That’s where my mom’s thoughts are these days — lost in Yonkers, which is where she lived most of her life and where I grew up. She’s spending most of her time going through old photos and organizing them. As she does this, she’s transported back in time, back to better times, back to the times when our extended family numbered in the many, many dozens. Now, the few that are left are even worse shape than she is in. She got a call yesterday that one of my aunts is in the hospital dying of cancer. Losing. Losing. Lost. This is my mom in the 1940s having her portrait painted by a woman-artist who escaped the Nazis and whose husband-doctor my dad helped to set up a practice in Yonkers back.

The portrait is no Vermeer, but I can probably write a better poem about it than I seem to be able to do with the assigned Lady Writing a Letter.
I guess I’m feeling pretty lost myself, although not in Yonkers. I’m feeling lost in my own skin, my own life. I can’t seem to generate whatever it is I need to work on my poetry. As a result, I’m not at my every-other-Tuesday-night group, and I won’t be going to the Grennon workshop on Thursday. Actually, I’m heading out to Boston on Friday to help my daughter and son-in-law look at some houses they might want to buy. Getting ready for that trip is a whole lot more important to me than sitting down and wrestling some more with Vermeer’s Lady. My brother is coming up to stay with my mom. And I’m packing up my car with food and diapers and more toys for my little grandson, and bags and bags of Peppridge Farm double chocolate Milano and Geneva cookes that I buy at the discount outlet store because we’re all addicted to them.
The poetry will come when it comes. I’m driving out of here to get lost in family.
And then I’ll come back and work on getting ready for the last of the Grennon workshop sessions. I don’t want to miss that last one, because it’s the last workshop I’m going to be doing for a long while to come. I’ll either write poetry or I won’t. But I will or won’t on my own terms.

It’s hardly a metaphorical “walk in the park,” but it was worth getting my mom into a wheelchair and taking her for a walk around our next-door park. Good exercise for me, actually.
Spring is not my favorite season — something to do with allergies, adjusting to warmer weather and all that comes with it. There’s a heaviness all around me — both in metaphor and reality.
I’d love to be able to “spring clean” my life; I’m hoping I can get enough energy up to throw out those old “corporate” clothes that are left over from my old life. I live in jeans and t-shirts and expect to continue to do so.
Mom walked in. Gotta go.

Sometimes life, like a labyrinth I wrote almost a year ago.
I think that I applied to the Grennon poetry workshop to see if I’m good enough to get in. I got in. Now I’m struggling to keep up. Not that I’m not good enough; rather my attentions are elsewhere. I’m a caregiver. I’m remembering today an art exhibit I went to back in September of 2000, when my life was my own and caregiving was absolutely not an option I would consider.
The exhibitor was Gail Nadeau, and her works were photographic enlargements of collages that she and her (dying from Alzheimer’s) mother had put together during the mother’s final days. It was called “From Artist to Caregiver: Holding the Edges Together.”
This is one of their collages, which I scanned from a postcard reproduction that I picked up at the exhibit. I was drawn to it because it’s called “Saffron’s Garden,” and the cat in it is a replica of my first cat, whose name was Saffron — you know, like in Mellow Yellow.
I made a point of talking to the artist, who was there at the opening reception. She talked of how she had given up three years of her life to help her mother through the most difficult time of both their lives. It seemed to me that she didn’t give up much as an artist, because what she did was immerse herself in an experience that she transformed into the most moving and awe-some art.
Now, in one sense, that’s a selfish way to look at it. In another, it’s a way to remind myself that life is what you make it.
I was the only one in Grennon’s workshop who didn’t really do the assignment as assigned. The good part was that, in my private session with him, he helped me begin revising the poem I’ve been having trouble with. It’s now transforming itself into three related poems. More on that another time.
The other good news is that, on my way into the building, I noticed a flyer announcing a presentation/book signing by John Horgan, science writer and author of Rational Mysticism. Now, that’s a title that catches my interest. He will be on campus on Monday, May 3. Maybe I can make it.
In the meanwhile, I go and get the book from the library. A blurb on the back cover says “A thought-provoking pilgrimage to the growing interface of science and spirituality…” I start reading the book and am hooked. It’s not that he gives any answers. There are no answers. What he does is remind me that it’s the transformative power of the journey that’s the point. Awesomeness emerges from going deep and being open to the experience of the moment.
Last night I watched an episode of “Without a Trace,” that I had taped in which one of the characters finds out his father (with whom he has the same kind of relationship that I often have with my mom) is slipping into Alzheimer’s.
There seem to be messages here for me in all of this. The messages I often and otherwise get from the world around me translate into something that seem to say ” be more selfish…put your mother aside and live your life…”
I remind myself of Nadeau’s choice and the results. I absorb Hogan’s reflections on what is truly “awe-some” about life.
My labyrinth. My path. My journey. My choice. Who knows that marvels might result?
UPDATE: Hah! So I go for a walk in the beautiful park next to my building and notice that there are a bunch of guys putting in dozens and dozens of 6 foot high spruce in some kind of pattern. “That’s a lot of trees. What’s that going to be?” I ask. “A maze,” he says, “146 trees and a quiet place to sit in the middle.” Now, a maze is a configuration meant to confuse; you can get lost in a maze. I doubt if they’d put a maze in a park where there are lots of little kids running around. But a labyrinth?? I’ll be it’s a labyrinth — which leads to a center, and in and out of which there is only one way. How about that for meaningful coincidence?

Michael Moore rides again in this post, which reminds me how my cousin’s tour of duty has been extended in Iraq so that the war profiteers don’t have to take any risks.
First, can we stop the Orwellian language and start using the proper names for things? Those are not