it's still the wrong answer
Thanks to Jim Culleny for his daily poetry emails.
Myth
Muriel Rukeyser
Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question. Why didn't I recognize my mother?"
"You gave the wrong answer," said the Sphinx. "But that was what made everything possible," said Oedipus. "No," she said. "When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn't say anything about woman."
"When you say Man," said Oedipus, "you include women too. Everyone knows that."
She said, "That's what you think."
the lone crow
For the first time ever, I see a lone crow wandering around the area of the bird feeders. At first I wonder if it's a grackle, but a quick look in the Audobon bird book confirms that, indeed, it is a crow.
I leave tomorrow to join family and friends for my late once-husband's remembrance party. A lone crow, and thoughts of death.
My mother is now losing her hair. Her digestive system is screwed up. She is always afraid, never satisfied or happy, constantly restless.
I watch the crow march back and forth across the small area where squirrels and doves are pecking at what the finches and cardinals have accidentally tossed their way. He doesn't seem to be eating. He looks like he's checking things out.
Is he wondering "Is this the place?"
the last post-it
My late once-husband often sent me books that he thought I would like, after he read them. He always had an uncanny knack for selecting both books and music that I liked as much as he did.
As I continue to clean out my "stuff," I moved a pile of books yesterday and found one I had forgotten about. And so I started reading it last night.
He was right, again. From the Amazon review:
Mixing magic and modernity, the acclaimed Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game) has woven threads of history, religion, and myth together into a convincing, time-hopping tale that is part love story, part adventure. Enchantment's heroes, "Prince" Ivan and Princess Katerina, must deal with cross-cultural mores, ancient gods, treacherous kinsmen (and fianceés), and ultimately Baba Yaga herself.
Thanks, again, Bill.
should I or shouldn't I
That's the dilemma of every blogger who is considering whether it's appropriate to post a certain entry.
b!X deliberated and then made the decision to post. And I could have left it at that.
But I see his Deathbed post and photo link as a tribute, a reminder -- in a sense, a virtual wake, a moment to say a final goodbye -- and, for those of us who were not there to actually witness, closure.
You can read his post and decide for yourself. This entry is my decision.
And, just as an added note that reflects how attuned our little family is to the magical occurrences in life that Myrln loved to recognize, Myrln died just about at 5 p.m. When we survivors were at his apartment last weekend sorting through his stuff, our daughter noticed that the clock on his wall, which was keeping accurate time the last time we were there, had stopped at 5 o'clock.
roses
I woke to the smell of roses today, but there are no roses anywhere around here. I smelled them in the garage, too, when I went to take out the garbage.
My father loved roses. His wake was full of them.
My mother barely woke up this morning. Her mouth hung slack, her words slurred. She took a few bites of french toast, a few sips of her fake coffee, and now she's back in bed. I wonder if she's smelling roses.
William Frankonis, dead at 70
I wasn't there this afternoon when my daughter gave permission to turn off the breathing machine and my ex-husband, her father, took his last artificial breath. I was home, getting ready for the Hospice nurse's visit tomorrow to assess my mother.
But I was with him for more than a day before that, when he told me had had an earworm for the past several days.
"Bloody Mary," he said smiling, as we remembered the production of South Pacific in which we performed together more than 35 years ago, he as Lt. Cable, and I as Liat.
In the back of my smile, I think about another bloody female. Kali: birth mother; death mother, tongue redder even than betel nuts. She had wormed in far beyond his ear.
He understood my fascination with Kali, Lilith. He might have used other names for those forces, but he knew them well. That was part of what we always had in common -- our immersion in the poetic power of myth. "Myrln" understood magic. Our son tells me that, for a couple of days before I called to tell him to get on a plane, he saw three crows chasing a hawk. Bill would have embraced that metaphor.
"There's one thing I really have to do," he had told me in between dozing off in his recliner just two days ago. "I want to write down how I feel about all those people who have been close to me. I know that I'm a very private person. I know that I've played my life close to the vest. I want to tell them how much they mean to me."
But he never had a chance to write that last piece of his special eloquence. He also never had a chance to enjoy that first day of 70 degree weather after the long dreary winter that he hated so much.
Nevertheless, the depths of his feelings had been expressed often in the many scripts (some performed and some not), memoirs, and poetry that he had written over his lifetime. His original stage play, The Killings Tale, won a audio book "Audie" in 2004.. His adaptations and original scripts have often been performed by the New York State Theater Institute.
Warner Music Group awarded NYSTI $400,000 in 1996 to develop five new musicals for family audiences. The first of those was “A Tale of Cinderella” by W.A.Frankonis, Will Severin, and George David Weiss, made possible in part by funding provided by Warner Music Group and by the participation of Warner/Chappell Music, Inc. An immediate success, the award-winning show is available as an Atlantic Theatre CD or cassette and has been re-released on VHS as part of Warner Home Video's 75th Anniversary Celebration. Vocal Selections from “A Tale of Cinderella” is available from Warner Bros. Publications. The video was broadcast nationwide on PBS stations to an audience of more than 56 million TV households (half of potential US audiences). In the 2000-01 Season, “A Tale of Cinderella” toured all the major cities of New York including Buffalo, Syracuse, the Capital Region, and Manhattan.
His life and work will be remembered by a great many people. But I will remember him as the young man I married in a flurry of passion and possessiveness even though in many ways we were oil and water. We wound up being better friends than spouses.
I will miss his political rants and the books he would send me after he read them. I will miss the father he was to our children. I will miss a friend, and I will always be glad that I was able to be there for him when he needed help so close to the end of a life ended too soon.
ADDENDUM: b!X has posted excerpts from his dad's willl and it is no surprise that Bill used the same humor, honesty, and creativity in writing his will as he had with all of his other writings.
a vernal wish
A very fruitful
Spring season
from Grammy the Great,
defender of all things
gray and growing,
familal and funky.
walking widdershins
Sometimes, if my mother naps in the afternoon, I try to get outside a walk a bit. Only I can't go out of earshot, because if she wakes up and can't find me, she'll spiral down into one of her dementia episodes.
So, like a prisoner let out into the prison yard, I walk in circles around the open area outside the front of the house. I go out in between snowstorms, when most of the snow has melted. I leave my footprints in the mud of now, rather than in the sands of time.
I find that I prefer to walk "widdershins," which is, in the rituals of myth and magic, counter clockwise. And which, if done while chanting an incantation, is supposed to generate productive energy.
What should I chant, I think, as I pace around my imprisoned yard. "Freedom!" If only.
Meanwhile, it's March and there's still a good deal of snow on the ground. Inside, the seeds I planted have already sprouted. I thought it would take a month. Now I have to transplant them all into pots and figure out where to put them. The windowsill is not an option. The cold radiating in would wipe out the whole crop. Sometimes my timing really sucks.
sun and moon and seeds
I've been trying to find the time to plant the seeds I want to grow for my planter garden this spring. (No more dig-in-the-earth garden, where pests of all sizes devoured what I had last year.)
The sunny day seemed auspicious for planting, so I got out my supplies and got to it.
I planted seeds for flowers that might not be too tasty to the critters who munched and lunched here all last summer. Mostly, I planted ornamental hot pepper plants -- colorful fruit and foliage, and inedible by, or unappetizingly firey to, any living creature. But they sure do look pretty in pots.
Perhaps the full lunar eclipse tonight will also mean that it is an auspicious time for planting seeds. I guess I will find out in a few weeks time.
Meanwhile, I hope this also is an auspicious time to open up my CPU and insert more RAM. I printed out instructions, and am ready to tackle another project I've been waiting to find time to do.
My mother has had a few days of either sleeping for 16 hours straight or being up for 16 hours straight. Her 92nd birthday was on Monday. On Tuesday, we had a local Polish Catholic priest over for lunch. They knew each other well back at the old parish in Yonkers. She doesn't remember him. But he remembers her and tried to talk to her about the old days. She sat and listened, and the only thing she seemed to be able to say was "How long have you been here?"
She is growing smaller and lighter, a drying pod waiting to fall.
Over in the corner, seeds wait to wake.
Now I will go out and watch the eclipse.
Then I will tackle the RAM.
Auspicious days are too few.
