My Wobbly Bicycle, 153

1. Well, I just haven’t. I haven’t posted in a long while. There’s been a great deal of caretaking around here, although Jerry does everything he can. Yesterday I saw him dragging the dirty clothes basket along behind his walker, making for the laundry room.

2. Have I lost focus? Once I wrote about cancer, but that subject, thank whatever-gods-may-be, is worn out for the time being. I have thought if I use what precious writing energy I have on a post, I won’t have anything left for the poems and essays.

 Yes, but of course energy begets energy. And when has not having anything to say stopped the words? They come out ahead of consciousness, sometimes. They know what they want even when “I” don’t. Aging. Aging and the writer. That subject should keep me busy for a long while. Today the subject is caretaking. There are probably two dozen good blogs about caretaking out there. And books. You don’t need to bother with this blog. However, I hope you do. Breathes there a caretaker with soul so dead that he or she doesn’t sometimes flare with internal anger, doesn’t watch others head out on mountain biking trips and feel jealous? Who doesn’t fantasize living alone, eating toast over the sink instead of bothering to get out breakfast stuff? Who doesn’t stare long minutes out the window at the turning trees? There’s no point in trying to balance that with heart-warming tales of the blessings of sharing hard times, of having a long-time mate that you love, no matter what. The deepening of tenderness and closeness when it’s down to brass tacks. No sense balancing at all. It’s not one or the other, but both.(Above poem is my 100-year-old father's favorite. Thought you might enjoy it.) Things have turned mysterious. First there was Jerry’s hip replacement, then it failed, then it was replaced again. For a short time there was no pain. In the last couple of weeks there is a lot of pain in the area of the sacrum. He’s had steroid injections. No help from that yet. We don’t know exactly what’s pressing on what, but after two major back surgeries, plus the hip surgeries, is there any wonder something’s pressing on something that it shouldn’t be. Can this be remedied? I don’t even know what we’ll have for lunch, much less what will transpire tomorrow. Meanwhile, Jerry’s just celebrated his 78^th birthday. We’ve had to give up our Alaska cruise, which was to be our present to each other. Note to reader: buy trip insurance (we did). We drove up the peninsula to look at trees and gorgeous water, the way old people do, and stopped for lunch along the way. My sister and brother in law picked up dinner for the four of us and brought it to our place. My children and grandchildren travel all over the place. Kelly’s family was in Croatia this spring. Scott’s in Italy right now. Interestingly, I have always been pretty content with a computer, paper, pen, trees, crickets, and water to swim in. I prefer our lake but I can make do with the Y.  There are all sorts of explorations, both interior and exterior. I lean toward the interior, anyhow. The interior has its own cathedrals and canals. In less than two weeks, I’ll have arthroscopic surgery to repair a torn meniscus that has tormented me for almost six months (took a while to diagnose).  I’ll be glad to get it fixed, but there’s Jerry, unable to help while I’m hobbling or whatever I’ll be. I mention this because this is how it is when you get old—people’s ailments don’t conveniently take turns. They sometimes come on simultaneously. Meanwhile, I’ve written a couple of essays I’m happy with this year, and more poems, good and bad, than I usually admit to. I tend to pretend I’m a total wuss as a writer. It seems to be my way of clearing the decks for the next thing. AND, the book I wrote with Sydney Lea, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, has just come out in paperback from Green Writers Press in Vermont. It has a great cover and a new chapter on politics. It’s gotten great response from people who’ve gotten hold of it. I ought to have a book launch!  This needs to be another blog post—the need to publicize when you get older and basically all you want to do is write. 

My Wobbly Bicycle, 33

This month is my “baby” sister (14 years younger) Michelle’s time at the lake (she owns 1/3 of the cottage, I own 2/3). She said that since she wasn’t able to visit when I was having chemo and radiation, she wanted to give me a lake-spa weekend.  She’s new to yoga this year, passionate about it, learning moves and practicing the techniques of “healing yoga” for herself. I had a session every day on the upstairs screened-in porch, waves lapping below, incense burning, woo-woo music on Pandora, and a little sister who loves me. If anything can cure a body, that ought to. Touch makes a huge difference, I think, not just when we’re sick. A masseuse is good, but someone who loves you is even better.

AND, I finally got in the lake!  I swam my usual swim to the boathouse three cottages down and back. We’ve always claimed the waters of our lake are the North American Lourdes, so I guess I’m doubly “cured.” But I have to say, my poor muscles are weak. It was a simple swim, breast stroke, not far, but it registered all over my body. Still does.  

I put on my swim cap ordered from one of the cancer sites. It’s white and ruffled and comes down over even my ears. It’s dopy. I look like Esther Williams. Michelle said something like, “Oh for Pete’s sake, take it off.” So I did. Here’s a photo, from a safe distance, but I put the cap back on when there were boaters or neighbors. And the photo Michelle took of the two of us, up close, my head shining in the sun? I can’t quite show you that one. I’m shy, obviously, about my head.   

I know, I know, a lot of young (particularly) people parade their bald heads around, an act of defiance of the disease, a statement that they feel okay no matter what they look like. I’m okay being bald, but I don’t like to be stared at, or have eyes drop when they see my head. I’m private. I’m okay with that.

I have days when I can walk over a mile, other days, like today, when I feel that chemo-y sick feeling and every movement is an effort. There seems to be no clear cause of either. My body just oscillates between okay and not-okay.

I feel somehow deficient that I haven’t been turning out poems about the cancer.  Other people have written really good poems about it. Though I’m reminded of what I said in my essay, “Mildred,” in Sydney Lea’s and my book (Growing Old in Poetry, on Kindle  from Autumn House. Ahem. Also a short version on Brevity’s website): you have to see things slant, you have to wait until they insinuate themselves in when the eyes are turned elsewhere.  I’d tried to write a poem about my adventure with Mildred the raccoon, but it was a failure. I’ve tried to write poems “about” this cancer experience. I only like one or two of them, if that.

“Emotion recollected in tranquility,” says Wordsworth. I say, if it’s tranquil, it’s lost its punch and you might as well not write it at all. However, if you let it sit, it will attach itself to the shirttail of some new  urgency and both will be charged by it.  Why did WW say “recollected”? Anything written about is recollected. “Tranquility” because almost certainly there’s much more to the poem/essay/story than the present scene yet knows. There’s a breadth and depth to be brought to bear upon it. There’s an assimilation that, if it happens, opens the door of the experience to let in the whole of our lives.

This relates to privacy, too, I think.  If we scatter ourselves all over Facebook, if we don’t allow enough pulling-back time, if we release every experience immediately into the general churning vat of conversation, OR (Ahem again) onto our blogs, how can we absorb, assimilate, and “see” what’s there? I’m not talking about making meaning of it, which is more akin to preaching than to writing. I’m talking about seeing by staying with it, by continuing to watch what emerges instead of quickly ossifying it into language, photos, and emoticons.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 27

Another effort to find a cooperative vein yesterday. Two tries this time. Did you know that warming the arm makes the veins easier to find and penetrate? The trivia I’m learning.

This was for a transfusion of one unit of red blood cells. I got to the hospital at 10:45, as requested, but the actual transfusion didn’t begin until after 1:30! They had to send a vial of blood to be typed and cross-checked for antibodies, and apparently the lab was slow that day. It was 3:50 and I’d read half The Marriage Plot before Jerry picked me up.

I’m supposed to feel perkier by this afternoon. I’m exhausted this morning. I think yesterday made me tireder than I thought. The waiting, the searching for a good vein—and on top of it all, my dear brother-in-law was having one of the most complicated and serious surgeries there is, at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor. It’s called the Whipple procedure, and is to head off incipient (or early stage) pancreatic cancer. They removed one-third of his pancreas, part of his stomach, gall bladder, duodenum, and bile duct. He’s doing well, by the way, and the tests so far haven’t shown active malignancy. Hooray for that.  

Two things occur to me. One is how, since we don’t die young so much these days from the old diseases, we can grow old, and suddenly all around us is illness and the sorrow of illness, barely staved off by modern medicine. This is so true in my family the last few years that it feels almost traitorous to turn away into my own work. That really isn’t the issue, though. It’s how to be with illness. Based on my own, I’d say—and have said, forgive me for repeating—the best thing we can do for each other is to be emotionally present. Not leaning toward identification, which is smothering, and not leaning away, which is escaping. Just being there.

It may be possible to avoid burnout that way. Although if we care, there’s bound to be a point where we just want to get the heck out of there and live our own lives. What can we do but recognize that? We’re human.

The other thing is the writing. I’ve written a few poems that concern themselves with my sister’s surgery for a brain tumor, her stroke afterward, and the long, slow recovery which has not at all been a full recovery. There’s a necessary objectification in this that feels like betrayal. How can one dip into someone else’s deeply personal and indescribable suffering and bring it to words?

It’s not any different, is it, from writing deep into anything we don’t know? What DO we really know?  But in this case, we’re carrying our imagination down into someone else’s territory. Which as writers, we can’t help doing. HOW we do this, I’d say, is what matters. We don’t want to usurp the pain for ourselves. There’s a respect we need for this: possibly the subjunctive, possibly a third-person removal, possibly a disavowal in the work, of our ability to really know. It may require the same emotional  “not leaning” I mention above.

What would that leaning look like? Emotional identification would look like “me,” overlaying myself on “you.” My students have given me some of the most amazing “interpretations” of poems that have nothing to do with the poem. It’s all about what’s going on in their heads. Reverse that as a writer and that’s what I’m calling identification. Not seeing what’s actually there. Happens a lot in some successful writing, but maybe not in humane and accurate treatment of those we care about.

Leaning back too far, escaping, is easy to spot. You can feel the cleverness of the metaphor taking over, the way the writing is all about the writing. For whatever reason, it doesn’t want to see the pain, really. It wants to play with it.  

I’m leaving in a few minutes to record the next pieces for Interlochen Public Radio’s show, “Michigan Writers on the Air.” I’ll be talking about Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap, that won the Pulitzer this year. It’s her best book, in my opinion. Olds, who's 70, by the way, writes into the pain of divorce after 32 years of what she thought was a happy marriage. Her metaphors seem to arise naturally. There’s little self-conscious playing with her own grief, and there’s no sense of trying to escape it, either. That’s what I mean.

P.S. Sydney Lea's and my book, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, (Autumn House Press) seems to be selling well. I hope you'll get a copy if you have a Kindle or IPad. Order from Amazon, $9.99. I think you'll like this book if you're old, if you're a writer, if you're young and want to be a writer, or if you're breathing. But that's just my opinion.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 17: A Tribute . . . .

. . . . To My Beloved HusbandWell over two decades ago, I’d just left a dangerously destructive marriage. I was terrified of another relationship, but lonely as hell. There was Jerry, my colleague in the English Department for lo those many years, himself having just eased out of a sad marriage. In our advance-and-retreat pas-de-deux, he was the perfect, gracious gentleman, leaving me all the time I needed to see what I needed. My head screamed “NO!” My heart played interception. “I will never hurt you,” he said. Verily, he spake the truth.Jerry’s the one you want with you if you are really sick, and he is the one you want with you if you want to have a good time. He’s interested in most everything except science, science-fiction, pretentious literary theory, and animated feature films.  He’s been a sessions singer in Nashville, he’s dated Pat Boone’s sister, had drinks with Robert Penn Warren, watched Elvis rehearse. He’s remodeled an eighteenth-century farmhouse, coached his daughters’ softball teams, farmed his 15 acres, as well as fronted a successful rock and roll band (“Jerry and the Juveniles”) while chairing a 60-member English Department, writing and editing seven books, being general editor of the works of the eighteenth century writer Tobias Smollett.. . . well, just to give him his due, before I get to what I really want to say.Jerry is nurturing. He’ll rub my feet until his hands get numb. He’s downstairs right now doing the laundry. He washes and folds it all, every week. He washes the dishes. (I cook! I’m not useless). He likes to do these things. He’s a detail person. When I got sick, he took my car to get the snow tires on, he took it in for service, filled it up with gas. He’s run dozens and dozens of errands for me. He wants to go to every daily radiation treatment, just to be with me. But he’s not cloying. He lines up my multitudinous pills for me and reminds me, but that’s because he knows how I am. He steps back if he thinks I’ve had enough of management, or closeness.He respects me. He’s not interested in Buddhist meditation, but he’s supported my practice by cheerfully sending me off to retreats (maybe he’s glad for the break!) and has never made one disparaging or dismissive comment.He's read and helped me edit almost every word I've written.He knows how to take care of himself. He’s going semi-weekly to a caregiver’s support group. So far, he’s the only one who shows up, but he likes the woman, so they keep talking. He has his own health issues which have been a trial for him for over two years—complicated neuropathy with possible spinal involvement, plus. He doesn’t martyr himself on the altar of my cancer. He’s doing what he can for himself with hopes that we can get to Mayo and see what the heck’s going on with him as soon as I’m through with all this.When I found that I’d need to have eye surgery in the middle of cancer treatment, he was in the retinal surgeon’s office with me. We were alone, waiting for the surgeon to come in. He looked up at me. Tears started down his cheeks. “You are so strong,“ he said. “And I see you sitting there looking so small and vulnerable. It hurts me.”So basically, this is in praise of our being able to cry together, which we’ve done face-to-face with fear, when it comes up, with sadness, when it comes up, and with sheer frustration, when it comes up. This is in praise of a man who tells me every day how beautiful I am, with my silly chemo hats and abdomen full of puncture scars, who runs his hand over my barely furry scalp as if I were Cleopatra.I’ve gotten irritated with him—he’s a tortoise and I‘m a hare—I’ve gotten frustrated by his meticulous attention to lining up the details in order. But not once, in 21 years of marriage, have I regretted marrying him.  We’ve been good for each other. We still are. Thank you, Jerry, for waiting with infinite patience until the moment—over two years from our first beer together—when I finally pled, “Oh, please PLEASE marry me!”

 YEA! THE MOMENT YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR! : Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, from Autumn House Books,  is now out on Kindle, $9.99.Go to Amazon, type in the title. Get your grandkids to do it for you! You’ll find this book of essays, a back-and-forth between Sydney Lea (current poet laureate of VT) and me (former poet laureate of DE), a comforting collection of geezerly thoughts about poetry today, about what’s happened to books, to reading, to sex, to our wilderness places, and what matters to us as poets, as poet-people, and as great friends.Please, if you have a moment, write a brief review, even one line, like “Wow, I liked this a lot!”  Amazon places their books according to the number of reviews. Give us a boost at the beginning! Thanks.

My Wobbly Bicycle, 15

This week has been, well, not so easy. I had a vitrectomy (My spell-check wanted to call it a vasectomy, but no.). My eye has been a bit sore, fuzzy, and I’ll have a large gas bubble in front of my vision for the next few weeks. But it’s done! And it needed to get done now rather than later.Imagine me typing this in 18-point just so I can see it. And my face two inches from the keys.Then, radiation of my upper pelvic region, which includes my stomach, has made me nauseous and gastrically disturbed. My radiation doctor gave me Friday off because I looked so peaked, and I missed most of a long-awaited meditation retreat lying in bed instead. There was talk of lowering the area of radiation to miss my stomach, but that would be risky. But I’m happy to report that it appears we (I’m now a “we”) have come up with a cocktail of drugs that keep me feeling pretty decent.  The addition of a small amount of steroid to the mix seems to settle my stomach. I don’t question why or whether this will last; I’m just grateful. This morning, to celebrate, I came down to breakfast wearing my funny hat, made by my friend Devon.Speaking of hats, I have a bunch, plus the wig. I wear the wig out, but at home the hats are more comfortable. I think a lot these days about apparel, about hair as apparel, which it clearly is for women and also for many men. We have a way we wish the world would see us. Or, rather, the way we wish to see ourselves.I am such a poor shopper! A couple of years ago, I asked a young writer friend, Holly Wren Spalding, to shop with me. She brought a folder of magazine photos of things she said would look good on me, and she was right. She picked out what I wore to the gallery opening of Bill Allen’s and my exhibit at the Dennos Museum. I have never looked better. Well, at my age.I have an essay called "Unruffled"  about my history with clothes that just appeared in a wonderful on-line journal called Numero Cinq.This essay will appear in Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives that poet Sydney Lea, the poet laureate of Vermont, and I co-wrote. It will be out April 1 from Autumn House Books exclusively as an e-book.Here’s the editor’s lovely introduction to my essay, You can read the whole  (fairly short) piece on their site,  http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/03/11/unruffled-essay-fleda-brown/#.UT3qoHqMKas.gmail  ************* Fleda Brown herewith offers a wonderfully smart, touching essay about girlhood, clothes and, amazingly enough, poetry! How does she rope all this together? And touching? Yes! The sweet free tomboyish little girl (of a certain era), a professor’s daughter, running free the summer long half-naked and innocent, suddenly a young lady, going to school, in dresses and appliqued sweaters, proper girl’s clothes, an awkward and constricting mask that delivers her to the agony of fashion and fitting in and the awful kindness of friends who feel sorry for her. Fleda delivers the goods, the terrible moments of humiliation, guilt and misunderstanding we all go through as children, often centered around money, precious money and small dreams that go awry, often small events in retrospect yet still capable of making you wince and yet which do not defeat you — as evidence by the delightful pun in the title.This beautiful, human, raw essay is the last installment here at Numéro Cinq of a series of essays by Contributing Editor Sydney Lea and Fleda Brown, two old friends, also two poet laureates, who have been writing a book together, a call-and-response essay book as Syd likes to call it, one essay calling forth another on a similar topic. As Sydney writes, “My friend Fleda Brown, lately poet laureate of Delaware but now escaped to northern Michigan, and I are writing a book together. She writes an essay on a topic (food, sex, clothes, houses, illness, and wild animals); then I write one on the same topic. Then I write one and she follows suit. Etc. It’s fun, though I don’t know who in Hell will publish it.”In fact Autumn House Books is publishing the book next month, April, as an e-book called Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. Other essays from the book published here at NC include Fleda Brown’s “Books Made of Paper” and three essays by Sydney Lea “Pony and Graveyard: A Dream of the Flesh,” “Unskunked” and “Becoming a Poet: A Way to Know.”*************I'll give you the link when it's available. We had such a grand time writing this book. I think you'll like it.   

My Wobbly Bicycle, 5

I’m leaning my bike against a tree for now, since I won’t see the doctor until tomorrow. I’ll report next week on what we learn, how chemo will go, and so on. In the meantime—you’ll see this is relevant—I want to tell you about a book I’ve co-written with Sydney Lea, called Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives. It’ll be out from Autumn House Press in April exclusively (O brave new world!) as an e-book. I have had the BEST time writing this book over the last couple of years with my dear friend Syd.Syd and I share being poet laureate of our respective states. I’m former poet laureate of Delaware; Syd is the current poet laureate of Vermont. You should know his work, if you don’t. His eleventh poetry collection, I Was Thinking of Beauty, will be out soon from Four Way Books. The University of Michigan Press recently issued A Hundred Himalayas, a sampling from his critical work over four decades. A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife (Skyhorse Publishing), a third volume of outdoor essays, will be published in early this year.We had an idea that a book of essays from two people who’ve given their lives to poetry would be good reading. We then had the idea that if we picked topics and each headed out as we wished with that topic, we could cover a lot of territory, both artistic and memoirish.  We picked our topics as we went along: some, such as “Wild Animals” are downright silly; some are, shall I say interesting, such as “Sex, “Music,” and “Food”; some are mundane but ultimately pretty revealing, such as “Clothes,” “Sports,” and “Houses.” The last one is called “Becoming a Poet,” but really, the whole collection is about us as people-poets. Poet-people. Poetry never completely goes off-stage.Here’s the beginning of one of my essays that’s less directly concerned with writing than some of the others. How ironic it is to me, now. I wrote this no more than six months ago. Our topic was illness.  It begins this way:

I loved being sick. If my body couldn’t work up the germs, my mind could. Through grade school, all the way through high school, I was deft at turning a slightly scratchy throat into a wicked possible strep condition that would keep me home from school. To cinch the matter, I would vigorously rub the thermometer, or hold it under warm water at the bathroom sink when no one was looking, I don’t know if my mother bought any of this, or if she was just too harried and/or depressed to fight me on it. The half-year my aunt Cleone and her three wildly healthy boys lived with us in Columbia, I would be “sick” and my Aunt Cleone would position herself at my bedroom door, frowning.  “Fleda, are you really sick enough to stay home?” she’d ask. She was onto me, which almost spoiled my day, but not quite. Our house, in truth, was a house of illness. My brother was severely mentally retarded and had grand mal seizures so awful that each one would take your breath away. There was a heap of bottles, all full of potent drugs, on the kitchen counter, along with an apothecary’s mortar and pestle to grind up the ones too difficult for him to swallow. My mother had severe arthritis—no wonder. My father had only allergies, but he was able to make a great deal out of lying on his back on the bed with his head over the side, dripping Neo-Synephrine into a stuffed-up nose. Don’t get me wrong—we were also very physical. My mother loved to walk, arthritis or no. She could move really fast, her scarf tied under her chin like a Russian peasant; my father rode his bike several miles to school when almost no one did such a thing; my sister and I rode bikes, swam, played rudimentary tennis, and walked. But it appears to me now that the one way I could be assured that my parents’ attention would be directed at me was to be sick. And also, I was shy —I guess you could call it that. In any case, I found being at home, being taken care of, very comforting. My mother would have liked to be a nurse and seemed to enjoy having me home, bringing me poached egg on toast, straightening my covers, finding the paper-doll pages in McCall’s magazine for me, bringing me scissors and Scotch tape. The kid in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Land of Counterpane” was me: When I was sick and lay a-bed,I had two pillows at my head,And all my toys beside me lay,To keep me happy all the day. In fact, I remember lying there reading A Child’s Garden of Verses. They were too young for me, but I loved them anyway. School was always pressure—get the math problems right, do well on the test, and carefully manage to fit into certain groups of friends.  I think I was a bit afraid of people. Being alone felt safer, easier. . . . in the mornings when my father was at school, teaching, and my mother was putting around, taking care of Mark and washing clothes, the house was quiet, peaceful—her little radio in the kitchen tuned to the Arthur Godfrey show or whatever followed that. 

 My essay has a postscript: “If I follow the lines of this essay, would I have to say that I brought this cancer on?  Not on your life. I have a good life, and work that I’m eager to continue. I’m happy. I don’t want to stay home from school anymore.”Syd has posted his essay on “Music” on his website, http://sydneylea.blogspot.com/ . I think you’d enjoy reading it. I’ll post part of mine on music later. I must, however, get back to this illness thing. Such a nuisance.