Even here on Kalilily Time, things are changing. Slowly, though, as I wait for b!X to find out why he’s been erased as administrator of this weblog and reverse whatever happened so that he can make the template changes that I want.
Meanwhile, over at the sidebar there’s a whole new section of links to poets who have weblogs and post their poetry therein. I’ve just started searching for these kinds of links and I’ll add them as I find ones that I like. Thanks to Greg Perry for getting me going in this direction.
Also, thanks to Ramona Moormann, a non-blogging reader who’s in my age and interest range. She’s having some trouble getting onto my weblog and emailed me about that and about the fact that she does stop in and visit here. She’s the editor/publisher of a small family-run newspaper in southwestern Michigan and is a political and environmental activist. She’s a truly interesting woman, and I’m glad she found and contacted me.
On the other hand, I’ve seem to have lost a blogpoet to whom I was going to link in my new sidebard section. Ray Sweatman seems to have “gone fishing — indefinitely.”
Meanwhile, I’ve got to stop procrastinating and take another stab at the Vermeer painting poem so that I have something to take with me to the last poetry workshop session this Thursday. It’s going to be a long night.

That means “What Would Dad Do?” That’s my dad, I mean. He’s been dead just about 20 years, and he was far from a perfect dad. But he never failed to be there when I needed his money or his time. He would leave someone else in charge of his business, pack up my mother and the car, and make the three-hour drive up to my house on the hill if I needed them to stay with my kids when I had to travel for my job. He bought me more than one car over the years, gave us money toward the house we bought, and substantially contributed toward my kids’ college costs. When my daughter got really sick at college, he dropped everything, drove out and bundled her into his car (he was closer than I), and even got a doctor to come to his house to see her.
And that’s why I drive across the whole state of Massachusetts to pick up my daughter and family (who don’t have a car) and then drive half way back again to help them look at houses for sale (where they hope to live, soon) and then drive back across that half I just drove them out across to take them back home. Of course, I do stay over a few nights, play with my sweet, sweet, toddler grandson, and read the books I never get around to reading at home. (This time it’s “Sweet Dream Baby.”) And that’s why I send more money to help out b!X than I really can afford.
I think that I inherited most of my personality traits from my dad — even the traits that laid dormant in him because no one ever enouraged them, like his creative urges. I remember that he tried “paint-by-number” paintings once, and he bought some reproductions that he thought were valuable art from places like the Franklin Mint and such, for which he paid exorbitant prices for stuff like Norman Rockwell plates and a replica of the Liberty Bell (including plexiglass case) and an odd concave enamel-on-copper supposedly three-dimensional winter scene. He thought they were an investment and would be worth more someday. In many of the ways of the world he was amazingly smart; he just didn’t know squat about art.
But he was smart enough and loving enough to try to be a good father in the only ways that he knew how. His own father, who is reputed to have beat him (and who was finally relegated by my grandmother to a room of his own on another floor of the apartment building that they owned), was hardly a role model.
For all of his flaws, though, my dad always extended himself to help me when I needed his help — even though I broke his heart by eloping and depriving him of his dream of walking me down the aisle of the cathedral-like Polish church where he spent so much of his energy volunteering, even though my teenage years were dedicated to flouting his authority, even though I turned my back on the religion that sustained him through all those difficult times, even though I divorced and lived a free-wheeling lifestyle that he couldn’t understand.
And so, driving back from Boston today in the rain — back to the demands of the care of an ailing 88 year-old woman (who is my mother and many of whose traits I have tried very hard not to emulate) — I think of what my dad did, what he still would do, what I choose to do.
For many of us, life is more important than art, family more important than frolic. But then, again, over the years, I have had more than my share of frolic, and I have been on the receiving end of much generosity.
Driving back from Boston today in the rain, I think about what my dad would think of me now, this tired, grubby granny who is still trying to grow up, who would really like, one day, to become one of those unerringly compassionate matriarchs, one of those serene and classy crones.

I should be getting ready to go to the poetry workshop at the Writers Institute.
I should be outside taking a walk in this great weather.
I should be making dinner and packing to go to see my toddler grandson.
Instead, I just watched The Banger Sisters and loved every minute of it.
Instead I polished my toenails because it’s warm enough to wear sandals and I’ve still got great toes.
Instead I left a comment on Tom Shugart’s weblog about a subject that apparently started at Yule Heibel’s weblog and about which I care a great deal.
Instead I post this.
But I promise that when I get back from Boston, I will have my poetry assignment done. And after I get back, I’ll make sure I get Greg Perry into my weblog, along with some other weblogcleaning I need to do.
OK. Now I really do have to make dinner for my mom. And pack. Maybe shave my legs.
Tally Ho!

Oh man, you gotta go to this site and see Trump fire Bush.
Got this in an email: Bush as Post Turtle. Love it.
While suturing a laceration on the hand of a 70-year-old Texas rancher (whose hand had caught in a gate while working cattle), a doctor and the old man were talking about George W. Bush being in the White House. The old Texan said “Well, ya know, Bush is a ‘post turtle’.”
Not knowing what the old man meant, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was. The old man said, “When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.”
The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain, “You know he didn’t get there by himself, he doesn’t belong there, he can’t get anything done while he’s up there, and you just want to help the poor stupid bastard get down.”

How sweet it is when a stranger finds your weblog and then emails you a compliment. Such was the case today when Greg Perry, who has a cleverly wine-designed weblog, told me that he’s been following my struggles to write poetry-on-assignment. He offered to link to me and asked me to link to him. Well, that’s a no-brainer! I’m also going to co-opt some of his poetry links and add them to my blogroll. (Except not tonight. I’m pooped.)
This connection from Greg has come at a perfect time for Kalilily Time, as I struggle with the fact that the blogcrowd around whose edges I’ve been running since I first began has gone off and left me behind. Or rather I’ve gone off in another direction. As a matter of fact, I’ve felt a little lost lately.
I’m not interested in the ins and outs of this technology. I’m a writer. I want to write about two things — caregiving and poetry. Well, sometimes about my grandson, too. And politics. Certainly politics. Politics and poetry. And loss.
As my mother loses herself in Yonkers, she finds this 1959 photo of me motor-boating up the Hudson River during the one summer I did go home between college semesters. Ah, was I ever that young? That slim? Yes. That “me” is long lost.

I never imagined, back then, when the Hudson River just outside New York City was clean enough to water ski in and life was just one big sunny-day boat ride, that I would wind up here.
So, I take a cue from Greg Perry’s post about the meme that’s going around and
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
And this is what I find in John Horgan’s Rational Mysticism:
“But the infinite can exclude nothing.”
Hmpf.

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