ensure

My grandmother posted on facebook tonight that she had cookies and Ensure for dinner.  First, I laughed. Then, struck by the reality of the situation, I cried.

Dear Mark,

Ten minutes off the top of my  head. Ok. I can do this.  Thank you for making me stretch in public. 

To your question:  Yes. 

Sometimes I do feel bad because I don't think of my patients beyond the moments that I'm with them.  I am a paper bag and they are a torrent, a waterfall my thin brown paper skin can not contain.  I care - I do! Genuinely! - standing over them, helping them undress, asking them about their childhoods and grandchildren as I pierce their flesh, the bevel of my needle always pointing up.  When I walk away, I usually don't blink.  I've got plenty of my own sad shit, you know?

There is one woman who never leaves me, though.  During sleepless nights I imagine her on H Street and wonder if she's safe or if her baby  (a girl) is still alive.  My prayers for her are simple: a coat, enough food, please Lord don't you let her walk in front of the X2 barreling toward Benning Road late at night.  She stumbled through the door at 18:50, I picked up her chart at 18:57.  It was a Thursday.  A man was waiting for me. I'd made chocolate mousse for dessert.  My skin was clear and the sky was pink and yellow.  We were poised to be young and beautiful. I almost put down the chart.  Nobody keeps triaging through shift change.

It took her a few minutes to gather up her baby and all the plastic bags, to cross the lobby and fall into the chair in my triage room.  I don't know why I didn't put down the chart.  The appeal of saving the world left when my adopted brothers moved in long long ago.  That's not my downfall.  Chest pain, breast pain, stomach pain, itching.  The bottoms of her earlobes were split in two where someone had yanked the gold hoops down through the flesh. She'd found duct tape, pieced them together. She'd pierced her new grey flesh. Her gold hoops were back where they belonged.

That was 13 minutes, but only because I looked up the medical term for earlobe because it bothers me how much I've forgotten, the things I forget.

As ever,

kathryn

definition

guy 1  (g) n. A rope, cord, or cable used to steady, guide, or secure something.

Lord Knows Best

that I don't give a damn

about anyone but you. 

I forgot my shirt at the water's edge

The first night swim of the summer.

The moon a perfect lonely arc, a bracing shot of bourbon against the midnight air,
and everyone asleep apart from me and the guy playing old Springsteen down at the fish camp,
far beyond the dark edge of the deep end.

June

It rains and rains and rains.  

The wrong things grow. The wrong things die. 

I still need to lean to/somebody I can sing to

empty to full

 

 

 

Yesterday

what hooks are

The colors come when the life-giving water and chlorophyll take their green wet business elsewhere, the leaves turn ghost, and we're left looking at shades -- shades of minerals, sipped in secret from the earth all spring and summer.  But what the botanists never tell is: who told the alder and the vineleaf growing side by side on a single ridge each to sip, separately, only the minerals that would turn their leaves dull gold, or blood red? And who told the neighboring firs never to die for the sake of a change of season? And who told the vineleaf and alder always to do so, but only for the sake of the change men call October? What the botanists never tell is why each tree, leaf and needle obey.  Not that botanists are at fault in this -- for mustn't it be that same who they failed to tell of who decreed what a botanist would and would not know? Decreed for example that they would know the phylum/genus/species of any plant a man might hope to see; decreed for example that they would not know why the dying leaves of the tree called "vineleaf maple" must turn the same blood red as the once-silver salmon that journey up the Tamanawis to give birth and die -- and at the same time of change: October; decreed for a final example that they would extend their analysis no deeper than to discuss the effects of water on the mineral Iron to explain why leaf skin, salmon skin, palm-of hand skin must be made scarlet in order to reach the ends they must reach.  Nor may a botanist wonder, within the confines of his discipline, what those ends are, or why they seem to be reached only by those who suffer, who know pain, and who learn in pain that it is this scarlet end and only this scarlet end that can free us from pain.  "So it is Iron?" I ask my Friend as we walked, "is it Iron that gives the blood its beautiful color ? And to learn to love that color will I somehow be wounded as Nick was wounded, and so come to know what hooks are, what they are, what they really are?"

David James Duncan, from The River Why

little heart

My brother is tall, rangy, thinks he knows most everything. 

His wife is tall, lissome, understands things without being told. 

Together they have made this tiny creature who seems both

to know and understand everything already --

who takes it all in -- even while his eyes are closed.  

Goodbye is too good a word, Gal.

Henry & me

Like a Man Eating Shark

WPA poster 1936

the short list

ceteris paribus...

Oxford, Mississippi
Cheyenne, Wyoming
Las Cruces, New Mexico
Bend, Oregon
Portland, Maine

Doc...I mean...Nurse Holliday

While I've often imagined living the life of a tragic 19th century European painter's muse, never suspected that I'd actually die of consumption like one.  Waiting for culture results of my least favorite bodily fluid - sputum - to determine if it's actually TB like the CT scan suggested or just a severe atypical multi-lobe pneumonia.  If it is the dreaded disease, look for me in Tombstone with Wyatt & the boys because I'm your huckleberry.

wasting the meaning and losing the rhyme

It’s time to move on, time to get going
What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, baby, grass is growing
It’s time to move on, it’s time to get going

Broken skyline, movin’ through the airport
She’s an honest defector
Conscientious objector
Now her own protector

Broken skyline, which way to love land
Which way to something better
Which way to forgiveness
Which way do I go

Time to move on, time to get going
What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, baby, grass is growing
It’s time to move on, it’s time to get going

Sometime later, getting the words wrong
Wasting the meaning and losing the rhyme
Nauseous adrenaline
Like breakin’ up a dogfight
Like a deer in the headlights
Frozen in real time
I’m losing my mind

It’s time to move on, time to get going
What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, baby, grass is growing

Under a Certain Little Star    

by Wislawa Szymborska 
translated by Joanna Trzeciak  

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken. Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own. May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker. My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second. My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first. Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home. Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss. My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning. Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes. Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water. And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage, staring, motionless, always at the same spot, absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed. My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs. My apologies to large questions for small answers. Truth, do not pay me too much attention. Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me. Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil. Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom. My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere. My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman. I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me, since I am my own obstacle. Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and then labor to make them light. 

you won't but you might

but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

When you are old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

William Butler Yeats


If I am ever loved by a man for any reason, let it be for my pilgrim soul. 

ring ring ring

I found this today, going through old papers. I wrote it when I was 23 & living in San Diego.  Strip away the overstatement & the whole je ne sais quois in italics thing and you'll find the same skeleton, the same heart, beneath. ------ring ring ring

Pick up the phone and answer me at last. Today I will step out of your past

- the Notwist

On a Wednesday morning that is clear and warm with southern light, Ben calls. Her ringing phone is the definition of "out-of-the blue" and Ruby almost answers. Partly out of shock that somehow slips into habit in the blink of an eye. And certainly in part because of the kamikaze curiosity that drives too many of her decisions. And then of course there is the longing to find what she has lost--to recoup some of her bad investments by snatching his rich, golden voice from the wire and spinning it into straw to stuff her deflated heart.

Mostly, though, she wants answers. Answers and information and details. Status reports and confessions. If Ruby has one failing that glares especially bright on her shining list of shortcomings it is this: she looks for sense in a nonsensical world. If I only had all the data, she tells herself in the middle of the night, I would draw the right conclusion. The dots would connect for me and then I could know.

She doesn't pick up the phone, though. Instead, she feeds the cat, listens to his garbled message and then erases his number from her phone even though she knows that it is as good carved into the back of her hand. Bea has left a key to the gated pool, so she puts on her swimming suit, the one with all the green and pink and orange circles, and goes to swim laps with the fading women who live in the complex.

She sticks her toe in the water and then stands at the edge of shallow end for a moment, still. When she finally steps off the edge, the water open ups and receives her without the fuss of a splash. Ruby's strokes are precise, quick, and concentrated. Her breathing is automated and rhythmic. When the old women stop in their lanes to catch their breath, they understand that that Ruby is swimming to forget. They know what this means and begin to plan their overtures. Poor girl.

Ruby swims every morning. She grows stronger and she shakes his message off like water out of her ears. She does not miss Ben exactly and thinks of him only in flashes. She is pleased with her progress and when her best friend hears the old lightness return to Ruby's voice she understands what it means without being told. Ruby's new friends, still in that tentative stage where judgment is whispered, begin to congratulate themselves for continuing to invite her to parties. We were right about her. She is a great girl. She just had to loosen up, feel comfortable. Men in bars begin to ask if they can buy her drinks.

Ben calls again on a Sunday night nearly a month later. This is her favorite time of the week, driving under tall trees along the 163 into the heart of the city that she has began to love. With the windows down and music and light from street lamps and the moon swirling around the car, it is easy to ignore the ring and keep singing. I have all but forgotten him, she smiles. She accelerates just in case, though.

That night when the cat howls by the open window at the possum in the bushes below, Ruby finally tells the truth to the ceiling: I have not forgotten anything. How can you forget something that is organic, that wends it's way through your bloodstream, snakes through your gray matter, and settles with marrow in your bones and the ache in your joints. This is what love does, Ruby is sure of it. And she loved him very long and well. She is not in love with him. Ruby is enough of a grammatical purist to understand what this preposition implies; to be in you must be surrounded by. To be surrounded by love supplied all by yourself--this is not possible. No one can do it alone. Still: Ruby loves Ben. She says his name out loud and feels the hard edges of this truth against her skin. Time may heal all wounds, but if it weakened all love, would there be anything left to anyone? she wonders.

Still: she doesn't call him back. At Christmas when she is back at home, sitting in the bleachers of her brother's hockey game and during the New Year's party with the medical student who kisses her and on a sad Friday night in February when she would give her right arm for a diversion, she does not answer his calls. She worries that the weight and significance of this is lost on him. For most people, returning calls requires an expenditure of effort. For Ruby, who hates loose ends and cruel, careless people, it takes monumental strength not to. Symmetry and redemption--these are things she craves. If he knew her, if he'd ever known her, he would know that her silence is the loudest statement of all.


Finally, in April she looks down at her ringing phone and wonders why not answer it? Her curiosity is still compelling but holds less potential for damage. She has come up with her own theories and found them sound and reasonable; they have become the lessons learned, the scientific laws to guide her through the chaos of love. Her life is full. His messages have become more coherent and measured as her own pain has become less pronounced. She still swims in the morning. She meets friends for lunch and the name Ben never crosses her lips. She thinks she understands all that was and then suddenly wasn't between them so what's the harm? She is resolved. Next time, she will answer, she promises herself and then tries to imagine the conversation in her head. Nothing comes. Even in the confines of her own brain she can't think of what to say. Is it possible that Ruby has forgotten how to talk to Ben, real or imaginary? She asks herself if this is it, the last dot on the page left to connect, as she touches the far wall and flips onto her back, her feet finding the cement and pushing her head through the reflection of the palms lying on the pool's surface. Is there a word that means to forget what you never knew in the first place?

February 2006

what you will

If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line - starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King's Highway past appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what looked like a straight line to me has been a circle or doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will.

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

caring & not caring

All of us, I think, are in some manner torn between caring and not caring, staying and going.

Wendell Berry
Another Turn of the Crank

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still

T.S. Eliot 
Ash Wednesday

Feast of the Epiphany

Last night I dreamed, for the second time this week, that people were bashing my teeth out with hammers.

This morning I woke up in a cold sweat, convinced that I needed to look up every word I've ever said to anyone I've ever known to make sure that I meant what I was saying, or saying what I thought I meant.

This afternoon I was snappish on the phone with my mother because I can not solve her problems or my own or anyone else's in any way that sticks.

This evening I looked down and realized my dress was on inside-out as I walked into church.

Tonight I ate a feast and both learned and knew all over again that nothing else really matters that much in the end.