she wants to dance. it’s the one thing she loves to do. so you buy a tape of line dancing for geriatrics, and I try to teach her the steps. she can no longer remember much, and even the first basic step — step, touch; step, touch — eludes her. you put on country music because it has the best beat for line dancing. you hold both her hands and try to lead her — step, touch; step touch. her face is a study in concentration. “I used to know all the dances,” she says. “Why can’t I remember?” you’re tired of trying to explain why. she doesn’t want to be what is. you leave the cable tv on the continuous country music, leave her trying so hard to remember how to do what she once loved so. you have her laundry to do. you find yourself humming and stepping to a Frank Sinatra song from the 40s.
I won’t dance, don’t ask me
I won’t dance, don’t ask me
I won’t dance, Madame, with you
My heart won’t let my feet do things that they should do
You know what?, you’re lovely
You know what?, you’re so lovely
And, oh, what you do to me
I’m like an ocean wave that’s bumped on the shore
I feel so absolutely stumped on the floor
When you dance, you’re charming and you’re gentle
‘specially when you do the Continental
But this feeling isn’t purely mental
For, heaven rest us, I am not asbestos
And that’s why
I won’t dance, why should I?
I won’t dance, how could I?
I won’t dance, merci beaucoup
I know that music leads the way to romance,
So if I hold you in arms I won’t dance
I won’t dance, don’t ask me,
I won’t dance, don’t ask me
I won’t dance, Madame, with you
My heart won’t let me feet do things that they want to do
You know what?, you’re lovely,
Ring-a-ding-ding, you’re lovely
And, oh, what you do to me
I’m like an ocean wave that’s bumped on the shore
I feel so absolutely stumped on the floor
When you dance, you’re charming and you’re gentle
‘specially when you do the Continental
But this feeling isn’t purely mental
For, heaven rest us, I am not asbestos
and that’s why
I won’t dance, I won’t dance
I won’t dance, merci beaucoup
I know that music leads the way to romance
So if I hold you in arms I won’t dance!!
I miss the romance of dancing.

Bear with me as I meander through the various meanings of the title of ths post.
We’re on a movie marathon, here, having been given a week or so of free TMC and Showtime. Movies on Demand on both of these are our favorite freebees.
Mind the Gap is a little movie that a lot more people should have seen. Begin with the reviews here, that include the following…
Warm-hearted but clear-eyed indie effort richly repays audience patience during deliberately paced and provocatively allusive early scenes with a cumulative emotional impact that is immensely satisfying.
..and then go rent the movie or bring some popcorn over to a friend who has TMC.
(Actually, “mind the gap” is the warning to subway travelers in London.)
There are lots of life’s gaps to mind, and that gap between good and evil is a big one to worry about these days. I found this great post about such here on The Mahablog, which begins with this quote:
Sometimes the worst evil is done by good people who do not know that they are not good. — Reinhold Niebuhr
I found that maha post via the Ex-Liontamer, who pointed out just one more evildoing by the government who’s supposed to protect us.
Then there’s my favorite gap, the generational one. For her birthday post, Ronni Bennet wrote eloquently about turning 65. Ronni is the premier elderblogger, read by generations of all persuasions. She has collected a blogroll of “elderbloggers” that make minding that gap on the far end of life’s road seem like no trouble at all. It’s through Ronni’s blogroll that I discovered. 84-year old Golden Lucy. I’ve always maintained that blogging is the perfect communication tool for us geezers over 60.
Back to movies and the various gaps. And it’s all kinds of gaps that the movie Crash mines and minds. It deserved every award it got.
As fate would have it, I got up from my mom’s couch at 11:11 tonight after ending tonight’s Showtime movie marathan with The Woodsman. I have to say that Kevin Bacon’s performance helped to narrow the gap in my understandng of such a man’s torturous war with himself.
Finally, quoting the taglines of Crash:
You think you know who you are. You have no idea.
Or, closer to my side of the gap:
Live your life at the point of impact

The above is not Ronni Bennet. But, as time continues to go by, who knows. This might be her next major accomplishment.
But at the moment,.
Ronni’s got a birthday, and
we bloggers think it’s great
that we all get together
and help her celebrate.
So, Ronni, here’s to more of
times like those gone by
that filled you with such wisdom,
on which we all rely.
Times will come and times will go
(we never know the path)
so , meanwhile, here’s something I hope
will make you stop and laugh.
(video; give it a minute)

From the end of Richard Cohen’s piece in the Washington Post: “A Hole in Which Hopes Are Buried.”
Little wonder Bush focuses on posterity. The present has to be painful. His embrace of incompetents, not to mention his own incompetence, is impossible to exaggerate. Rummy still runs the Pentagon. The only generals who have been penalized are those who spoke the truth. (They should get some sort of medal.) Victory in Iraq is now three years or so overdue and a bit over budget. Lives have been lost for no good reason — never mind the money — and now Bush suggests that his successor may still have to keep troops in Iraq. Those of us who once advocated this war are humbled. It’s not just that we grossly underestimated the enemy. We vastly overestimated the Bush administration.
This hallowed ground, this pitiless pit, has become Exhibit A on the inability of government to function. Plans get announced, news conferences held, breathtaking models shown of buildings reaching for the sky — and nothing happens. George Pataki, the governor of New York, supposedly fashions himself a presidential candidate, yet he cannot even get this development underway. He is at loggerheads with the site’s developer, and so nothing happens. In a city where developers are king — this is Donald Trump’s home town, after all — you can still go to Ground Zero and see zero. This is 16 acres of Katrina and all it taught us about feeble political leaders.
Maybe we should leave Ground Zero as it is. The imagination can provide a fitting memorial to those who died. “We dig a grave in the breezes,” Paul Celan wrote in his Holocaust poem “Death Fugue.” We can dig ours as deep as the World Trade Center once was tall. The ugly emptiness will remind us always to be wary of the grand schemes of politicians. They can’t build a building. They cannot capture a mass murderer. They cannot wage war in Iraq. This is their hole. It is, by dint of failure, George Bush’s presidential library. His proper legacy is a void.
——————
I wrote this poem decades ago, about a personal disaster. But speaking of Ground Zero, and thinking of Katrina….
Ground Zero
Where the hurrican hits hardest
there is not proof left
that a home once grew
in this forsaken place.
The ground cringes in shock,
disoriented in its stones —
the very heart of matter
consumed by an elemental peristalsis,
a raw cosmic mastication
of doorknobs and latches
and the wooden blocks of childhood.
Where time-worthy walls
once dared the night’s intrusion,
now the offal wind,
the excretion of stars,
the seminal sludge of infinity.

She refuses to go to her dentist appointment today. No way to convince her she should. So instead of sitting on a stool in the corner watching while she gets her cavities filled, I have some found time to blog.
I gave a friend the copy of Alice Hoffman’s Ice Queen that I had finished, wondering if he would be as taken with the heroine’s journey as I was. He responded: “I’ve finished The Ice Queen which I thought was a splendid read. Its mythic quality just kept drawing me in, so thoroughly intriguing me that I had to force myself to stop reading so I could absorb and enjoy (and sleep).”
For those who would distastefully dismiss the wisdom of the likes of myth-lovers such as Joseph Campbell and Sheldon Kopp, I suggest that literature that reflects cultural mythologies has been an inspiration to individuals as long as there have been individuals struggling to live satisfying lives. Hoffman is one contemporary writer who intuitively understands the power of myth.
Now, there are other writers out there whom I don’t know but who send me emails about their books. One of the recent notices came from the blogger, Grumpy Old Bookman. In February 2005, the Grumpy Old Bookman was listed by the Guardian as one of the top ten literary blogs worldwide. Well, MIchael Allen, that Grumpy guy, has written a novel that can be downloaded in PDF from the publisher’s site ; it’s scheduled for trade paperback publication later this year. According to Allen, this is what his novel, How and why Lisa’s Dad got to be famous is about:
Harry is a divorced man who has not been able to see his daughter Lisa since she was five years old. But Harry still loves Lisa more than anyone else in the world; and he worries about her future because she was born without a left foot. When Harry is offered the chance to win a million pounds for Lisa, by taking part in a reality-TV show, he immediately accepts. All he has to do is find a woman who is willing to risk her life for him – and he has just three months to do it
If another found hour or few find me, I’ll download and read Allen’s novel and let him know what I think.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking about the marvels of this age of science. This from here:
RESEARCHERS have grown complete urinary bladders in a laboratory and transplanted them into patients, improving their health and achieving the first cultivation of working replacements for failing solid human organs.
The “neo-bladders”, each one grown in a small laboratory container from a pinch of a patient’s own cells, have been working in seven young patients for an average of almost four years, says a report in the British journal The Lancet on Monday.
On the other side of the coin of marvels is our fearless leader, whose assinine actions are fueling the movement for his impeachment.
My current favorite is www.impeachthemotherfucker.com, from which you can get to lots of other related sites, like:
Impeach Bush Coalition
Impeach Bush Tattoo
Impeach Bush Yard Signs
and, most notably, the outlanding article in Harpers, The Case for Impeachment.
Now, there’s a myth in the making.

It’s a good thing that I enjoy challenges, because putting in a garden in this land of clay and shale is a major one. And before I can even begin, I had to wheel five barrows of fallen leaves off into the woods where the wind wouldn’t just blow them back. And lets not forget the plethera of shapes and sizes of stones, all part of the legacy of Mother Mountain.
Wheeling leaves, throwing stones, pick-axing clay and shale, raking rocks. Such was my day today in the early spring sunswept plot.
Now I have to figure out what the hell will grow here. There is a natural ground cover that I keep digging up from the edges of the property and transplanting closer to the house to cover up bare spots. I’m looking for stuff that grows naturally around here — the kinds of flowering vegetation for which clay are shale are not a challenge at all. Seems like a good place to start.

Just as I was about to press the button to open the DVD tray, I noticed the time on the display — 11:11.
I put the movie in and the time disappeared.
Crash! — a gorgeous mosaic of a movie that is actually about our fears of each other, set in the bright light of Los Angeles and the dark places in our hearts
The truth is, we don’t like each other very much, and the truth that “Crash” reckons with is that, in the safe enclosure of our cars, or our living rooms, we make easy assumptions and hard judgments about people we don’t really know.

I’ve become a nightime nosher — an evening couch potato, keeping my mom company, watching tv, and sharing snacks. It’s become an out-of-control addiction. I can’t seem to stop the noshing. And my weight shows it.
And that’s not all. When I get online after she goes to bed, I buy things. Mostly clothes. After all, so many of mine seem to be shrinking.
I guess it all smacked me in the head when I started taking out my spring and summer clothes (it was 70 degrees here yesterday). Can’t get the zippers up. Tight around the arms. This is bad. Very bad.
So I get online late at night (of course) and search for appetite suppressants — something to make me not want to eat myself out of my whole wardrobe — to say nothing of my health.
That’s when I discovered there’s an actual name for what I have: It’s called Nightime Eating Syndrome. WTF! I, who for the first 40 years of her life couldn’t put on weight, now has an overeating disorder.
OK, I know. Appetite suppressants won’t solve the problem. I eat because there’s nothing better that I’m free to do at night. I’m addicted and I don’t know how to stop. I already take something for depression, so just fiddling with my seratonin is going to help. Maybe blogging it all will.
And there’s the second addiction: buying stuff. I Google “shoppers anonymous.” So, while I can buy this for my nighttime eating disorder, that would just feed my other addiction. Talk about a rock and a hard place.
Hmm. So, maybe if I get on my laptop while I sit with my mother as she watches television at night, then I can get on some shoppers anonymous and carb addicts sites and get some moral support. Maybe I can start a Nightime Eating Syndrome weblog.
And then I’ll just shift my addictions to whatever I can do on my laptop.
Days are OK. I keep busy. And the garden-planting season is almost here.
But it’s the night. It’s always the night.

i once heard the survivors
of a colony of ants
that had been partially
obliterated by a cow s foot
seriously debating
the intentions of the gods
towards their civilization
— archy the cockroach, from certain maxims of archy
As I went to type in this new entry, I noticed that my last entry was post #1111. Yup, I’ve been seeing a lot of it again lately. I’ve never been able to associate these “sightings” with any consistent aftermath. If you google 11:11 phenomenon you’ll get all kinds of theories that I could choose from, if I were so inclined. I still think it’s interesting that the first post I ever did on my going through spurts of seeing those numbers still generates comments from people who also keep noticing the numbers and wonder what it all means.
Ah, yes, what does it all mean? I guess that I hold to the position that it means what you want it to mean.
What does it mean that I’ve spent the last half-hour wrapping the terra cotta pot in which an ailing house plant of mine sits in a bunch of those microwavable hot packs. And then I covered all of that with a blanket. And then I dug up an old grow-light bulb and donated my desk lamp to the recovery effort. Ah, the antics some of us go through to help the struggle for survival.
And that’s why I’m heading back to my daughter’s on Monday to grandson-sit so that she can try to survive some dental surgery. It will only be a two-night stay — but enough time for some fun antics with the kid who makes me laugh.
Wanna bet I just happen to look at the dashboard clock at 11:11??
as I was crawling
through the holes in
a swiss cheese
the other
day it occurred to
me to wonder
what a swiss cheese
would think and after
cogitating for some
time i said to myself
if a swiss cheese
could think
it would think that
a swiss chesse
was the most important
thing in the world
just as everything that
can think at all
does think about itself
— the words of that seriously smart cockroach, archy
ADDENDUM: So, as I was driving around running errands today (Sunday) I stopped at one point to check the time on the clock in my car. Yup. 1:11.