My Wobbly Bicycle, 287

I have so many existential questions. Because I’m spending so much time sitting or slow walking, so much time removed from my old life. Old life? It’s the same life, isn’t it? That’s one of the complicated questions—what is the kernel, if there is one, that has followed me through this life from childhood? What is this mysterious morphing? I look at my arms, the skin hanging in rivulets. It’s hard to imagine I’m the same person.

The difference between me and a flower is that the flower has no consciousness of its wrinkling and fading. I guess. It re-enters the earth carrying no baggage from its blooming-time.

I’ve had a lot of time to think. You can see that. This is a long healing, a long hurting. And the accompanying cold I caught in the hospital, the cough. I’m a mess. It’s an act of heroism to write even this small message to you, considering how contracted inward I am. The mind turns to the hurting place and remains there, trying to soothe it.

I’m not allowed to bend over yet.  Watch me try to put my pants on. Watch me pick up a Kleenex off the floor with the grabber device. Watch me pull on my socks with the sock device. There are many small logistical problems, many clever ways to move to avoid the risky ones.

Existential questions. Who am I? Am I the Ph.D., the poet laureate, the person who’s written “all those books”? We give people labels. We admire who we think they are. But we’ve made them up, haven’t we? They/we are polymorphous.

I’m glad I had this back surgery in winter. I’ll remember this time as a plunge into the dark, a stripping away of what had been my regular life. What have I been doing? Reading, mostly.  To perk myself up, there’s  The Dear Committee Trilogy, by Julie Schumacher. And The Women, and Drop City by T. C. Boyle. Jeffrey, the Poet’s Cat  by Oliver Soden. Those are the unusual ones.

The Women is the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s women. What a brilliant, driven bastard he was! And then I’m thinking genius in general, how genius isn’t forgiven, doesn’t ask to be forgiven, but goes its own way, shining and stumbling over mere mortals. Admired, worshiped, hated. I’m thinking no one would choose to be a genius. Every time I delve into the life of genius, I see suffering. Everyone suffers, but a simpler mind, one that’s more blunted, seems able to pack the suffering into suitcases of cliché. The bigger the mind, the more space for parsing the nuances of pain. Also, the bigger the mind, the more intense the joy, one would think. Maybe so.

Much has been made of Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffrey. Jeoffrey, whose life is celebrated in every twitch of his tail by poor Chris Smart, friend of Boswell, of Samuel Johnson, locked up in the asylum because he will not stop obsessively praying over everything. Who turns his obsession into the most amazing poem of praise. https://poets.org/poem/jubilate-agno-fragment-b-i-will-consider-my-cat-jeoffry

Who really knows anything about the mind of Jeoffry? The writer Oliver Soden stands a few feet off, imagining, following along. (Consider also Virginia Woolf’s Flush, her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel). When a space feels vacant, we fill it with our own stories. How many stories have Jerry and I invented about our Ollie?

How many stories have I invented about myself? I think of the essays I’ve written, how I’ve shaped experience to suit myself, to entertain you if I can, to garner your sympathy, your praise. By the time I have one wrapped up, I no longer know what part of it is true. And maybe none of it is. Or all of it.

Oh look! There’s a big red cardinal on the bush outside our window. They show up so startlingly against the brown. The suddenness is better than all the stories because it’s unpremeditated, a gift. Its presence makes children of  us.

When a child skins her knee, she runs crying to her parent. It’s a catastrophe, a break in the perfection of the knee. The child wants sympathy, but the child is also fascinated by this new thing. Likewise, I’ve read everything I can find about back fusion surgery, its rate of healing, levels of pain, its success rate. I meet people who’ve had back surgery who have all sorts of tales to tell. My research results are much more optimistic. Generally, after six months or so, the problem is healed for a lifetime. I’m going to count on that.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 286

d

It’s time for a Wobbly, isn’t it? Lord. I’m not ready! I’m sitting on the sofa with my back brace laced tight, fuzzed by Norco, and still hurting. It’s hard to imagine the violence done to my body. I’ve been split open in the back, bone cut away, filler packed in, and all stabilized with four rods and four big screws. Granted, the hip and leg that were almost unbearably hurting before no longer hurt. What hurts now is the incision. I expect it to hurt for months. Did I mention I’ll be 80 my next birthday?

I read all I can find about this kind of back surgery, including one thread that included a message that said you can fix all this with careful yoga. Do not have surgery! he pleaded. I’ve heard that before. I can’t imagine the yoga techniques or the meditative practices that might straighten my spine, shrink the nodules that press on nerves, and so on. Frankly, I hate being made to feel guilty for doing what seemed inevitable, necessary. To add guilt to this pain.

Did I make my body? Am I responsible for scoliosis, stenosis, and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? And/or what made my brain think it runs this show? I have foolishly weighted myself with responsibility for the entire production.

Another guilt to add: opioids. I hurt. You bet I hurt. There are these pills that soften that pain, but every time I take one, I feel vaguely guilty. The bottle says one every 6-8 hours. I need one every four hours, and so that’s what I’m doing. I appreciate the vigilance  of the medical profession, but there are those of us who have to be encouraged to take the pills, not discouraged. I don’t need to feel guilty about taking care of my pain.

I wish I could write anything but this poor report. Poems come up in me like flowers, live their lives entirely in my mind, and pass away again, unseen. I don’t much want to read poems or anything else but novels, a plot I can follow. I have nothing else to do but watch the chickadees and titmice. I have not been out of our apartment since I came home from the hospital a week ago. On that day, I threw up twice and went into a shaking fit for a while. Nerve disruption? Whatever, it stopped.

I keep track of my steps going back and forth from bedroom to kitchen.  Today perhaps I’ll walk the outer halls a bit. I’m encouraging myself to make progress. I took a shower yesterday, the first one. No leg shaving because I’m instructed not to bend over. I’m using Jerry’s “grabber” and “sock assist,” nifty gadgets that enable you to pick up things and pull on socks without bending.

At least today I can call Wellness and send back the walker they lent me, and give them the freebee walker the hospital sent me home with. I don’t need those.

The hospital gave Jerry a bad cold. Probably. This is how it goes. We live in community. Speaking of that, I’ve gotten wonderful cards and flowers. Each one makes me smile. Do you ever ask yourself, “Why do people seem to love me?” Surely you’ve wondered when the cards show up.  There’s that community thing—we’re all in this together. When we cheer one up, we cheer us all up.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 284

I’m sitting here feeling halfway comfortable after having taken my morning painkiller drug. As is typical of people in pain, I can’t think of much to talk about. I’m withdrawn. I just dug through two plastic boxes to find the knee brace I once used. My bad back is now affecting my knee, and I still have seven days until they knock me blissfully out and I wake up later, no time having passed but much having transpired.

People like to talk about their surgeries the same way the ancient mariner liked to talk about the albatross. It’s proof of the ordeal they’ve survived, proof of their bravery and the mystical nature of survival. It’s all mystery, all below consciousness.

When I was a child, I had sore throats, ear infections, stomach aches, and the usual childhood diseases. Of course I did. I was building up immunities. The cures were so feeble, comparatively. In the 40s (I was born in ’44) there were no antihistamines, so when the mucus got terribly bad, I’d be off to the doctor to lie down on the table and say “K,K,K,K,K,K,” while the doctor sucked mucus out of my sinuses with a large syringe. (Imagine the person who had to clean out the syringe later!). As for ear infections, which I had plenty of, and which were probably responsible for my bad ears today, the remedy was to puncture the eardrum to let the pressure out. I can still hear/feel the sound of the drum being punctured, a kind of hollow, watery thud.

You might say the doctor was the most prominent member of our family. My brain damaged brother had daily seizures and often hurt himself in the process. It was the infancy of therapeutic drugs, and there was always the search for a more effective one, or combination.

I am a walking, talking tribute to modern medicine. Cancer, twice. The first was stage 3. And here I am, still. Hernias, meniscus repair, retinal repair (twice), cataract surgery. I can mentally travel the length of my body stumbling over old surgeries as I go. My very first was to raise the totally flat arch of my right foot to stop the pain of bone hitting the pavement.

Then again, I’ve been a walker, a runner, a biker, a swimmer. I say “have been,” in the devout hope that I will be back to at least two of those activities by spring or summer. I feel like a strong, athletic person, even if the evidence at present belies that.

It seems incongruous that I’m a writer first of all. Give me a choice, maybe I’d go swimming instead of writing. At least sometimes. Here’s what I just thought of—you have to ride your bike along the road, take long walks, swim the distance, in order to see the squirming, wriggling details of living. To see the delicate way the birds at the feeder pick up one sunflower seed and take off with it.

poets in their bassinets 
dream a splendid woman holding over their baby eyes 
a globe, shining with 
possibility.    someone, 
she smiles, has to see this  
and report it, and they 
in their innocence 
believing that all will be 
as beautiful as she is, 
whimper     use me, use me 
and oh how terrifying 
that she does.

—-Lucille Clifton

Immerse, that is. You have to immerse, or be immersed, don’t you? You have to drown in your own life, feel its relentlessness, including its pain. The church I grew up in baptized by immersion. You couldn’t just be sprinkled; It had to be all the way under. There have been times I felt so far under I thought I was drowning.

Here is one kind of immersion: a small child riding her tricycle down the hill, picking her way around the cracks in the sidewalk. Totally focused. The other kind—that of the watcher, the writer, who sees the child and records. Who ruminates, considers, evaluates. It’s a double layer, neither precluding the other.

I wonder if they’ll use the Da Vinci machine for my surgery. They used it for my cancer surgery. It’s a remarkable remove from the actual hands-on. The surgeon sits at a desk alongside, looking into the screen where the patient’s insides are magnified. The arms of the machine are directed to do the cutting, moving of organs, stitching. You could say it’s like the surgeon is writing a book.

P.S. I’ve decided to post my interviews with homeless people exclusively on Substack, so as not to confuse the two. I hope you’ll go to fledabrown.substack.com to read the next installment. It’s free unless you decide to pay.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 283

Note to my beloved Wobbly subscribers—At present, you can find the same material on both Wobbly and Substack. I hope you’ll join me either or both places. Substack costs nothing, but allows you to give money to support the writer’s work. Wobbly, as you know, costs nothing, either. Wobbly, located here on my website, offers you my entire publication history. If you follow me here, you can always check out the other at fledabrown.substack.com.

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Today is Chapter 3” of The Homeless Game. If you missed the first two, you can get them at https://substack.com/@fledabrown. Chapter 1 gives the history of this project.

 

I might mention that mostly the names have been changed. Occasionally, people asked me to use their real name. You won’t know which is which.

 

Claudia

I had this idea I’d start by pointing out how much Claudia and I have in common:  both grandmothers, about the same age.  Why is it I always want to imagine similarities before I see what’s actually there? Between us, my husband and I have four children and ten grandchildren. Claudia has four children, not all by the same man, a bunch of grandchildren, plus one great-grandchild. Some have been real problems. Her youngest son Derrick’s child is the one she’s focused on now.

Derrick had already broken up with the mother, Chantelle, when Chantelle found out she was pregnant. But when the baby was born, he was still living in the basement of her townhouse.  Chantelle’s mother, Derrick’s mother-in-law, so to speak, was worried sick after the birth—she didn’t want her mentally ill daughter alone with the baby. Chantelle had quit taking her medication when she got pregnant, and now, one minute she flew off the handle, the next she was lethargic or sleeping. She’d get up at night and start vacuuming, she’d throw things, yell into the baby’s monitor.  She ran away and hid in the woods with him a couple of times. She’d take him into the bathroom, lock the door, and coo, “What’s the matter, Buddy?” when he cried. Finally one night a neighbor called the police. When they arrived, she’d climbed in bed with the baby and lain on top of it.  Protecting it from what, herself?

 

Derrick asked Claudia to move in. The mother wasn’t letting the baby nurse long enough, so Claudia found a wet nurse.  It was agreed that the baby could stay with Chantelle as long as Claudia and the father remained in the house. Chantelle was allowed to have the baby alone only four hours a week. Lutheran services sent a woman who practically lived with them.

An army of helpers made Chantelle begin to feel extraneous to the process of baby-tending, and she began to work furiously to get more milk. But when she gave the baby a whack on the bottom because he wasn’t “obeying” her, protective services abandoned their in-home efforts and came to pick him up. Claudia and Derrick moved out. Derrick began a round of house-surfing with friends and acquaintances, while Chantelle kept calling Claudia, threatening to kill her.  Claudia went to live way out in the country with a friend. No car, no transportation.  Derrick had a car, but the starter was broken.

Remember, you’re hearing all this through me.  I could just let Claudia talk, just let you try to piece her tacks and digressions together. But this is about me, too. Why did I get started on this? Curiosity? Some need to save my own soul? How does that work?  I get lost in her story, not knowing exactly what to do with it except to stay here with her story, to not let up on my involvement in it.

I wonder what the people I interview here will think when they read their words, and my thoughts. I wonder if some will be angry at my comments, or pleased to be included, or will feel misrepresented. I wonder if any of them will feel more visible, more recognized as a true voice, a real person.

These people I’m writing about—Claudia, for example—I wonder what I mean by real. When they tell me their stories, they invent themselves as they go, no matter how utterly “true” the story is. And I invent them, each one a character shaped for our mutual interest.   Is my own story “true”? Is the past I picture the “true” one? Is my future anything but a movie I make? I can’t even swear I have my own story right.

 

It’s time to return to the beginning, to Mobile, Alabama, where Claudia was born, to see if I can pick up the thread of her life, make sense of it, or at least find a few cause-effect relationships. But it will do me no good to return there. I will find no birth certificate. The courthouse has burned down with all its records, and the hospital where she was born has since been torn down. She’s had trouble even getting a driver’s license. How does a person prove her existence? Who will believe her stories? Her story is that her mother worked in a restaurant and in a bar at night. She had two brothers and a sister, and when she was barely old enough to walk, her mother gave up trying to take care of her youngest three children and put them in an orphanage, where they remained for four years.

There are still orphanages in the United States.  Proposals to reinstitute funding for orphanages have appeared with surprising regularity. In the mid-1990s, the Republican Party and Representative Newt Gingrich endorsed orphanages as a key component of their proposed Contract with America and the Personal Responsibility Act of 1995. The way it was going to work was to limit benefits under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and use the savings to establish and operate orphanages for poor children.

In the orphanage, Claudia and her brother, eight, and her sister, seven, were placed in separate buildings. Her sister, who had taken such close care of her that she would often ride her around in her bicycle basket, went on a hunger strike to be allowed to see her—she was afraid Claudia had been adopted out.

The years must have gone by then, after that, unrecorded in any detail in Claudia’s young mind except for the brief visits with her sister. They’re unrecorded here, only a pause to imagine, based on old movies, maybe, or the sinking feeling we all get in the pit of our stomach when we’ve been left alone, maybe a memory of some early fear, our father walking out of the room, maybe, leaving us at nursery school.  That’s me, what I remember. One  portion of my anxious soul.

Then one day, Claudia’s  mother showed up with her new stepfather, and they all went home. Actually, this is a fairy-tale ending to this chapter. It turns out that the stepfather was a wonderful father. He worked hard, paid his taxes, didn’t believe in welfare. He was strict but giving. And it was a good thing. Claudia had become a bit wild in the orphanage. She did not like rules. But in her new home, she got good grades in school and went to church every Sunday.

Her stepfather had given up being a truck driver to become a turf farmer in Mississippi. They were poor, but so was everyone else. What is poverty, anyhow, without a TV to offer an alternative, without slick magazine ads? They had no TV. They had no running water, only an outhouse. Claudia was happy then, until she was ten years old. The land was wide open:  a farm, a creek, crops in perfect rows. She remembers them as perfect, a horizon marked with the care and dignity of alignment. Her stepfather let her ride the mule. He carried her on his shoulders.

Too young to do chores, she spent a lot of time alone, trying to stay out from under foot. She found snakes—her stepfather came with a hoe. She dug around in the dirt, gathering pill bugs and watching the miracle of their retreat into tight little bundles. 

It’s easy to idealize rural life, since few of us have lived it. Or to reject it, as we drive by shacks and rusty trailers stuck in the middle of bare fields, blank-eyed children in the yard.  In between idealizing and rejecting, I imagine, is a real life, hard and sometimes mean, but full of the ordinary wonders of crops coming up, cattle bobbing toward the barn, chickens reluctantly giving up their eggs. The meaningfulness of the ordinary.

Then when she turned ten, her stepfather decided they’d better move north so he could get a job that paid enough to let him retire someday. How to imagine, or illustrate, the radical shift in consciousness that must happen when an entirely other world, one not dreamed of, suddenly becomes the only world?  Like a move to Mars. He found the family two rooms in a boarding house in Flint, and returned to auction off the house. The whole passel arrived in Flint like the Beverly Hillbillies, in a big red truck, riding in the back on top of the mattresses.

There she’d be, walking down the sidewalk, passing a stranger.  She’d go “Haaah there!” in her caramel Mississippi voice. The stranger would keep walking. “He must be hard of hearing,” Claudia would conclude.

After high school, she went to beauty school, met a guy. All her friends were married; he asked her, so she said yes. They had two children. He started drinking. They divorced and she went home to Daddy. She always called him Daddy.  She found a job, met a fireman, and married him. He was a lot better husband. Her family loved him, the children did, she did. But it turned out he was a secret alcoholic.

Anyone by now would detect the thread of alcohol running through this story.  How much attention shall we give it? When should it become elevated to main character, when should it remain a bit player?

Meanwhile, Claudia was losing weight and felt sick all the time. Tests were run. She was in the hospital for weeks. After they found some lumps that looked suspiciously like Hodgkins disease, her husband dropped the children off at her mother’s house and took off. He said he loved her too much to watch her die. That was the end of that marriage. Claudia’s weight dropped to 77 pounds before her surgery—she isn’t quite clear what for.

This, I see, is the limbo of the poor, of those who enter the system as statistics, those who are shuffled through, those the doctor mumbles to in generalities, not at all confident that what she says will be understood or adhered to.  Those who enter hospitals and leave with no clear sense of what happened, except that they hurt, that they have this bottle of pills to take, that they’re to come back in two weeks.

No, that’s not fair.  Claudia’s no dummy.  She enrolled at a community college and was on the Dean’s list for all three years of a four-year nursing program. One day at the beginning of her final year, a plumber cut through a wire and her apartment building burned down—she lost her wedding ring, watch, uniforms, books, clothes, children’s things, everything. No insurance. After she moved into a new apartment, she got pneumonia.

She was in the internship semester of her nursing program, in labor and delivery, so intensive a work load that she decided she’d better drop out for the semester to get their lives back together. But she was never able to manage returning to school, even with loans.

But—notice how often “but” appears in this story, turning our corners abruptly for us, assuring us of some happy new development, or plunging us back into an abyss—she was young, feisty, and good-looking. She got some good jobs, ones that more than paid the rent.   She did the books for a CPA, learned to write insurance estimates. She bought a new trailer, got a new car. Her credit was good.

She’d decided she was no good at marriage and was raising her kids alone, doing all right. Then she met a man who reminded her of her stepfather, a good family man. Her children adored him and he did them. They mixed their families and planned to get married, but when it came right down to it, both of them got cold feet.  So Claudia and her children moved back to her trailer. “We’re just going too fast,” they said to each other.

Then Claudia found out she was pregnant.  She was 44, her youngest child was 19. “God had just made this monumental mistake,” she said. Here she was, unwed, pregnant, a Sunday School teacher. But as churches often do, they took her under their wing.  “Well, all right, we’re going to have this baby and love him,” she said.

Her partner had a brand new motorcycle. Coming around a curve, he lost control, crashed, and died instantly. Claudia was seven months pregnant, and since they weren’t living together at the time, she wasn’t eligible to collect his Social Security or insurance. Nothing could be done.

I try to figure how things can go from bad to worse for some people, if this litany of bad breaks, we might call them, or this string of tragedies, has any thread to follow. And, if I discovered it and could wind it back up, would I run into one small knot somewhere near its beginning that could be unknotted and relax the future’s tension?   For me or for any of us? If the teeth quit grinding, for example, would the gums be saved, and if the gums were saved, would  the teeth last, and if the teeth lasted, would the face be prettier, and if the face were prettier, would the job be saved?

When her son Derrick was 3 ½, she slipped on the ice picking up the mail. She stumbled back into the house, vomiting.  She’d fractured her skull. She was in the hospital for seven weeks and was unable to function for months after that. She lost a lot of her memory—couldn’t read, couldn’t add, couldn’t remember past two numbers. When she went to the grocery, she’d let others get ahead of her at the checkout line while she desperately tried to add up what she’d put in her cart, to make sure she had enough money.

 One day she started to write the check. “What day is this?” she asked.

“It’s the sixth,” the cashier said.

“The sixth of what?” 

The cashier told her the month.

“What year?” Claudia asked.

The cashier burst out laughing. Claudia took Derrick and left the store without her groceries.

On their walks, she and Derrick often passed a nursery school/kindergarten. Derrick would repeat, time after time, that he wanted to go to that school, and so Claudia stopped in to talk with the administrator. “Can you teach me how to read a calendar?” Derrick asked her. “I need to know that,” he said,” so I can tell my mother what day it is.”

The next month, due no doubt to the sympathetic persuasion of someone at the school, he was enrolled. He began right away learning the calendar. Claudia, meanwhile, was recovering slowly, with no physical or cognitive therapy ever suggested to her. Derrick gave her the shots she was supposed to have. She couldn’t remember anything. She’d forget and check the mail over and over. When she had her terrible headaches, she would tie a rope to Derrick’s waist, give him six feet—enough to get off the bed and put a movie in the VCR, but not enough to reach the stove or go to the front door.

I took her five years to get disability payments. She simply was not clear-headed enough to figure out how to apply for disability earlier, and she had no advocate. Welfare seemed perfectly happy to continue sending her food stamps.

She would read to Derrick as she could, little by little regaining her ability and her concentration.  Derrick got a paper route—much too young, but the supervisor saw the situation—and delivered papers within their apartment complex. With his paper route money, Derrick bought all his own supplies and occasionally took his mother out to eat.

At last Claudia was able to get a job at a downtown shelter in Flint, where people got shot and beaten up outside, and crack was everywhere. She was able to buy a car on a five year plan, the kind that if you don’t make the payments, they just take the car back right away.

These are just images, you know, to break up the print. None of these is authentic.

But she had her trailer, a place to retreat.  There was a basketball hoop in front where all the kids would congregate. But there were fistfights, and one day one teenager sprayed shot against her trailer. “That’s it,” she told Derrick. “We’re outta here.” They packed up and went to live with a niece in Gaylord, later moved to Traverse City.

She misses her grandchildren and great-grandchild in Flint, but she’s happy here, now, starting over at the homeless shelter.  I think of my own life, running parallel in time, each of us oblivious to the other, each of us entirely engaged in our own version of how to survive, our own imagining of the peace and security we call Home. I think neither of us would say, “It’s been a bad life.” I can almost feel the invisible muscles we’ve each built from the accumulation of moments when we’ve said, “Oh shit, what now,” and figured out what. There’s a kind of rush in terror, a gathering of forces. Are her terrors worse than mine? There’s no measuring stick. 

Claudia says Derrick brings his son to see her for an hour a week. She gets that hour.  But, she says, the foster parents are wonderful, all bouncy and cheerful, and the child is happy.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 282

Kelly, swimming with pigs in the Bahamas. Some floatings are more strange than others.

Ever since the day over ten years ago when I got the phone call that my biopsy was positive, I’ve carried the weight of uncertainty. No, weight’s the wrong word. It’s more like floating. The float of uncertainty. It’s always been there, of course. I don’t remember being born. I don’t know when I’ll die. In between, like all of us, I’m on a raft going somewhere, going nowhere in particular. You might say uncertainty and I have become friends. At least, we kind of understand each other.

We’ve worked together through poems and essays. We haven’t known what’s next, ever-ever. However, my attention has been well-trained through years of meditation (thank you dear Shinzen, dear Sokuzan). My brain is ready to travel in any direction. Not poised with weapon in hand, but curious.

Not a thread of preparation is involved. You know that feeling, staring into space, unable to grab hold of anything? Rebecca Solnit calls this the “spaciousness of uncertainty,” a realm of possibility. The only place possibility lives. The door is open. Actually, there’s no door.

You might say I’m afraid of the next election. Terrified, actually, as Michelle Obama said. I’m afraid of another world war. You might say I’m afraid my cancer might return. Or that Jerry might die first. Oh my, the list of fears, including my fear of not writing another worthy poem. There they are, the building blocks of fears like the teetering tower of Legos my grandson built many years ago, that reached almost to the ceiling. How amazing!

Back up. Are they all really fears? Maybe they’re simply uncertainties. One can cause the other, but not necessarily so. Truth is, I have a lot of back and leg pain, but I don’t have much in the way of fear.

It’s called Pig Beach. You can swim with the pigs. Kelly sent these. They take my mind off back pain.

The mystery of what’s wrong with my back has been solved. Next month I’m having a lamination and fusion of my lower spine. I’ve exhausted every alternative. I’ve read enough to feel relatively okay with this. There comes a time when anything is better than this pain. When I had my big cancer surgery, I think I went numb for a short while. That’s how I lived with the fear. This time—and I do equate those events, a little—I feel curious. Not afraid.

It's hard to feel afraid, taking these PILLS. These zombie-making opioids! Please excuse the floatingness of my thoughts. I am putting the top Legos on the tower, watching them waver. I am not at all myself.  

To shift metaphors, my fingers are on the keys, their home base, but my mind hasn’t come along. I have to get this written by tomorrow. I promised you I would, every two weeks. I promised myself I would.

You might figure I’d read everything I can about this surgery, since Jerry’s back is the awful wreck it is, owing to surgeries. Necessary surgeries. And you’d be right. I don’t expect my surgery to be so dire. I expect to recover. To be “myself” again.

Taking inventory.

Meanwhile, I’m borrowing a walker. That’s the only way I can get around. The moral of this ridiculously disjointed blog post is that one does what’s necessary. I’ve been doing that all my life, through a raft (another usage) of physical and emotional troubles. Tragedies, sometimes, but  they seem more like events, one after the other, to work through. My life so far has been really interesting! Painful, sad, joyful, fearful—the gamut. Hooray for the gamut! I picture myself lying in my final bed, taking inventory, if one does that. It’s been a roller coaster ride. It still is.

 

P.S. If you’d like to hear a more sane version of me, here’s a link to the Boise Radio show, hosted by Rebecca Evans, their “Writer to Writer Series.” https://soundcloud.com/radioboise/writer-to-writer-january-7-2024-fleda-brown?in=radioboise/sets/writer-to-writer&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

My Wobbly Bicycle, 281

Hydrocodone is a miracle for reducing pain.  Twenty minutes after I take a tablet, my back is much improved. However, I am reduced to some degree of zombieism. What I have lost is my ability to write a poem. Now, this is interesting, I say to myself. What particular quality of mind is necessary to lift language into the rarified sphere of poetry, if that is indeed the issue. What kind of effect does Hydrocodone have on the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobes? What does it do to my introspection?

What is a zombie like? A zombie clomps along, dragging its ragged grave clothes, unaware in a primal sense, that it’s leaving death and destruction in its wake. If I’m working on a poem, when it reaches the point of Thinking Through, the point of Making Connections, my mind goes numb. This is the pill, kicking in. Along with the numbness is a predictable easing of my back pain.

“When did the pain begin?” asks the PA. Nearest I can remember is maybe four years ago, rolling over on the dock and feeling a sharp pain in my lumbar region. Well, don’t DO that, I said to myself. Don’t roll over that way. Maybe from then, maybe later. It was never much to fuss about, nothi`ng like my endometrial cancer those years ago!

I got through last summer, blessedly numbed by injections. The next round of injections , three months later, did no good at all. As the pain increased, I tried Tramadol, which did no good, and then—for now, Hydrocodone.

The back is a marvelous invention. Pretty much.

What’s the matter? Beats me. It may be my back; it may be my hip. I’ve been waiting over two months for my appointment with the surgeon my primary doc wants me to see—Jan 8 shimmers in the foreground of my mind like the land of Oz, where the wizard will work his magic, or not.

Meanwhile, I take my pills, I write a few lines, trying to keep the motor running. I’ve given up exercise class. I can sometimes take short walks. Sometimes I borrow Jerry’s walker.

Look at me! I was walking 2-3 miles a day, plus exercise class 3 times a week, and now this!

  * 

Update: Yesterday I got a call from my physical medicine doctor. They have a cancellation! I go in and get new injections in slightly different places. She is pretty sure it’s my back, not my hip. She says when I finally get to see the back surgeon, she thinks he’ll say I’m not a candidate (thank heavens) for surgery. We’ll have to keep working with it in other ways. There is no Land of Oz.

Back to the poems I’m not writing. What’s the relationship between pain and creativity? I’m sitting here in relatively little pain (I took a pill half an hour ago), but also I’m drifting, my mind unable to focus. Interestingly, I can write this blog post. I’m talking to you, telling you about my pain, joking to make the pain seem less. I can do this, but I can’t find the kind of attention necessary to fasten my thoughts to whatever a poem requires.

What do I mean by that?  Heaven knows. Poems come from somewhere. About all I can say is in a poem, there’s a necessary shift into a different perception that, in Emily Dickinson’s words, “takes [your] breath away.” The answer to this question is not unlike the question of pain. Where, exactly, does it come from? Sometimes it’s possible to spot the exact place and “fix” it. Sometimes not so much.

I wonder—since my intention is to write this for you, to connect with you in this way—whether this is at all interesting. Have you ever asked someone how they’re getting along, after some physical difficulty, and they go off on a long description of procedures? At some point, you glaze over. So you (the one in difficulty) must turn to other ways to maintain your connection. I promise, the next blog will turn to other matters. Pain can make you narcissistic. You have to climb out of that pit.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 280

I started a meditation group last week. I don’t know how it’s going to go, since a number of people here are some degree of deaf. And since many people have no experience,  I’m doing guided meditation. They need to be able to hear me.

I’m hoping I can do some actual teaching while calling it “Relaxation.” I’ve been at this so long—35 years or so—and then I took a break—and suddenly found myself wanting to help again. When I say “help,” I mean that there comes a time, don’t you think, when our accumulated skill, learning, even wisdom, start to turn around and begin to want to be helpful in the world?  

I’ve held off this impulse for a long while, remembering the early days when my ego liked to teach, be in charge, dispense wisdom. I’ve been checking out my motives. And then, too, I’ve been checking out whether I’m needed for this. There’s already a meditation group. I’m calling this one “relaxation” as a different way into the practice. It's a sneaky way to begin what, if continued, becomes a bumpy, difficult, and life-changing work.

I realized this morning I need to emphasize the “awake” part, the staying alert while being relaxed. The tendency is to think of “relax” as something akin to sleep. But what we’re after here is relaxed-while-alert-ness. There’s a close connection to writing, here. To all forms of art. Remaining alert, seeing what’s here without closing the mind and eyes. Doing the intellectual work of choosing words, moving words around, revising, while at the same time staying relaxed enough to let the intuitive self step forth. It’s a dance.

Given that I’ve been meditating so many years, I haven’t written much about it. It’s a practice, not so much a body of knowledge.  There is learning, but most of it is body-learning. I think you have to focus on Enlightenment (whatever you take that to be) at first. You have to have a goal.  Eventually, after a long practice time, the sense of a goal begins to dissolve.

Likewise, when I started writing poems so many years ago, my goal, I guess, was to find my place among the poets and writers I admired. Now where am I? Writing to be writing, putting down words to see more clearly, to make something. Why do I want to make something? I can’t say.  I’ve gotten stupider. I’m like Forest Gump. I’m like Melville’s Pip. What comes out of my mouth, out of my mind, is 80 percent intuitive, fastened by loose threads to the ever-shifting universe.

Last night I dreamed I forgot to go to meditation. Everyone was waiting for me. Why had I forgotten? Where was I in the world? How have I landed here, at this far end of my life, writing these posts, keeping on picking out words to say how it is, how it was. I am half-crazy, half calculating. Did I “land” here? Little by little the accumulations have brought me here. I think it’s like that.

All those years of sitting on a cushion, hour after hour, day after day, have disappeared like nighttime when the sun comes up. It’s no longer of any importance how I got here, or how much time I “spent.” Nothing adds up anymore. This is what I have to report to you from where I am. If you are much younger, this will sound frightening. If you are closer to my age, you may get it. You won’t care about things adding up any more.  

Oh, sorry! I notice that there’s no thru-line in this post! Sometimes I read obituaries, I see the way the family has tried to construct a story, something about devotion to family, or to church, or being a good coach. This, apparently, has been the narrative of that person’s life. But really, there’s been no story, only a narrative put together by a relative. Instead, it’s been a gradual accumulation—this, and then this, and then this. That’s enough, I think.

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I’ve been newly appreciating the easy, the cliché, you could say: the mysteries of Jaqueline Winspear, Donna Leon, David Baldacci, episodes of Call the Midwife, the hymns of my childhood, that I hum under my breath.  I’m barely concerned with whether the stories are as complicated as life. Life has no easy threads to pull from the skein. Life has few criminals who get locked out of sight forever. Real life has  nothing to match the self-assured measures of  “I come to the garden alone/ while the dew is still on the roses,” and the rest of it, which surely you must know.

“Surely you must know” is the key. The mutuality, which there’s precious little of left in our culture. The ball of yarn turns out to have dozens of short pieces, each a different story, each originating from a different source, a different religion, different ethnic sensibility, different upbringing. If we could convert the whole world to our way of seeing, if we could “buy the whole world a Coke,” as the old commercial went, we could eliminate the angst, the dissonance.

We just finished a Kathy Bates film festival at Cordia. In “Unconditional Love,” Grace Beasley, (A.K.A. Kathy Bates) a housewife is ecstatic that she’s won a ticket to hear her favorite singer, her romantic crush. She simultaneously finds out that her husband is leaving her. She flies to England for the concert, only to discover that her beloved singer has been murdered. And that the singer was gay. She and his former partner set out to find the murderer. They do, and at the end, she’s gained enough self-confidence to collude with the singer’s lover to bury the singer, against the wishes of his family,  in his flamboyant fluffy pink outfit.

Everything’s cliché. Lonely housewife. Crush on famous person. Fandom. Gay-dom. And a murder, solved. I was doing my smirky snicker. Stupid movie. Then I got into it. Into it in a gentle, lost way. Which is what this kind of writing causes to happen.

This kind of writing is metaphor. Instead of the grit and rubble, instead of nature red in tooth and claw, this kind of writing rises into the realm—you might say this—of religious ritual, where everything stands for something else. The murderer = evil. The housewife = those trapped in a role. The famous singer = unfulfilled aspiration, romance. The gay partner = the good to be found in those people on the margins.

This is not where we live, but it is where we live. Don’t we swing between grit and fantasy, between complication and clarity? I could say the fantasy provides relief, but then what am I doing? Making pleasure useful! The passion for universal usefulness is an American flaw, one that kills pleasure. Fantasy is itself. Poems are themselves. They are not morals.

I’ve joined the Cordia Players, a readers’ theater. We just gave a reading of an old “Our Miss Brooks” episode. I had the pleasure of being the lovelorn Miss Brooks, with a 50s dress with a red flower on the neckline, red lipstick, stockings, and the dorkiest shoes I own. In the episode, as in all of them, I try to get Mr. Boyton (Jerry) to notice me. I haven’t had so much fun in forever. Plain fun. Simple fun. Fun I think I have had to spend a lifetime of angst, striving, and worry to arrive at. A freedom.

What a serious child I was! How hard I’ve worked! It’s an enlightenment to be silly. To waste my time. To throw off the yoke of responsibility, not as a rest in order to get back to work, but for the hell of it. Maybe you have to be my age to see this. 

There’s something I want to say, that I intuit, about the silly movie, the silly play. It is in the moments of un-yoking ourselves that we’re alike. The laughter, the dancing, the music that cuts through—ignores—dismisses—mocks our self-righteous striving, that lifts our heads out of the muck of necessity into the realm of infinity, where there is no life and death, no right or wrong, no this or that, only the moment of being alive.

You know all this. That is, if you grew up feeling secure enough to be silly, if you were not, like me, the first child, tasked with redeeming the lostness of your family, fixing the world, and in your spare time, weeding the family’s overrun flower beds.

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Poetry’s mysterious. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you have a theme or a throughline that you can pick up on and keep going in the direction you were headed. Most of the time you’re starting from scratch. I’ve been intensely aware of the process lately, since my mind is sitting stubbornly at the level of grocery lists. Has the poetry fairy flitted off into the mountains? Am I done? Finis? Are you sick of hearing this from me?  

When I quit whining comes the hard work. The sitting at the keyboard going on with something, anything. It’s not the words I’m struggling with. It’s my mind. If you’re a runner, a violinist, a meditator, you understand this. Discipline. Discipline is when you feel you have nothing left, nothing to give anymore, and you keep on. You don’t know why you keep on. You’re past your edge. You’re out here, wherever here is. You’ve lost all sense of purpose, of direction. It’s as if you exist in a vacuum.

Sometimes I get energy and interesting words from other people’s poetry. I jot things down. All the world is making stunning poems with those words. How does it work, this poetry thing? What made me think I could do this?

On a day that isn’t gray. Who could possibly complain?

This isn’t a poem, here; it’s a letter to you. Presumably you’re following the life of a writer, and I’m sorry to say, this is part of it. This part of it is another gray day here in Northern Michigan. We’re into that time of year. For all the glorious beauty of this region—the hundreds of lakes, the bay, the rivers—winter is gray. A lot. There used to be heaps and heaps of snow to brighten it. These days the snow comes and goes, not the bright long-lasting heaps.

What started me with this poetry thing, anyway? The poems I wrote in sixth grade, ninth grade, that were so much fun/pleasure for me, I guess. Where did they come from? I had a feel for it. I loved watching words go down on paper. I loved playing with the shapes they could make, the line breaks. I loved the the sounds. I would say the poem to myself. I would re-write it. Something about rhythm, something about making my own way, my own voice. Something made for an audience. A little dance on a little stage. Not “look at me,” but “let’s dance.” You wouldn’t know there was dancing going on at first listen, but when the lines break, when the words bend in unusual ways, when there’s an unexpected downbeat, you realize you’re in motion.  

I’ve always been a Gerard. Manley Hopkins fan. I think of his poems, for all their religious angst, as jazz. I’ve gotten more interested in jazz lately.  It’s the improvisation. Like Mozart, you don’t find the same notes played the same twice. There’s really good jazz in Traverse City.

So if I love NOT knowing what’s coming next, why am I so bent out of shape when the writing isn’t going well? What is “well”? What’s “next”? It’s never been easy and I’ve seldom been satisfied. Poetry is an out of control lurching, if you ask me. It has always been thus.

You go flying through the air, you land flat footed, you plod and then you catch the wind again. It is all you, but it’s not you at all. I dunno. It’s something else.

CODA: How the hell can I can do this work while the children are dying, buildings crashing to the ground? I wonder if suffering can be so extreme that all music would be gone from the world. I suppose, though, the keening of a mother over her dead child is a kind of music. And when there’s nothing but rubble left, someone has to do the work of bringing back whatever broken song is possible, to honor the dead and to remind us that the work of the living is to be glad to be alive. To write and to sing, to make life worthwhile.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 277

When you have nothing to say, might as well watch Ollie play with his purple worm.

Truthfully, this is one of those times when I have nothing to say. I have nothing on my mind, no “message,” no thru-line. You should go empty your dishwasher; don’t bother with this.

All I have is my commitment to write to you every two weeks. And our common humanity. I talk to each of my children once a week. Often there’s nothing going on, as we say. Just another week, no big news. But as we talk, the smaller news begins to emerge, what we think of AS we talk, not what we might have planned to say.

One could decide it’s not worth a phone call, but the value of hanging out together on the phone, not talking about anything much, may be more than the momentous calls about big events. The minute threads of conversation weave us together.

We humans want to know each other. We want to be known. Even those who hide, who keep their lives private, want to be known, I’m pretty sure. People used to write letters. The sweep of the penmanship, the curves of vowels, was its own language. Aunt Patty must be angry!  Look at the way she’s pressed down on her letters, made them so large. Twelve point type doesn’t give us that information. We’ve eliminated hands and body in the communication.

Speaking of body, I’ve transitioned from water therapy for my back to regular PT.  My trainer just sent me this morning my list of daily exercises. It’s the body core, of course. It’s the tendons and muscles which have to work harder to compensate for the collapse of age. I also got several cortisone shots in my lower back. Miracle! Suddenly there’s almost no pain. This won’t last, of course, but as the Dr. says, it gives me time to strengthen what needs strengthening.

It's too bad so many of us sit so much—for our work, to watch TV, etc., slouched on the sofa with our phones. But we do. Our backs hurt.

When I am at PT, when Kristie is showing me an exercise, when I am at the dentist having my teeth cleaned—those are oddly the times when the disparity particularly haunts me. A little tartar on my teeth! The people stumbling through the rubble of their lives have teeth that need care, too. They have aching backs, too, that must be ignored because of the bombs. I hear the cries of the children, I hear the cries of their parents. I guess it has always been thus—rich and poor, war-torn and comfortable—but it’s worse, and its visible in ways it wasn’t before. The burden of suffering is falling on all of us and will continue to do so.

I read poetry magazines and journals. The voices are there, the ones we’ve not heard before, telling the stories of their suffering. It’s hard to imagine how narrow my life was when I thought poetry was written only by people like me. Oh, I see, the thru-line of this post is about seeing everything, using the whole self, the whole community of selves.  Communication isn’t a line on a page. It is the whole thing.

At the moment, in my mind seems to be in the disappearing aquifers I just read about, the diminishing underground water. And Israel and Palestine and Hamas and Ollie diving in and out of his three grocery bags, chasing his little worm-toy. In my head is my sister and her major health problems, my son-in-law recovering from back surgery, my stepdaughter, braving on through stage four cancer, the autumn rain on the bright yellow leaves, the car tires on the wet pavement. All of it. All of it.