Christmas Eve, In the Morning

It's the morning of Christmas Eve and I am worried the store will run out of the precise food items I need today. What is that? I think it has to do with these bleak grey-white skies, with this seemingly endless snowfall.

Because, yes, I got up and it was snowing again. We have been buried in ice and snow now for 2 weeks. Last weekend, it snowed Friday morning through Sunday night. Yes, I am sick of shoveling. I had the simple realization that snow simply gets in the way. In fact, inclement winter weather itself gets in the way of my life, especially as I walk everywhere. By tonight, this snow is supposed to have turned to rain. Rain! What the fuck. Honestly. I like to walk to Christmas Eve worship, and I was very much looking forward to seeing our lovely church, with candlelit luminarias lining the driveway, softly surrounded by snow. So now I am praying the rain will pass us by. Yes, praying. Dear God, may it please not rain this night so that my daughter and I may have our annual walk to and from church. How selfish is that? (Though it isn't like I am asking for a pony, or even a Porsche.) What it is is an indication of how desperately sick I am of this weather. Must be a sign of age, of wishing for the carefree ease of warm days when a person can simply run out the front door barefoot and go wherever she pleases.

Earlier I was out back re-filling the bird feeder with black oil sunflower seeds. I have been very careful and conscientious in keeping the feeder filled as best I can, because while I might be annoyed and inconvenienced by this bleak weather, the little birds, who have no warm house to go into, nor pots of tea to brew, nor soft blankets to snuggle under, nor even warm, waterproof boots, are out in it all the time. So, I filled the feeder, spilled some piles of seed on the ground for the mourning doves and other ground feeders, and moved the suet cage to a better place inside the branches of the apple tree, a place with more available perches around the suet. Then I retraced my steps in the foot deep holes that are my footprints back up the hill, and as I went, I heard a watery warble of birdsong unlike any I had ever heard before. It came from up high, perhaps from the large old tree next door. I looked, but could not see, and yet, I could certainly hear. A lovely, woodwind--flutey--call, that sounded, as best as my human language could mangle such music into verbiage, like 'Pretty bird." So I said to this bird I could not see, "How lovely! Where are you? And thank you! Pretty bird, pretty bird."

And the bird sang back, "Pretty bird."

And I called back, "Pretty bird."

And so we did this as I stood in the gently falling snow, in a hushed world of white and black and grey, until I finally came back to my senses and went into the house to dogs eagerly awaiting biscuits. They knew I would have to unlace and remove my boots first, always much too lengthy a process for their ever challenged (but mellowing with age) dog patience, and then brush off my pants, and then carry my boots into the other room to place them on newspaper to melt. They watched me with dark, reproachful eyes reflecting light shining out from somewhere to meet their dark gazes but where that light came from was something I could never quite say.

But what I was thinking of, as I sidestepped dog demands, what I was pondering was that transcendent moment with the unfamiliar bird, that strange visitor to our backyard bird buffet, and it briefly seemed to me that the birds, collectively, were thanking me for my efforts to keep them fed as best I can.

This wasn't a grand eloquent, Aren't-I-great? kind of thought, but a realization of a simple truth: that one single human person, tired and cranky by the end of the day (often tired and cranky even at the beginning of the day!)--that one single human person making the effort to consistently and simply place seed out into the snow can help nurture and nourish the collective world of birds. It has to do with helping to keep life strong. And life, like light, is a warm thing, a bright thing. And so, this faithful feeding of the birds is also a little like lighting candles in the dark, and as the candles join together in a network of light, all the world becomes just that much brighter and warmer.

It is upon as simple a belief as this that faith rests. That what we do, no matter how big, no matter how small, how visible or invisible, how private, secret, or blazing the headlines, that what we do to care for and nurture others, always matters.

Always. Matters.

"God is light and in him there is no darkness at all." 1 John 1:5

"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never put it out." John 1:5

Blessings of light in this season of apparent darkness, to you, one and all.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

Image courtesy of minnesotapublicradio.org

What I Saw in the Light of the Ice

I just survived 30 hours of no heat or electricity. That also means I cannot cook--no tea! Last night the temperatures got down around 5F. I had spent part of the evening in a dim room lit by an array of scented candles--not any of them the same scent, quite the potpourri and not always a harmony of scents. I sat near the window and watched cars go by, the white of their headlights illuminating the ice as if from within. I talked on the phone to my mother. Around 6:30, I took the dogs and myself to bed. The dogs had been wild all night, not understanding a thing. Cold! No lights! Why? Little Bear and Bumby roughhoused and made puppy noises on the floor behind me, despite their elderly years. Bumby chewed my mitten like a puppy as I talked on the phone. Yes, I wore mittens. Heavy sheepskin mittens. I also wore a hat, two pairs of soft, warm pants, a sports bra, an undershirt, a turtleneck, a flannel shirt, a cotton sweater, a thermal shirt, a sweatshirt, a heavy wool sweater, and my bathrobe. Heavy sheepskin slipper boots. I had covered the fish tanks in blankets, 3 blankets each. I put towels over the African violets and the Rex begonia. I set the kitchen faucet to dripping so that the pipes would not freeze. I brought 2 candles into my room to read by. I wore my hat and mittens to bed. But just before that, I got a phone call from the power company. An automated message told me the outage was quite severe and I should call my local authorities so as to be able to locate a shelter. Somehow that message did nothing to reassure me that the power might be back on soon.

It was warmer in my small room this morning than in the rest of the house. One human, 2 dogs, and a cat shut in together generate a fair amount of heat in an enclosed room, especially with blankets hung over the windows. When I came out into the hall, the cold felt like a slight slap. My breath steamed out ahead of me. I persevered. The back door knob was frozen shut and I could not open the back door to let out the dogs. I exhaled on the doorknob until my warm breath finally thawed it enough to open it, but it was still stiff and persnickety, so I turned it to the open position and left it like that, using only the dead bolt lock to secure the door shut.

For my morning prayers and devotions these past 2 powerless mornings, I have drank a cup of water when I would usually drink tea as I prayed prayers of gratitude, and have my own small version of Communion--the time when I remember God loves me and feeds me and always takes care of me. This morning's devotion began with a reading of Psalm 23. How apt. You are there, God! You pop up in unexpected places just when I am about to fall into the blandest pit of despair. And the reading was about exactly that--falling into a pit, or, in this case, a well. An African writer told a tale of a donkey falling into an abandoned well, and instead of being rescued, the people decide to fill the well in, with the donkey trapped inside! The donkey brays and shakes off the successive shovels full of sand that land on her back. As she shakes off the sand, the well gradually fills up beneath her, and finally she is able to step out to safety. The writer writes, " When trials befall us, God listens when we cry out and helps us to persevere."

I clung to that thought, 'God helps us to persevere', for the rest of the morning. My spirits were descending with the cold. I hadn't had much to eat. Mostly I huddled under blankets with a book and dozed. It takes a lot of energy to keep warm, and the dogs still expected at least one of their daily walks. They were wild children last night not only because of the cold and the dark, but also because I had not taken them outside for our evening walk. It was cold outside, and cold inside! Why would I want to step out into the cold and dark when my house holds the same, if only to a lesser degree? Part of being able to venture forth out into the coldest dark night is the knowledge a brightly lit warm house awaits you on your return! Without that, why bother stepping out at all?

But this morning we walked. The world was a'gleam and a'glimmer with new day sun shining heavenly golden blue, and iced trees shimmered like a crystal forest from a magical world. I had never seen such light. Despite the intense cold, I stopped and took in this scene of wonder and beauty with my eyes, my heart, my mind, my soul. This kind of beauty is a rare thing, a gift only an iced over frozen world can bestow. It heartened me in a way the cold of my house did not. I began to remember all that I could be grateful for despite this time of solitary deprivation : I had enough food to feed the animals, including the birds outside. I had enough blankets to secure the fish tanks and myself, and hand towels to cover the tender plants. I had some hot water in the tank. I had crackers to eat along with cheese or peanut butter or sardines. My phone worked. The water worked. I had several good books from the library to read. I had plenty of candles, seconds brought home from work. I had my dogs and cats to cheer me and to warm me. (I also discovered an interesting thing: cats growling at one another sound like the furnace turning on.)

When I came back inside, I decided to use that precious hot water to take a bath, to immerse my stiffened and chilled body into hot water and stay there as it gradually cooled. Filling the tub used it all up. And when I came out, warm, but feeling the full weight of my exhaustion and ready to simply go back to bed to wait this time of trial out, the power came back on. Yes! I yelled for joy! I yelled, Thanks! I did a little happy dance. And then I made myself the first of several pots of tea.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

Image: "Ice Storm '98 Vermont" by Gary Stanley

Don't You Get Cat Hair On My Casket!

Dotty is short, and very round. She wheezes. She walks with a cane. She is overweight, she has 'sugar', as some of the folks around here call diabetes, and she has very little confidence. She was raised by a woman who belittled her at every turn and razed any fledgling Dotty-confidence right to the ground and then stomped and salted that earth for good measure. Dotty will never think highly of herself, and she will rarely think well of herself. Her mother did a good job making sure of that.

Dotty worries. Dotty procrastinates as a way to deal with her worry. Dotty has a ready smile and a good heart. She sings in the choir. She can sign either alto or soprano as needed. After years of sitting in the alto section with us, she switched over to the soprano side when 2 people had dropped out. She used to perform in community theater musicals, but the most recent contribution she made to local theatrics was to work backstage. She has pretty much given all of that, and a lot else, up.

She got a cat several years ago, and even though she lived in her own apartment, she was terrified to tell her mother or her son she had a cat. She was in her 50's then. She is in her early 60's now and seems like a woman 15 years older.

From about the age of 10 onwards, Dotty's son was raised by her mother. Dotty's husband had left her when her son was quite young, a toddler. He had had to have surgery for a hare lip, and remained a very shy child, especially once he got into school and was teased for his scar. Since Dotty had to work full-time to support them, he went to his grandparent's house after school. Eventually Dotty's mother strong armed Dotty into believing she couldn't really do a good job raising him, having to work and all, and that the boy should just live with her. Dotty, having no confidence, acquiesced, of course.

Her son was idolized by his grandmother, and she gave all the nurturing love and attention she denied her daughter to her daughter's son. She was so good to him. He grew up into a gentle, sweet, funny man. He teaches music at the elementary school. He directs our choir. He has a warm baritone voice and a sly and wily sense of humor. He was very fortunate to get a teaching job in his home town and lives in his grandmother's house yet.

Two years ago, his grandmother had to be hospitalized after a small stroke. Alzheimer's Disease set in quickly and she never returned to their little house, staying in the hospital until a nursing home bed opened up. About a year ago, Dotty moved in with her son. He takes just as good care of her as he did his Grandma. He was raised right, trained for the role, in fact. He has a good and gentle heart.

Sometimes, Dotty is frankly a mess. She will come to church wearing a stretchy black cardigan, with silvery bright rhinestone buttons, that is also covered in cat hair. She likes the colors green and orange. She often dresses in shirts of horizontal stripes wrapping around her pudgy body. Her hair is cut short like a man's. It isn't flattering. But, her hair is also very thick and very straight, a gingery color, with hardly any grey. It sits like a thick cap above her chubby, round face. She will complain that her sugar is high as she eats her third doughnut. She doesn't take good care of herself, and why should she? She has known for years that she doesn't matter.

Grandma died this week. It was also Dotty's birthday this week. And guess what? They held the funeral on Dotty's birthday. (I wish I was making this up.) I had a small hissy fit with our pastor over it, but no one besides me seemed to think it was a bad thing to have Dotty's mother's funeral on Dotty's birthday. In fact, I was told, Dotty said it was okay. Of course Dotty would say that, I almost yelled. Why does no one but me see the tragedy in this? Why does no one but me understand that from now on, on every single birthday she has left, Dotty will remember it as the day of her mother's funeral?

The sanctuary of our church is upstairs. When you enter the foyer, stair cases wind up to the left and the right. Just ahead is a glass case full of historic items related to the church. It is a venerable old church, the first in the village, founded by the wealthy Dutchman who set up a plantation settlement in this one time wilderness, a settlement raided, razed and burned twice during the conflicts with the French in Quebec, what history books call 'The French-Indian War'. The existent church records date from after the Revolutionary War, because earlier records were destroyed in the fires of the raids. It is the church that, at one time, the first families of this village were proud to join. It was the 'status' church. Now it is probably the church with the smallest amount of members, a church that always hovers on the rim of financial ruin. It has beautiful stained glass windows though, and a sanctuary that holds love like light in its acoustically perfect space.

On either side of the glass case are 2 doors leading into our fellowship hall. On the morning of Dotty's birthday, it was in that very space that the funeral director had parked her mother's powder blue casket, on the far right hand side, for the calling hours. Dotty was the first one at the left side door, to meet and greet, and also the furthest away from her mother in her blue box. Dotty wore that same stretchy black cardigan with the rhinestone buttons over a black top and black pants. She had her pink cane held firmly in her left hand. She seemed to have gotten most of the cat hairs off of her sweater. I took her in my arms--she is barely 5 feet tall--and held her in a warm hug. I kissed her fat cheek and I told her that I loved her. (I do! Whenever I see Dotty, I see a little girl with a hopeful light in her eyes, and I want to put strong, protective arms around her.) She said, "I know, I know you do." She seemed unable to accept this direct gift of affection. It lay like a hot potato in her hand. What should she do with this? Finally she sighed and said, "We love you too."

I asked her how she was doing, and she said she was fine for the moment, but wasn't sure how she would be later, during the service. She thought she might fall apart. I told her not to worry, that she was surrounded by people who would gladly hold her up. She gave me that quizzical look again, and then I moved on to greet her son. I told him what I had told his mom, that I love them both, and his eyes overflowed with tears and he said they loved me too.

I did not go over to the powder blue box to look on the deceased.

During the memorial service, Dotty's son spoke clearly, eloquently and emotionally about his grandmother and all she had given him and taught him about life. He cried a lot as he spoke about this woman he loved and admired so much, and I could not help but look at the back of Dotty, her schlumpy rounded shoulders up there ahead of me, as she listened to her son praise his grandmother with the same words someone might use to describe their mother.

But Dotty is used to that. She knows she's nobody. And her family, and our church, reinforced that by allowing Dotty's mother's funeral to be held on Dotty's birthday.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

Our First Night Back

The children's home sits atop a hill, much like a castle might sit, commanding a hillside, with clear views to the 4 directions. The drive up there winds around that hill. It is an unpaved path of creamy, slightly rusty, slightly yellow limestone, crushed and pressed by countless tires, a strip of green growing up between. And so, when our bus arrives, it is dark, it is night, it is nearly 10 o'clock. We have arrived later than usual, but the kids are all about, running out, walking out, to meet us, to greet us. Arnella approaches me steadily, her eyes on my face, her arms outstretched. She loves it that I remember her name, always, every year I remember her name. And there are new faces too, children we have not yet met, smiling, greeting, calling out, laughing, reaching out to us. The kids are eager to grab our bags, to help us carry them in. They are clambering all over the bus, all over us. Several of us have returned to the home for consecutive years, and others of us are new, and still others have come but many years before. None of that matters to the kids. They are simply overjoyed with welcoming us. As are we in greeting them. It is a crazy time when we first arrive, and I love it.

I don't see all my friends yet. Not all come out in the first rush of greeting. Some of the kids are slow to open their hearts again, and that is understandable. I always think about that -- what is it like to open in love and then to be left again when our week is over? How is it for the kids and the staff after we leave? Are the kids harder to deal with? Does it make more work for the staff? Does our leaving re-open old wounds of abandonment in the kids? These are questions I may never know the answer to, and they are not thoughts I have on arrival. I am not thinking, I am alight with joy and my eyes are seeking familiar faces.

So, we have carried boxes of water in and out, deposited our bags. It isn't quite time to eat yet and I feel like I am still going in and out, back and forth, seeing what is here and what is there, and who is here and who is there. On one of my trips back inside, I feel a tentative touch on my arm, from behind. I turn to look and it is Morris, dear Morris, whom I love. I do. I love that boy. He is simple and quiet and sweet and well accustomed to being overlooked and mistreated. He is quiet and shy again now, his eyes alight with tears. We greet each other softly--he is not a boy to reach out and grab up in a hug, he is all bones and angled arms and he is not comfortable in an embrace. Our smiles are huge, though, and our eyes are speaking what our shy words do not. One of the first things he asks me is when I am leaving. When am I leaving!? I just got here! But it is because he has something to tell me, he has to tell me he is playing drums in church on Sunday (today is Tuesday) and he wants to make sure I will still be there to see him play. Of course I will be there, I assure him, and then I tell him how happy I am he has been practicing the drums in the year's time since I saw him last, when I asked Kevin, a young man who also grew up in the children's home and who lives nearby yet, to teach Morris the drums, to promise me he would, and he did.

This is so important a thing, he has to tell me that first. He too has remembered all that he and I shared the year before -- when this shy boy opened up and revealed a talent for music and for art, a crazy sense of humor and love of singing, this boy who had been so quiet all the years before, and even now, if you did not know him, in his tentative shyness and stammered attempts to communicate with me, you would think him unable to say more than 5 words. But he has a vastness inside him that is kept mainly out of reach, hidden, safe, and yes, overlooked. He is accustomed to being overlooked, and probably he prefers it that way, as he is easy prey for the mean and the vicious, because he is so gentle, so simple, so quiet. He shows his agitation and nervousness when he is attacked by other kids only by twitching and itching. He never fights back, never raises his voice. He skitters away and keeps to the edges, and oh how I recognize all these traits in him, how familiar they are to me, though he and I are not the same, we share much in our approaches to life and to survival.

I do know what a fragile walk I must walk with him, balancing how to love and attend to him with a caution that comes from knowing I must leave again, knowing that I cannot make it all right for him. I can shed some light along his way. I am happy when others of our group reach out to him, but I also know he relates to me as he would a mother or a teacher, always seeking me out and asking me to watch, "Watch, Miss" as he draws or coasts downhill on a bike. So this small meeting of ours, our quietly ecstatic reunion, would look like nothing much to an outside observer -- it is but a brief touch, a small conversation, four eyes bright with tears shining in the night, and yet to us it is huge, it is so much. And I have had to trust, in faith, that God holds Morris in his hands as one of his own beloved children, an orphan at the mercy of a world that often offers little mercy at all. I have to trust that God is using me, my hands, my heart, my mind, to share his love with this gangly boy, and that when I fly away home again at the end of the week, God will continue to fill in the spaces of Morris' life, that other kind people will reach out for and care for and shelter him. I have to trust, in faith. I have to. God uses us in ways we might never imagine, until we offer ourselves up to be used by him. And it isn't all hearts and flowers and joyous love, it is also heartbreak and tears and fearful attempts at trusting, the agony of vulnerability. The naked edge of opening our hearts even though we know what heartbreak feels like and we don't like it, but we do it anyway because that is life. Life lived passionately. Passion as in suffering too--Christ's passion, intense emotion, the heart exposed in love. It is all that.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

A Few Facts, Random, Yet True

I found a huge, large, really big earthworm in my bathroom the other evening. Where did that come from? P the cat was sitting in front of it, idly tapping at it. It writhed. I picked it up with my back scratcher; I carried it outside. Slightly unsettling event.

I finally fixed my front porch light. The bulb had blown and the rust on the screws holding it all together was remarkably strong. Amazing what a bit of WD-40 and some borrowed pliers can do. Slightly empowering event.

These people running for President and all their talking heads scare the crap out of me. Some of them more than others--like, the old man former POW and his babe. And, I don't understand the economy. No, really. None of this is pretty. I actually wasn't even going to vote this year, as I feel there are nefarious behind the scenes manipulations of the democratic process going on and that our votes are but a puppet show, shadow play, a diversion while the truly evil ones, obsessed with holding power, force outcomes on us. Just like the terrorists manage to attack us in ways we might never expect, we decent people, because they are so unimaginably awful, these behind the scenes manipulators make things happen the way they want it to happen and cover their tracks very well. They are very good at throwing shit. And, you know what? I don't care if you think I am unreasonably paranoid, or if you think I sound crazy. Anyway, I do plan to vote this year, and what changed my mind about that was the old man former POW's babe. She scares the beejeezus out of me. I will vote even if it is like throwing pebbles at tanks. I have to do something. I got the mysterious earthworm out of my bathroom. I fixed my light, and changed a 20 year old bulb previously imprisoned by strong old rust. I don't believe God involves himself in our political process, but I do believe good people have to keep trying even when it seems futile.

Getting Back to Jamaica

This past July, I made my 4th trip to Jamaica, to stay and work for a week at a home for children up in the mountains -- approximately 2 hours northwest of Kingston. Overall this year, we had a very good week there. Our difficulties came primarily during our travels. N, a 16 year old from our church making her first visit, was traveling with only a green card for ID. She had no passport. Her parents insisted it would be fine. Sometimes it was, and sometimes it wasn't.

We had little trouble leaving from the airport closest to home, since N's step-mom convinced the bag check in people it was okay for her to travel with just the green card. It did take her 20 minutes to do that, however (and what she knew then, and never told us at the time, was that once when she traveled back from the Caribbean with N, they were detained overnight in Puerto Rico because of N's scanty documentation). Once we got to North Carolina it was a different matter. The descent into Charlotte was long and bumpy and made me quite nauseous. I spent most of that time breathing deeply and slowly and holding on to the seat in front of me, hoping not to vomit. I was regretting that can of spicy tomato juice I drank earlier -- it had seemed like such a good idea at the time! Once we landed, we had to scurry fast to our next gate, where our plane was already boarding. What I needed most was clean, cool, fresh air, but that was not possible in the airport. What I smelled was stale recycled inside air and diesel fumes. I kept walking, and tried not to think about it.

We got to our gate and lined up to board. I was almost to the door of the plane when another of our travelers called to me, telling me N, our 16 year old, was being refused boarding. So, several of us tromped back to help out with the situation.

N is native to the Caribbean nation of St. Lucia. She came to the States 6 years ago to join her dad, step-mom, and half sisters. She was already talking to him on D's cell phone, and I could hear his deep, emotional voice from where I stood talking to the woman behind the counter. I told her N was cleared at the first airport. She told me the first airport dropped the ball and they were sending her back. Five of us from our group stood there looking at the woman, and she refused to look back at any of us. She did consent to call a supervisor, as we were not going away, a large group of us, holding up the plane. N asked me to talk to her dad. He was irate, but in a nice way, insisting she could travel just on her green card. I replied in frustrated yet consoling tones. What could I do? I wished I could hand the phone to the airline employee and let him harangue her. But, she was busy talking to her supervisor. Who said that Yes, N could fly on her green card. Yay!!! So off we went.

Everything went smoothly for N after that. She passed through customs in Jamaica with no problem, though others of our group weren't so lucky, and we had to wait for them while they answered innumerable questions about our plans and destination. We spent the time admiring the changes to Sangster International Airport, most of them begun when the Cricket World Cup was played in various Caribbean nations 2 years ago.

Finally we were all together again, all 9 of us, and we got our bags, and then had only the last hurdle to clear, getting those big bags full of donations and supplies inspected and approved. Some of us got through easily, some of us not. I did not. The woman who inspected the big bag I carried full of donated clothing, balls, crayons, pens and candies insisted I unpack everything. This was a very large green canvas duffel. She had me unwrap every bag, open up the boxes of crayons, and explain to her what we planned to do with these items. Were we selling them? What was their value? And I sweetly, albeit obsequiously-- in the hopes that'd gain me a measure of mercy (it didn't) -- explained the items were donated, for the ORPHANS, as gifts to them.

Finally we came to a box of ballpoint pens. What are these, she wanted to know. Pens, I told her, purple ball point pens. Purple!? she exclaimed, I need blue. (I had already seen her take away some toys from the suitcase of the Jamaican family who had preceded me in the line -- for her grandkids?)

And so it went, until finally she signed the paper and let me through, leaving me with lots of clothing, balls, and crayons all disassembled and falling all over and needing to be somehow put back into the duffel.

My predicament was proving to be somewhat of a spectator sport for the younger members of our group, who watched me struggle but did not lend a hand. Finally, B, the group leader, came over and helped me. She had had her own problems in her own line because W, the man traveling with us, had gotten angry and nasty with the custom's people. But finally! Off we went, outside into the heat and air that smelled like burning plastic, hazy smoke hanging low over the hills rising up from the coast at Montego Bay. The area outside the airport doors is always crowded with people. I love it. I love Jamaica. I love how there are always people everywhere, hanging out, talking on cell phones, eating, being.

We found Peat, our bus driver, loaded up, and off we went. Our trip went smoothly on the newly resurfaced and paved Queen's Highway that traverses the northern shore of the island (another legacy of the World Cup). B wanted to stop at the food market in Ocho Rios (Ochi), and so after several hour's drive time, we pulled into the familiar parking lot beside the Straw Market and went over to General Foods. B wanted to get popcorn and oil and a few other food items. I followed along, always happy to check out the stuff in the store. B was already in that place of losing her mind and I already had no patience for it, despite my best intentions to be a support to her. Every suggestion made to her to help her resolve perceived difficulties was met with 5 or 6 reasons why that would't work either. She is always that way. I knew it but already couldn't deal with it, and yet, thankfully, M, 21 and full of youthful vigor, was up to the challenge. She replied to B's whining with the same answers I had already given B and B had already shot down, and I snickered to myself while also admiring M's efforts. Finally B decided that she had to have a certain size bag of popcorn and that market simply did not have it. Maybe Seow's across the street would have that certain size bag.

So. N and M and B and I all tromped across the busy street to Seow's. I really didn't want to go in and decided to wait out front with the bags of oil B had bought at General Foods. N decided to stay with me and M accompanied B. As N and I stood there, watching the busy life of Ochi going by, a young beggar woman, dressed like a boy, smelling of pee, and seeming fairly mentally ill to my eye, insisted we give her money. Just give her some money so she can get a patty. I kept apologizing and saying no, I had no money (white! American! of course you have money! who are you trying to fool! was what was in her eyes). This went round and round until another woman came over and told the young begging woman to leave us alone. To go away and leave us alone. She went away down the street a bit.

I decided to cross the street and stand someplace else to wait for B and M. The woman who helped us had also crossed over and I thanked her. She told me that the young beggar woman would have finally begun taking off all her clothes to get us to give her money. And she was still there, across the street, watching us, and following us. With the clear instinct of the crazy, she knew she had unnerved me. I decided to go stand by the bus. B and M would find us there, and B would simply have to understand why we walked away from Seow's.

I felt a little guilty about not giving the woman any money. And this guilt tagged along with me as I walked back to the bus and was met by a drunken, angry vendor from the Straw Market. He insisted I come in and look at his wares. I said No (again!) and he harangued and harassed for for a little bit. I looked him in the eye and answered him very directly and he got angrier and I got scared but I wasn't backing down. Finally he abruptly shifted his focus away from me to D, a woman in her early 40s from the other church, and he was nice to her! Why wasn't he nice to me? I had had it. All tangled up in crazy emotions, tired from being up since 3am and traveling all day into now the early evening, being sick and all the rest of it, I got into the bus to hide.

B never found the 'right' sized bag of popcorn she wanted, but M convinced her to buy what was there. They returned and gave me a funny look for going away. When I explained why, I felt like they didn't believe me. But my emotions were all messed up by then, and probably my judgment was a bit skewed too. We sat awhile longer there in Ochi, way longer than we had planned to, while B and some others tried to get the cell phone to work. It never did work, not in the way she wanted it to. We couldn't call anyone in Jamaica, only back home in the States. Not that she ever let us use it!

But sitting there for what felt like forever made us late for getting to the children's home. Much of the drive was in the darkness, and once we turned up into the mountains at Port Maria, the road became very, very windy and bumpy. As usual. Usually it doesn't bother me. M has the problem with motion sickness, but she was well dosed on Dramamine. As the journey in the darkness progressed, I started feeling sick again, sick like I had felt on the plane. That really was a wonder to me, because it had never happened before. I couldn't figure out why it suddenly bothered me so much, but I felt progressively sicker and sicker, despite my attempts at deep, slow breathing and staying very still. I finally got to a point where I was deciding where I would vomit: in my denim shirt? In my carry on? Wasn't there a puke bucket under a seat somewhere?

And then good sense somehow prevailed and I simply asked Peat to stop the bus because I felt sick. So he did. And I got out and sat on these concrete steps that smelled of dog pee and bus exhaust and thought, This isn't much better, is it?

But at least I wasn't moving anymore. I gathered myself as best I could, and then got back on the bus. There was a small building just up ahead where Peat said he could get me some over-proof rum if I wanted, and I could rub it on my head, it would make me feel better. Mostly the suggestion made me laugh. I told him if he got me rum I certainly would not rub it on my head. He continued to speak consolingly and calmly to me in his beautiful smooth voice, in his good natured way. We were actually only about 10 minutes away from the children's home and seeing the familiar lights and pale colored limestone gravel driveway distracted my mind away from my nausea and lifted my heart up high. We were there! I felt happy; I felt excited, eager to see cherished friends, and to make new ones.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

fits

a white bear sits
on the green side of the hill
holding a red
red
rose. 'my heart,'

cries the crow
as she leaps into a sky
torn open by flame. the bear
glances aside
and feels her shadow fall
onto the silence of grass
stretching upward. 'where

does my life
fit into all this, where
does my life fit?'

who asks this? not crow,
nor bear,
nor rose,
nor sky,
and grass sings only
what the earth
might wish
to speak,
(just as a dog
might laugh as he trots aside
to shit on a well tended
lawn) and yet,
who might be so uncertain
as to where her life

might fit into all this?
who?
for even if white bears
might sometimes wish
the red roses
they hold were instead
rainbow dappled ice,
they sit tight anyway and

the crows yelling
while leaping
into skies aflame with yet
another day
bound to become falling ash
never question whether it
(the leaping, the yelling)
is worth it --
they know where they are -- they know
how they fit --

encompassed inside them
is this knowing. it rides
their blood tides, it shines
from their eyes, it tints
feather, fur, leaf edge and cloud
tendril. there is simply
no room
for questions as vain
and silly
as this.
so,
who asks?

foolish human, naked
wanderer, lost
and yet found, blind but
not deaf, willing and yet
unable
to get it, to get this, what all
the rest of it knows without thinking,
without pausing to ask.
for in the pause
is the losing, in the asking
is the losing, in the thinking
is the ridiculous loss
of what every living being
is born with, given by earth, by breath, by sun shade and
star fall.
moon hovers and shelters every last single one of us, and so
to ask, 'where do i fit'
is to refuse the banquet spread before you,
to scorn the feast, to be boor,
fool.

crow is no fool. crow,
bear, even dog knows
the world
is one big sandwich. they do not question.
they eat.
grass eats earth
and sky breathes plant and
sun feeds moon
while quenching itself.

we
are it
and it
all fits.

A Bit of Weirdness

I stepped into a time machine today. Inadvertently. Maybe it would be more precise to say a trap door opened beneath my feet and I fell into the past.

It happened like this.

I was at work. The phone rang. I answered it as I always do, "Good Afternoon, blahblah blah blah...." and the voice on the other end, a man, knew it was me but I did not know who he was. After a bit of confused and unbalanced verbal back and forth, I realized it was an old friend of my parents'. He and his wife are visiting my mother for the weekend. It was hardly 2pm, but my mother and his wife had been drinking. I knew that. I simply knew that. And as I heard them in the background while the man gently harassed (gently, and yet, with a trace of menace) me for not knowing who he was, I suddenly was the 8 year old kid with the crazy drunk parents up to who knows what chaos creating madness. Them over there, sitting and drinking and verbally harassing us kids. I always knew, and know, those people could explode at any time.

Those friends have 3 kids. We'd spend weekends together, us kids being kids while the adults sat around and drank and drank, marathon drinking sessions lasting from early afternoon until well after midnight. My mother can do that, sit and drink and talk for hours, hours, hours, and then go to bed at 2 am and get up in the morning and function, and even do it all over again. Back in the day they'd be smoking cigarettes too, and maybe playing cards. And, they probably wouldn't explode on us all gathered together for a friendly weekend like that, but afterwards, after we left, on the trip home.....

As a child, I was well acquainted with catching hell in the car. I was well acquainted with the terror that lives in private family spaces.

This might sound like a simple thing. But I was catapulted back into a bad old past, a place of being bullied and harassed and prodded by guilt. Of adults who acted badly towards children, then blamed the children for their bad behavior, and laid guilt like a blanket soaked in gasoline over us if we dared speak up for ourselves, dared call the bad behavior by its true name. I heard all that in the man's voice today. I heard the uncomfortable heat of that in the laughing banter behind him, of my mother and her friend, already tipsy by 2pm and still hours of drinking yet before them. I didn't try to feel like an 8 year old again, I simply did, despite the fact I am 50 and I talked to him in the smoothed polished voice of a woman skilled in handling crazy people, the very polite, measured cadences that keep the volatile calm. Saying, "I really need to get back to work now, but it is so great to hear from you. Thank you for calling." Smooth as satin kid gloves, smooth as pearls. I have left that world behind and I will do anything I can to keep it far away, over there.

The thing is, I have had 2 good talks with my mother lately. She wasn't drinking and our emotions never ran the conversation. We said things that needed to be said, and a bridge of toothpick sized trust was built between us. Something after nothing for so many years. But after that call today, to me at work, of all places--part of my mind kept insisting, "This simply isn't appropriate'--I remembered, she still is crazy, and I still need to keep her far away, over there.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

MotherGuilt

So, everyone says, How was your trip to Boston? They ask me that with an excited gleam in their eye, as if I had fun, or should have....

...because that was the trip to bring my daughter to college. And here is my truthful answer: it was emotional, it was exhausting, I wanted to go home. The trip was expensive, and I had left the dogs home unattended. Overnight. Bad mother. Bad dog mother.

And I felt so guilty. I felt guilty because we aren't wealthy. I couldn't really afford the trip out there, couldn't afford meals out, couldn't afford to buy her little tables and shelving units for her room. Couldn't afford to stay out there 2 or 3 nights like the other parents, in the fancy hotel right near the college. Couldn't afford to spend the afternoon after she was all moved in out wandering the city shopping, buying lunch and then dinner out. Couldn't afford to then stay the entire next day after to attend day long parental orientation events. (Parent orientation? I kept thinking, Why? I am not going to college. But there we were, surrounded by the newest sociological phenomenon, 'helicopter parents', hovering over their kids' lives like the TV news team, noting, recording, commenting, and shepherding.)

And yet, what did I do every time I felt guilty? I gave her cash, the cash I had brought with me to buy us meals and whatnot. Just handed it over. Here take this, and I pray you will be okay. I pray you won't be homesick and you won't be mad at me and you will find friends immediately and will fit in and everything will work out gloriously well for you. As for me, this city is making me crazy and tired and all these emotions rushing around inside me like a crazed herd of unmilked Holsteins are leaving me exhausted and wishing I was in my little house drinking tea with soymilk and yelling at the cats to leave me alone.

So, there's the truthful answer to the question, How was your trip to Boston?

I hope you all still like me.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

Where Have I Been?

Let's just say the computer company that is named after a fruit (and in my case that fruit should be re-named Lemon) will not be asking to me do a commercial for them very soon. If ever. Their competition might, however, should they ever learn of the twists and tangles of tech support and the repair processs I have been traversing. I was ready to go over to their side, by last Saturday, as I was on the phone yet again with tech support.

I told the person there, "I am going to put this thing in its box and drop it in the river. And then I am heading to Best Buy to get an eMachine."

And he replied, with a faint note of horror, "Oh, no. Don't do that."

And I thought, what is this -- a computer company, or a cult?

And now, after replacing nearly all the parts, and even failing to put some of them back in--yes! the repair service center, their very own, failed to replace my RAM! (honestly, I am not imaginatively gifted enough to be making this shit up), the machine seems to be fixed, seems to be working better than it ever has in the 2 years I have owned it. But I am still not ready to say, Yes, it's fixed. Time will tell.....

So, soon I will return to the mindset of this blog. I can only say for certain that the mornings are cool and foggy, with the sun golden, set high like a brilliant softly rounded topaz gem amidst a bright blue clarity of sky, all of it floating above the tangles of soft grey mist. I hear Canada geese up there, wending their way back south, but taking their time about it as they always do. The leaves on the trees are all still green.

Here on earth, I see a mother deer and her twin older babies out amongst the meadow grass at the tree's edge, the youngsters foolish and curious and unaware of the potential threat of human and dog. They are that intense orange color of summer's end. Their large ears flip and flap as they stare at us with big, dark eyes, so beautiful, so beautiful.

As I turn up the hill again, back into the mist sprawling beneath the old trees, I see a large crow, inky black, perched atop a large grey gravestone. The crow is babbling and chortling to itself as it preens its shining feathers dappled by beads of early day fog. The sunlight pierces that fog in pale golden shafts at random angles and in crazed patterns of new day light.

I emerge from the trees and stop and stand and look out and up at the very top branches of a venerable old tree, its leaves vividly green and tipped by amber gold. The sky is that devastatingly bright September blue, a northern shade, truly.

All this tells me, softly, fiercely, how deeply I am blessed.

May you know that too, today and any day, in whatever way the message comes through to you.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

Off to the East

My daughter is heading off to college today. It is roughly a 4 hour drive to the east. A friend has graciously agreed to drive us. We will spend the night in a hotel that my employers paid for, as a gift to me in appreciation for all my hard work for them this summer. And then tomorrow, between the hours of 1 and 2, we will move my daughter in to this new phase of her life.

I have had many thoughts and emotions about this, not surprisingly, what with my only child going off to school. Part of my mind is awhirl in the sense of how fast time has gone by, when in fact, the years passed as years will and were not sped up by some magic or technological process. It goes fast, and yet, we lived every minute of it.

I can easily say I never expected to raise a child alone, and I can also easily say I did not expect to help her reach for and achieve her life goals alone either. I had thought her Fuckhead Father (FF) would have done the right thing and helped with her expenses. But no. His selfishness has reached a new peak, and I am not wasting any more thought or space on that pathetic fact.

We haven't had an easy summer of it, her and I. Like with most things in her life, what people told me I could expect simply did not happen. When she was a baby and we lived on the farm with FF, people told me how wonderful it is she can grow up in such a delightful place, surrounded by trees and fields and nature. As it turned out, she doesn't actually like being outside all that much, and prefers urban stimulation to nature's sights, sounds, and scents. This summer people told me how wonderful it will be to do things with her and make memories with her, but it turned out she was, for the most part, surly and uncommunicative and largely ungrateful. I am sure it was her way of distancing herself from me, as I have also in my own ways begun to distance myself from her.

She has had her own small freak-outs. She isn't one to talk about her emotions much, but she has changed the color of her hair 3 times in the span of a month.

Last night she came home from a concert, her last outing with a high school friend -- the only high school friend left in town as her college starts even later than my daughter's -- and she began to panic, saying she could not believe it was time to leave already and she is not ready and she has so much to do and blah blah. I told her she had plenty of time, and once she gets there, she and all the other people on her floor, and in her suite, will all be in the same boat. I think she will be fine. I think she is coming into herself. I think this college will provide her with the best opportunity she could hope for, and I think the place is a good fit. We have all day today to get there, to sleep over, and to finally move in early tomorrow afternoon.

When I got up this morning, all her stuff is packed, ready, and assembled here in the livingroom, needing only to be put in the back of our friend's car.

It is my wish that my daughter grows into her beautiful, regal, swan self, and that she begins to trust herself and have confidence in her abilities. She is beautiful; she is intelligent; she is talented-- and hopefully one day, awareness of all those gifts will awaken in her.

I am grateful to have been blessed all these years with as gentle and dignified a spirit as hers to nurture and care for. She has always seemed older than her years to me, even as a baby. I would hold her in my arms and look into her wise, old eyes and have to consciously remind myself that even though I perceive an old, old soul in her, her tiny body is but a few months old. It has always been that way -- me needing to remind myself that even though I see the elder spirit in her, to herself she is what she is, the present chronological age she knows herself to be.

As for me, I am letting her go into the east, the place of the rising sun, of the gift of light, of the dawning of consciousness. And, I will look to the east every morning, after I climb this hill with my dogs, and I will send wishes for peace and contentment, prayers of love and protection her way. The wind will carry them, I trust, and wrap them safely around her.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

photo: Winter Sunrise, courtesy of freefoto.com

Bumby and the Blackberries

There's a wild blackberry patch on our early morning walk. Both the dogs like to pick and eat the berries. However, Bumby, who is now a 9 year old shaggy grey mess of a mongrel (not unlike myself were I to stop coloring my hair...) delights in the berries with a joy that wiggles her entire body with anticipated delight. She grabs the berries with her front teeth, she gobbles, her tail wags and her whole body curves in an ecstatic dance.

Little Bear, now 10 and generally more serious in his outlook, likes the berries too, and yet he eats with a single minded focus, moving in a straight line, direct and intent on the prize--much like the sled dog he is, pacing steadily along a straight track.

But Bumby's childlike joy! What a sight to see! And as with children, I have to finally say, 'Okay, time to go...", and I pull them away, as they stretch back, eyes looking longingly at the berries.

I do love dogs.

Sunshine

I can wake up any morning feeling like utter crap, rumpled and stained by bad dreams, or coated in the stale bread crumbs of old worries, but as soon as I get outside and up the hill and see the new day's sunlight tinting the mist an amber gold, and smell the freshness of the night's last moist exhalations coating the grass, and rest my eyes on the myriad shades of green plant life reaching up to the light all around me, I am refreshed, I am renewed -- as new as the day.

Which somehow reminds me -- how about those Jamaican athletes tearing up the track at the Olympics? Given the fact Jamaica is an island of great monetary poverty and has one of the highest murder rates in the world (according to the UN), what brilliant rays of sunshine and hope these brilliant athletes are. And I must say that when I heard how Usain Bolt finished the 100m, looking back, seeing everyone far behind and slowing up in laughter and joy, despite not yet reaching the finish line (and imagine what a time he might have had if he'd kept charging on instead of beginning to celebrate) I thought, how Jamaican of him.....

When I was in Jamaica in July, my special friend Morris and I had a lot of fun drawing on concrete and stones with sidewalk chalk. He drew a heart and then began to write: "Jesus love me and send (h)is sun to shine'. (Jamaicans don't pronounce the letter 'h' -- that's why he wrote 'is' instead of 'his'.)

(Morris, by the way, is roughly 15. I have written of him before. No one knows his true age or birth date, and he and his sister Kerry Ann, are true orphans, with no family to claim them. Which is a sadder thing in Jamaica, where it seems like everyone is connected to someone else somehow. Morris is also what people there call 'simple'. He is one of the sweetest, gentlest souls I have ever encountered.)

I was so inspired by him that I drew a bright yellow star on a large round stone sticking out of the ground. I wrote the word 'Shine' beneath it. And when Morris repeated the word 'shine', I told him he shines, I told him when he smiles, he shines.

Our days are full of shining stars. May you see them, may you greet them, may you know them, and may you shine right back at them.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

"...And the Sun Shines"

I went to the Childen's Home in Jamaica this past July again, my 4th trip. And I do plan to write about it here. I only just began transcribing my journal yesterday. The depth of my emotions surrounding the trip this year is stupendous. It has taken me a lot of time to even be able to begin to put it into words. Going back into the journal was almost like diving deep into an underwater city; there is still so much there that is yet untouched, much less brought up to the surface and the light.

To our partner church, it is a mission trip with A, B, C goals. Receipts are expected, measurable results demanded. To our church, it is a journey of the heart. We go to connect with people, to hug and hold and listen to children who are accustomed to being overlooked. I have real relationships happening there now, after 4 visits. My heart has opened and I have come to love in a way I never allow myself to love here, in the north. Hard to explain. There is an immediacy, a directness, an authenticity to the expression of the people I encounter there. Whereas here, people wear more masks, hide behind artifice and social forms. It is an elaborate dance of subterfuge. Not so there. And it is a relief and a joy.

I love Jamaica. I am at home there. I did a little experiment on the bus ride back down to Ochi after we had left the kids. The windows were open. I smiled at every man I saw, and every man I saw, regardless of age, looked right back at me and smiled in return. Openly, like sunshine.

Before I left, I found an explanation of the colors of the Jamaican flag, the yellow, green, and black. This is what I found: "Hardship there is, but the land is green, and the sun shines."

To be continued.

Until next time, I remain your friend, Rozenkraai

I Told the Sky How Annoyed I Was

I just went through a freaky full moon. I just went through a week from hell. I just walked through the fires and tread the raging waters, carrying a balloon as I went, alternately angry and racked with laughter. Where to begin?

18 years ago, when my daughter was born? Life certainly changed then. And now she is informing me she is legally an adult and can drink in Canada, she can drink in Mexico, she can get a tattoo and work as a stripper. She can vote and go to war. Good for you, I think. But can you put your clothes away?

Her birthday was Tuesday. She has been so odd, so difficult to please all summer that I, veteran of abuse that I am, found myself with confidence whittled away to a bare shred of finest gossamer spider web nothing. Buy her a gift? And watch her lip subtly curl in a sneer? No. Not up for that. Gave her money and took her out for a meal. The rain poured as we went, though the western sky was sunny and clear and so we walked beneath the arch of a great rainbow. She thought it was there for her, and I thought it was there for me. Mothers remember their children's birthdays in a slightly different light.

We got through the meal and she didn't sneer or roll her eyes. A good thing. It has been a summer of such. She is off to college in 2 weeks. She is living more in the then than in the now. It's how she deals with it. This change, massive, like a continent altered by earthquake or hurricane.

The next day, with steamy condescension in her voice, she lectured me on perceived realities ahead. Her tone clearly said, You are stupid, and I don't need your help. And so I very calmly told her how her summer long sneers and sighs and nothing is good enough for this princess affected me, chipping away at my confidence until I did not even know what to give her for her birthday. I had given other gifts this summer that were met with 'So what'. And I told her that. All very matter-of-factly I told her that, and I told her more, and then I took myself off to my room, to read and be very far away from ungrateful changeling children becoming women, gawky chicks becoming regal swans and yet not as graceful as they will be once they have had more practice.

That night I dreamt of a beautiful silvery city, shining by a misty white and softly blue ocean. The edge of the world. I was driving her there. And I knew then, I was ready to let her go.

That was Wednesday. By Thursday, she was making an effort to be pleasant. I made an effort to be appreciative. Throughout this time, the rain fell while the sun shone, thunder boomed out of a blue sky, and the moon grew fuller, lighting up the midnight sky.

Friday morning, 5:45am. I open the back door and hook the tie-out to Little Bear's collar. I shut the door, attend to the morning tasks, hear him lunge at a cat, most likely, and then his woof, farther away. I opened the door, went down the porch steps and found his collar, broken, attached to the lead, the one I got special, the one that can take 1700 pounds worth of lunge. The lead held; the collar failed--the second he had broken this year.

When Little Bear runs away, it is an opportunity for panic. He kills cats, given the opportunity. He plays smart ass with the cars. He will not let me catch him. He rolls in stink and he eats nasty unnameable objects. But that morning, I felt a true sense of God's peace within me, and I was not worried--I thought I would first have my tea and my devotions, my Scripture reading, and my prayers. Then I would take out Bumby on a lead and try to find him.

And so we went. And Little Bear, intrigued, followed us. He came close enough for me to catch him, but Bumby leapt at him, and so, he skittered off. That pissed me off. I dragged Bumby back to the house, and made her go in. She barked, she yipped, I heard her through the window. I saw Little Bear up the hill. I set off after him. I kept going up, looking for him, and when I got nearly to the top, I happened to look back down the hill, and I see Little Bear crossing the road back into our driveway. Which meant I had to hoof it all the way back down to try to get him. As I walked back, I looked up at the sky, and I said to God, in an angry tone, "I really do not need this." If I were in a movie I would have shaken my fist at the sky too.

I must say here, that despite all this drama, I had wakened with a sense of calm. And that calm was still inside me, but it was eroding fast. My sense, my faith, that all would be well was slipping away from me.

So here comes Little Bear, back up the hill towards me, but over across the way. I live on a fairly busy road by small town standards. He had already lunged out at a passing truck and made me scream his name. I kept talking to him as he came up nearer to me. I had angled completely across the road by this time.

Little Bear is wild and wily for a domesticated dog. He will not ever come to me. What he will do is he will stop long enough to let me come to him. And so he did, under the ruse of sniffing at a tuft of grass. He let me approach him and praise him and stroke him and put the leash around his neck. Then we went back to the house and got Bumby and had our walk.

All this to say, God was testing me. God was waiting to see if I lost my cool and panicked. I almost did. God wasn't through with me either.

I got home and discovered the phone line was dead. I already did not have a working computer, and now no phone either. I called it in to the phone company and the computer voice told me it would be fixed by 5pm, Monday. 3 days away. Yippee.

The rest of the day was the usual crap. Work. Walking. I drove a borrowed car with a cracked windshield to get Little Bear a new collar. My daughter went with her Fuckhead Father (FF) for the weekend. I went to bed when it got dark, reading a thick novel, eloquent, beautiful, tragic and cruel.

Around 1am I heard a tremendous cat fight. It sounded awfully close, like maybe it was even inside. I got up to go out and look. The screen in the kitchen window was gone! I did a quick head count of the cats and discovered one was gone. I shut the window fast, and found flip flops and went outside, into the heavy dewey wet, into the silvery moonlight, like walking into water. I looked for the screen. It was nowhere I could see. I called the cat. I walked down into the yard, calling his name, softly. I went back inside and got Little Bear, wanting to see how he would react once he was outside. He acted as if nothing were amiss. I looked for the screen some more, I circled the house calling the cat. Finally I went back inside. And there was the cat standing in the kitchen. Where had he been? I wedged a wooden spoon in the window to make sure it stayed shut, for I was properly freaked out by then, thinking how easy it was for someone, any one, anything, to get into the house--and with the dead phone, I was utterly unable to call 911. I went back to bed and prayed prayers of thanksgiving to God while hearing another cat fight continuing on outside my window. I was so mindfully thankful we were all inside and safe. Thankful no cats had jumped out the window into the night, thankful no cats or rabid raccoons or whatevers had jumped in the window into the house!

I was grateful and mindful of all our blessings. But I was also slightly rattled out of my mind, as were the cats long into the next day. Even so, God had spoken to me yet again, in the deep of the night, lit by a silvery moon, God had called to me to respond, and I rose from my sleep and stepped into the darkness and I responded and never felt afraid, just saw what needed to be done, and did it. (Though as I did it, a part of my mind reminded me of how such scenes play out in movies, with the woman taken unawares by creepy men or space aliens hiding in the vines. A part of my mind was also thinking, as I walked through the cold wet grass calling the missing cat that actually I wouldn't mind having one cat less, that it'd be a bit of a relief.)

I had been having a crisis of faith all week. Exhausted, frustrated, discouraged. Saying to the Lord, "I believe; help my unbelief". He heard me. It was rough and rocky and potentially scary but I felt like I was being tested, tested to a deeper level of faith in the one God who loves and cares for us, who holds us in the palm of his hands, who shelters us under his great wings. Ragged and rattled, I had lost the feel of that assurance, but by the end of Friday into Saturday, I most securely had it back.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

Back

I have been away for far too long. So much has happened, so much has changed. I will be adding entries here again soon. For now, I leave you with a haiku:

the river tells me
always keep moving forward
singing as you go.

spring from the north

the rain fell but did not wash away all the snow, back to the river, as i had hoped it would. and yet as we walked, there was bare ground visible, and plenty of it. squishy and wet, the mud scented by the passing of countless feet, two legs, four legs. the dogs were delirious with it. so much so they broke out in a crazed dance, running joyful circles, turning, leaping, catching up snow in their mouths and eating it, pantingly, smilingly. the wind was out of the north but it was not cold and biting; it was fresh, damp, alive. it felt like a vital caress, a sounding back to life, a bath with strong hands gently smoothing away my fears. it felt like a wily angel sending mixed messages of hope and necessary darkness. i thought of jacob wrestling all night with that fierce angel at the river. the encounter left him sore and lame. perhaps what i have perceived as demons out to destroy me are only fierce and wily angels out to trick me back to full throated life? goading me to defiance and humility?

Dr. Freud's Penis

When I was a little girl, I used to take baths with my cousin Kip. He was a great pal. His mom was nuts and an abuser; she was the man in the wheelchair's cousin. His dad was my mother's cousin, both of them nasty too, but in a whole other way--they were nasty with their talk, with their minds, not so much with their hands. Kip was a sweet boy, and we had simple, innocent childish fun together. His mother sexually abused me, at the age when I was too young to make sense of it, or even to tell on her--just like the man in the wheelchair did. (And it did not take me long to learn that telling on the adult never ever led to anything good for me.) I can only imagine what she did to Kip, or for how long. Or if at all. Maybe she liked messing with girls better. I know she was obsessed with her own genitalia--she stayed in my room when they came to visit and I accidentally walked in on her masturbating there. I backed out of that room so fast, and went somewhere and hid. I was really scared.

(One of the precursors to my last breakdown was the hypnotherapy sessions I was having with a therapist who had just learned the technique and liked to practice it on me. Little did she (or I!) know what a huge monster it would call to the surface in me, as times of Kip's mom abusing me began to surface in bits and pieces of memory and body sensation. It was painful and sickening and totally rocked me right off my foundations. After the breakdown, and my participation in the day program at the psych hospital, where I had told them of the hypnotherapy and the woman's inability to handle the consequences of it, I ended up telling that therapist what had happened to me, and how her practicing on me contributed to it--the memory of the uncomfortable angle of my neck as Kip's mom held me down on the table, of the sunlight shining into my face and the smell of the cigarette smoke lazily coiling up beside us making me queasy. I remembered that she always volunteered to go change my diaper so that she could manipulate me to orgasm. I remembered all that and it sent me right off the edge of the known earth. I told all the therapists that in the hopes they would not perpetuate such treatment on anyone else ever again.)

Anyway, they used to put us in the bath together. Knowing what a pervert his mother was (she died of cancer a few years ago and I was not sorry, in fact I thought, 'Serves her right.'), she probably hoped Kip and I would engage in some hanky panky so she could watch and get off on it. We didn't. Despite what the adults did to us, we were still innocent children.

All this is a long winded introduction into saying, when I was a small girl I knew about penises. And this is what I thought about penises, Dr. Freud. I thought that as boys grew older, their penises got smaller and smaller and finally dissolved so that by the time they were adults, we all looked the same.

At the time I was 6 or 7, my best friend was named Doreen and she came from a gigantic Irish American family who lived down the other end of the street. She had several older brothers. She knew the truth about penises. So, when I told her my theory about dissolving penises, she laughed really hard, and then she set me straight about that--saving me future embarrassment.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

Flat Line

I had the sense early this morning that my life is a flat line, a bleak horizon. I felt the demons of fear and despair gnawing at me, and I became overwhelmed. Now all I want to do is stay home and tidy up and reclaim the sense that I have some control over my life. (Do I? And will cleaning the floor and keeping guard here, making sure all is tidy and safe, is that really going to make it all better?)

My daughter went out with friends last night. I woke at 4am and saw the lights were still on in the living room, so I got up and went out there to discover she was not yet home. I went over to the phone and saw there had been 14 calls. My instant fear was something bad had happened and the state police had tried to call me all those times. I need glasses (and can't afford them!) and the light was dim so I could not read the numbers on the caller ID. That frustrated me! That was when I discovered the lamp right near the phone had been knocked over by the cats and the bulb lay shattered in the corner. I fumbled with the phone and dialed my voice mail number, and then was subjected to a mandatory message from the phone company all about how they are going to upgrade the voice mail service. I had to sit through that endless blather while I waited in fear and frustration, feeling very much like a Bad Mother because I didn't stay out on the couch instead of going into bed so that I would be able to hear the phone. Finally I was able to listen to my messages, and there she was telling me of a change in plans and where she was going, but it all sounded a bit vague to my worried ears. She said she would continue to try to call me, which she did do; that's why there were 14 calls.

I turned out the lights. I went back to bed. I felt like a Bad Mother. Because I have depression, because it sucks my energy and I need to sleep. Because I have just one phone and it is on the other end of the house. Because I close my bedroom door so that cats won't come in and bother me with their nonsense. I battered and berated myself. And finally, I realized I was succumbing to the lure of the dark demons; they were swarming me like hungry fish. I tried to console myself. I told myself that if the state police really needed to get a hold of me, they would have come pounding on my door. But I wasn't very deeply consoled; the light inside me was too dim. So then my fears seized the opportunity and began spiraling my thoughts into dizziness, conjuring potential financial disasters and all the many other ways I live on a very fine edge, trusting in faith to be held up by God, trusting in faith that anything that comes will be nothing I cannot handle. Except it all felt very skimpy there in the dark as I clutched a stuffed bear to my heart, talking to God but not sure anyone was hearing me just then, and I felt just as much like a lonely shivering child with too thin a blanket as I ever have. That was when I realized I am very overwhelmed by trying to hold my life together--that, in fact, it feels like a fucking disaster and a mess-- and I am too ashamed to tell anyone that fact.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

I Know Why

There is an article in today's New York Times written by Patricia Cohen and entitled 'Midlife Suicide Rises, Puzzling Researchers'. There has been, she writes, "an unusually large increase in suicides among middle-aged Americans in recent years. Just why thousands of men and women have crossed the line between enduring life’s burdens and surrendering to them is a painful question for their loved ones. But for officials, it is a surprising and baffling public health mystery."

Remember a few posts back when I talked about how I used to wonder why Virginia Woolf killed herself at middle age, because when I was young I always thought if you could make it this far, you had somehow made it? Read on.

"Linda Cronin was 43 and working in a gym when she gulped down a lethal dose of prescription drugs in her Denver apartment in 2006, after battling eating disorders and depression for years."

"Ms. Cronin explained in a note that she had struggled with an inexplicable gloom that would leave her cowering tearfully in a closet as early as age 9. After attempting suicide before, she had checked into a residential treatment program not long before she died, but after a month, her insurance ran out. Her parents had offered to continue the payments, but her sister, Kelly Gifford, said Ms. Cronin did not want to burden them.

Ms. Gifford added, “I think she just got sick of trying to get better.”'

"For women 45 to 54, the (suicide) rate leapt 31 percent."

"Without a “psychological autopsy” into someone’s mental health, Dr. Caine said, “we’re kind of in the dark.”

"And although an unusual event might cause the suicide rate to spike, like in Thailand after Asia’s economic collapse in 1997, suicide much more frequently punctuates a long series of troubles — mental illness, substance abuse, unemployment, failed romances."

Many depressives appear very competent on the surface, and are often very accomplished people. What with the stigma surrounding mental health issues (the nice way to say mental illness), most of us have learned to conceal as much as possible the times when we are feeling bad--to put a good face on things. Until our energy runs out and the depression gets too strong, that is, and we can't keep up the facade anymore.

People who have not themselves suffered from true chronic depression simply do not know what it is like to have yourself taken over by this dark monster that numbs sensation, turns a regular day into an endurance event, saps your vitality, makes you crabby and irritable and unable to enjoy life or to believe you are worthy of love. I even know that that monster could lead me to my death and that my loving friends would feel sad and bad and wonder what more they could have done for me. And the answer would be: "Nothing! You did your best for me!" They just don't understand the power of depression.

I have recently been absolutely surrounded by loving friends, eager to show me kindness and affection. And the hardest thing is, when I feel bad like I have been feeling, I really cannot comprehend their loving words or their affectionate efforts on my behalf. I keep thinking they will one day see the 'real me' and realize they should never have wasted their time on me. As if I am the monster, living behind a solid dark grey rock wall, somewhere behind my heart, somewhere in the center of my brain, and their loving attentions are waves of sound and light reverberating against that rock. Or, it is like I am trapped behind a wall of ice and their kind words are pebbles tossed at the ice. I can only hear the ticking of the pebbles striking the ice, I cannot comprehend the heat of the love and affection inside them.

My hope is always for the day when I begin to feel better and those walls begin to fall down.

But I also know that even when the walls fall down, they never stay down, and eventually I am trapped back behind them again.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

(Photo: 'Star' by Rozenkraai)

Providence

I have made some pretty dumb decisions. One of them was to move to Providence after college. The real plan was to move back to Boston, where I had lived for several years after high school. But I took the train to Providence, because my mother and her husband lived relatively nearby, and I was going to stay with them while I looked for a place in Boston. I walked out of the train station, looked at the city spread out before me and said, "This looks nice. I'll stay here."

Big mistake. It was like living in a foreign country and it turned out to be one of the worst years of my life, no small thing in a life of many bad years. I think it seemed all the worse because I had just come from a few very good years at a small college in a beautiful rural area. I had just come from a few years of thriving and feeling nurtured. But, all things must pass, as they say, and it was time to move on. I mean, me, stay in a place where things were going well? Too scary! Things going well is just the precursor to things going to shit! And even though I had such high hopes for myself by then, I was just as lost as ever.

I found an apartment (they called them 'tenements' there) on the third floor above a fish restaurant in an Italian neighborhood. There is another Italian neighborhood in that city that is semi-famous and kind of a tourist attraction. This was not that one. This was the shabbier version. The apartment was permeated with the oily smell of fried fish. The building swayed when big trucks rumbled by. The previous tenants had not cleaned out the refrigerator, and it was full of rotted food. But it was the only place I could get with 6 cats in tow. I also think I got the place because one of the guys in the rental office liked me, but I was in no way ready to get all friendly with an unknown, quiet man who had a loyal German shepherd following him everywhere. My neighbor below me was a very elderly woman who told me all she could eat was bread soaked in coffee or milk, "like a baby", as she said. I think she was related to the people who owned the building. The woman across the way from me was originally from Pittsburgh and had 2 young sons, and a husband who was there sometimes, but mostly not. He was Hispanic. She was Irish American, and she spoke as if she was raised by people with heavy brogues. The older boy was bright and sweet, and the younger one was sweet and had autism and was mostly locked away in his own mind.

She was pretty much locked away there too. She could not drive, she had no car, she waited around for him to come home and give her money. He did not give her much. He kept a lot of it for himself and used it at the dog track. I would talk to her on the steps by the door we used to enter the place--it led out into the parking lot, right beside the dumpster. She'd stay out there smoking cigarettes, watching the boys play on the black top. I was having a really hard time finding a job, so I spent a bit of time talking to her. I played with the boys too, and got the younger one to say the word balloon--he said it "ba-doon". We had a game where we would stomp on balloons. He really liked it.

That July was hot. The black top parking lot radiated up the heat in shimmery waves. She began to talk more and more about how badly he treated her. She became feverish in her speech, and somewhat irrational. She told me she was keeping a knife by her bed. She told me she saw the devil out on the fire escape looking in at her with fiery red eyes. She locked the boys in their room at night with a hook and eye lock. It finally got so bad she had told the husband to get out and to stay away.

That July the full moon came up mean and red. Reminded me of the old Creedence Clearwater song, "I see a bad moon a'risin....' It was hot, it was humid, it was nasty. I was soaked in sweat in my bed as I tried to sleep. At some point I heard sirens and feet stomping up and down the stairs. On my bedroom walls, I saw the flashing blue lights from police cars and could hear their radios. I stayed in my bed. I did not get up and look. I did not move. I stayed very still and quiet, like a child when the adults are fighting and I want them to not be reminded of my presence.

But sometime the next day there was a knock at my door. There was my neighbor. She had on a really pretty sun dress. It was cream colored with spaghetti straps and was patterned with flowers, blue and lavender and green, a little yellow, a little red. She was bruised all over--huge dark purple bruises on her face and shoulders and chest. She had a black eye. Quite unselfconsciously, she told me all about her husband sneaking in the night before. He wore sneakers, she said, and crept in. He crept in and he began to beat her. He didn't know she had the knife beside her bed, and she used it. She stabbed him. She killed him. She finished her story by saying, "I don't know how I will get that stain out of my rug."

Her public defender was a sad looking man with a bad toupee and a skin ailment that gave him white spots. He came to talk to me. He sat at my kitchen table and tape recorded what I said. When he asked me if I thought she had acted in self-defense, I had said, "Oh, absolutely, yes."

I'll bet you think I am making this up.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

Tasty

Dare I say this? Yes, I do dare.

Last Sunday, one of the liturgical readings was from Genesis, chapter 3. That's the Eve and the Serpent and the Forbidden Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden section. Yes, that story. The one we women have been paying for for centuries--'the woman made me do it, Lord, really she did, she said it tasted good.' Well, I heard it in a new way. I heard this. I heard that when they ate of the forbidden fruit, they became able to discern the difference between good and evil. They became like God, in that regard. The serpent did not lie and Eve knew a good deal when she heard it. And lazy Adam, he should have thanked her for what she did. Because, given the choice between childlike innocence all my life, and the ability to look at the complexities of the world with discernment and judgment, with free will and the ability to respond to challenges as I see fit, I would eat the fruit too. I would prefer to be an actor, an enactor, than a passive child, waiting to be rescued, waiting for some one else to figure out what we do next. It's like all those TV shows with the male hero and the woman sidekick and whenever the shit hits the fan, the woman turns to him and screeches, What do we do now???

(Of course, I haven't had the luxury of a male hero to protect me and make all the hard decisions for me, especially when things got rough. Actually, more often than not, they got rough because of the male 'hero'. And so it is to God and to Jesus that I turn for help; I turn to that wisdom voice inside me, that which is commonly called 'the Holy Spirit', Jesus' last gift to us humans as we fretted and wrung our hands at the thought of him leaving us. He hasn't left us, for as he says at the end of Matthew's Gospel, "For I will be with you always, even to the end of the age.")

And sure, God was mad at Eve and Adam. God is mad a lot in the Old Testament. They broke his rule. He threw them out of the garden. Nothing new in that. I know what that feels like. I have been broken and banished and abandoned and humiliated myself. We humans, we all still break God's rules. Seems to be part of our human nature, and not just feminine human nature. Maybe that's why that's one of the very first stories, after the creation, in the whole Bible. Because it is basic and fundamental.

And so is this: God still loves us. God still gives us endless chances to get it right. Because it is up to us to get it right, actively. Not to sit there and wait for God to swoop in and fix it all. We have to make an effort to meet God at least half-way--and we do that by making an effort to do the right thing, to live mindfully and consciously, an ability given to us by Mother Eve who said, 'Hey, taste this fruit. It's good.'

Okay so now it's crazy time again, and I lose you here. Because after listening to all that about Eve and the Serpent, and then listening to the part in Matthew's Gospel about Jesus being tempted by the Evil One during his own 40 days in the desert--facing down Satan with Scripture, no less--, and then thinking about how it is now Lent, a season when people who participate in this part of the Christian walk face our own sources of temptation--be they an enticing food or a bad habit or a bad attitude or a negative way of thinking or whatever (pick your favorite!)--I thought I heard the sound of giant slithering snakes right there in our sanctuary. My eyes were closed as I listened to our Pastor pray prayers of thanksgiving and intercession, and I heard that slithery sound and not knowing what it was, I saw with my inner vision the sight of giant black snakes slithering up and down the pews: the visible symbols of all our temptations.

Because we are all tempted in how so ever many ways. Even more so during Lent, when we have turned our spiritual attentions that way. When we fast and pray and strive and walk that lonely walk with Jesus. It is not a bad thing, to struggle and to be tempted. It is a human thing. And we are the children of the great God who lets us struggle and fall and rise again and so learn from the falling, the great God who forgives us our fumbling attempts to be nearer to him. The great God who gave us Jesus, finest most divine teacher of them all to embody our human weakness and be at one with us, he who was wrongly arrested and tortured and humiliated and abandoned and finally hung up on a cross to die.

He did not run away. He stuck it out. He could have run away that night in Gethsemane Garden, he knew they were coming to get him, he had plenty of time to go. But no. He stayed, he stayed and he spent the time praying-- for us, for goodness sake.

And, he did not deny who he was. Pilate asked him if he was the King of the Jews, and Jesus replied, "So you say." Like, do your worst, Pilate, do your worst, let's get this over with. (Of course it was his own people who demanded such savage justice for one they considered a blasphemer extraordinaire, and it is NOT anti-Semitic to say that. Read it in all the Gospel versions: Pilate put the decision to the Jewish authorities. Politically expedient of him, really, being a Roman authority in an occupied land. He didn't want open rebellion.) And so, my sweet Jesus hung up there and he died and the sky was split asunder and the women wept. He was taken down and put away in a stone tomb. And a couple of days later, he rose again. He rose again. He showed us by facing his fear and his tormentors, he showed us by rising again, the magnificent power of our great God's blazingly glorious love, a love that defies the darkness of sin and death. A love that transcends temptation and all our puny human badness. And in our Protestant tradition, we are forgiven by God's grace through our faith in Jesus, in knowing that he was God's beloved son and he came to earth as a gift of love to us.

What they did to Jesus was so bad--and yet, he forgave them. He forgave them, and from the cross his asked God to forgive them, and he even forgave his own closest disciples who denied they knew him and ran away from him in his time of need. People still keep doing bad stuff like that to each other and to children and animals and to the planet every single day. Every single moment of every single day. And God still loves us, and gives us every single moment the chance to reverse our ways and begin to treat one another with love. To live the knowledge of the difference between good and evil acts. It is up to us. Truly. We simply have to get over ourselves, and do it.

Anyway. The snakes? Turns out the battery in the microphone needed changing. Nearly everyone I asked said, 'Oh yeah, I heard that, I thought it was a problem with the sound system.'

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

(Image: painting by William Blake, 'Eve Tempted by the Serpent', Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

His Birthday Too

We just had a birthday, Little Bear and me. I am 50; he is 10. Milestones for us both. It was 10 years ago that I packed it up and left the X. We moved out on Halloween weekend. On the advice of a friend, my daughter was staying at her friend's house that weekend, and they were having pure Halloween fun. That left Little Bear, The Empress (cat), and me that first night in our new home, the second floor of that old tumble down house that was nice once but in shabby disrepair now. The tenants downstairs were moving in that weekend too. He needed to do some plumbing repairs and shut off the water. So we were waterless after our grubby move, but I dealt with it, like I deal with everything, by enduring. Little Bear was young then, about 8 months old. He barked at every sound. He jumped up in the window to look out at whatever sparked his interest down on the street below. He got caught in the cord of my new lamp and pulled it off the table. I told him to shut up, I picked up the lamp and put it in a different spot, I got back in bed and tried to sleep. I did what I do: pick up the pieces, and start over again.

As the weather got colder, and the days shorter, I would awaken early to the company of the dog and the cat. Little Bear's bed was at the foot of my bed, my futon on the floor. The Empress would sleep with me. In the cold and the increasing dark, Little Bear and I would head out first thing for a walk, so he could pee and sniff and stretch his legs. I couldn't just let him out the back door; we had virtually no yard. And so we'd walk. Five times a day, at least, I would take him for a walk so he could do what he needed to do. I was used to the unlimited access to the outdoors that country living provides, but I was in the village now, and wasn't sure of everyone's turf. So, first thing in the morning and last thing at night, right before work, right after work, and after supper. It kept me occupied and it kept me distracted. I could focus on him and not focus on the cold, my loneliness, my uncertainty, the solitude of this new stage in my life--this constant time of improvisation, on my own with a child depending on me. I had been on my own before but not with the responsibility of a daughter. I had to make sure things were right. I had to provide a good environment for her. I did not expect her to endure like I did, or sleep at the foot of my bed like a dog. I did not want her to know how hard or how scary it was for me. She was just 8 years old. I did not want her to have adult sized worries. I did not let her see how hard it was for me. And now that she is older, and acts all unconcerned about how hard things are for me, I have to get over my annoyance and remind myself why: I made it that way. I succeeded at not laying my worries on her. I let her be a child.

Anyway, that made Little Bear my main emotional support. My puppy, now 10 years old. I look at him and see a major stage in my life, a time of huge transition, challenge, and accomplishment. I was so alone when I first moved to this village. But I had a warm, loving dog to brighten up the cold, dark dawns. I am prey to anxiety when I first wake up. His happy face and his daily good morning kiss--he still does it, comes over and licks me when he sees I am awake--chase the worries back into their dark webs in the obscure corners they originate from.

The other thing I see when I look back over this 10 years past is the home I found in this village when I followed the white light of my meditative vision to the big old brick church on the corner. The one with the pretty windows. The one with the sweet faced woman pastor robed in white with a rainbow stole around her neck, a woman who lives her faith, who shines the light of Jesus' love and responds with compassionate kindness to all who seek her attention. She does! She is the Real Deal. And so, that church is such a welcoming place. I could feel the love and the warmth the first time I walked into that sanctuary. I have friends there, solid friends, like family, only better because they are people trying to follow the light of the values Jesus taught them--love unconditionally, forgive, be compassionate, be kind. ("I was a stranger and you welcomed me in..." Matthew 25:35b) I am anchored in my life thanks partly to them. I have brightness and laughter thanks partly to them. They welcomed me in. They didn't judge me or disbelieve me. They let me be me. In their loving space, I have healed. They, and Little Bear and Bumby and my daughter and all the other critters who live here have helped me re-root myself so that I might thrive on this sunny hillside above the river, my heart's home.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai

('Rozenkraai and Little Bear' photo by my daughter)