The Pit - and The Pendulum Too

This was me Sunday night, all but the rats: I was so sick I thought I was dying. That’s exactly how you do feel when those steel walls of pain close in on you, like they did for the poor sucker in "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allen Poe. Here come the room’s walls, shoving you like dirt before a backhoe, closer and closer toward this yawning oubliette-style hole that has suddenly opened in the center of your pain - and let’s not forget that special blade of a pendulum that starts lowering down from the ceiling on the poor guy.I could feel that too, in my delirium, tickling the fibers of my pj's, then starting to slice me neatly open.What did our friend Emily Dickinson say? Pain has an element of blank, It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not. She was right about that, boy. Past and future fall away when pain is extreme.I tried to think of all the tasks and projects I had planned for the day and could not even remember what they were.I felt like Job on the dung heap. Like Job scraping his boils, and listening to that trio of distinctly uncomforting comforters who showed up and started proposing reasons for his suffering. You deserve this, I kept thinking, and really it’s not hard to think you do deserve many of the blows Fate deals you. In my case I have to look no further than the self-satisfied tone of my last post:  Oh! I swapped out some colors and re-arranged the decor in my little burrow!  What a clever little foxy am I!

(That's me on the right, the girl-looking one, admiring my walls. )

It was a terrible night anyway, with some vividly extra terribleness toward dawn. But then ....As quickly as it came the pain left, and one again I felt skipped over by the Grim Reaper; passed over as the ancient Jews were passed over by the Angel of Death so 4,000 years ago today. and happy be set down on the safer shores of that wide Red Sea; once again on the shores of Health and the blessed dullness of everyday life.

The Waiting Days

Yesterday David and I went again to Uncle Ed’s house and saw again the empty chair that he sat in all day long and struggled so to rise from, crippled as he was with the bad hips even before you got to the arthritis and the gout.As David studied his box of crucial documents, I just stood, looking at everything:His many photos.His water glass there by the chair.His cane that he would so lightly toss to me before he slowly, painstaking lifted those burdened legs, one and then the other to fold himself into my car.We picked up his paper and fetched in his mail.We took his address book and pulled the door shut and left the dust motes swirling minutely in the air.The ancient Jews in the day after their deliverance: I keep thinking of them. “Now what?" I keep thinking, just as they must have thought, dazed by the empty space all around them."Now what?" I keep saying to myself, as the followers of Jesus must have also said the day after his execution, when it turned out he hadn't thrown over his captors and come off the cross swinging at all but had died like all the others - of strangulation, they say, when the method is crucifixion; when the victim grows so weak he can no longer push off with the feet and the pressure on the pectoral muscles cuts off the airway.Dark thoughts in these waiting days.I roused myself finally and called the newspaper to cancel his subscription. I called ElderCare and stopped the service that would pick up his laundry Tuesdays and return it Fridays, so clean it made your nostrils sting to sniff it.I called the two ladies who had sent him Easter cards, one signed in such a spidery hand she must have been in her 90s too.I spoke to his faraway blood nephews. I worked out a date and time for the service, so we could get the one great minister from the church his near nephews grew up in. (Ed was their uncle really, the uncle by marriage of David and his three brothers.) I wrote the obit in which I did not name myself.We drove straight north from his house to be at a place that calms me every time. We will go home in the morning for church and then it will be Easter and maybe I'll feel a little better.

For now I feel like the speaker in this poem, W.S. Merwin’s "How It Happens." Though he has written it with no punctuation, it's easy to tell it's a dialogue. Maybe he wrote it without punctuation to suggest that this conversation is an inner one. I know the inner conversation is mainly what I'm having right now. Read this piece of bleak beauty by our poet laureate now.

The sky said I am watchingto see what youcan make out of nothingI was looking up and I saidI thought youwere supposed to be doing thatthe sky said manyare clinging to thatI am giving you a chanceI was looking up and I saidI am the only chance I havethen the sky did not answerand here we arewith our names for the daysthe vast days that do not listen to us

New Day

I'm up north writing this. On Friday I sat on the deck here in 60-degree warmth, basking in sunlight. Then, an hour before sunset a big wind came along and tickled the treetops till they bent over laughing. It was a day like the painted landscapes inside one of those peek-a-boo Easter eggs: beautiful.  Then... we woke to a six-hour snowstorm. We think we know what a day will bring us, but we never do really. Example; this picture I just took with spring and winter together .... Where are those footsteps leading, forward into spring or back into winter?Anyway, that was yesterday. I post this today at 6am, hopeful of a return to the warmth. Today at the family celebration I will wear ivory colored slacks and a pale green sweater and will hope to look a little less like the grizzly bear I resembled yesterday in my furry brown jacket.This year I didn’t dye Easter eggs, what with our little people away in Florida. Nor did I try making the family bunny cake recipe, which is just as well since it always looks to me more like a bunny corpse, covered for decency with a white sheet of coconut. And thank God I didn’t have to go to the Mall, that industrial-strength crowd-magnet. Instead, I worked on my refinishing project and read my book and talked with David about how badly you can hurt yourself even just falling off a small step ladder if you don’t keep those quick-reacting stabilizer muscles active. We talk that way to each other for courage.The sun is just coming up now, see how lovely? A new day for us all; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

and now, with the sun so strong already, a last coat of finish on that just-stripped table 

Lift Me

When I was young and under the influence of the nuns, I was told to keep silence on this day, at least from noon until 3 when tradition says Jesus suffered that death-by-strangulation that crucifixion is. I couldn't do it then or for many years after, even though I knew how silence concentrates the mind.  I always thought the Jews had the better idea at the Seder, having the youngest ask that great starting-point of a question, “How is this night different from all other nights?”  which kind of translates to “Who are we and how did we get to this place?” This is a question I ask myself every morning on waking from the kind of deep sleep I always sleep, so all-forgetting I sometime wake and calmly think  'Soon some kind person will come and lift me from this crib!'  For Christians today is  Good Friday . I remember the Good Friday they played "We Are the World" on practically every radio station all over the country at exactly the same hour. I was driving through beautiful western Connecticut calling on newspapers to sell them my column. I had just had my last baby and knew he was my last felt..... I don't know, released into the rest of my life somehow. I spent much of yesterday driving too and just at sunset when I finally stopped the car and sat looking around, three deer crossed the field front of me and it was as if I had been waiting all day for them; as if seeing them proved that there really is this other reality just around the corner and out of our everyday sight, which is pretty much the idea communicated in most of the world's religions.    Here for you now accordingly ,  "We are the World," written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie, as it was sung at the funeral  of poor Michael not quite two years ago now.  Note the ecumenical symbols above the singers’ heads.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-ToznKNe6U&feature=related]And to really walk down memory lane, treat yourself to the original version here below. And remember this week to keep holy the Sabbath, whatever form a Sabbath day has for you.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xy1gp3F5NhY]

April First, Sun and Clouds

I felt awful last night that I seemed to be making light of the plight of the people who can’t flush their toilets with all this flooding. When I saw on the news this morning how many people have raw sewage bubbling up in their houses I felt even worse. That’s how it always is with me: I’m laughing AND I’m feeling so squeezed by empathy I can hardly breathe. It’s a weird combination.First, here’s some more of the empathy part: in connection with the plastic bags that our trees are wearing like brooches, I mentioned a tent city outside Tijuana many of  whose ‘houses’ are made of plywood, tar paper, even cloth. In this community of  La Morita,  uncountable numbers of plastic bag bits cling to the barbed wire fencing off every vacant lot for miles around. I worked there for a week helping to build a house and the plastic bags looked like dead birds to me, their wings lifting and falling in the wind. Plumbing and electricity, phone service and trash removal: none of these exist in La Morita. The unpaved streets run in mud, and when it rains, no one gets in or out.And yet here were children in crisp uniforms walking toward the small school; adults perfectly turned out, picking their way down the rutted hills to ride the series of buses that take them to the factories.But it is April 1^st when we're meant to laugh some. There’s nothing funny about raw sewage of course, or about having your friends pass out on you the one time you ask them to stay awake and help you mentally prepare for whatever crucifixion awaits you. But it’s also the third day of Passover and what a great thing that memorializes: Getting free after centuries of servitude. Making it out at last with that old Angel of Death sparing everyone you love..... So what’s a principle common to the three things that make this day notable? Maybe that you’ll be all right as long as you keep your spirit free, no matter what gets done to your body. This cartoon regarding that new God the computer is meant to keep that spirit up. I say stay awake to this day and to everything it offers you even IF you have to  keep feeling your backside for Kick Me signs.

Known and Found and Gathered In

Today dawned clear and I rose early in it knowing I had many jobs ahead. I’m  lucky because we’re eating at our brother and sister-in-law’s but I’m busy nonetheless: There's that bunny cake to make and I have to go get our uncle, 88, who will want to go sit by that special pond first. He has his eye on distant horizons now. And he’ll need some good hot coffee to wrap his hands around. And then there’s church and Skip and Miriam’s, and an airport run and an uncle drop-off and then back here with just our small family and the grandbabies and then to work at night to ready my column for its deadline in the morning.

Little Eddie called last night with his emergency voice on. “TT!” he said wasting no time on preliminaries. “Bring all my Star Wars guys to Skip and Miriam’s!” Only he still talks a little funny so it sounded like ‘Stoh Wohs.’

There is a stunningly capable young guy named Nick, soon to be 20, who helps me now in my business life and little Eddie and I went to his house on Friday where his beautiful mom and he dug out all his Star Wars toys to give to us. Then, while I went foodshopping, Nick and Eddie came back here and built a spaceship out of all the perfectly-sized boxes I had been saving to ship my books in when a clamoring public beat down my door to buy them.

Books by the thousand still fill the cellar. Not everything turns out the way you think it will.

But it’s true spring now, Easter, Passover, the season of release into new life. And this is our boy-cat at the top here, so sick a year ago and hiding behind a door waiting to die. He didn’t die, because he was found in the nick of time - just as we all hope to be found and claimed and gathered in, when we too set sail for that far horizon.