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

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.

empty to full

 

 

 

Yesterday

Goodbye is too good a word, Gal.

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

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

Транссибирская магистраль

I spent the morning watching a program about a railroad, the afternoon brooding about escape, and the evening drinking vodka. Now that it is night and the cold air creeping through my open window smells faintly of rain and sky, I will pretend that the clang of the furnace is the rumble of a steam engine and my down comfort a thick, mink fur. When the swaying of my berth wakes me in the middle of the night, Konstantin will wake, too. He will hand me a glass of water, tuck the mink tight around me, and say  Go back to sleep my darling Katya. We've only just crossed the Volga. Vladivostok is thousands of miles away. Then he will kiss my forehead and I will know that the adventure has only just begun. 

(Еше водки, пожалуйста!)

For JPN. Someday. 

but wear out the pavement of your street

Don't look for heaven, my heart,

but wear out the pavement of your street.

 Pindar, from Pythian Odes 

------------------------------------------------------------------

FROM 09 JULY 2007

I'm just not sure why he likes me, what he's got to go on at this point besides physical appearance. She shouts this over her shoulder because I am a few steps behind, trying my best not to intrude on the family portrait setting itself up in front of me. Lately we've taken to wandering the streets, walking it off as she likes to say and today we've ended up in front of the White House, stepping into the frame of who knows how many Christmas cards along the way. SEASON'S GREETINGS from OUR FAMILY ( don't mind the suspicious looking girl in the sunglasses) to YOURS! HAPPY NEW YEAR!

What do you mean you don't know why he likes you? Why wouldn't he like you? I stop and she keeps going, my words chasing her down because a Japanese man has handed me a camera. He is wearing white shoes and pressed white cotton shorts. His white polo shirt and a white visor are made from the same white terrycloth. His socks are brown though, and his short wife, also dressed toe to top in white, has a red carnation pinned to the (white) band of her straw hat. She looks plucky so I tell her so and when she hears the words in her own language she smiles, looking up into the frozen face of her posed husband, I snap a couple shots. There, I think, finally, a picture with a smile. They bow and I bow and then we all bow again before I'm able to push the camera back into the man's hands, the hair on his knuckles very black and sparse. I picture these same hands holding chopsticks, reading the newspaper on a crowded train, as I dart ahead through the crowds to where my friend stands, talking into the air beside her. I'm not like "oh woe is me, why would anyone ever like me?" because you know I'm not like that. I think I'm pretty great. I have a lot to offer, right?

Right. Of course. So what's the problem? She didn't notice, so I don't break her stride.

Well, I just don't understand. Why does he like me? What's he basing this on? A bus barrels past and her words get whipped up and swirled around in the hot air gushing by us. He doesn't know me. He barely knows me. Her face is red now, from the sun and the hot air, but also from the exertion, the emotion behind the words. It's real confusion. She wants to understand so the color rises in her cheeks.

Why do you like him? Why does anyone like anyone? We are waiting to cross the street. The Japanese couple sidles up to us. You do like him, don't you? Even though they don't speak English, I lower my voice. You kissed him and you weren't even drunk. That means something, right. Doesn't it? I want desperately, irrationally to appear respectable for these people -- to fix myself in the album of their memories as that upstanding young girl who spoke their language a bit, took that great picture in front of the White House.

I do. I do like him. She is forging ahead, through a group of middle-aged Italian men who whistle and stare and gawk. They make comments and gestures but she ignores them. The Japanese people turn left, toward the Mall, so I exhale and settle back into who I am today: someone who is wrung-out and and a bit lost in her own town. The sort of girl who finds consolation wandering the streets. I like him she says, and then turns around, all the way, to look at me straight on for the first time all morning. I like him, right? 

Sure you like him. I'm not sure what to say because all my answers have been wrong lately, but I keep talking, like a shark who will die if it stops moving through the murky water. Let's put it this way -- you like something about him. There is something you like that keeps you going back. And he likes something about you and it keeps him coming back. That makes sense, right?

Is that enough? She isn't moving. She's just standing there, waiting for an answer. We are smudged and dripping and almost shouting, surrounded by a mill and flow of people who came here to relax, to spend some time with the family, to experience history first hand or didn't know where else to go.

Do you remember when I fell for Martin? Do you remember what it was that I liked about him? She nods her head and turns, walking again and I'm glad that motion relieves the pressure of the moment. She doesn't say anything though, so I go on. I liked his teeth. He had the deliciousest, most toothy grin in the world and I loved it. I loved it. I fell for it.

She does not look convinced. So you liked his smile. I see a million people a day with nice smiles. What does that mean?

It's a starting place. You take something and you go with it and then you add on to it. I liked his teeth. And then I liked the way his teeth fit in his mouth when he smiled and then I liked how he smiled at me when I talked about killing every plant I've ever had. I'm about to be lost, about to be broadsided by a busload of memories, but I keep going.  And then I liked the way he wrote with his left hand in the library and the way his left hand wrote a note like an 8th grade boy asking me to the movies. And then I liked the way that we laughed all through the movie and the way his left hand grabbed my right hand and the way he kissed me by the back door. I am shouting now and a mother in squeaky clean tennis shoes, purchased for this trip, gives her daughter a look -- a God-forbid you should grow up and wander the streets, shouting like a crazy person look -- and again I am overcome with a desire to appear ok, hinged and functional for these people, guests in my city.

I don't know. It's such a big gamble. I mean, look how wrecked you were by Martin in the end. Whatever. It will sort itself out, right? We are in front of a coffee shop and her hand is on the door. Wanna get something to eat? This walking makes me ravenous. 

Right, I want to say. Right. It will sort itself out. I repeat it to myself because she is already inside, in line, and because suddenly, standing in the confluence of men, women, their children, of history, commerce, love, country, summer I am the one who needs convincing, not her. We only have words and images, projected and gathered, to go on-- only eyes and ears to take them in. And what can they hold? I want to shout.What can you build out of light and sound? Out of nothing?

it will all come out in the wash

I almost bought an old double washtub from the 1920's at the junk store this morning.  It was about waist high, sitting on its castors, and the word "IDEAL" was stamped into the tin sides.  I liked it immediately, could think of at least ten different uses for it that would make my home (and so clearly by extension, MY LIFE) just a little cooler, more nifty and interesting. In the end, I decided to see if it's still there next month and got back in my car empty handed.

On the way back into the city I imagined the woman who used the washtub for its intended purpose, perhaps beside a small wooden house on the edge of a very big plain.  Who knows how many sets of coveralls or flour sack dresses she had to get through, or if she rationed the water in the summer, but I imagine her scrubbing and beating and rinsing all day.  The clean clothes on the line wave in the breeze, a flag flying high against all the lonely unknowns beyond the bounds of the homestead. 

I spent the rest of the morning attending to the small details of my own housekeeping.  I paid my bills, bought coffee and cream to get me through the week, swept the kitchen floor, and bleached the sink.  All in under an hour.  Then I wandered around a museum, read my book in the park, and went to the movies for the second time in as many days.  So much of my life is stamped with the word "IDEAL."  And yet has the hollow ring of an empty tin tub.

Tonight I will gather up my clothes and sheets and towels and go to the laundromat down the road from my home.  I will feed the machine quarters and it will take care of most of the scrubbing and rinsing, leaving me to fight only the loneliest spots that never quite come out in the wash.  

Some lines along Secession

More Tired

I'm more tired than I've ever been in my whole life I tell Squirrel after a particularly harrowing string of days. Go to sleep, she says before hanging up. The next day she sends me a plane ticket to visit her at the Left Handed Captain's house on the shores of Lake Secession.

Packing List

4 dresses with pockets, 6 books, 2 aprons, pens & hairpins, ibuprofen. 

Middle Seat

Sweetheart, can I buy you a drink? the man in the window seat asks as the drink cart rattles our way. Forget the drink, the other one says, she looks like she needs someone to buy her a good steak and a month of sleep. They are nice men, these two good old boys in their Clemson caps and fishing vests. They hand me each a bottle of Wild Turkey and then pretend not to notice that I can't stop crying. 

ipod: shuffle: first song

Sufjan Stevens: Seven Swans
A Good Man is Hard to Find
Once in the backyard, 
she was once like me, 
she was once like me. 
Twice when I killed them, 
they were once at peace, 
they were once like me. 
Hold to your gun, man, 
and put off all your peace, 
put off all the beast. 
Paid a full of these, I wait for it, 
but someone's once like me. 
She was once like me. 
I once was better. 
I put off all my grief. 
I put off all my grief. 
And so I go to hell, I wait for it, 
but someone's left me creased. 
And Someone's left me creased

Tenderness by the hand

Used to navigating the open seas by stars, the Left Handed Captain is at a loss when it comes to keeping the moving blue dot on the course charted out for us by google maps. We pass the exit for Fair Play, South Carolina 3 times before I fall asleep amidst the pile of bags and fishing gear in the back of the truck. When I wake, the truck has stopped at the end of a gravel driveway. Squirrel leads me with tenderness by the hand to the guest room of the house on the shores of Lake Secession. A real live dead alligator is splayed out across the floor and the collected works of Flannery O'Connor sit on the table by the bed, as though waiting up for my arrival.

Crawford's Country Store

South Carolina Department of Natural Resources: 7 day fishing license 90994213
Issued: Crawford's Country Store
$11.00

Yeah, Mang

The back wall of the country store is lined with jigs, lures, weights, hooks. Bait. Tackle. There, the Left Handed Captain, stands, talking crappie and bass with his high school buddy Dixon and another guy who stretches out his hand and says Max Crawford, ma'am with a nod. Their voices are slow and cool and deep and I find myself floating on the surface of this particular lagoon with no trouble at all.   

It doesn't take long

Aww hell, Kate, I whisper to myself. Don't you practically do this very thing for a living? Skin is skin and a needle is a needle. It doesn't take long before I can reach into the bucket, fish out a minnow, thread the hook through its lip, and cast in under a minute.  I let my line drift, let the tethered minnow think he is leading the charge. And then I reel him back in.

Certain Sensibilities/High Life

We pass the boiled peanuts back and forth across the boat and I marvel how much the afternoon tastes like my childhood in Japan, all salty legumes and dried bits of fish on my fingers.  The Left Handed Captain is a man of certain sensibilities, some of which extend to the lining of his intestinal tract, so he leaves the six pack of High Life to me and drinks something from a bright colored can that is supposed to taste like sweet tea, only no sweet tea your mama would make. When we stop to fill up the tank, he comes out of the shack with a giant dill pickle and my heart almost explodes trying to contain the perfection of the day.

All is indeed lost

The land is wooded, with gentle hills and patches of good pasture between the stands of trees. I watch for houses with handsome bunches of cattle and imagine knocking on the doors of these homes and asking for work or if there are any awkward, taciturn bachelor sons who need the love of a good woman. I'm a hard worker, I'd say, and what's more I'll make biscuits on weekdays and pies on the weekends. As we pull into Abbeville the Left Handed Captain points out the Burt Stark mansion and tells me this is where the Confederate Generals decided to surrender, where Jefferson Davis looked at the great price of secession and declared All is indeed lost. I picture his nice full head of hair and high cheek bones. I wonder if any of his great great great grandsons are awkward taciturn bachelors still farming these parts, hankering for a piece of good pie; secretly wanting a more perfect union with the north.

Handful of hushpuppies

Squirrel dips the crappie fillets in buttermilk and flour and drops them into the skillet while I stand over the kettle of bubbling peanut oil and wait for the hush puppies to roll over in their bath. The Left Handed Captain keeps the daiquiris flowing, his mother opens jars of pickled okra, and his father teaches us dice games. We laugh and laugh.  At the end of the night I put a handful of hush puppies, heavy as musket balls, into the pocket of my apron and sneak down to the dock to throw my edible rocks at the lake, my only weapons against Secession.  

Girls are shitheads, too.

Squirrel and I leave the Left Handed Captain to his book by the falls. We tell him we want to go shopping! and then over our drinks, laugh at how he believed us, two rumpled old gals that we are.  We find a bar called The Velo Fellow and I fall for it immediately, for the rhyming name, half french and half english, for the bicycles everywhere, for its cool dark sanctuary. Squirrel tells me all her sadness and worry about the Left Handed Captain and then I tell her of my exhaustion and fracture. The bartender listens as he dries a flat of clean glasses and doesn't even ask before bringing us another round. Men are such shitheads! Squirrel says after we've said just about all that needed saying.  Yeah. But girls are shitheads, too I remind her.

Moonshine cocktails

In Greenville we meet the Left Handed Captain's friend from college.  He has dark, dark hair and bright blue eyes and the best manners of any man I've ever met, a real southern gentleman.  He takes us to a distillery where they make moonshine. The rawness of the liquor burns its way down my throat and I feel the wiring of my insides, already stripped and frayed, spark. Back at his house the southern gentleman makes moonshine cocktails with strawberries and home-made ginger ale while we get ready for the party. I put on my new dress (pink and black flowers, pockets), pink lipstick, a brave face.  Outside hail the size and weight of quarters pelts the bathroom window, snapping the dogwood and azalea blossoms from their stems.  

This is how the conversation goes

He tells me he is 22, almost done with a degree in philosophy. I catch him staring at my breasts. I am in no mood to be charming and certainly no mood to be charmed.

So you're from Washington, DC? 

Yes.

There are a lot of great museums there. Do you like art?

It's okay, I suppose.

You know what city has great art museums?

Do tell.

Florence.

Florence, South Carolina? I've never been.

Oh...um...I mean Florence, Italy. It's beautiful!

Yes. Most of Italy is, I hear.

Do you like music?

Some.

You should listen to this guy called Sufjan Stevens. You'd really like him.

Easy now, Old Gal. Only spinsters call young men whippersnappers.  

I bite my tongue and smile for the first time.

Thank you for the suggestion. I'll have to look into that.

Yeah! He's great. Hey...are you on facebook?

Turn away and stamp your feet

It is Palm Sunday and the pews are filled with men in pastel polo shirts and women in sleeveless sundresses. The choir mistress is ancient and perches unsteadily on a stool, looking at the congregation over her beaky nose like an egret gazing over the water.  A woman announces from the doorway that there are lemon meringue pies and seven-layer salads left over from the church social on sale, a bargain at $7 apiece. Across the way I see Max Crawford from the country store. The minister notes how good it is to have Sister So and So back after all the trouble she went through with her sugar diabetes. We wave our palm branches during the hymns. You sing hosanna now, the minister booms from the pulpit, but when God's plan doesn't look like what you want do you turn away and stamp your feet and yell CRUCIFY HIM? At the end of the service we file down the aisle and leave our palms at the alter. 

 After church, sitting on the dock at Lake Secession, I think of the poem 
I read every Ash Wednesday, 
of reading it this Ash Wednesday, 33 days prior, in particular, 
in the poetry corner at a man's house.

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And I pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgment not be too heavy upon us

Secession, rebellion, submission, redemption. We turn and we turn and we turn again.  

Teach us to care and to not care

Teach us to sit still   

(from Ash Wednesday, by TS Eliot)

Spare half hour

The airport restaurant overlooks a sculpture garden. We eat salads and talk about the weekend in the spare half hour before I must go through security. I look at these two people across the table, people who I love so much, who are trying to figure out what it means to love each other. I wonder what will become of all of us, about all the ways we could die, or kill each other, trying. 

     

Middle seat, again.

Are you coming or going? the man in the aisle seat asks me. Both, constantly. I close my eyes and sleep.

--
(for Squirrel, JPB, and JLR).

fiance in the waiting room

The younger men ask, mostly, because they hope to get lucky, even from a hospital stretcher.


Girl, I don't see no ring on that finger. You on lock down or still up for grabs? 


Old men are more skillful.  Courtlier.


Thank you, Sugar. You take care of your husband this good? If I was 40 years younger, he'd better watch out cause, let me tell you, I'd snatch you right up.


(Well let me tell you, Mr. Jones... if I was 40 years older...)


Young women ask to even the playing field, to see how we stack up against each other.  I tell them to take off their clothes and hold their babies while they go pee in a cup. I ask them about their menstrual cycles, their sexual habits, their bowel movements.  They want a turn at asking the questions.


You got kids? No?! Hmm. Well, you got a fiance, right?


Usually I don't mind.  An honest question deserves an honest answer and I've got nothing to hide or be ashamed of.  Their questions have very little to do with me. It's much more about them, the holes and the missing pieces in their lives.


My patient tonight was in her 70's.  She drove herself to the hospital when her heart started to hurt. I helped her unbutton her blouse, tied the strings of her hospital gown, brought her ice, called her sister, and tucked more blankets around her while she waited for the doctor.


You sure do work hard, Sweetheart.  What time you get off? 11 pm?!  Is your husband keeping dinner warm for you, I hope?


I'd like to think that if I had a husband, he'd be the kind who would keep dinner warm. But no, I'm not married. 


You're not married? Why on Earth is a sweet girl like you not married?


I read once that in a courtroom, an attorney should never ask a witness a question unless he already knows the answer or truly wants to know the answer.  In the courtroom of my own mind, where I am prosecutor, defendant, witness, jury, and judge, this is a question that no one ever asks or answers.

---

Can you go get my fiance out the waiting room?


Sure. What's her name?


Sheila.


What's Sheila's last name?


I don't know?


What do you mean you don't know? I though Sheila is your fiance.


She is. But I just met her on the bus the other day.

new home #1

Even before I moved I crawled inside this song and made myself a new home.  Ain't it feel right? Ain't it feel nice. 

pause & reflect

Recently I read an article in a scholarly journal suggesting that nurses who take a few moments each shift to pause and reflect on the deeper meaning and significance of their work generally suffer less anxiety and burnout.

Ok. Whatever you say, guy. Here it goes:

Hmmm. Stopping to pause and reflect as I look around, it appears that I somehow work in the middle of a Hieronymus Bosch painting. How lovely that my life so closely imitates art!

Hieronymus Bosch The Last Judgment, detail

The Cemetery

Step into the light poor Lazarus/Don't die alone behind the window shade/

Let me see the mark death made/I dream a highway back to you

-Gillian Welch

Bowled over lately by the unfine-ness of things, I take to wandering the cemetery in the melting light, a mug of milky tea in hand and a nip of bourbon in the pocket of my spring blue coat.

There are lots of Katherines and Catherines there. Some Katies and Kitties but few Kates. On good days I make sure to visit my favorites: Ms. Peach Wayland, The Meachem Family, Agnes Plum, Stonewall Jackson Kerns and his son, Adelbert Jackson Kearns. On bad days I consider laying down amongst the McCathran clan until the damp green ground of their plot accepts the persistent weight of my tired bones.

Today is neither good nor bad, though, so I sit on the slope of the far hill and watch the birds peck at things I can not see. An old man follows his dog along the muddy path below and when he looks up and sees me, doffs his cap with a sweeping bow.  I touched three dead bodies this week I say aloud to the birds. Three men who were alive one minute and then not alive the next. I think of everything it means to be dead and then I think of all the ways to be dead while you are alive and the way to come back to life, which requires another kind of dying, too.  In my notebook I write DEAD in all capital letters and below it

CHERRYRED UNWED INBRED SOFABED WIDESPREAD TALKINGHEAD

which makes me laugh aloud to myself. Underneath my rhyme I sketch crude outlines of headstones and fill them in with my best gothic handwriting:

KATE

who tried her best to be kind

to drunks & addicts

who pissed on the floor & her shoes

or

Here lies KATE

who believed in

at least 100 second chances

or even just

KATE

who was usually on time

but is now truly late.

I sit on the side of the hill until I hear the bells from the church down the road. Long after their carolling ends, their message floats over the acres of graves. I sit as still as I can in the near dark and listen. Let the dead bury the dead. Go back to your living.  And for heaven's sake, be thankful you were not named for a Civil War general.