music, music, music
I've been thinking about my life's soundtrack -- the songs that have played in the background as I lived through various eras in my life so far. My still new car still has it's free trial satellite radio connection, and I find that the only station I really listen to is the 1950s one. With each song, my being remembers the feeling of when I heard it played all those decades ago. I don't necessarily remember events; I remember feelings. That's the magic of music.
I have discovered that many of the songs from subsequent decades that I still like to listen to are the ones written by Leonard Cohen. Not sung by him, but written -- or co-written -- by him. They seem to generate the most visceral emotional response.
I'm thinking particularly of the songs on Jennifer Warnes' Famous Blue Raincoat all-Leonard-Cohen-album, which was a gift from Myrln.
Simon and Garfunkel were major players in my 60s and 70s head -- poignant and soulful and melancholy: "Cloudy," "Bookends," "Patterns," "America."
And Don McClean with his "And I Love You So" and "Winterwood" and "Vincent."
Judy Collins singing "Suzanne" and"Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye" and "Sisters of Mercy" ..... -- music that took me through bittersweet 70s.
Over the past decade or so, especially those years taking care of my mother, I haven't been listening to much music. There is no stereo in her rooms, and I spend a great deal of my time there with her, watching television.
Occasionally, in my own space, I listen to Josh Groban. "Vincent," again.
I'm finally starting to download songs into my MP3 player, but it's not any new music that I want to listen to. I want to hear the old songs, the ones that bring me to remembering when I had a real life.
Myrln Monday (2)
Myrln is gone, but his spirit remains with us in the power of his words:
Fathers and Daughters
Little girls are nice,
but we do them wrong
fussing with their hair and dressing them up
like dolls –
teaching them from the start
they are decorative playthings.
Better we should feed them
words and numbers and tools
to remind them
that before women, they are people.
Teach them love and caring and nurture, yes,
but not as the entirety of their being,
else those qualities
become walls and prisons.
Give them, as well, wings
and teach them to fly –
in case later in life
someone builds walls around them.
Little girls are nice,
but daughters who are their soaring selves
are better.
Fathers and Sons
All the time they’re growing up,
sons try hard to please their fathers.
They play ball, follow dad’s interest in cars,
or in building things,
or in fishing –
whatever it is that pleases dad.
Mostly learning how to be a man.
If they’re lucky,
they’re not required to embrace any of those
for a lifetime.
If they’re lucky,
somewhere along the way,
they’re let loose
to strike out after their own interests
and to please themselves.
And fathers,
if they’re smart,
realize that somewhere along the way
is a turning point:
a time when sons become teachers,
and fathers can learn
what their sons became on their own,
how manhood is not a fixed concept.
And say to their sons,
“Good job.”
Then both will know
they did right
in pleasing each other.
William A. Frankonis, 1937 - 2008
in support of melancholy
From here:
I do, however, wonder why so many people experiencing melancholia are now taking pills simply to ease the pain. Of course there is a fine line between what I'm calling melancholia and what society calls depression. In my mind, what separates the two is degree of activity. Both forms are more or less chronic sadness that leads to continuing unease with how things are — persistent feelings that the world is not quite right, that it is a place of suffering, stupidity, and evil. Depression (as I see it, at least) causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything one way or another. In contrast, melancholia generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.
[snip]
Melancholia, far from a mere disease or weakness of will, is an almost miraculous invitation to transcend the banal status quo and imagine the untapped possibilities for existence. Without melancholia, the earth would likely freeze over into a fixed state, as predictable as metal. Only with the help of constant sorrow can this dying world be changed, enlivened, pushed to the new.
Poets are friends with melancholy. All artists are. Probably scientists as well.
a time for every purpose
It's hard to stop feeling melancholy, remembering and then recognizing that what's gone is gone for good.
I play Mary Chapin Carpenter's album with which blogger friend Dave Rogers kindly gifted me through ITunes. It's melancholy resonates with mine and fills me. And then the melancholy is gone, at least for now. I can think of something else besides what's lost.
I can think of something like the elections.
I've had mixed feelings about Hillary Clinton for the same reasons that many others do. But I'm slowly becoming more and more convinced that she's the better democratic candidate.
I was particularly interested in the points made in the Washington Post by Geoff Garin, strategist on the Clinton campaign.
So let me get this straight.
On the one hand, it's perfectly decent for Obama to argue that only he has the virtue to bring change to Washington and that Clinton lacks the character and the commitment to do so. On the other hand, we are somehow hitting below the belt when we say that Clinton is the candidate best able to withstand the pressures of the presidency and do what's right for the American people, while leaving the decisions about Obama's preparedness to the voters.
Who made up those rules? And who would ever think they are fair?
[snip]
The bottom line is that one campaign really has engaged in a mean-spirited, unfair character attack on the other candidate -- but it has been Obama's campaign, not ours. You would be hard-pressed to find significant analogues from our candidate, our senior campaign officials or our advertising to the direct personal statements that the Obama campaign has made about Clinton.
The problem is that the Obama campaign holds itself to a different standard than the one to which it holds us -- and sometimes the media do, too.
There are no saints in politics. But there are those who can get the job of fixing this country done more effectively than others.
I originally supported John Edwards. Hillary Clinton is my next choice.
life is so confusing
I'm back from another day of helping my daughter clean out her Dad's stuff. I focused on his clothes, setting aside some that I'll send to b!X, since they probably will fit him. As it turns out, I took a pair of summer shorts and a pair of cargo pants that fit me because they both have elastic in the waistband. Men's pants always have lots of pockets. I wish more women's pants did.
It was so strange going through his things. An invasion of his privacy. Except it doesn't matter any more. Except it sort of does.
His being gone forever still doesn't seem real.
I took a Best of Moody Blues CD. A blue pottery bowl. A mortar and pestle. An orange windbreaker. I don't have a windbreaker. I took the two new deliciously soft bed pillows that he never had a chance to use.
I took five trash bags of clothes, a big box of shoes, and several suits on hangars to the Salvation Army. And there are still clothes left in his closets.
His walls and shelves (except for the full book shelves) are covered with art and crafts. Beautiful stuff that none of us has room for. It will all have to be disposed of.
We keep reminding ourselves that these things are not him, they are not his legacy. They are the things he liked to look at, to think about, to help him remember. They served an important function in his life. He no longer needs them. His legacies are our memories and all that he accomplished through his creativity and passion.
We assess his belongings with great practicality. One or the other of us will make use of his recliner, his couch, the chest of drawers that was part of the first real bedroom set we bought when we were married. (When we divorced, he got the bed and the chest of drawers. I took the dresser with the mirror. The dresser fell apart two of my moves ago. The chest of drawers still looks brand new.)
We go on with our lives.
Myrln Monday (1)
Monday was the day that Myrln (aka William Frankonis and my once-husband) posted his rants here on Kalilily Time. He wrote a great deal more than political rants, however, and from now on, Mondays will be the place where Myrln will post some of his best writings, posthumously, through the auspices of our daughter.
Snippets from “A Letter to My Grown Children” -- post 9/11 2001
[snip]
…We live in the Now. Sometimes drastic events make us aware of that simple fact we tend to forget or ignore; we always live only in Now. As Buddhism has been telling us for centuries. No matter how or how much the world changes, we can still live only in the right Now. How is ours to determine. We may mourn loss and worry what’s to come, but here we are – Now. And Now is sometimes good, sometimes bad; sometimes easy, sometimes hard; sometimes joyful, sometimes sad. But whatever it is, it is, and we have no choice but to live in it. Which, when you think of it, is a fine thing.
[snip]
It makes sense, then, to make Now the best possible o us because we never know. And that fact should teach us: no delaying, waiting around, procrastinating, habituating, sinking into torpor. Look. See. Be. Whether alone or with others, do it. Now…not tomorrow.
[snip]
So how do I know the validity of what I’m preaching? Because in many ways, I have always delayed Now for dreams-to-come or for fear of future consequences. But I know – Now – those dreams/fears will never come to pass. And even if the fears prove true in the end or the dreams went unfulfilled, so what? Why didn’t I at least make my Nows what I wanted them to be?
[snip]
Only love lives still in past and future. Strange thing, love. It’s why I can always say I love you Now, always have, and always will.
[snip]
more unearthings
In the bottom of my jewelry box -- a yellowing note from my once-husband that came with a statue of a traveling Buddha that he gave me after we split.
It begins with a quote from Sheldon Kopp's Guru:
Though solitude and communion are both necessary and do in part serve to renew the depth of one another, a man must decide for himself at which point to give up one for the other.
In the corner of a file folder holding my various diplomas -- a transcript of my grades for the 1958 - 1959 college semesters. Suffice it to say that I was much less than a stellar student. But I could hold more beer than most of the guys I knew. Ah, those were the days.
rooting around
Our offspring and I are rooting around in search of legacies left by my once-husband. He left boxes of memorabilia about his plays -- from playbills to reviews, to posters -- so those legacies are obvious. What is not obvious to our kids are the times in his life before they existed, and b!X, for one, is in the process of digging out his Dad's military history -- mostly because it appears that during that time period he changed from good Catholic to angry agnostic. I met him after he got out of the army, so I have no idea what transpired to precipitate that shift in world view.
As I'm rooting around in my -- and my mom's -- old files, I'm finding glimpses of an old self of mine that I had forgotten in the lines of poetry I had written back when I was in high school. Those are the ones that my mother saved; I never gave them to her, so she must have gone through my teen-age dresser to find them when I was away at college. If I knew then that she was invading my privacy, I would have had a fit. Now, I'm kind of glad she saved them, because I never would have.
The Winter passes into Spring
The birds begin to sweetly sing,
And through the air the Church bells ring.
But, yet, I notice not a thing.
To me the world is cold and gray,
E'er in twilight, ne'er in day.
There's nothing in my life that's gay.
Happiness seems far away.
(Of course, in 1957, "gay" only meant "happy.")
Here's one from 1953. I was 13.
The land is so dry, it's all just a waste.
We've no water for days, no food to tatse.
The sand on the desert is not food to eat.
Even the cactus furnish no meat.
The sun is so hot and oh so dry.
The hot breeze in our ears whispers
"Die......dry.......die!"
I don't know if it was adolescent angst or if I was depressed even back then, but here's one I wrote when I was 18.
I hear the dreary, mournful refrain
Of the steadily falling downpour of rain.
Not the rain of a wild and stormy night,
With furious streaks and flashes of light,
With tormenting winds of passionate force
And eerie outcries from an unknown source.
Not the kind of rain that rises from hell
And holds all the world in its magical spell.
Not the kind of rain that's so torrid and splendid --
That you still stand in wonder even after its ended.
And still not the rain that's mellow and mild
As sweet and refreshing as the smile of a child.
Not the shower that calls all of nature to waken
With gentle caresses that leaves all unshaken.
Not the rain that makes every creature feel new.
Not the rain that leaves the world sparkling with dew.
But a gloomy depressing curtain of gray
That covers and hides all the brightness of day --
A shroud of depression, a mist of despair,
A cloak of discouragement, everywhere.
OK, so there's lots of trite phrases and rhymings. After all, my high school education was in a Catholic school, where in our senior year the big piece of "literature" we read was "Father Malachy's Miracle." What I can't help noticing, though, is my focus on the dark side of things. Even then.
Here's one I like. I must have been a freshman in college when I wrote it:
If I were to choose my own heaven,
It would be forever Spring,
with no bugs
and plenty of food
and books, books books
and a rock 'n roll band on weekdays
and a jazz band on Sundays
and people people people
and all of them would be college graduates.
If I were to choose my own hell
it could be no worse
than boredom.
I think that my once-husband would have chosen the same kind of heaven. Except for the "people people people" and probably the "college graduates." He was never bored in his own company. Unlike me.
Finally, I wrote this when I was 20. Apparently, I knew that one day I would be rooting around.
Twenty is Young
When I am old
I will not care for
rock 'n roll,
slopping
and
jazz
bongos drums
beat poetry
and
Kafka
Kerouac
Jake Trussell
and
lifeguards with
sea-burnished hair
and convertibles.
But now I am young
and I know that all of these
will one day be
the cushions
on the couch of memories
on which I will repose
When I am old.
Note: The Slop was a dance from the fifties. I had to google Jake Trussell and I still don't remember. But I still like rock 'n roll. And convertibles. And I'm still known to ogle lifeguards.
picturing it
I am going through my photo albums, looking for photos of my once-husband from the old days. I was surprised to discover that I only had one of both of us with our kids, and that one was from back in 1970. b!X has posted it on his blog. There are lots of photos of our kids, but few of us together.
I did find one photo of the two of us from our beer-partying college days.
I'm hoping that, as word spreads among our long-time-ago friends, they will look and see if they have any old photos of Bill and send them along. I know that our offspring would love to have them.
down but not out yet
What is my problem!!
The sun is out, my seedlings are thriving, I'm taking my 60 milligrams of happy pill every day, we have hospice available (including a social worker for moral support), and my mom is still sleeping a lot.
I should be feeling a whole lot better than I do. I shouldn't be feeling this "stuck." I should have more energy.
Maybe I have spring fever. Maybe it's the just-past full moon. Maybe the loss is greater than I thought.
Elevator
Jim Culleny
Be still in a field of
slowly falling snow
and renounce focus
Peer into the distance
to where the hare
hunkers under a log
and the coy dog
waits for it to move
Let a billion dropping flakes
inundate your vision
unselfconsciously
and find yourself rising,
taking the forest with you,
taking it all,
riding the snow-snuffed
woods into a gray sky,
levitating at the pace
of cool, languid
precipitation,
rising gently weightless
with pine and spruce
and the white-clad carcasses
of busted oak and ash
and every crystal-buried
stalk of undergrowth,
—the graygreen scales of lichen,
the silent future of mushrooms
underneath awaiting
the blessed touch
of damp and sun,
take with you the lights
of a distant house
and the wisps that unwind
from its chimney
like tendrils of love
of a blazing heart,
find yourself rising
unfettered as a hawk on a thermal
a dandelion tuft on a whistled breath
a balloon let loose from the grip of a child
ride upward,
easy,
weightless as a well-lived
soul
The above from one of Jim Culleny's daily poetry emails.
in memory of myrln
My once-husband was my Monday guest blogger, Myrln (AKA William A. Frankonis), who passed away lalst Thursday. In honor of his memory, our daughter asked me to post the following, which she found in his extensive files of his own writings. He doesn't have to be here to be here.
Lessons from the Wonderground: a Father to his Children
ONE
Try not to hurt anyone, which includes yourself.
TWO
Try to make yourself whole, knowing all the while that’s a lifelong process.
THREE
Be true to yourself, whatever that is at the time, for like everything else, your self changes.
FOUR
Speak out against wrong, however you define it and no matter who is the culprit.
FIVE
Honor children and always listen carefully to them; they are all smarter than we credit them and beyond you, they may have no voice but yours.
SIX
Find and honor all the wonder in all of Nature and in all of yourself, and reconnect, for you, too, are a part of Nature.
SEVEN
Keep close to family, blood or otherwise, for you are, and always will be part of each other.
EIGHT
Remember the dead in your heart, but honor life and the living with your time and attention because afterwards it is too late.
NINE
Laugh often, cry as necessary, fear what should be feared, love deeply, hurt when there’s pain, be courageous, know the holy value of breathing and of everything else that makes up living.
TEN
Find and regularly visit the stillness at the heart of life.
I love you dad.
namaste
W. A. Frankonis condolence page
b!X has set up a way for those who knew Bill to express their remembrances. Go to www.myrln.com. There's an email address.
a letter to the dead
Dear Bill,
"..a bit of sun and the touch of love's hand," you wrote once in your script about "Myrln."
That's what we had yesterday when we gathered to pick up your ashes and bring them home. I know that you will appreciate the plans to temporarily keep them in the old Orville Redenbacher popcorn tin that you kept on your bookshelf. We are making plans to gather again this summer to take you where you found the most peace and comfort and leave you to the gentle rocking of Mother Sea.
It was a beautiful early spring day sandwiched between those wet and gloomy days April often brings. We took you to lunch. Well, we left you in the car while we had lunch. Here we are, leaving the restaurant. Not me, of course. I was taking the picture.
And then we went back to your apartment, got a bat and ball and went out into the sunny field to play. There was lots of sun and lots of love. We felt your spirit there with us, popping the ball and chasing it out into left field. I was too warm in the sweater I had worn, so I went back to the apartment and changed into one of your shirts. I hope that was OK. I guess it's too late if it wasn't.
"We're a quirky family," Melisa commented to a strange look from the funeral director after something she had said.
We all took something of yours before we left (although we will be back in a week or so to manage what needs to be saved from the complexities of memories you left behind). I took the little laughing Buddha as company for the traveling Buddha you gave me so long ago. I also took a little side table with a tiled top painted with two flowers that look kind of like anemones. That is going to become my altar space. I think that would be just fine with you.
There are so many chores I should be doing now that I'm back here with my mother. Instead, it sit alone at my computer and write and cry.. You would understand that.
I wish we had had more time with you -- a lot more of Myrln's magical
bit of sun and the touch of love's hand
love,
your wacky once-wife, Elaine
"seated on waves"
For Bill, who will soon be seated on waves.
The Same
Pablo Neruda
It costs much to grow old:
I've fondled the Springs
like sticks of new furniture
with the wood still sweet to the smell, suave
in the grain, and hidden away in its lockers,
I've stored my wild honey.
That's why the bell tolled
bearing its sound to the dead,
out of range of my reason:
one grows used to one's skin,
the cut of one's nose, one's good looks,
while summer by summer, the sun
sinks in it's brazier.
Noting the sea's health,
its insistence and turbulence,
I kept skimming the beaches;
now seated on waves
I keep the bitter green smell
of a lifetime's apprenticeship
to live on in the whole of my motion.
Coincidentally, this is a recent one of Jim Culleny's daily poetry emails.
four-day earworm
A song from the fifties, I think, keeps running through my head. It's been there for almost a week now. I can't find it anywhere on the net, but, of course, I don't know the actual title. I remember the first line and the tune.
"You're my first love, and you'll be my last love...."
Any of you who remember the fifties know that song?
ADDENDUM: Thanks to Cora, who left a comment, I now know that the song is "Soldier Boy" by the Shirelles -- which is appropriate, since I met Bill just after he got out of the army and returned to the college where I was also a student.
William Frankonis, dead at 70
I wasn't there this afternoon when my daughter gave permission to turn off the breathing machine and my ex-husband, her father, took his last artificial breath. I was home, getting ready for the Hospice nurse's visit tomorrow to assess my mother.
But I was with him for more than a day before that, when he told me had had an earworm for the past several days.
"Bloody Mary," he said smiling, as we remembered the production of South Pacific in which we performed together more than 35 years ago, he as Lt. Cable, and I as Liat.
In the back of my smile, I think about another bloody female. Kali: birth mother; death mother, tongue redder even than betel nuts. She had wormed in far beyond his ear.
He understood my fascination with Kali, Lilith. He might have used other names for those forces, but he knew them well. That was part of what we always had in common -- our immersion in the poetic power of myth. "Myrln" understood magic. Our son tells me that, for a couple of days before I called to tell him to get on a plane, he saw three crows chasing a hawk. Bill would have embraced that metaphor.
"There's one thing I really have to do," he had told me in between dozing off in his recliner just two days ago. "I want to write down how I feel about all those people who have been close to me. I know that I'm a very private person. I know that I've played my life close to the vest. I want to tell them how much they mean to me."
But he never had a chance to write that last piece of his special eloquence. He also never had a chance to enjoy that first day of 70 degree weather after the long dreary winter that he hated so much.
Nevertheless, the depths of his feelings had been expressed often in the many scripts (some performed and some not), memoirs, and poetry that he had written over his lifetime. His original stage play, The Killings Tale, won a audio book "Audie" in 2004.. His adaptations and original scripts have often been performed by the New York State Theater Institute.
Warner Music Group awarded NYSTI $400,000 in 1996 to develop five new musicals for family audiences. The first of those was “A Tale of Cinderella” by W.A.Frankonis, Will Severin, and George David Weiss, made possible in part by funding provided by Warner Music Group and by the participation of Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. An immediate success, the award-winning show is available as an Atlantic Theatre CD or cassette and has been re-released on VHS as part of Warner Home Video's 75th Anniversary Celebration. Vocal Selections from “A Tale of Cinderella” is available from Warner Bros. Publications. The video was broadcast nationwide on PBS stations to an audience of more than 56 million TV households (half of potential US audiences). In the 2000-01 Season, “A Tale of Cinderella” toured all the major cities of New York including Buffalo, Syracuse, the Capital Region, and Manhattan.
His life and work will be remembered by a great many people. But I will remember him as the young man I married in a flurry of passion and possessiveness even though in many ways we were oil and water. We wound up being better friends than spouses.
I will miss his political rants and the books he would send me after he read them. I will miss the father he was to our children. I will miss a friend, and I will always be glad that I was able to be there for him when he needed help so close to the end of a life ended too soon.
ADDENDUM: b!X has posted excerpts from his dad's willl and it is no surprise that Bill used the same humor, honesty, and creativity in writing his will as he had with all of his other writings.
he can't go home again
Myrln fidgets in the hospital bed in the emergency room, where they have him hooked up to various machines that beep and chime and whir.
"I just wanted a few more days. I needed a few more days. I needed time to think...." He looks at me with eyes angry and sad at the same time. He is back in the hospital after only two days at home from a week-long stay for tests and such. I have been with him for the past 36 hours, including this morning when we had to call a Rescue Ambulance because he couldn't breathe, even with an oxygen tank.
We have been divorced now for twice as many years as we were married. But time had healed our wounds and we had developed a friendly relationship.
"I will be eternally grateful," he wheezes, "for all you are doing for me now."
My eyes fill with tears. "No problem," I say.
"I have to tell you something," he says. "Even through it all, there was always a little love left."
"Yes," I say. "Me too."
And I'm crying and we are holding hands the way we once did long before I begged him to stop smoking.
Tonight he is temporarily hooked up to a respirator. b!X arrived from Oregon, and his sister and family from Massachusetts. He has not yet been awake for b!X and him to have a little time together. I hope he wakes, for both their sakes.
Meanwhile, I am back on the mountain with my mother, but I suspect will be be leaving again in a day or so.
They will take him off the respirator. He will either breathe or not. Either way, he won't be going home again.
Myrln, who once blogged here on Mondays, is my former spouse, the father of my children. He has inoperable lung cancer, which has spread to just about every vital organ.
going....going.....
While my mom fades slowly away, we are dealing with another crisis in the family, and that's why I haven't been blogging. I haven't been here; I've been in Albany with my daughter as she struggles her way through the health care systems to get support for her dad when he leaves the hospital.
My role was moral support, source of experiential information, and entertainer of my grandson, who had to come with her from Massachusetts. There was no one with whom to leave him for four full days while his own dad went to work and also monitored the construction process on their house addition.
Other patients came and went throughout those four days that we sat in and out of his hospital room. We watched them being taken to surgery, watched them come back and get going again.
But my offspring's dad didn't get up and didn't go anywhere. His lungs are waging war against hope. We are waiting to hear where he will be going.
And now I'm back here with my mother, and my daughter is back in her home as well. I am worried about her own health, as her commitment and persistence kick in and she continues her long distance struggle to manage her dad's care (with crucial help from a close friend of his who lives nearby).
I help from here as best I can -- checking out a county program that provides financial assistance with home care for eligible elders, local home care agencies, walkers, tub chairs, recliner lift chairs.....
Whatever the outcome of his final tests today, he will need an awful lot of help. And our small family is scattered, each with his/her own responsibilities. But we are doing all we can from where we are, knowing there will come a time, too soon, when we will all be gathering for the final going.
