splendid food for 17 of us, though alas we are mostly segregated by family but people had catching up to do and there was commingling and intermingling, I had the scrumptious chicken and have somehow switched tenses, though it wasn't too tense, except for maybe my eyes staring and jaw dropping at the date of the bride's brother, direct from Miami, and the father of the bride graciously offering to help pay and I accept, not sure if offense would be taken by an acceptance of that or a rejection oh well.

Saturday I refrained from panic or refused to buy into it the sweltering record or near-record heat exchange of texts and calls from Ballet Daughter wishing she were here, likewise the call from Cayman Brac Godmother; the motherly wifely (mine) 140 to 150 cupcake parade into the zoo, a perfect place for this wedding couple, having met at a pet store, and indulging in an ardent love of animalia exotica, a zoo that overlooks the cityscape. An afternoon thunderstorm I tried to nap through, a tying of E.'s knot by me, his silk tie, a paternal snugness, a double-Windsor bond; E. the groom at the zoo at 4 p.m. two hours early, pacing like an expectant father; his lapel flower forgotten, I rush to the zoo and flower him; back home, expectant for Maryland Brother and Wife who arrive in the nick of time, wondering in my soul at the absence of Massachusetts Brother and Clan; wondering further at a funeral and a wedding in the same week (for me and B. and A. at least). And then the vows, a justice of the peace (an omen one hopes); inside, threat of rain, not at gazebo; IrishStepDaughter reads Emily Dickinson clearly and proudly flowergirl too:

It's all I have to bring today --
This, and my heart beside --
This, and my heart, and all the fields --
And all the meadows wide --
Be sure you count -- should I forget
Some one the sum could tell --
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.

right after I had read my just-composed barely ink-is-dry haiku:

October dusk light
wedding all here with love's fire
all ways radiant

resisting the temptation to say "this is a haiku, a haiku consists of" and then E. almost saying the vows even before the judge finishes the prompt an eagerness of love and J., his wife, his legal wife now, holding hands, staring seriously and meaningfully into each other's eyes. Followed by the photos and fotos and dancing and eating and former in-laws [including a chat re the serial comma w/ NYC lawyer Catherine; she's unfortunately against it but I may've converted her] and drinking (no liquor for your scribe not a drop not even at the toast...and no dancing for me with the J lo lookalike), Mom (Grandma) in tears because Their Song (for which they took dance lessons, it was sweet and innocent and endearing) was Unforgettable and our lost beloved Richard loved Nat King Cole, he did. If you look around at any wedding sadness you will find, and not just in corners. The breaking of the cake (muffins) results in sloppy messes, licked off the bride's bosom, so I'm told, because I was talking to someone, but, hey, he's My Boy, so it's no surprise.

Sunday brunch here at Purple House with Bro J. and Wife B. from Maryland here despite the quick preparations and tensions a fine food time and later Mom off on a plane all smoothly.

Whew.

Beat.

And I gotta work Monday, a holiday for some but not for me.

Cheers.