They finished taking down the 100+ year old oak today. Most of it was dead, its brittle limbs threatening roofs and wires and hoop-shooting. If it had grown in the middle of the woods, it would still be standing there, biding its time. But our houses grew around it, and so it was only a matter of time.
Dentist today, haircut tomorrow, doctor on Thursday. I wonder if, like a car, it gets to the point at which it’s just not cost effective to keep fixing it up.
A young salesgirl called me “honey” today. No one should call an elder woman with gray hair “honey.” Next time I won’t let it go. (See this.)
You can’t convince me that life (especially human life) on this planet is not on a downward spiral. The following disturbing news clips are from Harper’s Magazine Yearly Review.
Not only are we screwing with other lives on this planet….:
Exposure to antidepressants in the ocean was making shrimp suicidal, and female snails exposed to the chemical TBT were growing penises from their heads. A pair of swans stunned staff at a British wildfowl sanctuary by becoming only the second couple in 40 years to divorce. Seventy-five starlings fell from the sky in Somerset, England, and 10,000 birds were trapped in the twin beams of light projected up from the World Trade Center site, dazzled and unable to return to their migratory paths.
…we are screwing up our own:
A three-year-old girl in South Korea died of starvation while her parents played a child-rearing game online, a Kentucky man was charged with wanton endangerment after he got drunk and put his five-week-old son to bed in an oven, and a Georgia mother punished her 12-year-old son for his bad grades by forcing him to hammer to death his pet hamster. The body of a registered Japanese centenarian was found in her son’s backpack. A video surfaced of an Indonesian two-year-old smoking and propelling himself around on a toy truck because he is too out of shape to toddle.
And here in America, where it’s “don’t think, don’t care”:
“Not to be funny about it,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told the FCIC, “but my daughter asked me… ‘What’s the financial crisis,’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s something that happens every five to seven years.'”
The Texas State Board of Education voted to revise its social-studies curriculum, mandating that the U.S. government should not be called “democratic,”
A Texas newborn with a heart defect was denied health insurance because of his pre-existing condition.
There’s even more such frightening 2010 news bits at the above link to Harper’s.
And you think 2011 is going to be any better for the likes of us?
needing something to look forward to, I find a library book club to join, buy the book, hope to make new friends
The vacuum cleaner stands, waiting. So does the pile of laundry. I am starting the new year, stopped.
I am feeling the weight of this wretched world, where greed and politics have made a destructively unholy marriage.
So, I am glad to have stumbled upon this, from here, a reminder of just how awesome the real world is.
I guess I’ll go vacuum now.
The strings on the pine hang empty now, where he had hung apples and popcorn balls — hoping for deer, but understanding squirrels.
This is the year for me to really start paying attention.
Creativity emerges from paying attention. Problem solving requires paying attention. Connections thrive on paying attention.
Until the middle of November, my mother’s fatal dementia, by necessity, was the focus of my attention for the past decade. It feels strange, in a way, not to feel that pull any more — to have no excuse for not paying attention.
Writing well depends upon paying attention.
And so I begin here, tomorrow, participating in a month long project, A River of Stones.
A small stone is a polished moment of paying proper attention, and the challenge of the project is to write a small stone every day.
I will start tomorrow. One small stone. And, stone upon stone, I will try to set a solid path out of the stress and sorrow of the last decade and into a more focused future.
________________________
I was starting to feel guilty about not posting frequently enough on this blog. Then I read what my son wrote on Twitter about his blog:
I write for me, and then stop writing for me. Anyone who reads in the meantime? Cool.
Under his white cassock, the good-looking young priest is wearing sneakers and jeans. I can see them peeking out from underneath the garment’s neat hem. The inside of the 110 year-old ornate church of my childhood is colder than this winter morning in the urban outside. The seat of the wooden pew is freezing my butt.
The church’s boiler has stopped working, and all through the service periodic clangings continue to irreverently punctuate the “words of the Lord.”
I am sitting in the exact spot in which I sat almost exactly a month ago. That was for my mother’s funeral service. This time it’s for my aunt’s (the wife of my father’s brother). They say that death comes in threes. I wonder if my 87 year-old aunt sitting to my left will be the third. I hope, instead, what will count is my dead desktop computer, which, at the moment is awaiting a possible resurrection on the repair desk of my most trusted geek. These are things over which I have no control.
I only go back to my home town for weddings and funerals, all of which include rituals celebrated in this spectacularly vaulted nave that is bordered by detailed mosaic depictions of the Stations of the Cross, above which large elaborate stained glass windows tell the rest of the story. The aesthetics of the church inspires awe, even without the faith that sustains it.
Neither my cousin nor I join in the line to receive Holy Communion. It has been decades since either one of us believed and practiced what we had been so carefully taught during our 13 years of Catholic schooling. When we sit around the table hours after her mother’s burial, my cousin and I and dredge up shared memories of some of our more innocent times — the May processions in which we tossed rose petals as we walked down the aisle (“one, two, three, this is for you, Baby Jesus…”) My mind slips away to the less innocent scenes from the movie “The Polish Wedding.”
We spend hours sitting around that table — my cousin and I and our remaining paternal aunt and uncle — sharing family stories and attitudes that had somehow eluded me during the 17 years I lived in the bosom of a clan that had, apparently, quickly separated into two camps — the “laws” and the “in-laws,” although which was which depended on whose perspective one adopted.
The story that surprises me most is one associated with the version my mother told of a seminal event in my life about which I once wrote a poem. In my mother’s version, her mother saved my young life; in the “in-law” version, my other grandmother believed that my mother was withholding medical treatment for me in favor of “leeches.” I see now that it became a stand-off between two matriarchs, and family relationships through the generations suffered as a result.
While it was my mother’s side of the family that I came to know best, it was an aunt on my father’s side who most impressed me, even though I only knew her for a very short while in my pre-teens.
Eleanor married my Uncle John, to the chagrin of my paternal grandmother. Eleanor was a free spirit, odd and artsy and strikingly beautiful. She had her kitchen ceiling painted red, she started to teach me how to sketch faces, and she sewed me a lavish ruffled robe that I wore until I could no longer button it across my chest. Suddenly (or so it seemed to me) she and my uncle were gone — moved out of state, out of touch.
And, in our post-funeral table conversation with my relatives from that side of the family, I learn just how strict my paternal grandmother was, refusing to accept her non-conformist daughter-in-law and leaving the couple with little alternative but to create a life for themselves apart from family expectations. I begin to understand the difficulties that my mother had in fulfilling her daughter-in-law role.
Eleanor and John had children — five, I think. I have never met them or been in touch with them. My cousin has but lost track of their lives long ago.
We have been a family burdened with expectations, and both my cousin and I acknowledge (with some private pride) that we opted not to meet a select number of them.
We are the matriarchs, now — much different in attitudes and expectations from our foremothers.
At least we hope so.
I started blogging on November 29, 2001, and the old bloghome is still here, reminding me why I started and how I grew as a “personal blogger.” I still keep in touch with many of the bloggers who were around at that early time in blogging history, only now it’s mainly through Facebook.
In reading some of my old posts, I realize that I still write about the same things: politics, injustice, being a woman, ordinary magic, getting older, being me. Things change. Things stay the same.
Let’s see if I can make it to year 10.