Forgot that too

Oh yeah! There was this idea - I must have lost track of it somewhere  - of going on a pilgrimage. I was out there on the trail preparing for it; communing with nature, carrying a pack on my back, and starting to feel pretty good there for awhile. I guess I got sidetracked by something like I so often do and let it slip. We could call it attention deficit and take the blame out of the game. Or we could point fingers and call it boredom, laziness and a lack of self-discipline and slap me around with that a little. Whatever it was though, I got out there this evening when the sun decided to emerge after three days of cold rain. The angle of the light coming across through the trees was one I hadn't seen before. Everything had greened and grown and the trail had narrowed and the brooks all ran high. I was a little fatter and had to work harder to get up the hills than I did the last time I came through.

Forgot the coffee

The people at Trader Joe's are young and hip and there are just a few too many for my comfort. Last time here I carried a basket and put too many items in it. This time I pushed a cart and did the same. As I am shopping, I notice one of the cashiers staring into the far distance seemingly entranced. Her eyes are striking above her mask. When I emerge from my leisurely trip down the next aisle, she is in exactly the same position. Without blinking, her gaze shifts to my eyes, like an owl. There's an otherworldly intensity to her eyes that unsettles me. For a moment, I want her to take off her mask. I need to be reassured that she's human. I wind up purchasing too many spreads and dips. There's no sign of you in there. Why would there be? I don't think you live anywhere near here. Everyone is young, and when I place the images from my memory of you and I shopping here beside them they look like black and white newspaper cutouts from the 1940's. All of that has been turned under to make room for the new. Shards of pottery, a skeleton wrapped in a blanket, a stone foundation to be discovered many years from now by archeologists. The meaning of it all, which you once felt so acutely, will have been lost in time.

Flat

I shopped for groceries and forgot coffee which is what prompted the trip in the first place. Then I ate a solo dinner in an Indian restaurant. And finally, I declined an invitation for human company. It rained all day.

Weekend

During this passed week, I made a concrete plan for a weekend activity with my son. I usually avoid concrete. I made a reservation for a two-person kayak to take down a gentle river here in Central Massachusetts. It was a sunny day above 80 degrees when I made that call. Three days later it's raining and just barley above 40 degrees. Tomorrow morning's forecast is much the same. Do we forge ahead, bonding over hypothermia and a swift trip down a swollen river with no kayaking experience, or cancel the reservation and wait for better conditions?

Not bad

Productive at work today. Engaged in things that matter. That helps.

Checking boxes

Apparently sewer gases degraded the integrity of the concrete, so I found a very heavy replacement cover and replaced it. All there is to do now is bury it so I can find it again and remember to have it pumped out in three years time. I'll probably plant some wild flowers over it. I also bled the air out of the line and the burner kicked in without issue returning me to the first world and on demand hot water. It was a cold shower yesterday morning though that set me in motion to accomplish these basic but deferred projects. Talked to an old friend, of sorts, about attachment styles - anxious and avoidant - and how the two so often find each other. She believes a mature adult form of love is possible in which a decision to love is made, mutuality exists, and the two can love in equal measure. She is not sure she can do the healing she needs to do in one lifetime to achieve that though. That's what this writing thing is about, I suppose. What rises to the surface is what needs to be expelled, worked through, integrated. It's strange to be nearly 55 years old and to have so many of the scenes and conflicts in your head be rooted in your childhood. 

Therapy, kids. Do it while you're young. 

Fragment

When he was struggling with any stubborn or problematic obstacle, he'd often call it/him/her a "goddamn Irish bastard." The fact that I was part Irish never deterred him. Sometime later I heard the expression "like a redheaded stepchild." A pariah, an unwanted thing. That's when I found my people. 

Social

When I go out, it's usually because I'm hungry and there is no food in the house that I feel like eating. Last night was like that. I stopped into O'Connor's - the Irish place, you might've guessed - on the way home from work. 

There was a sign with descriptions of various cocktails. I ordered an Espresso Martini out of pure nostalgia. 

Some years ago, early in my separation, I found a bartender in a place that no longer exists. She was working her way through nursing school. I asked her if she had a specialty, a drink she especially liked to prepare. She made me an Espresso Martini. The libation was not only delicious but also somehow both soothing and invigorating at the same time. I wasn't entirely sure if it was the drink itself or the person mixing it. When it was time to go, I placed my health insurance card on the bar. The bartender looked puzzled. I let her know that from this point forward she was to be my primary care physician. 

This one was too sweet and lacked the medicinal qualities of the one I was pining for. I ate my food in my plexiglassed section of bar with a single barstool separating me from two men. One of them was loud, talked incessantly, and said nothing of interest. I turned to scrolling through my phone and ordered a tall beer with the vague plan of drinking that and getting out 

Those men left while I was reading an article and two more replaced them. Apparently they'd been golfing. They were talking about an upcoming bachelor party they were preparing for. One of them said he was going to get a mullet for the occasion. 

"It's not in North Korea, is it?" I butted in. 

"Huh?"

"The bachelor party. Is it in North Korea?"

"No, it's in Mass. Where'd you get North Korea?"

"Well, mullets have been outlawed there. Just trying to save you some trouble."

 "What???"

"Yup, mullets and skinny jeans are now illegal in North Korea."

"That's a good look."

We are laughing. I am laughing so hard that tears are starting to run down my cheek. My response is disproportionate. I don't get out enough to know how to behave anymore. I pay the tab. 

"Kamsahamnida," I tell the young men.

"What's that?"

"It's Korean. If you have any problems over there, just tell them that."

"Kamsahamnida?"

"Exactly!"

I'm still laughing in the parking lot. The moon looks full and I'm glad to be leaving here. 

Bob Dylan's Birthday

Pallid underside up

Tina said you were a handsome man

Pinned to the table like a dissected frog

Tina said you looked like a TV star

Modest quotient of guts observed and removed

Tina said a man in his 50's is a flower in bloom

Keep talking, Tina

But my grave is already dug

And that round silver moon knows my name

And all the things I done and all the things I ain't never 

Lifecycle

Seems like only a couple of days ago that I was looking at the dandelions in my yard and reading up on the process for making them into wine. 

The leaves, even the young ones, were pretty bitter for eating raw but I thought I could mix them with other greens in a salad. I wondered if there were enough flowers out there to make a small batch. They seemed to be everywhere. 

This morning, I'm refilling the feeders and watering the flowers and noticing only a very few yellow flowers across the yard. All of them have gone to seed. 

I'm out of synch. The process of wine making is too slow for me while the life cycle of the flower is too fast. 

I got the septic tank pumped for the first time. Apparently that should be done every three years. I believe I've been living here twenty.

My daughter, now twenty-three, wants to learn to ride a bicycle. I'm afraid I won't remember how to teach her. 

Fast

I parked in the hospital's garage.

Walking through, I remembered too many mornings getting off shift at 7 A.M. and rushing to my car so I could sleep in the garage for an hour or so before starting my day job across town at 9 A.M. I worked in the psychiatric emergency department there. People often waited too long to be seen, and even longer to be placed, should they need or want psychiatric hospitalization. There was often distress, anger, hostility. Leaving there in the morning, I often felt like I'd been in a fight. With who or what I'm not exactly sure. Whatever you call that thing that's trying to crush us. 

Tonight I was in the hospital to support some nurses who lost a child, unexpectedly and horrifically, while working a shift. They'd all witnessed the violent  end of a young life while working frantically to save it. A person who, earlier in the day, looked better than he had in a year, walking the hallways with his parents and smiling broadly at the nurses who knew him well. 

It was so fast, one of the seasoned nurses said. 

She's overwhelmed in this moment - exhausted, crying. 

I'm sorry. I'm just tired. 

She saw death rise from the depths, snatch the boy in its jaws and disappear. Everything she'd learned to do in more than twenty years of nursing was of no use. 

I tried to transmit to them what I observed in their presence: that the most important thing to remember is that all of these people came together and did everything they possibly could to try to help.

Humid night

Reading the Irish guy who lived for a few years without money and self-relied a damn site longer and deeper than I could. Makes me feel lazy, uninspired, and devoid of zest. I also read something about resilience. On the other side of recovery is the spark that lights the candle that provides the light that makes life worth living or some such something or other. How inspiring reading that stuff must be when you can feel it. How flat and hollow it sounds when you can't. What I can do though is put one foot in front of the other in just about whatever shit you put me in. So there's that.

I turned on the fan

Drowsy early tonight. There's little to report. And even less desire to report it. 

Late afternoon caller

The black bear lay on its belly gently eating every black sunflower seed from the still-intact bird feeder now on the ground. The bear was bedeviled by mosquitoes, and I watched it scratch an ear with a hind foot. I spoke to it, not ten feet away, through the screen door. The bear looked in my direction but did not appear bothered in the least by the sound of my voice. It wore a leather looking radio collar around its neck and both of its ears were tagged in blue. I wondered what that meant for him or her socially. When the bear had finished eating, it sniffed the air and took a leisurely drink from the basin of a birdbath I keep on the ground for chipmunks and other low-to-the-ground types of critters. Then it walked directly through my little patch of newly sprouted wild flowers, around to the front of the house, down the driveway, across the street and into my neighbor's yard. The bear's pace was slow and seemingly untroubled. It emitted an air of habituation to the human milieu. 

Since we're paying you until eight

She came in to talk during my last half hour there. 

She's worn thin from what feels to her like the ongoing disrespect of her co-workers. She's been at it for 40 years and doesn't want to get fired so close to retirement. She's nearly sixty. She's starting to cry. It's been a hard year, she says. She nearly died of Covid. She lost her husband to it. Her daughter moved to another country. Her other daughter lost her newly opened restaurant to Covid. She was laid off for awhile so she started a business cleaning houses because she had to. She does a lot of the daily work of raising her grandkids too. Now these new nurses, some of whom are young enough to be her grandchildren, want to be flip and disrespectful to her. I'm not having it, she tells me, looking hard into my eyes. More tears come.

It's been a hard year alright, I say. 

Tuesday notes

Awake at first light with anxiety dreams that I can no longer remember. I'm going for a walk this morning with the pack on my back before things get started. It actually weighs 36 pounds, not 20, so I feel a little better about having not felt so great the last time I wore it down the trail for a couple of hours. This morning I'm planning on Sampson's Pebble and back. Let's go. 

I don't feel like talking

What it's like to be a bird...

I couldn't resist picking it up. 

Something's happening, or trying to happen,

But I'm still predominantly somnolent, and the days pass by

Far from full, mostly.

Flowering

He was paging through a book on foraging in the Northeast when something prompted a memory of a Native healer in Alaska. She had worked back then with plants to heal people. He'd asked her once how she knew which plants worked well on what ailments. Was it knowledge passed down to her? No, she'd said, it came mostly from talking with the plants. A kind of singing. A kind of praying. Very humble. Being completely open to what the plants have to teach. A certain mindset or maybe even the complete absence of a mindset. 

She'd said it just comes from the Universe. 

He also remembered a time, some years later, trying to talk with plants himself. But he wasn't nearly as open or clear or humble or unencumbered as the Healer had seemed. For an entire day, he had tried to remain calm as various apparently nonsensical words appeared in his mind in certain rhythmic patterns. He'd feared he was having a psychotic break. He'd known though that he had to open himself wider and get beyond the fear. 

Later, in a dream, the word patterns returned and made sense within the dream's context. He'd come to the realization that just as people generally don't know the languages of plants, so the plants are imperfect in their attempts to communicate in human languages. 

Outside the bookstore, he crouched for a moment to gently caress a dandelion. He sang to the flower, imperfectly, in a new language. 

Dyslexic practitioner

Vaccination obtained. A walk through the downtown and the changed landscape of this city. Attractive young people. Outdoor brunch. Gentrification. Soon, if not already, the underdogs who forged the mentality of this place will be priced out. Thankful for the vaccination. Ended the evening with a beautiful pregnant Swedish woman - possessor of an elongated and unsettling stare - turning into a spider on Jake Gyllenhaal and an early, less complicated bed time for me. It was hot today, near 80, and the leaves came out on the trees while we were looking at other things. 

Outing

He is cautious and unvaccinated. He is working himself up to pound a shot of Nyquil for relief of congestion and to help him sleep. Instead of Maine, we'll seek a vaccination site tomorrow. 

Shopper

I've gone to that Trader Joe's only three times in the last five years, probably because I associate it with you. I found traces of old laughter there tonight. 

Remember how much you loved their almond butter?

I like to think we managed to extract greater than average joy and fun from small things back then . They were the only things I had to offer. 

Fork

It was likely alcohol that killed him, but nobody said it out loud. 

The last time I drank a Mai-Tai, I remembered how he'd down three to everyone else's one and then start buying rounds of Kamikazes for the group. By the end of the night he'd usually assaulted, or at the very least, insulted someone. 

The Japanese place had a live band Thursday nights. Once, the two of us sang Papa Was A Rolling Stone together in place of the singer. 

Shortly after he hired me, I learned that when someone asked if you were going to the gym after work they meant the neighborhood bar around the corner. 

The first time that we drank together, we went hard. I think he wanted to find out who I was. To get the measure of my character. 

I saw him clearly then and told him so. I told him I could see the same demon in him as I have in me. I told him I wouldn't be able to hang out with him too often.

Bahala Na!  He knew what that meant and lived it.

The demon's eyes are emerald green. 

I had a young wife and a new born baby then. And I chose them instead. 

Refund

Reading while waiting for the machines to wash and dry my clothes. A weekly meditation of sorts. The Mennonite preacher writes about the four focal affirmations:

    "When were you last able to affirm them?

            There is no place I would rather be.

            There is nothing I would rather do.

            There is no one I would rather be with.

            This I will remember well."

Yeah. 

And then later I went for some chow at the Tavern of Regrets. The waitress took the liberty of ordering me  my usual opening drink. I ordered the pizza on special this week. It had white onions, scallions, green olives (the topping that sold me) but was devoid of even one piece of the advertised crispy chicken. When it was time for the check, I complained to the waitress who has begun to acknowledge me as a reluctant regular. She took the pizza off my bill and went to the kitchen to yell at "them". 

Driving home with the leftovers,  I was looking at the black clouds and the first stars against the darkening blue hour backdrop. I thought of Okinawa and a small town made up mostly of tiny bars and restaurants called Henoko. 

There was a bar there called the New Sakura (Cherry Blosson). I'd go to drink the habu saki when I was just 19. The habu is a local venomous snake. They soaked them in saki in big glass jars and the resulting liquor was supposed to give you fantastic powers. 

There were two or three hostesses in the New Sakura and Mamasan. They were always working. The hostesses always smiled. Mamasan never did. 

Their jobs were to make us happy enough to buy drinks. Especially those lady drinks that afforded us a few minutes of flirtatious conversation with a woman which would, in the end, lead us only further into frustration and with empty pockets. 

Of course, all organisms move towards stasis, and so we evolved the natural defenses which allowed us to survive the experience. Just as these girls had evolved their defenses long before we arrived. 

Anyway, there were three hostesses. My friend assigned them names. I cannot remember the other two right now, but there was one that he nicknamed Monkey Face. She was not pretty in any conventional sense. But she always wore the biggest smile. And she always seemed to be working the hardest to overcome. She bore the weight of so many jokes and slights. 

She was a lot like us jarheads, I thought. Adrift, lonesome, expendable, longing for something other than this. Maybe just trying to find enough warmth to keep living.

I never laughed at her. She was a spiritual sister. Sometimes we sat together. Always she hid behind that smile. 

Usually all of these things would get the better of me at some point, and I'd take off to be alone. When every place in Henoko had closed, I'd stumble back to the base under a strange, sometimes hostile, moon and sky. Like this one, here, tonight. 

Sometimes, while walking, I'd pull against the tether that kept me tied me to the planet, but not too hard, because I found out it was only just the very thinnest of threads. 

Yes, I've been able to make those four affirmations. But it cost me.

A conclusion not at all foregone

Talking to someone in the outside world provides perspective. You're going to have to make a lot of changes if you ever want to live with a woman again. Yeah, that's true huh? 

Mother's Day

I was visiting with family today and revisiting memories. A mention of what happened just a few days before Christmas when I was six years old and she was not yet 30. She's got a way of weaving it all into some sort of eventual triumph. Always there's an ultimately warm and happy glow. She can see it clearly while I cannot see it at all. Hallmark channel stuff. Who am I to tell a different story now? 

But we sat in a room together, several of us, relatives, and it felt good. 

Castaway near Mother's Day

I wake up earlier than I want to, listen to the dawn birds, think about cicadas arriving soon and wonder if they will here, get up to pee, step on the scale (down a pound from yesterday), read an article about strange health problems suffered by government employees, and wonder if anyone is pointing concentrated pulsed radio waves at my cabeza. 

I go back to sleep. 

Immediately I'm dreaming several fragmented family scenes. I'm witnessing but not a part of these families. Some of them make me ache and some of them make me worry, so I finally just get up and write this. 

I've got to see my kids and find some tulips today.

Thursday

I didn't write anything because there wasn't much to say. Got home late. Was tired. Went to bed. Saw a friend yesterday for a few hours and took a walk. We talked. It felt pretty easy. This doesn't happen very often. Normally I avoid interaction. Which is probably not normal at all. 

Passing

Another day evaporates. 

The high points, I guess, were the pair of hummingbirds stopping separately by the window to visit and then a little girl of maybe two playing peek-a-boo with me from the next table at dinner. 

A rainy day. The outside world is greening and growing. 

Just a day of work going along mostly as anticipated. A modicum of turbulence to justify the employment of a manager.

The inside world - well, it was just a day you wish had been dedicated to the pursuit of something higher. 

Maybe.

5-4-21

Good sleep. The kind that happens with cool temperatures on a rainy night when your body needs to recover. Deep sensual magic. How I appreciate it. 

Ranchero

I put the hummingbird feeders up today a couple of days later than planned. Within three hours, they were there. I couldn't shake the feeling they'd been waiting and were kind of pissed. But it sure is good to see them again. 

One foot in front of the other

I was struggling up Moose Hill at about the two hour mark thinking this isn't even close to how traversing the Pyrenees will be. I started thinking of an elegant lady in New Jersey - the vision of her standing under a light on a foggy pier dressed in a long coat with a fur color - something I've never actually seen with my eyes. I imagined how she might imagine me out here and that gave me the strength to stop inwardly whining for a minute and to straighten my spine a little. For her imagination's sake, I want to be a mensch on the march not a shlub on a shlep. 

If you go away

 

Not much but something

The flowers I planted have sprouted and I've been fairly good about keeping them watered. The lilacs have bloomed in Amherst, but I've not seen them here yet. I caught a hint of their scent on the breeze somewhere. When I was waiting for the washer to finish its agitating, I walked outside the laundromat and approached a lilac tree with the intent to smell. I put my nose very near to up against a large cluster of blossoms but smelled nothing. Maybe it's too early yet. Maybe they haven't ripened enough. Maybe I'm learning yet again that whatever you love you will eventually lose. Be unattached, I guess. I've known the pleasure of the scent of lilacs. Cool today but sunny. Tomorrow the hummingbird feeders go up and I'll strap that backpack on and get out on the trail heading South this time. 

Woke up with this in mind.