Author Archives: Elaine

not yet spring (1999)

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All kitchens should have windows
double wide and Windexed clear —
if not into sunny vistas,
at least into frames of sky
beyond a stand of trees marked
by clumps of day lilies,
maybe a lilac bush
or two —

certainly a bird feeder
filled with lilting movement,
and a wide indoor sill
where green seeds sprout
even when winter still
shrouds the view.

copyright Elaine Frankonis

4 am, Friday the 13th

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I tell myself that it’s a dream and I can wake up. But I don’t wake up.

I have gone back to my apartment building, but I can’t find my apartment. It’s no longer there. Everything I own is gone — my clothes, my cell phone, my car keys. I have to call my daughter, I think. I can’t remember the last two digits of her phone number. But I don’t have a phone anyway.

I run down to the lobby. I don’t know anyone. I ask various people for help, but no one will help me.

It’s dark out now, and raining. I run out into the street, go into a store and ask for help. I ask them to call my daughter at ….. I can’t remember the phone number.

I am crying now, running down the dark wet city streets. I find a police station and run in, asking for their help. They ignore me. I go to reach for the phone on a desk, but I can’t remember the phone number anyway.

I run back out into the street, lose one shoe, keep running and crying,

Part of me says it’s a dream. You can wake up.

But I don’t wake up.

I run farther, shivering in the cold rain, without a coat, with only one shoe, and with no way to find a safe place. I run and cry.

I can wake up. I can wake up. This seems so real, but it can’t be real. I can wake up.

Eventually I do wake up. It’s just about dawn, and I am in my bed with my cat sitting on my head.

While I was in the dream, it was so amazingly real — the fear, the abandonment, the isolation, the cold rain. At the same time, I was watching myself in the dream, telling myself to wake up.

I wonder if I had been having my mother’s dream.

Maxine sums it up

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maxine1

My grandson helped his mom make a delicious carrot cake for my birthday.

Got lots of birthday wishes from friends and relatives.

My new printer was delivered today; my old one finally died.

It’s raining and I’m expecting another kind of storm.

As birthdays go, it wasn’t bad.

I wonder how I’ll feel next year when I’m 70.

maxine22

family values

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No, this is not some kind of rant about that political football.

This is about my family (of origin) and how we deal with each other, the value we place on each other and on ourselves.

As I was growing up, “love” was equated with money. My parents showed they loved us by buying us things. I never refused any of their “love.” It’s all I knew, and I grew to love “things.” Until I immersed by self in therapy — years after a lot of damage was done.

I have a sibling. We have become about as opposite as two offspring from the same parents could be. Maybe because he never dealt with those warped family values.

And now I find that I am going to have to battle him for control of my mother’s assets and for her guardianship. She (93 years old with dementia) is in his care, and he doesn’t know how to care. I can’t bring her to live with me here at my daughter’s, and after the last eight years taking care of her, I need to take care of my own health and well-being.

I have avoided visiting my mother and brother for almost a month because he treats me so awfully. And I can’t stand watching how he treats her. When I go there, I wash her up so that she doesn’t smell, I change her sheets, her clothes, wash her hair. I dance with her each night before she goes to sleep. I make sure she takes her meds and eats nourishing food. I am tired, but she is being treated abusively when I’m not there.

He can use her assets to bring in professional help to take care of her. He won’t.

I feel angry and stupid and tired. I wonder where that “Kali” part of me went. I need to find that part of me to help me win the battle ahead.

I am going to be 69 in a few days. I think I need some Geritol.

a black cat almost

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A black cat almost crossed my path yesterday as I walked along almost spring streets.

It saw me coming, took a left, trotting a path ahead and parallel to mine, looking back to see if I were still there, moving forward.

With a last look back, it skittered under a car and watched me pass.

I wrote the following a decade ago while on a weekend writing retreat.

Walking the Stone Labyrinth

Sometimes life
like a labyrinth,
leads you where you have to go.

You think you make choices–
this man or that,
some child or not.

You set your alarm,
choose your shoes,
gather friends for tea,
count your changes.

Until one day a corner comes,
slipping you a glimpse
of those strings of stones
shaping your shadows edge.

And sometimes, perhaps,
on a perfect day,
under a perfect sky,
a perfect black cat
with eyes like glowing stones
races across your path
and waits in the early ferns
for you to cross hers.

it’s not just that 11:11 thing again

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Well, actually, it is that 11:11 thing again, with but an added twist.

According to the 2012 Blog,

..What to make of the fact that the winter solstice in 2012 will occur at 11:11 universal time? It is of course this event that is so deeply linked with the Mayan calendar and its ending – or, if you are a fan of “The X Files”, the date of the alien invasion.

And we all know what December 21, 2012 is, right?

And as far as 11:11 is concerned, this account really spooks me.

I guess I could lie and say I’m posting this at 11:11, but it’s more like 2 a.m.

a good day for a poem

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While I was moving, I sorted through some of the stacks of poetry that I had written over the years and pulled out a batch of short ones. Perhaps Thursday will be the day of each week that I will post one of them.

I live in Pioneer Valley these days, but I wrote this one back in the 70s when I lived in another valley. I think one of the reasons I call this blog Kalilily Time is because of my memories of that past valley time.

Valley Time

Easterly,
the winds tease the the sun
toward morning,
brushing aside the easy showers
of early summer clouds.

Time follows the way of the wind
through this dawn-misted valley,
filters through the blue unfoldings
of fragile morning chicory,
flows through the slow, green seekings
of those low growing vines,
breathes honeysuckle and wildrose rain
into the season’s drifting light.

Westward,
the sun leaves the high horizon,
draping a dry autumn night
over the tired faces
of September sunflowers.

I am thinking today of my late once-husband, who loved the power of words more than anything in his life, except his children. We shared both of those loves, but not in the same ways or same volume.

I am, once again, searching for the voice that I misplaced somewhere during this last decade.

cross that doctor off the list!

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After I moved here a little over a month ago, I immediately began to find a new doctor and dentist. My new dentist, a woman, is young enough to be my daughter. But then, just about every professional I see these days is apt to be the ages of my offspring.

Two weeks ago, I went for my initial visit with (what I thought would be) my new doctor. I chose him because the website of the group practice indicated that he had a sub-specialty in geriatrics, and I figured if I started now, I wouldn’t have to find another doctor when my age REALLY caught up to me. While I had sent my old medical records on ahead, it was obvious that he never even looked at those or the questionnaire that I had filled out summarizing my medical history. Instead, he began asking me those same questions, scribbling my answers in the margins of the form on which I had already written the answers. He did ask a few more questions about my education level and what kind of job I had; I’m not sure why he had to know that.

We went through my medications, and I asked for new scripts for two that had run out. He said I could pick them up on my way out. Because I have been having sinus problems and also need to get my hearing checked (again; it’s getting worse), he said that he office would make an appointment for me with an ENT specialist.

Then he changed the subject to tell me about a book he had published and proceeded to read me the introduction. When I asked him if he ever loaned the book out because I would be interested in reading it, he set the book down, turned around, and mumbled something like “…well, I only have 60 copies left…” — which made me realize the book must have been self-published, and he was trying to sell me one.

He leaned back in his chair and asked me if there was anything else I needed to add. I said no. He left the room.

As I left and went to check out, I found that he left NO scripts for me; neither did he leave instructions to make an appointment for me with an ENT. They asked me to wait while they got the necessary information from him. Which I did. For a half hour. Then I left.

After three phone calls over the next few days, they finally called in my prescriptions. I just let the rest go.

Yesterday, I make an appointment at the Jewish Geriatric Services Family Medical Care located a mile from here. A woman doctor this time.

the tax hike boondoggle?

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Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By and I are the same age, so I’m launching this post based on what she has written about the mistaken notions many people have about income tax rates and the history thereof.

From our early youth to our early twenties, the top tax bracket ranged between 81 and 94 percent. (See here.) For most of that period, those tax rates were placed on incomes over $400,000. That level of taxation on the wealthy helped to propel us out of the vestiges of the Great Depression and into the middle class prosperity of the 1950s.

Understandably but not forgiveably, the Republicans are waging a war against President Obama’s plan to make the tax burden placed on all economic classes more fair.

From here:

It [Obama’s plan] would boost taxes on the wealthy, oil companies and other businesses while cutting Medicare and Medicaid payments to insurance companies and hospitals to make way for a $634 billion down payment on universal health care. It would also limit charitable and other tax deductions for the affluent and trim spending on government subsidies to big farms.

Predictably, Republicans complained, much as they had done during last year’s presidential campaign, that Obama was pitting the haves against the have-nots.

Here’s a reminder from Ronni Bennett’s Crabby Old Lady rant linked to above:

The rate remained around 70 percent until Ronald Reagan was elected when the rate was dropped to 28 percent for awhile. George H.W. Bush raised it to 31 percent and Clinton increased it to 39 percent. Then George W. Bush got the rate down to 35 percent in 2003, where it has remained.

The rich have been making out like bandits for half a century on the backs of working stiffs. No one is asking them to pay 91 percent and a few more percentage points isn’t going to change the lives of the rich and famous much, but it will help a bit to offset needed spending.

As President Obama has mentioned and any thinking person knows on their own, we all need to make sacrifices now, and the rich cannot be exempt.

It seems to me that the Republican way of solving the country’s economic problem would just be another Bermie Madoff Boondoggle.