on center street

winter returns

2005-02-21T07:20:00.000-05:00

only the neighbor's dog barking out beyond the old barn and the snow coming down in slants. it must have started late last night after i went to bed, after i had dinner with my father at Bittersweet where Jeffrey sat with his his back to us like a slammed-shut door, after lunch with JG in providence which was what i expected it to be--another very needy and wounded man who i was pleasantly surprised by as i saw him from a distance but then got up close and tried not to see the uneven shave, the rumpled clothing, the bits of white on the shoulders of his sport coat, all a disapointment foretold and made fact, after my drunken saturday night at the Pawkachuck party and finding myself in EM's big white truck, his kisses too hard and his hand too fast down my shirt as if he were grabbing the gearshift and trying to go from neutral straight into fifth, after driving away and leaving a message on Jeffrey's cell --i'll leave the backdoor open if you need place to crash--and believing that my little message in a bottle would find the shore.

and so now it is snowing again and i am back to where i was before, my bravado and self-assurance of the past few days tattered, lost in a forest of my own circling, exposed, cold and looking for a way home.

why again the why

2005-02-19T08:36:00.000-05:00

tired, too many indulgences, can't settle. world is scrambled by the weird confluence of seeing Jeffrey several times in public over the past few weeks and feeling unalterably sad that he doesn't appear on my doorstep, despite all the door-slamming i've done. throw into the mix a nice guy who i met 'virutally' who has all the right pedigrees --ivy league, tenured, learned, articulate--i was totally infatuated on email, loved his picture, but when i talked to him last night felt wayyy too in control, detected more than a little wounded bird, a little too needy, a little too nice.....but which is worse? neediness covered-up with a thick veneer of nastiness and alcohol or one that is right out there?

why is 'nice' not something i am drawn to? why does 'nice' make me want to run as fast as i can towards every guy who ever treated me badly?

i don't know. just want to crawl back into my hole. tried to move a bureau from one room to another, thinking some sort of productivity would make me feel better. but, wouldn't ya know it, it's now stuck between rooms and god knows who i will have to invite over to help me.

so many words

2005-02-06T15:44:00.000-05:00

...and so it comes to this: it is not, i'm afraid, enough to be your own best friend.

at least not today, on my birthday, when i feel so alone and so sad, empty and hopeless. the calls from my kids this morning, their loving and dutiful voices music on the other end of the phone, dinner with my parents last night, but more of a celebration of my mother being upright than anything else. she was uncomfortable and ansy before the main course was finished, so i was left to wait for the bill alone. i bought a neighborhood-sized bag of chocolate covered raisins at the convenience store, and ate that as my birthday cake, in front of re-runs of Law & Order. I have tried, all day, to not fall through the floor as I always do on my birthday, running just ahead of the cloud of despair, waiting for something unexpected to happen, which it never does. yesterday, i saw J driving in the bright sunlight, his top down, sunglasses on. he gave me a little, almost imperceptible 3-finger wave, his hand hardly moving from the steering wheel and roared-off. all day i missed him, all day i was off my game, willing him to come by, willing him to stay the night, hating him and wanting him at the same time.

my age hits me harder than ever before. i am not just an adult, which i've just barely come to terms with, but i am an aging adult and this fact is tough. i am still struggling, still working everything out as if i were an adolescent, still living in split worlds, split minds, not knowing who i am or how i want to spend the change in my pocket.

i don't want to be married, but i wonder why i am not? why has everyone else that i know managed to negotiate this terrain? why do i feel like a fragile vessel that leaks all of the water that is poured into it?

faith is the evidence of things unseen, but i am so very tired of not seeing.

2005-01-31T07:15:00.000-05:00

The glass-blue days are those
when every color glows,
each shape and shadow shows.
Gerard Manley Hopkins

the pieces

2005-01-31T06:38:00.000-05:00

"I am not sick, just broken." My mother says this to me over the phone yesterday. It is late afternoon and she is calling because my father has gotten the car stuck in a snowbank and is trying to shovel his way out. "You've got to come over and stop him." I hear her crying. "I have to remember, I am not sick, just broken, " she says again, and in her voice I hear the first timbre of emotional honesty that I have heard in a long time, the bald, raw admission of her state of being, of the rocks that she finds herself shipwrecked on. "I don't want to talk anymore. I just want to make a cup of tea. I'll see you soon."

By the time I get there, she is up and in the kitchen, fixing supper for my father and me again, not ordering us around or groaning, but pushing herself along the counters to get the napkins or the pepper herself. We sit at the table. She eats everything on her plate, swallowing it all. She tells us stories about Duxbury when she was growing up. She laughs, we laugh, and then she goes back to her room to eat her Jello and go to bed.

oh, pink and frozen earth

2005-01-29T06:23:00.000-05:00

The Dog gets me up and out onto the brittle snowpack, my steps and his echoing in the thick and twinkling black of an almost-dawn. I'm limping on a twisted knee and my arm hurts from being pulled too hard too many times by his leash as we make our way back into house under the stars. The coffee is waiting and hot. I start a day again.

The Boy called yesterday bursting with proud news of call-backs from his first auditions. I call his sister but only get her voicemail. I struggle with the enveloping loneliness of deepest winter, becoming a hermit in my house but unable to use this gift of time and health effectively. Waking up with the excitement of all the things I will tackle and accomplish, running out of mental gas by mid-afternoon.

Yesterday, primary care for my mother. My father went to New York for a couple of days. I am claustrophobic there, and guilty because of it. I want to flee the moment I arrive and am impatient both when she sleeps too much and when she wants to talk. I am impatient with the groaning, impatient with the slowness with which she moves, impatient that she can't remember what pills she is supposed to take when. Like gas poured in a line, the anger burns straight ahead, all around me, follows me back home and consumes the night into wasteful, surrendering ash.

2005-01-24T13:04:00.000-05:00

my back porch this morning.....

the plow and the stars

2005-01-24T05:57:00.000-05:00

the wind and snow have abated although occasional roars can still be heard from the northeast. the snow is up to the windows on the back porch and still no plow for the driveway. did not leave the house yesterday and fought my own anciness, as well as the demons by midday -- be productive, they screamed, this house is falling down around you. work on your novel. you've got a whole day with nowhere to go. do something. i shut them up with a nap, and by then it was time to cook a small dinner,watch the football game (which i don't understand or much like) and knit, which i am uniquely bad at, ripping out hours of work twice in order to get it right. poor Jack -- he was inside all day. we ventured out 2 or 3 times, but the wind was too strong for much of anything, so he hunkered down with me, waiting for the plow which never came. awake an hour or so ago, still not plowed-out. i will work from here for the morning and then head home.

2005-01-23T08:37:00.000-05:00

sunday 1-23-05

blizzard of 05

2005-01-23T08:31:00.000-05:00

and so the winds roar out of the northeast at 60+ mph, and the snow keeps on coming, starting yesterday as i left hartford after dropping the Girl back at college after a long break, sorry to say good-bye all over again as our companionable weeks together came to an end. we decorated her room with a new quilt and rug, rearranged the furniture somewhat, stockpiled food on her shelves, and went out for subs before i dropped her off, into the waiting arms of friends as they arrived back, too. i headed towards the Farm, a very long two hours traversing secondary roads, just in line with the gathering storm. bone tired when i got here, but headed out to D's for a warm supper before the roads became impassable. it was a good time, one of the best that we have had together. a chicken. some pan fried potatoes. beans. an agreement as he poured his sambuca that if we were both alone when we were 75 that we would be together, take care of each other, and not die alone.

later than usual

2005-01-16T07:52:00.000-05:00

sunday morning and the only sounds, if there are sounds at all, are mine and the Dog's. the Boy and his friends left for home last night after a lush and savory dinner at a wonderful little restaurant, Nat Porters's, in Warren, Rhode Island. Crackling fires in the three dining rooms, and plates heaped with food. My father holding court at the head of the table, genuinely interested in the lives of the four twenty-something young actors, his grandson, of whom he is enormously proud, being one. I find myself unable to relax, managing everyoe's moods and tastes -- have we travelled too far afield, is everyone having a good time, what should i be talking about in order to connect with these fabulous kids, who am i as someone's mother, as someone's daughter, unable to leave any of these questions long enough to sit back and relish the meal and the moment.

the days are getting longer

2005-01-15T06:06:00.000-05:00

so quiet and so early. six o'clock on a saturday morning feels so much earlier than it does during the week. only the occasional car on the road outside. am headed to the Farm in an hour or so, delaying my usual thursday/friday departure until now because the house is full of my Boy and his NYU friends, sprawling into every corner of my treasured abode. i realize how much of a personal, private sanctuary it has become for me as others use it. having anyone there, even my Boy or my Girl, is making my insides plain, myself known. if the beds are unmade, the furniture moved, (which they will be) the refrigerator full of food i didn't buy, i have to fight the feeling of chaos that hovers over me until i can "put it to rights" again.

what it boils down to

2005-01-15T06:04:00.000-05:00

"......This is what so much of life boils down to: How do we bear what we know and go on doing what is right? How do we see right into the heart of people and not go mad? The answer is: We have our devices. We have religion and philosophy and speedboats. We sit on the back porch and whittle, or order escargot. We sing the blues or run for office. We just keep going. ."

snow fog

2005-01-10T09:43:00.000-05:00

facing the week. fighting lethargy. trying to step on my internal accellerator to get the work underway that needs to be done. i am seeing a client at noon today, and have a long list of other 'to do's' sitting at my elbow, breathing heavily. focus, i say to myself, focus. it is work that will save you. my father called a little while ago, as he always does around 8 in the morning. his voice was angry and hoarse. he had just spoken to my sister, whose husband, spiralling steadily downward in a vortex of manic depression and who knows what else, has moved out of their house and taken an apartment a few miles away. it is a tone of voice i recognize from long ago, when i was in the first throes of J leaving me and the kids for M, twenty years his junior. hurt, unable to control his rage, his fear for my sister and her daughters. the threat of emotional and physical violence hanging over, under, and in between it all.

home improvement

2005-01-09T07:36:00.000-05:00

torrential rain all day yesterday here at the farm, with D in tow. a ragged night’s sleep since there are no doors on the bedrooms here and she, up and down almost every hour, feeling sick. a companionable day followed. D had her Christmas present massage. I bought blinds for the windows that face the street, and a trip to the yarn store full of magical colors and textures on a whim of mine to knit again, which I never did well, or even completed, several lifetimes ago. D left in the mid-afternoon, to get away from her mother no doubt, in the same way that I embraced the aloneness of this house, still full of her, but mine again, to read masha hamilton’s newest book the distance between us, to sleep, to put up the blinds –a task which I abandoned but will take-up again this morning, trying to focus on doing it right rather than quickly, to silence the home-improvement demons who won’t stop telling me how bad I am at anything requiring a tool. I will try to work today; at least, to get some work-work done in anticipation of a chaotic house full of kids and their friends at home. I miss my pre-holiday routine of writing, working and being here by myself and long to have it back again.

2005-01-09T07:17:00.000-05:00

the dunes on a sunday morning

seeing the wise one

2005-01-06T13:47:00.000-05:00

i see the Wise One this morning after a hiatus of more than a month. i am surprised that it has been this long, sitting in the second floor office where I have spent so many fifty-minute sessions over the past sixteen years, since D was two. Two! It is possibly the longest, and certainly the most intimate, non-blood relationship of my life.

About my parents, she says: “can you really accept that they are saying ‘this is the way we want to end it?’” There is nothing, she says, that I can do, beyond what I am already doing.

About JD, she asks me if I am surprised that he has disappeared again. A little, I reply. I describe my daily descent into loneliness and depression most days in the early evening, about the only time of day that I try to will him to appear. Think about it, she says. He has been drinking since he woke-up, and by 4pm is in high gear. He is unable to make a plan, or to stick to any agreements made.

I tell her that I kept my feet on the ground during and after my New Year’s Eve collapse. That is new; that is good. I also tell her of my new-found refuge in work.

I will write about her. But not today.

buddha in hanoi

2005-01-05T08:57:00.000-05:00

read my good friend reg henry's column in the pittsburgh post-gazette about waiting for news of whether his 21 year-old son had survived the devastation in Phuket.

so much of being a parent, it seems to me, is truly terrifying, especially in those moments when we are helpless to do anything, when we are no longer running alongside their bicycles, but waiting at the other end of a telephone for news that does or does not come, waiting for children who we have raised to be independent to somehow find their way home. it is the ultimate act of faith, i suppose, when all you can do is to trust in the unknown and in our own ability to survive whatever it brings to our doorstep.

deep breaths

2005-01-05T07:13:00.000-05:00

the beginning of January lull. waiting for snow, waiting for ice, waiting for the unending grey to take hold. i struggle with my role as parent these days as the fragile world that I have created for myself since D left for college in september is upended with both children now home for several weeks. i grab the time when they are asleep or not in the house greedily, as if it were an oxygen mask. i chafe at the mirror they hold up to me. who am i to them, what I am supposed to be? i have no model for this stage of our lives together, can only dimly remember being conscious of my own mother at their ages, and attempt to wrap myself in a shroud of invisibility. make sure the trains run on time, that there is food in the fridge, money in the bank, that the cable bill is up-to-date, laundry soap by the washing machine, a car to use.

from susan sontag

2005-01-04T06:42:00.000-05:00

this, from today's issue of salon.com.......

"Mutual friends told me about an evening they spent with Susan Sontag a few months before she entered her final illness. They were talking about George Plimpton's peaceful death, in his sleep, and my friends agreed that they would want to go that way. Sontag replied that she wouldn't. She wanted to die of cancer -- "I want to experience my death." How resplendently Sontag. The contrarianism, the fearlessness, the romantic infatuation with experience, the almost Faustian hunger for knowledge, the absolute and unfaltering commitment to consciousness and, of course, the sensuality of the intellect: Always, always she wanted to feel -- and to think about what she felt."

quote du jour

2005-01-02T11:48:00.000-05:00

"The only miracle we can perform is to go on living...to preserve the fragility of life from day to day, as if it were blind and did not know where to go, it places itself in our hands......."
José Saramago

grace

2005-01-02T07:51:00.000-05:00

today dawns with the sun lying gently on top of the trees. I’m sitting in whatever room I’m calling this – the parlor? the other living room? the main road is quiet and the temperature has dropped backed down to where it should be in January. Jack watches me from the window seat.

My rage and despair of the night before subsided yesterday as I drove to my parents house to visit my mother, an epiphany of sorts as I drove over the little bridge into Adamsville, that my reactions to this last stage of my parents lives were suddenly recognizable as the transformational stages of grief: denial, followed by anger, anger to sadness, to be followed eventually by grace and acceptance. I see, now, that it was my dam of anger that finally burst on new year’s eve, giving way to wave after swelling wave of deep sorrow that I have been holding at bay these last months. The task, as I see it now, is to make both of them comfortable, to suspend judgment, to love them as purely as I can.

My father is a few steps behind and may stay there. I thought that I should say to him, “we’ve got to accept that Mum is dying,” but when we got to the restaurant last night, which was mercifully empty and with JD nowhere in sight, he looked at me and said about the two of them, ‘we’re closer than we’ve ever been.’

Is it my job to take practical control or to accept that the way they are living now is the way that they want it to be? Is this facilitating their denial or helping them to live it out the way as they have a god-given right to do?

the first

2005-01-01T07:24:00.000-05:00

last night i crashed, a kind of small panic attack when i got to my parents house, which, in hindsight, had been brewing all day, like clouds that grow thicker and more ominous until finally they let loose and the rain just won't stop.

i drugged myself with sleep for most of the afternoon, and awoke to a burst of energy and home repair, mounting a shelf in the bathroom and fixing another. talked to DA, in anticipation of going out or at least, being invited to dinner for New Year's Eve, since he had asked earlier in the morning if he and Diana could spend the night here to get away from a teenage party that would be happening into the wee hours at his house. in the end it was kind of a back-handed invite, "or you could come eat here," which made me suddenly very sad, produced a distinct and lasting catch in my throat, and left me marooned and close to tears when i hung-up, agreeing to talk to them after i had gone to check-in on my parents. maybe i would feel better, i thought. maybe i could rally the persona who didn't care, who could go out and get drunk.

when i arrived, my mother was already eating her supper in her bedroom, sitting up in front of her tray. as is her way now, she chews her food and then spits it out into her hand and makes little piles of macerated bites on the rim of her plate. she has no teeth, and when she talks her mouth is full of food. she groans. My father brings in a glass of champagne for me and a plate of smoked salmon. i don't want either. i sit on the edge of their bed, on the stained quilt in the fetid air, as my mother slowly gets up to go to the bathroom, to sit on the hospital chair over the toilet bowl in full view of my father and me. i cannot breathe. i cannot talk. i cannot feel anything but disgust.

I am dangerously close to tears as he and I escape to have our dinner. We sit at the dining room table, with two of the five candles lit, his nose running with a cold which he assures me will be gone by morning. The food is cold, as if it has been sitting there for a long time, and the plate he gives me has a leftover piece of steak, two thin asparagus, and a half a cold baked potato. He doesn’t seem to notice that there is almost no food on my plate—has he just not cooked enough or eaten it all before I arrived? I ask him about whether he’s thought any more about the Cedars and he is non-committal, saying he wants to get my mother ‘stronger’ so that she can cope on her own when he goes to New York. You have to go, I say. I don’t want to spend the money for someone to stay, he says. I’ll do it, I say. We’ll see, he says.
There is a strong smell of gas and when I go to turn-off the burners, one explodes with the loud and frightening, built-up bang.

I flee as he walks upstairs to watch a television show and with my mother sound asleep, the bandanna around her dirty hair fallen down across her forehead. The sobs come quickly as I steer blindly down their driveway, the humid fifty-degree air fogging the windshield. I call DA. I can’t have you stay tonight, I say. I need to be alone.

I am caught in my own maelstrom, hurricane-force winds of grief and loss blowing me over, around and down.

the last day of this year

2004-12-31T07:30:00.000-05:00

the sky is an early pink, staining everything around it…the left-over soggy snow, the white clapboard‘s on my neighbor’s garage, as if all of the whites of my view had just been washed, accidentally, with a new red shirt.

the furnace hums, welcoming me back to the Farm where I arrived late last night, after several hours of indecision about whether to come then or wait until morning. The uncertainty was around the “why” of it; it’s always around the “why” of it…did I want to be here last night in case JD appeared at my doorstep, or to just be really alone, now that D is solidly home from college for the next few weeks?

And so, here it is, the last day of this particular year. I am tempted to take inventory. But of what? Charting myself over the last 12 months like the stock market, a bar graph of highs and lows, a report of personal profit and loss? If I were a numbers kind-of-gal, if I were the kind of person who could lay out units of experience, fitting each one into its own little box until the Table of Elements was complete, then I would undoubtedly see that this year has been one of significant learning: learning to be alone (with several notable exceptions), learning to trust my writers voice and eye, learning to put it down, and learning to take the first tentative steps towards making this explication the central tenet of my life.

half-sleep

2004-12-30T06:27:00.000-05:00

Since leaving the Farm on Monday, I have been operating in a kind of netherworld, bursts of energy and determination interspersed with long bouts of drugged sleep. sleep has always been my drug of choice, a bloated overload of sluggishness and sloth that only drives me deeper into a waking awareness of how stuck i am in the present. sleep is my default response to psychic ennui, my shut-off valve, an ether that overtakes me every day in the early afternoons and evenings. like the first rush of chemicals shooting through my veins, i stretch out in a chair or on the couch, giving myself over to this sweet surrender, the suspension of thought and movement, the seduction of the in-between as the gentle unconscious begins to take hold. only to come-to minutes or hours later, the daylight gone or too high overhead, in another day or still in the same one, but not sure, unsteady, heavy, hungry and hung-over, full of self-loathing for the time wasted, time lost, time unrecoverable.

faith or something like it

2004-12-29T07:04:00.000-05:00

I remembered something my Jesuit friend Tom told me -- that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, and emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Annie Lamont

as the sun goes down

2004-12-27T16:01:00.000-05:00

the car is running, it's fitful exhaust visible through the dining room window. it looks like cold breath, panting and chattering as i begin the slow trudge toward home. the sun is out now, orange for the short time before it dissapears, mocking me with its orange glow on the windows, the brief pools of weightless color on the crusted snow. it will be gone soon, and i will be in the car, driving away again from the demons which find me here, my mostly unworn clothes back in the bag only to be packed there again when i return in a few days time. what do i come here hoping to find? and what am i running away from when i leave? when will what i do be enough, be all, instead of camouflage for not waiting?

snowed in, on a monday

2004-12-27T11:45:00.000-05:00

howling winds and drifting snow, beginning mid-afternoon yesterday as my father and i left The Cedars, an assisted living facility a couple of miles from here. we walked through the creamy yellow hallways, along the cheerfully patterned carpets to a two bedroom "unit" that would, as we said to each other later, 'work just fine.' Our tour guide was a woman named Mary Ellen, who looked more like a head nurse than an administrator in a bright blue suit with gold buttons, looked at my father and told him about how the health of the primary caregiver would rapidly and steadily decline, and as we left, she touched my elbow and said 'let me tell you that one-third of caregivers die within the first year of doing what your father is doing.' my father kept laughing as she was talking, the kind of laugh that says, we'll see about that, but she held onto my arm and wouldn't let go until i looked her in the eye. they were red and unflinching. was she about to cry?

against my better judgement, i called JD on christmas eve as i was driving from my parents house over to D & D's to play pool. i missed him, suddenly, after more than a month of having expunged him from my life. thought that i was tougher now, like a caloused heel after too many blisters. our last interaction had been a note saying i wanted my key back and to 'please leave it on the table.' but all of his inadequacies, all of his not being what i want or need, escaped me at the moment when i called his cell. when he answered, i hung-up. later, leaving D & D's, as i listened to his return message, he called again. was, he said, sitting in my driveway. his words were slurred and he was mumbling something about ending-up in a cornfield with a cruiser in pursuit. 'do you have a glass of wine in there or are we going to just sit here?'

he spent the night. he hung around as i scrambled to to cook the whole of christmas dinner which would shortly be transported to my parents house. it was the JD that i like, the JD that sets me back to believing in our possibilities together, that we can break through our separate walls and find a secret garden that will hold and sustain us. and as before, i fly on these rapidly evaporating fumes all through the day, christmas day, with the shakey hope that he will re-appear later that night. when he doesn't, i am relieved to be alone, and angry at myself for taking the backward steps to that all too familiar place of anxiety and insecurity.

so last night, after dinner with my father at the local pub in front of a blazing fire as the snow came down, i trudged back here to wait again, waiting for the dog to bark as JD comes in through the kitchen door in the wee hours, waiting for his shadow to emerge in the wan light of snowy dark in my bedroom.

waiting.

gently snowing

2004-12-26T08:46:00.000-05:00

Someone said recently that we become who we truly are at the end of our lives, and as i watch my mother dying, i suspect that this is true.

Unable to call upon her old friends, alcohol and cigarettes, she is alone without those steadfast companions. She lies in bed without defense, begging for the Atavan. She has stopped eating. Sleep is her only comfort. She must face herself, and I, for the first time, am facing who she really is in order to find whatever compassion, patience, and selflessness I have. It sounds odd to say this, but as I struggle to acknowledge what is actually happening -- that these are probably her last days--I can see that we are both shedding our separate skins, albeit at different phases of our lives. She is stripped down to her most basic functions -- breath, voice, smell. Her pleasures are only in memory. The other day she told me that when she hadn't been able to sleep the night before, she had played all eighteen holes of the Army Navy Country Club in Washington, D.C. in her head. "And quite well, too," she said, her sad blue eyes flickering over at me.

I, on the other hand, have reached a place on the trail after a long climb. Not a place where I can pitch a tent or even take off my shoes, but a small clearing that holds me for the moment, way above the treeline where the air is thin. I can choose to climb higher, or turn around and go back, can pick any point on the compass and head for it. I am middle-aged.

Just writing those words is difficult, almost as difficult as it is to say that my mother is dying. Middle-age feels like a kind of death, too. I grieve for the possibilities lost, the chances not taken, the consequences of decisions made. Much the way my mother plays those holes, counting each stroke, remembering the sandtraps and the fairways, going over and over in her mind the choice of clubs and how she might have hit the ball differently.

If only.......