Category Archives: Ordinary Things

seamus heaney & a dance for mother’s day

12 Sunday May 2013

Posted by in Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Themes of Childhood

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This Mother’s Day in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by the ironing board in my mother’s kitchen, but before the fog rolled in on the end of a windy afternoon on the sandy edges of California. Folding our beach blanket, edge to edge, while unbeknownst to us, my husband took photographs and wrote our names in the sand . . . 

From Clearances V by Seamus Heaney

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984I

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“The cool that came off the sheets just off the line 
Made me think the damp must still be in them 
But when I took my corners of the linen 
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem 
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook 
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, 
They made a dried-out undulating thwack. 
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand 
For a split second as if nothing had happened 
For nothing had that had not always happened 
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, 
Coming close again by holding back 
In moves where I was x and she was o 
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.”

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Listen here as Seamus Heaney reads the poem.

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little marvels on mother’s day in america . . .

05 Sunday May 2013

Posted by in Arizona, Artisans, Crafts, Fosterling, Lewis Hyde, Memoir, Memoir, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Phoenix, Seamus Heaney, Writing

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In a special for CNBC, Anna Andrianova shares the National Retail Federation’s estimate that $20.7 billion will be spent next Sunday, Mother’s Day in America. How easily that number rolls off the tongue – twenty-point-seven-billion-dollars – but what does it mean? A lot, of course. Years ago, I told my students to avoid using “a lot” in their compositions, because it was too vague. “A lot” of money to, say, Oprah or Donald Trump, is something altogether different from “a lot” of money in my wallet, the latter implying I remembered to bring cash for parking or I happened upon the hundred-dollar bill I once hid between two wallet-size photographs, knowing I would forget about it and be surprised when I found it. Typically, I only carry a debit card, and if I have cash at all, it is probably the result of returning to Marshalls a thing I didn’t need in the first place and opting for cash instead of a credit to my card when the nice cashier asks how I would like my refund.
imagesTo help me appreciate what one, let alone twenty billion dollars looks like, I did some poking around and found at Wealthy Matters which may or may not be a reliable online source, that for this sum, I could stay at the Burj Al Arab luxury hotel 
 in Dubai. For 137 years (at $20,000 a night). Or I could spring for forty idyllic private islands. Multiply that by twenty, and you will come very close to understanding just how well Hallmark will fare on Mother’s Day followed closely by those in the business of flowers, jewels, and chocolate. On their corporate page, Hallmark proudly declares, “cards reflect our culture.” I’ll say. There is a greeting card to capture almost every sentiment and to exploit every ounce of guilt.

Still, and although I am not his mother, my husband knows I will be annoyed should he not take advantage of the opportunity the second Sunday in May presents to commission for me a work of art by our teenage daughter. There are twenty-point-seven-billion reasons why he does not need to trudge to the mall, our girl in tow, searching for a “for my wife on Mother’s day” card or a gift he can purchase for me on her behalf. True, there have been birthdays, Mother’s Days, and Christmasses past, when my favorite duo visited very antique shop in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area, on a quest for something bijou that would bring whimsy to our backyard. Every one of those gifts, I accepted with glee, from napping cats wrought of stone and metal, to fading windsocks and wind chimes of bamboo that would toil less were they hung from a cypress tree on the coast of Monterey. 

cropped-photo-602.jpgI know my odds of acquiring a piece of original art by my daughter are greatly increased if her father asks her to do it and if his request coincides with a federal holiday or a special occasion on the United States calendar. Of course, she will do it because it is Mother’s Day, and it doesn’t even bother me if it feels obligatory; I want frozen in time this time in which she loves to draw, to create at her own pace and to her own drummer, without pressure from deadlines or critics. Admittedly, I fear this passion for art might disappear as though a phase to be outgrown, a bit like the way she eventually took umbrage against pigtails in her hair, Mary Janes on her feet, playing the piano, and leaving notes for Tooth Fairy Zoe and an assortment of pixie pals that live in the trees in our backyard.

As a child, I was imaginative, but there is little hard evidence of it. I was not a “maker” of things, unlike my mother who, out of necessity, made clothes and cakes and what would now be called “artisanal” paper packages tied up with string and my father who made gardens grow, cars run, houses more spacious, and children happy with his hand-crafted toys (he even made a guitar for his brother when he was just ten years old).  Maybe this explains my enchantment with my daughter’s labors of love, and when she lets me in while wondering aloud where life will take her, I jump at the opportunity to tell her she will never make enough money to do work she does not love and to remind myself of something I underlined in red a long time ago, in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World:

Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus–these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify … writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms — these are labors.

The older I get, the more I appreciate evidence of such labors all around me – from Sophie’s drawings to the dark boughs of our Chilean mesquite tree weighed down with a haphazard assortment of wind-chimes and rusty things that twirl and spin in warm desert winds. From the uppermost branches, hang bird houses of weathered wood, veritable treasures crafted from trash scavenged by artisan, David Bruce. In his hands, scrap lumber and sheet metal, random doorknobs, rusty garden fixtures, tarnished silver forks and spoons turn over and into art. 

For about a decade, Bruce constructed these whimsical abodes that could withstand the extreme Phoenix temperatures in his workshop, “Weathered Wonders.” A welcome splash of Dr. Seuss-decor on an otherwise humdrum street in Phoenix, it was displaced in 2009 when the ubiquitous Circle K moved in. Were it not for that utterly depressing fact, our great mesquite tree would be home to  more of his “avian art.”  As Bruce says himself: “For some people, these birdhouses are like Lays potato chips. They can’t just have one.” 

I am one of those people and driving by that space where he once labored, I long to see the row of houses he set down each morning on an urban sidewalk, little labors of love in better days.

Around his fiftieth birthday, in the 1991 collection, Seeing Things, poet Seamus Heaney writes the beautiful “Fosterling,” the beginning of which finds him recollecting a picture he loved at school, presumably a landscape of the County Derry of his childhood:

Fosterling

“That heavy greenness fostered by water“

At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness –
Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails.
The millhouses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness
Still more in place when mirrored in canals.
I can’t remember not ever having known
The immanent hydraulics of a land
Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.
My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.

Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

And here I sit, on the south-western corner of another continent, far away, and at fifty crediting Heaney’s poetry and back home and wondering how or why I waited so long to see things above, within, and around me . . .  to credit the marvelous.  

 

Happy Mother’s Day.

a day without pain or pity

26 Friday Apr 2013

Posted by in Awesome Women, Blogging, Breast Cancer Treatment, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Language matters, Memory, Ordinary Things, Social Media

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A creature of habit, I count on certain rituals to know that all is well in my world. Breakfast, always the same, is a poached egg, toast, berries of some sort, an orange, and coffee from a favorite cup. When I wave goodbye to my love, in return he will blow a kiss, flash a peace sign, and watch from the window until I disappear from view. Predictably perfect. Let the day begin.

Phoenix is beautiful in April with hot days and cool nights. Already, I am thinking of vacation and our annual escape to another place, where one set of routines is temporarily traded for another. Long days, devoid of oppressive heat and work, with freeways abandoned by snowbirds for cooler climes, and air-conditioned cars and offices faking a chill. On the central California coast, the living is easier. Summer living happens without us even knowing what time it is. Days begin when we decide, with idle conversations over real food at Good Tides and a scan of the local newspaper for news about people we don’t even know. The only schedule of any import is that of the local Farmer’s Markets so my husband can make his annual pilgrimage to Atascadero for his favorite avocados. On a late afternoon, you will find me sprawled on a beach ostensibly reading a book I’ve been meaning to read since 1997, but in fact staring far beyond the words and out towards the horizon, delighted by the realization that the shimmer atop rocks the color of coal is rising from the glistening pelts of six seals basking in the sun at low tide.

Last summer was my first with cancer, thus qualifying it as some sort of milestone. Ensconced by a bay in a Bed and Breakfast the decor of which reminded us of a little house, indeed on a prairie, we fell asleep by the fire every evening and woke to a view of grey water that inspired the kinds of daydreams that made our summer-time pass too quickly. For the most part, cancer was absent. You couldn’t have paid me to think about it during that magical moment with those shimmering seals.

Still, there were reminders that I could always count on cancer to be there when I wasn’t looking for it. I panicked one evening, when I realized I had forgotten to refill the  Tamoxifen before leaving home. No need. We found a CVS pharmacist who kept the wheels turning. I remember being a bit sad that the people who worked there would no longer think of me as just another nameless vacationer looking for sunscreen or the best place to buy fireworks, but as another bloody cancer patient whose most personal information was at their fingertips. I remember the kind young pharmacist who wondered if I had any questions about the medication. She could not have known how that my brain was and is still teeming with questions about the Tamoxifen and what I thought it was doing to me. But, I was on vacation. She knew it. Thus, with empathy and efficiency, she had the prescription filled in less than fifteen minutes. I wonder if it was because she understood, perhaps better than I, cancer does not take a vacation.

There is something I want to tell you on Day 26 of this month of writing challenges. Today, I am supposed to be writing about a day when I wish I could have used a pain-free pass. I simply cannot do it. I know no pain. I am here. I am happy. I am much loved. My natural habitat is in some realm realm between great joy and uncertainty but I am still here. 

How I wish I could use a pain-free pass for someone I never knew.

Leaning back against a rock on Morro Bay Strand one day last summer, idly scrolling through favorite blogs and my Twitter feed, minimally distracted by short bursts of news about Tom Cruise’s diovrce or the unfolding events in Syria, I noticed from Elizabeth Whittington, this:“What a loss. Heartfelt condolences to u all @FightCRC: It is with great sadness we report Pat Steer passed away yesterday.”  

On the sandy edges of California, I may as well have found a message in a bottle. I did not know Elizabeth Whittington, nor did I know Pat Steer or what was represented by the acronym CRC. That changed. By the time the amber evening rolled in, bringing with it a cool mist and throngs of people intent on capturing forever a beautiful sunset, I was deep in thought about Pat Steer. Retracing my steps through the day’s Tweets, I rediscovered Elizabeth Whittington’s condolences. On I ventured, to Pat’s blog where I found a woman who had been a dog trainer, a writer, and a cook who loved exploring in Syracuse always on a quest for culinary novelties. Pat had been diagnosed with Stage IV rectal cancer in 2004, and she had stopped active treatment on March 28 2012.

On May 7, 2012, she wrote a guest post No More Room in the Bucket for the Fight ColoRectal Cancer website.  It was a poignant response to her friend, Janet, who wondered if there were perhaps some unfinished business, some loose ends, or bucket list items that Pat would like to fulfill. I imagine Janet was hoping for something grand, but Pat’s wish was for a pass of sorts, a pain-free pass that would grant her enough strength and mobility to go upstairs and do a load of laundry by herself. Strength and mobility.

Pat had no formal bucket list; she had long-term goals that were not written down but fulfilled nonetheless – paying off credit card debt and a mortgage, retiring from corporate life at 55, training her dogs, experiencing the vastness of North America by train. Following her diagnosis, I learned that she traveled to New York for consultations and treatments, and subsequently took advantage of the Amtrak points she earned. From coast to coast on sleeper train, she savored America and Canada, visiting relatives sprinkled in various states along the way. For Pat, it was leisurely travel, idyllic, and allowed her to build upon dreams of future destinations and how to get there.

In 2011, she was all set for another cross-country trip to Denver for the English Cocker Spaniel Club of America national specialty. Amtrak prohibits dogs, so Pat abandoned the idea of a train and decided to drive in her Jeep. Everything was coming together perfectly for a dream trip, until one of those New York city consultations revealed an inoperable recurrence of her stage IV rectal cancer. There were tumors in her lung and in her lower spine. Her oncologist confirmed metastatic cancer in her spine and hipbones. A weekly chemotherapy regimen abruptly ended those carefully thought out plans for a six week cross-country road trip.  How Pat cursed chemo for ruining her summer vacation, but she found consolation in learning that the tumors were shrinking. Her strength was returning, so much so that she felt strong enough to travel to New York for treatments. Her routines of writing and lunches with friends were once again part of her life. And, she had all those Amtrak rewards to use later.

The ironies of cancer are beyond cruel. Throughout Pat’s treatment and in her advocacy work, she always cautioned other patients to be prepared for the speed at which things can change in Stage 1V colorectal cancer. With a living will and an advanced directive, Pat was “officially” prepared. Her family knew her wishes. But Pat was wholly unprepared for the rapidity of cancer’s final, painful assaults on her  body. In No More Room in the Bucket she wrote that it took not even one month for her “to morph from full-time functional adult who could drive herself around to full-time cancer patient who is mostly bedridden.

I was done

Pain control became paramount, and in consultation with her team, she chose to stop treatment. She blogged about it at Life out Loud: Surviving Cancer Living Life where I discovered she had been held aloft, as I have, by virtual connections and the sheer kindness of online friends, including a woman she had never met who created a virtual tour of Seville, Spain for her, complete with well-wishes from Spanish waiters.

Summer is already in the air again in Phoenix, and I have begun to prepare mentally for a break away from the city and into the cool fog of California. Tonight, I am thinking of Pat Steer and her bucket list; Pat Steer who wanted so little.

As you consider the gift of just one day without pain, consider Pat Steer. I never knew her, but I will always remember her. 

mePPavatar80x80.jpgThere is no more room in the bucket for big dreams like cross-country train trips. I feel a pang watching tv shows set in NYC, knowing that I’ll likely never visit my favorite city again. It aches to see puppies and kittens and know I’ll never own another one. I’ve never tasted foie gras, or truffles, or uni. I never got to visit the Food Network. I’ll never meet my friend Shawn in person or visit her in Seville, Spain.

And perhaps the hardest thing – I ran out of health and activity before I ran out of treatment options. My body quit on me before my brain has … In the greatest cancer race, hanging on until the next new thing becomes available, I didn’t quite make it to the finish line after eight years of trying.

Simple things are my goals now – and simple things are what I miss most. I miss spontaneous restaurant lunches with my friends. I miss being able to shop for fresh food every other day. I miss being strong enough to walk outside. I miss my dog, Madison, who I sent back to Virginia to be with her co-owner because I’m no longer healthy enough to care for her.

It’s frustrating to have to ask someone else to do laundry because I can’t safely climb the stairs to get it done. Knowing that I may never be independently mobile again – that’s what I miss the most in this phase of non-treatment. More strength and mobility – that’s what’s on my bucket list these days.

That and, well, I decided that at the very least, I could take care of a little desktop aquarium and a betta. Petsmart is delivering the aquarium, filter, gravel and betta food tomorrow. A friend has already agreed to pick out my new fish…and maybe my sister and brother-in-law will take the tank when the time comes. Until then, it’s a small goal that I can reach, one that will remind me every day of brightness, and color, and movement – even when I can’t always accomplish those things.”

Rest in Peace, Pat Steer

take two poems, a shot of Skype & call me in the morning …

23 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in Awesome Women, Family, Health Activist Writer's Challenge 2013, Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Social Media, Soundtracks of our Lives, Themes of childhood, Themes of Childhood, Twitter

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npm2013_poster_540Social media has enriched my life in ways I never thought possible, while at the same time snuffing out a way of life for so many of us.  I will always treasure the hand-written letters that also served as envelopes.  Trimmed in red, white, and blue, those sky-blue single sheets, delicate as onion skin, were sturdy enough to make the journey par avion  from Ireland to the other side of America. With only one sheet of thin paper, we had to be economical with our words, shaping our tidings with only the very best.

In school, I filled blue jotters with words that weren’t my own, but I learned by heart from favorite poems carefully copied in a fountain pen full of Quink. Love medicine on every page.

Before Skype, I treasured long-distance phone calls with my mother and my friends, usually during the weekend when we could be less circumspect over the time difference and the cost per minute. Before the Olde Antrim Photos page appeared on Facebook recently, now with 480 members all feverishly posting pictures and recollections of childhoods that have grown more idyllic over the passage of time – before all of that, those of us far from home relied on the pleasant interruptions of sporadic phone calls from childhood friends, the rhythm of home so achingly familiar, we fell simply and softly into conversation, all the comforting colloquialisms helping us pick up where we left off a lifetime ago. Unlike the phone or Skype which brings my mother to me whenever I need her, as though she is sitting across the table from me at lunchtime, it is the letter, with its faint fragrance of home that I have always found superior, because I could hold it in my hands.

sorry-marketers-you-re-doing-twitter-wrong-report-692a5ff817-300x168Now, I cannot imagine a world without Twitter, its sheer speed and instantaneous access to the information I need. Bite-size chunks or, if I need more, connections to charts and graphs, studies and reports, to newspapers from every corner of the globe, to communities of writers, teachers, cooks, politicians, breast cancer patients, scholars, musicians, poets, readers et cetera.

“Whatever happened to Tuesday and so slow,                                                 Going down the old mine with a transistor radio?”

Van Morrison asked in 1967. Almost my entire life later, he is singing in the background of my home far away from home, The Days Before Rock and Roll, and I am a teenager, once again sitting by my bedroom window, turning knobs on that old transistor, circling through Athlone and Budapest on the way to Radio Luxembourg.

It is National Poetry Month, and I no longer have to search through anthologies to find a favorite poem, or copy it out line by line in a book that will become a personal collection to lean on when I am weary. At my fingertips, at lightning speed, I can find any poem I need. I have needed Damian Gorman‘s “Devices of Detachment,” often throughout the years, especially when I am reminded of the extraordinary coping skills of ordinary people, revealed through their words, how we can turn a phrase, a word, a hint, around and around until we have successfully distanced ourselves from the subject. Then, we can feel no longer responsible or accountable.  Terrorism. Cancer. The Wars on both. How well we use words and phrases to sanitize and glamorize the suffering and pain, to hide the horror and heartbreak so often visited upon ordinary people going about their daily lives.

While ruminating on the complexities of cancer and the politics of its lexicon, I rediscovered Damian Gorman and his spare but searing suggestion that the bombs and bullets, the “suspect incendiary devices” all too familiar in 1980s Northern Ireland were far less deadly than the “devices of detachment” its people used to distance themselves from the violence. Aware of it, yet so removed. When we think we need to be, we are all very good at “detachment.”

Devices of Detachment by Damian Gorman

“I’ve come to point the finger

I’m rounding on my own

The decent cagey people

I count myself among …

We are like rows of idle hands

We are like lost or mislaid plans

We’re working under cover

We’re making in our homes

Devices of detachment

As dangerous as bombs.

Sometimes when I need my mother but she’s out shopping or the time difference doesn’t allow it, I turn to Seamus Heaney, the Nobel poet whose poetry so easily scoops me up and into the County Derry countryside where he grew up, just down the road from my mother. Recently, in an act of mild rebellion, I gave my ironing board to Goodwill. I couldn’t quite part with the iron, but that day is on the horizon. This was no small act, given that I was reared in County Antrim by a mother who ironed everything, including socks and dishcloths. Nonetheless, when I close my eyes and picture her, she is not as she was just this afternoon on Skype, inches away from me on a computer screen; rather, she is standing at the ironing board in our kitchen, in the house my dad renovated from top to bottom during my childhood. As plain as day, I can see her setting the steaming iron in its stand, while she shakes out one of my father’s shirts. As she resumes “the smoothing,” she is telling me a story she has told before or reminding me not to  wish my life away because I’ll be a long time dead, and invariably, she is reminding me to consider the lilies.

Old Smoothing Iron by Seamus Heaney

Often I watched her lift it
from where its compact wedge
rode the back of the stove
like a tug at achor.

To test its heat by ear
she spat in its iron face
or held it up next her cheek
to divine the stored danger.

Soft thumps on the ironing board.
Her dimpled angled elbow
and intent stoop
as she aimed the smoothing iron

like a plane into linen
like the resentment of women
To work, her dumb lunge says,
is to move a certain mass

through a certain distance,
is to pull your weight and feel
exact and equal to it.
Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.