Sun

Happy Summer Solstice, 2024! 

Yeah, I’m a day late. Scientists and people who have spiritual reasons to track solstices remind us that the solstice is the day on which the earth’s axis is the most tilted on its journey around the sun. Winter solstice on one side of the planet, summer on the other. So this year summer solstice happened on June 20th.

Summer solstice activities generally celebrate the sun, nature (especially trees), renewal, fertility, abundance, and the season to come. Undoubtedly there were celebrations around the northern hemisphere yesterday. As far as I know no one erected a Stonehenge or, thank goodness, sacrificed an unborn calf. There must have been barbecues, though. Also bonfires, reenactments of the wrestling match between the Oak King and the Holly King, flower crowns, morning-dew baths, watch-the-sunrise parties, tree appreciations, picnics in the park, etc. Maybe even a few people set wooden wheels on fire and rolled them downhill into an unsuspecting body of water, like their ancestors used to.

Anyhow, I’m actually a bit glad to have been oblivious. It took pressure off of the day, and on June 20th it was hot and humid here, with temperatures in the high 90s. Plus I much prefer the number 21 to the number 20. I’m just a little mad that the solstice isn’t on the 21st every year. Sure, I can do summer-is-here stuff today, and for the next few months. Now if only that lhude cuccu would quit making so much noise…

Our patio umbrella knew. This morning, soon after sunrise, Dave went outside to take out the trash. At some point on the evening of June 20th, the umbrella had worked its way out of its base and aperture of the iron patio table and made its way into the back yard. Its blue canopy, tilted as the earth had been, maybe a bit more so, shaded the grass, and its finial pointed straight at the oak tree.

The umbrella’s solstice party was pretty wild, thunder and lightning and gusty winds, but suggestions abound for more temperate solstice activities. Outings, crafts, self-care stuff, mystical stuff. Watch the sun rise. Bathe your toes in morning dew. Meditate in the sun, or about the sun, or something. Take a prophetic walk. Build a summer altar. Wear yellow or gold. Make a flower crown. Plant a tree. Write your problems on little pieces of paper and burn them. Get sun into your day somehow. 

I reviewed my yesterday, trying to figure out if I’d celebrated half as much as the umbrella. Even if by accident.

Let’s see…I’d missed the sunrise and worn sneakers, so no morning dew. I had taken a little walk before Cardiac Rehab, during which I’d passed through some nice gardens which I’d appreciated. Was it a prophetic walk? 

A prophetic walk is evidently a walk in nature where you look for—or try to be open to—things that can be interpreted as signs or messages. Basically the kind of thing that happens to me a lot, because I’m such a pattern-seeker. The most recent occurrence was a few days back, with a message delivered by cats. I know, I know—last week I wrote about cats, but hear me out: I was walking down a quiet street and came upon a house with seven cats, super relaxed, in the front yard. Just sitting there, on the steps and in the garden and on the grass. Not disturbed one whit when I stopped to take a photo. And then, just three houses down the same street, four more cats doing exactly the same thing—except clumped a little closer together. Prophetic! It’s gotta be! Not sure of what, yet.

Yesterday’s walk was just a walk. Not prophetic of anything except being a little more tired than usual in rehab. Too bad. After rehab I hit walmart for aspirin and seat cushions. Then, as it was a slow day, I’d gone for my first pedicure in a couple of years. 

Hole-in-the-wall place between a fish market and a dollar store. Inside: AC working. It was 97 degrees, so I was delighted to get out of the sun. (But: I’d been in the sun for a while at this point; that gives me a check on the solstice activity list). Friendly owner and nail techs. Lots of regular customers, everyone complaining about the heat. Man getting his toes done while taking a little nap in the chair across from me.

I picked a dusky pink polish with a sparkly overcoat. By the time the tech was finished, my toe tips were a shimmery, sandy rose gold. Wear yellow or gold: check.

The rest of the day was mundane and indoors: practice, dinner, TV shows, books, bed. I missed the sunset. No checks there. 

Still, every time I look at my feet, I see the sun’s glow. And I didn’t have to prostrate myself before a tree…Checkmate, umbrella! 

Goslings

Audio version with some extra thoughts

In my baseball cap, sunglasses, headphones, and sneakers I passed Neighbor Nancy and her black lab, Skye. Nancy puffed on a cigarette while Skye sniffed at my knees with an air of friendly disappointment. 

“She wants a walk,” said Nancy. 

“Me too,” I said. Dave sometimes takes Skye to the dog park, but my relationship with her is limited to head-scratching and the occasional tennis ball toss. “I’m going for thirty minutes today.” 

Nancy wished me luck, and I headed for the park. I was determined to progress toward my  SMART goal. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. This kind of objective supposedly has a good chance of success, especially if the Time-Bound element is in the intermediate distance. Quarterly, some recommend, rather than annually or weekly. I was in the mood for a goal that lay a couple of months out. (For a while my post-surgery goals had mostly involved stuff like living through the night and reducing my daily Tylenol doses.) 

My SMART goal was being able to walk outdoors for an hour (specific, measurable) by the end of July (time-bound), so that I could fully participate in a family vacation (relevant). The cardiac rehab folks thought I could do it (achievable). I had eight weeks and was starting from a baseline of twenty-five minutes. Adding five little minutes each week would get me there in plenty of time.   

My feet settled into the rhythms of my playlist. I enjoyed all the things. Leaves on all the trees now, deep green grass, flowers. People out doing garden stuff, walking dogs, backing their cars out of the driveway. I saw Marty walking his cocker spaniel towards his front stoop. We bought Marty’s house when we came to town, and his second house is a block away from our second house. Soon I took the path into the park, which is packed dirt in some places and paved in others. Shady woods and reed beds surrounded the pond, where a swan floated, asleep, its head tucked under a wing. It looked like a piece of cloud had dropped onto the water. Nearby was a V’s worth of Canada geese, awake and making plenty of noise but keeping their distance. A pair of grownups glided towards shore, making the movement look easy, with three goslings paddling along—making it look fun, but effortful.

I had lied a little to Nancy. My true goal was for a longer walk than thirty minutes, even though this week was thirty-minute week. Surely I could do forty, maybe forty-five? I’d gone thirty minutes the last time I was out, including a steepish hill. I wanted to be better than that person. 

I walked to the front end of the park, where there were restrooms, a kids’ playground, and a pavilion, then looped back to the pond. Soon the reeds and tall grasses would make it hard to see, but today I still had a good view of the birds. The geese had moved off the pond surface. The swan raised its head for a couple of seconds and decided to snooze some more. The sun burned hot on my head. The dirt grabbed at my feet. The tunes in my headphones felt a little too fast to walk in time with them. I checked my watch: twenty minutes in. 

I passed the goose family. On shore the goslings were less awkward than in the water. Their parents stood protectively between them and the path. A few yards in front of me a dog and its human turned onto the boardwalk that twisted through the swamp.

Those were the last things I noticed. From the twenty-minute point to to thirty minutes I went into the dark, cool woods, down a wooden ramp to my street, and up the street past houses whose landscaping I normally study for hints on how to arrange annuals in pots. Barely saw ‘em. I reached the first cross street and checked my watch. Thirty minutes. I could stop moving. I steadied myself on a utility pole and pretended to study my phone, as if I were checking an important message, rather than considering calling my husband Dave to drive the fifteen seconds to pick me up. 

Reminding myself that a month before I could walk about fifteen minutes at a time wasn’t as helpful as I wanted, though I tried. It was just as easy to remember that a year ago I was walking eight miles a day in Austria. Or that ten years ago I could run and jump. 

In a couple of minutes my breathing eased, and my calves loosened. My brain began to focus on normal concerns, such as how the goats were doing. Third house down the cross street there are goats. Two or three. They have a little platform that they like to stand on top of and bleat at passersby. I wouldn’t see them today. 

Fast walkers passed, going somewhere. Stupid to be upset; I’d achieved my goal. But I am terribly susceptible to magnum opus-itis. Magnum opus ambitions can lead to Beethoven’s Ninth, and also to the first three chapters of a Great American Novel, gathering dust at the back of a closet.  My compulsion is to make bigger, better numbers, in this case each walk being longer or more intense, until it gets to the point where I can’t keep up. And then…

A lady I see most days passed by, walking in the direction of my house. She was tall, slender, and, as always, wearing beautiful patterned pants. Her pace was regal and restrained. I waited until one house separated us and followed, matching her pace, though not her elegance. Just one hundred steps and then I would stop, if I wanted. And by then I could see my house in the distance, so I kept moving. Left foot, right foot. Clumsy, effortful, got me there.

Reader, it was just an extra five minutes. When I got home I sat down at the patio table. Dave kindly brought me a cold beverage and a hot book. I sipped the drink and flipped the pages and tried to parse why it’s so hard to take the advice to compare who you are today with who you were yesterday or last week. It makes me feel as though I’m constantly one-upping myself, and who enjoys being one-upped? Maybe I’ve regressed for a bit, goose to gosling. Who knows? Sip, flip; sip, flip…enjoy, and try again tomorrow.  

Rehab

I was nervous as I pushed through the steel double doors that led to the Cardiac Rehabilitation Center. They were the kind of doors behind which there might be a lady or a tiger. Instead there was a lobby, and another door, with a glass panel this time. I peeked in. A desk, lots of electronics. Treadmills, stationary bikes, and a couple of other kinds of exercise machines. A rack of dumbbells. People using this equipment, moving their arms and legs in rhythm with the oldies hits on the sound system. There were mirrors on some of the walls, posters on others, and one wall that was mostly windows looking out on the street. 

During my 20s and 30s, up until around the time I gave birth and became very, very busy, I was a gym rat and then, eventually, an exercise instructor. Like music gigs, my fitness gigs had me bopping all over town. I taught in big brand-name gyms with flashing disco lights and music that shook the floor; on college basketball courts; in small, ritzy clubs with white fluffy towels and pitchers of cucumber water; and in neighborhood gyms with lots of weight-lifting equipment and a tiny bit of floor for aerobics classes. I liked them all. I was never a night club person—too wary, too shy. But gyms!  Gyms were full of light and sound and so many different kinds of people, all sweating away. 

The cardiac rehab area was reminiscent of a neighborhood gym, so I felt instantly happy and at home. Home, for me, has never been tied to a single location. Even the question where are you from? is hard for me to answer.  I moved around a lot as a kid and never developed a sentimental attachment to our succession of dwellings: relatives’ houses, mobile homes, apartments, and houses. Still, I wanted to connect with the feelings of homesickness and being attached to a place in my favorite stories. No luck. (With, as it turned out, one exception: the smell of May in Richmond. Somehow the magnolias and honeysuckle got into my nervous system: this is Spring. I didn’t figure this out until I visited in May with my 15-year-old son.) 

I made home, in the longing-and-belonging sense, from the objects that gave me comfort. The piano. My folding stand and clarinet, a glow-in-the-dark Jesus, my shelf of nature guides and mystery and fantasy novels. The works I sneaked out of my mother’s glass-fronted bookcase filled with Literature. The stuffed animals on my bunk bed. 

Later, perhaps autistically, I extended that concept into most spaces that felt familiar and comfortable. I wanted a home, bad. Libraries, rehearsal rooms, classrooms, and eventually gyms, along with their markers. Manhasset stands and music folders. Stacks and study carrels. Chalkboards and desks. Exercise equipment and locker rooms. Things that reassured me that I was in a place with clear behavior protocols and the opportunity to make connections in my favorite way—slowly and side by side. 

Therefore the exercise equipment and locker rooms of the rehab area made me eager to get started. It helped that I was tired of moving carefully and never pushing too hard. (At least after the first couple of weeks, when it had taken every ounce of strength to get from a bed to a chair, from the chair to the dresser.) When the cardiologist told me I was ready for rehab, apologies to Amy Winehouse, I said, a-yes, yes, yes.  

The cardiac rehab people are very cautious at the start. There’s a little box with wires and electrodes to track your heart rate. There are therapists and nurses to check your blood pressure and to make sure you know how to use the machines. The exercises are short and simple. Five minutes on the bike. Eight minutes on the treadmill. Five minutes on the recumbent stair-stepper. Five minutes on the ergometer for people whose breastbones aren’t still knitting back together (so: not me at the moment). Strength exercises with light weights. There are even people around who come and make small-talk with you to keep you feeling welcome and to make sure you’re not baffled by the equipment controls or working too hard. 

I was sweating. Not too much, I figured. But it was such a relief to be able to push some and assume, given the location and personnel, that I wasn’t going to die in the attempt. (At least probably not.) I’d been out of the hospital for almost two months, but it was only about a week since I hadn’t gone to bed most nights afraid that I’d lay me down to sleep and never wake up. I was so tired of being careful…Five minutes a machine was safe enough to dig in with my legs. A little. Not like I used to do, going to the edge of collapse and feeling crazy good. 

That restrained push tanked my blood pressure a bit. I had to take a two-hour nap afterwards, but I was still happy. The muscles in my legs felt tired and seemed happier about being inside my body than of late. Home: it’s anywhere and everywhere. I find it all the time these days. 

On the Subway

Audio version with some added thoughts

I’ve often envied people who who are able to raise their voices. One time, at Walmart, I was in line at the cash register. In front of me stood a pair of customers—a man and woman, clearly newly in love, their cart loaded well beyond its capacity—who disputed the price of every item and then used six separate cards to pay the bill, still running about one hundred dollars short. This in turned sparked a long discussion about which items to take off the cart. Oh, we can’t put back that cute li’l robe, sweetie! she pleaded, her hand buried in his front jeans pocket. I berated myself for not going to the self checkout, rolled my eyes, and worried about the ice cream melting in my basket. But I said nothing. Finally the customer behind me suggested, loudly, to the cashier that it was time to call a manager so that the troublesome duo’s transaction could be put in limbo or another register opened. The rest of us wanted to make it home by dinner time. She spoke clearly and confidently for the line. We nodded our heads and murmured our agreement. I was glad that not everyone’s default is apology and fear of complaining. I thought about talking to her, maybe about what flavor of ice cream was melting in her cart, but the words stuck in my throat. Instead I shuffled my feet in a grateful manner. 

Starting such a conversation would take a lot, however, since experience has made me aware of the risks. I grew up in Virginia, where we smiled and said hi to everyone. My move to Chicago for college quickly broke me of this habit. It was the 1980s, when President Reagan’s callous policies threw a lot of people with mental illness and substance problems out of inpatient care. The streets, buses, and subway cars had folks who were more in their own heads than the rest of us. Some of them communicated their visions forcefully. Even a brief interaction could go sideways in a hurry. One Saturday morning, around 10:30, on a busy street, a stranger said hello to me, reminded me that I was his girlfriend, and told me that I’d betrayed him. Then he punched me in the face and tried to push me into traffic.

I eventually moved to the sedate Boston suburbs and used public transportation infrequently for years. My biggest concern when I’d take the train into the city was usually how much more the car rattled and shook on the tracks than I remembered. The other day I rode the subway for the first time in about six months in order to get to a doctor’s appointment. As is true of many of my recent experiences, I found myself noticing things I’d taken for granted with extra interest and intensity. Braintree Station, the lower level a sussurus of conversations, Charlie card beeps,  and gates swishing open and shut. The long escalator ride up to the platform. The joy of seeing a waiting subway car, its motor idling, and the snick of its doors sliding open. I waited politely just to the side of the doors, then scurried inside. The platform was windy and chilly, but mostly I wanted to grab my favorite seat, a forward-facing one at the end of the car, near the extra space for a wheelchair. In the car’s center the seats face one another, with a large empty aisle in between, so that the riders see the scenery going sideways and wind up staring at one another, neither of which do I like. 

I’d only seen a wheelchair rider once or twice in my years of subway trips, but as the departure bell sounded a woman pushing a wheelchair and pulling a small suitcase entered the car. Not surprisingly, she headed for the seats near me. The wheelchair was loaded with blankets and a cushion and clothes. She locked the wheels, then unlocked them to move the chair a few inches to the left. Then she dragged the chair to the other side of the aisle and placed the suitcase beside it. Then behind it. Then she moved the chair in front of the door between the cars. As she adjusted positions she spoke softly. 

I often talk to inanimate objects as well as myself, but it wasn’t clear this was what she was doing. All that was certain was that she couldn’t get her gear into a satisfactory position. Her speech became louder and more annoyed-sounding.

I stood and moved to another part of the car, walking as casually as possible. This left me in one of the side-facing seats, but I had a paperback thriller to occupy me and keep me from locking gazes with the other passengers. I told myself I was just being considerate, giving the loud lady some room, but that was a lie. I was wary and hoping to avoid trouble.

The ride from Braintree to the Park Street station in downtown Boston was smoother and slower than it used to be. What had been a forty-minute journey took close to an hour. Throughout the ride, the lady spoke. She enjoined, exclaimed, and expostulated, not addresing —at first—us passengers. Maybe the comments were aimed toward her chair, or herself, or a memory. Louder and louder. For the rest of the train ride, until Park Street—my stop and as it turned out, the lady’s—we endured the seconds as they turned into minutes, then into quarter hours. I tried to lose myself in my book. The loud lady eventually turned her attention to us, accusing us of wiretapping her and ordering us to stop NOW!

You’d think I’d congratulate myself on having moved away, but I felt regretful. I wondered what would have happened if I’d started a conversation with her or offered to help her with the  chair. I was surprised and confused by this reaction. I remembered my father-in-law coming out of anesthesia, still goofy, talking about the CIA being after him, which was interesting. Also a brief, unpleasant experience with Ativan during my own hospitalization. Ativan is an anti-anxiety medication that’s now on my allergies list. I had what’s called a paradoxical reaction, which happens more often than I’d like with meds. That is, I felt more anxious, not less, and for a while I couldn’t quite figure out what year it was. The urge to communicate…something…was strong. What that something was, I can’t remember. But it felt urgent at the time.

The lady at Walmart got immediate approval for speaking up. We appreciated her comments. And they were effective: a manager appeared and opened another checkout lane, and we all decamped to it. 

 Moving away from the noisy lady was the sensible thing to do. I’m still on the frail side and not sure that at the moment I’d have the reflexes to dodge a punch in the face or a shove. Still, I kind of wish I’d been brave, or reckless, enough to have a conversation with her. It must be maddening to shout your truth to a subway car’s worth of people who react as if your volume is dialed down to zero. No one looking at you or replying—do you exist?

Makes perfect

Audio version with extras here!

My husband Dave parked in front of the church. I was happy to see that the front door was wide open. One of my post-operative restrictions, of which there are quite a few, is to avoid lifting more than 10 pounds, which at the last minute was explained to me as 10 pounds, both arms, not each arm; per arm it’s about five pounds. The front door—one of a pair that fill in an arch—is solid wood with iron bands, oversized, and tends to stick. I maneuvered out of the back seat (no sitting in a vehicle’s front seat for a month, for airbag-avoidance reasons), while Dave ran up the stone stairs (I’m not supposed to hop up staircases, either) and opened the interior door, which isn’t as heavy as the first but is still substantial. 

The church’s interior was beyond familiar, but it struck me almost as sharply as it had when I’d come for my audition three years before. Thick patterned rugs in the vestibule, creaky floors, dark wood, a long table stocked with cups, coffee urns and flowers, sage green carpet in the back halls, photographs of clergy covering the walls, and drips of candle wax all over the place. 

I headed to the choir vesting room, happy to be back. 

The postop restriction that I like the least is a prohibition on playing/practicing musical instruments for a couple of months. Once the ban expires, I’m going to need practice, lots of it. I canceled my instrumental performing engagements for the spring when it became clear I’d need a big surgery.  Practice is essential to get me ready to play again. Besides which, without checking in with my instruments I feel…weird. I haven’t taken that much time off of them since I was five years old. 

I’m no saint when it comes to practicing. Musicians stress its importance; so do people in a lot of other professions. I wholeheartedly agree—in theory. Publilius Syrus, a Roman writer who had a knack for turning a phrase, wrote “Practice is the best of all instructors.” Sure, that’s true. 

Still, I remember a conversation that I had during my teenage years with someone’s mom. She said, “My boy would practice even if he didn’t have anywhere to play. Just him and the piano. I’m sure you’re like that, too.” 

Nope! I felt guilty about it for years, but that person, motivated by sheer love to master an instrument, wasn’t me. Without other musicians to play with, or an audience to play for, the younger me would have dropped practice in a heartbeat.  It took a long while to appreciate the beauty of technical exercises, the scales and long tones and etudes done with the  metronome clicking in the background. The kind of thing band directors wanted us students to document on our practice cards. 

I wanted to spend my time playing my favorite songs, the ones I’d already mastered, and also the hard parts in my music that annoyed me by being just out of reach. I hoped that my fingers would somehow master scales and other building blocks without much work. Therefore I lied weekly on my practice cards from the fifth to the twelfth grades, and my mother—who must have known that I was lying, but who had her own ambivalent history with practicing—signed them without protest or inquiry. 

I’ll admit I felt a little worried by the no-instruments restriction. It’s taken a lot of experience and years to get myself into a proper practicing habit. I worried that various stuff would start going sour. I once read a guide that insisted that practicing regularly would lead to lots of other things going right with my life. That turned out to be true, although I was biased in favor of finding the truth. It turns out that bumping to the edge of my abilities and then trying again the next day is a good thing.

 I’m lucky to have my voice as an instrument. I’d croaked through some warmups earlier in the week and arranged Maundy Thursday (a Holy Week service involving foot-washing) as my return to choir. My voice was still a bit froggy and soft, but the notes were there, nonetheless. People said hi, glad to see you. The warmup started. The music wrapped around me like a  heated blanket. For the next hour I cherished the pew beneath me, the sitting and standing, the sound of the pitch pipe, the scent of wax, the scratchy choir robe, and the notes on the page. 

 Charlie Parker said, “You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then you practice practice practice…then when you get up on the bandstand forget all that and just wail.” And that’s exactly what I did, wailing these ancient songs until the lights were dimmed and the candles snuffed. 

…distraction…

Now with video!

I was about three-quarters of the way to work on Sunday morning when I saw him. Fort Hill Street was unusually quiet, with little action around the CVS, the Dunkin’ Donuts shop, or the commuter rail station. So maybe I was a little bored, in search of a distraction, as I came to the residential section. The man was round-faced, with curly brown hair and a beard, and he was wearing two tan bath towels—and nothing else. He was barefoot. One hand clutched a car key, while the other held the towels in position. (Barely.) It was a chilly 25 degrees Fahrenheit…

(He reminded me of a painting, one of those allegorical or historical ones of biblical scenes or ancient Greeks and Romans. Pictures where the garments—himations, togas, etc.—seem held together solely with big clumpy knots. No buttons, belts, or seams. The knots tend to look iffy. It may be just my imagination, but it often seems that the characters are clutching at their clothing for fear it will tumble earthward at any moment.

My personal experience with bath towels may have have influenced this interpretation. I’m terrible at fastening terrycloth. No matter how firm the knot, the towel slides off the second I turn on the blowdryer to do my hair. I’d blame my soft surfaces except that many a towel of my acquaintance has also made its way off of a hard-edged chair or hook.)

 …anyhow, on sight of the man my mind went into a frenzy of speculation. Medication left in the car? Wife threw him out after discovering he’d used up her favorite shampoo? Friend called needing an emergency pick-up? Lost a bet? Driven to the wilderness by the geas of his god? 

Distraction is often positioned as a moral failing, a weakness, as in Australian philosopher Damon Young’s definition: “distraction is chiefly an inability to identify, attend to or attain what is valuable.” The condescension in those 14 words makes me want to stop writing this and doom-scroll for an hour. Although I don’t. It stings especially because I have been feeling particularly distracted lately. Not as much by the usual stuff, the screens and chocolates and fun books, but by the things that I encounter on routine journeys. People, animals, clouds, and other mundane sights. Has that branch always hung that low? Why leave lawnchairs in the snow? How does the afternoon sun make the obnoxious yellow house pretty? Who was that prophet in two towels?

Sunday morning, five-sixths of the way to church: I kept theorizing, trying to tighten the prophet plot. Then I hit a curve too fast and had to force my attention onto the road. I was lucky that Sunday morning traffic was so light. 

I wondered whether my distractibility was helping or hurting. There’s a less damning take on the issue from Jud Brewer, who is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Brown University. Brewer’s article “Are You Stuck in the Anxiety-Distraction Feedback Loop?” explains that to cope with anxiety, the brain pursues distractions. The cycle goes Anxiety Trigger, Distraction Behavior, and Reward. The Reward is relief from the anxiety. The problem, as we all discover, and as happened when I tried to chocolate-cake myself through Covid and fascism, etc., is that the relief tends to be short-lived, becomes progressively less satisfying, and can have pernicious side effects.

I let the prophet back into my thoughts during the Sunday sermon. When I was a kid, I was often subject to a post-sermon quiz to make sure I’d paid proper attention. It’s therefore a treat, as an adult, to let my mind wander. If I pay too much much attention I start arguing with the speaker’s points or delivery, which it makes it harder to perform my Sunday morning work of singing with accuracy and enthusiasm. I listened enough to understand that the priest was going on about the prophet John the Baptist. My mind wandered to my surroundings (stained glass and carved wood and organ pipes, fun fun fun) and the man in the towels. He’d looked vaguely like a figure in Stained Glass Window #4, although that guy’s robe was green and covered considerably more of his skin.

Intellectually I know that the world is not trying to tell me anything, but it’s still absorbing to try to make connections. Religious writer Jon Bloom has a point: “When we are regularly distracted by something, we need to take note. Our attention often runs to what’s important to us.” Maybe the message is that I’m spending too much time focused inward. Or maybe that I need more interesting entries in my writing journal.

A couple of days later I edged past a parked fire truck with its lights flashing, and an ambulance. The ambulance crew was pushing a stretcher with a white-haired woman wrapped in a white blanket. Her pale hands were folded in her lap.  Two houses farther down was a U-Haul truck with its bay open. There were boxes and a stepladder and tools inside, and also something big, shapeless, and powder blue that fell suddenly onto the road. A tarp or a covering of some sort, I assumed, but then there was a gust of wind and the blob moved. I thought it would blow into my lane, and maybe I’d have to dodge it, but it turned out to be a man in a blue jumpsuit. He picked himself up and leaned against the truck bed, favoring one leg. Lucky for him, in a way, that there were emergency personnel next door, if it turned out that he’d damaged himself.

Jud Brewer’s recommendation is that people not beat themselves up for being distracted.  Instead, we should look for the Bigger Better Offer. In other words, experiment with behaviors that have a better long-run payoff than chocolate cake. For me that’s a tall order, but it sounds worth exploring. 

On the way to Thursday night’s choir rehearsal I slowed down near where I’d seen the man. It was already dark, with the streetlights set to gently glow rather than illuminate. There was no sign of him. 

My image of a prophet, like the picture at the top of the blog*, is messy hair, beard, sandals, a robe, an angry face, and a message. The towel dude had the hair, the beard, and the garments, but not the sandals, and not the angry face. Or it didn’t seem so. His had been the face of a person barefoot in 25-degree weather. As for the message, as far as I could tell it was something born of realizing that he wasn’t outfitted or equipped for his journey, but he’d have to muddle through somehow.  

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* New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Master of the Dinteville Allegory, Netherlandish/French, 1537; the scene is of Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh

Of Dreams and Dragonflies

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In my dream I hit Tony with a metal folding chair in a church parking lot. That got me out of bed a half hour before the alarm. What was my brain trying to tell me? Just outside the bedroom is the upstairs landing. The twelve stairs to the ground floor curve at the top and curve at the bottom, with a straight stretch in the middle. I stopped at the first curve, where there’s a window, because a big dragonfly was resting on the window screen. The sight of it hit like a shot of espresso. A slender body, three or four inches long, and wings to match. Its legs were hooked into the screen, so my view was of its underbelly.The wings looked like stained glass on a cloudy day, a translucent gray with gold patches at the tips. I got as close as I dared, my nose at the level of the dragonfly’s head. Although the head was mostly eyes, the thing didn’t startle.

I swear that I was simply manuevering the chair over a low wooden fence. Either I didn’t realize how close Tony was to it or he stepped nose-first into the swing. I haven’t seen Tony in person for forever, since sometime in 2019. He’s the leader of my old a cappella group, a perfectly congenial dude. We’re still Facebook friends; over the weekend he posted pictures from his oldest son’s college graduation. Maybe that’s why my brain conjured him up. Why it decided to attack him, I haven’t a clue.

Just a couple of days back I’d managed to bang my sunglasses into the driver’s side visor as I got into my car. This caused brief, but extreme, pain at the bridge of my nose. I therefore had a clear idea of what I done to poor Dream Tony. Hands clapped to his face, he refused to accept my apology or my offers to go for ice or medical assistance. Waking I cause annoyance mostly to myself (or so I hope); sleeping I cause annoyance to others. What’s going on there?

Explaining never gets me anywhere good, but Dream Me feels compelled to try, nevertheless. I told Tony that I’d been having difficulty seeing how far away people or things were. This might have been a truth in the world of the dream; in real life my depth perception is normal. On a couple of occasions recently I’ve had a hard time dodging people appropriately, but this happens when you visit the grocery store early in the morning, when employees are stocking the shelves.

Dragonflies can see almost 360 degrees around them. They also have excellent depth perception; they have to, as they catch their prey (mosquitos and other insects) and eat and mate all while flying. They can also hover, fly backwards, forwards, up and down, pretty much in every direction, at dizzying speeds. They’re amazing creatures.

Dream Tony seemed inclined to explore my visual difficulties, which may be why I woke up when I did. I can make up stuff for fiction but am not good at embroidering lies tete-a-tete. Was my brain trying to tell me I’m not seeing something straight? A warning that one is being deceived turns out to be one of the meanings imputed to seeing a dragonfly, according to Google. I didn’t care for that one, preferring the much more common view of a dragonfly as a sign of transformation and one’s luck changing for the better.

Transformation meanings are often assigned to metamorphosing creatures like butterflies and dragonflies. Both start their lives as homely larvae and end them as winged beauties. In the larval stage dragonflies are called nymphs. Not to be confused with the toothsome female nature spirits pursued by gods and heroes. Dragonfly nymphs are fearsome and hungry and aquatic. They have serrated teeth (the dragonfly belongs to the order Odonata, which means “toothed one”) and can unhinge their jaws and snap up whatever water life is passing by, including fish, other insects, and the occasional sibling. These apex predator skills have helped dragonflies survive for 300 million years, albeit in smaller form. The Paleozoic dragonflies  had wingspans of up to two feet, compared to the typical two to five inches of today.

The larval stage lasts through multiple moltings and can take a couple of years, or even longer in cooler climates. At the final molt, the exoskeleton opens and the dragonfly’s long abdomen unfurls. Its wings emerge, dry, and harden, and in a few hours it’s ready to fly. The final stage, the mating and egg-depositing one, is the briefest, often just a few weeks long. I was glad to learn that some dragonflies live for up to a year. This made me feel better because calculations on the other figure made me something like 244 dragonflies old, which seemed a little much.

I went upstairs and downstairs several times in the next hour as I got ready for my day proper, drinking coffee and catching up on the news, all the things. I photographed the dragonfly, fogged the glass near it with my breath, and even jokingly offered to name it Tony. No response. When I got back from my morning walk it was gone. No matter what it was trying to tell me, I hope that it will live a long and happy life, and that it may feast on many a mosquito during that lifetime.

Haunted

Especially when the October wind

With frosty fingers punishes my hair, 

Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire 

And cast a shadow crab upon the land. 

                                      —Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems 

Until a couple of days ago we’d been having quite a temperate October. The trees were turning amusing colors, and most mornings there were more leaves on the ground, but there’d been no  need for anything more than a light jacket. Then I left book club on Wednesday night–we meet at a restaurant–and it was cold and windy.

“Bring a sweater!” Connie, Choir Director, email, Thursday afternoon

Something was wrong with the heat at St. Pete’s on Thursday. Since the choir rehearses in a room the size of a barn which is a bit chilly on a good day, a sweater would be a good idea. The parking lot was cold, windy, and dark. The only illumination came from the orange fairy lights outlining a sign over the entrance of the “Not Too Spooky Haunted House” for kids that St. Pete’s runs every October. The narrow, steep set of steps descending to a heavy door sure looked spooky to me. I shivered a little as I passed.

That wintry hint in the October breeze was still in my mind this morning, Friday, when I read the opening lines of Thomas’ poem. I’m not far into the Collected Poems yet, and I’m hoping I’ll start to catch on better to Thomas’ style eventually. The autism in my brain has accidentally cemented reading a couple of poems aloud into a morning routine and strongly suggests that I tackle my accumulated poetry collection one book at a time. There have been benefits. I can immerse myself in a single writer’s voice, and also it lessens the guilt I feel when, toting a laundry basket, I pass the bookcase whose contents consist of shrink-wrapped board games and worthy books that I should have read all the way through but haven’t. I’ve checked off Keats and Herrick and moved on to Thomas.

His poems are tougher than I anticipated, adding a frisson of fear to my morning reading. What if I don’t understand this poem? What if I can’t understand this poem? His pieces bring back memories of the star students in the poetry workshops of my past. I did quite a few workshops but never quite got the knack of writing anything that sounded like a real poem— dense, word-drunk, allusive, with subtle points that could only be understood after much reflection and analysis.

One time I came near to achieving something approaching this style through a writing exercise that involved taking a line from a real poet’s poem and manipulating it by using antonyms, changing the word order, etc., and then working from that first line. This technique produced something that sounded like a poem, although I had no idea what it meant. In workshop the teacher liked it, and so did most of the other students, who enthusiastically explained my composition to me. (The best poet in the class didn’t like it—he said he couldn’t make heads or tails of it; he was probably right.)

Thursday evening, most of the choir members wore sweaters. This was handy because after rehearsal we got to tour the haunted house. Five rooms, one ghost, one witch, a trio of singing jack o’ lanterns, an old-fashioned TV in a cabinet, Pirates of the Caribbean, and skeletons galore. We chanted as instructed to urge a ghost to appear. That was the most fun. Repeating short phrases, not thinking about them too hard. I think Dylan Thomas would have enjoyed chanting also. While a child he fell in love with the words of Mother Goose nursery rhymes as “words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance,” he recalled. As an actor, he’d probably have enjoyed playing one of the pirates, or a wizard.

Haunted houses have never been my thing; I usually find them overwhelming and confusing. (Scary movies have never been my thing, either: one horror film can give me a year’s worth of nightmares.) Maybe some of the issue is not being being exposed enough to these situations. The fundie churches of my childhood, generally suspicious of Halloween, didn’t host haunted houses. But surprisingly, I enjoyed the not-too-spooky house, especially the last bit.

In the final room we were given novelty spectacles that made the walls seem covered with floating, twinkling jack o’ lanterns. I loved the nonsense of it. It occurred to me while I was reading today’s selection that requiring that Thomas’s poems make 100% sense might not be the point. So I read without trying to stop and analyze and found my favorite so far. It was like my first time at the ocean, when I stepped into the water and realized the waves would never stop. A little bit frightening, but a bigger bit thrilling.

Here’s how the Thomas ends: 

The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry

Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.

By the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

News fit to print

Sometimes the morning news brings me up short. “Amazon is closing down five warehouses in Massachusetts—in X, X, X, my town, and X.” An Amazon spokesperson told Channel 4 that the closures were in order to renovate and modernize the facilities. That seemed…odd…in my town’s case, since our Amazon warehouse has been operating for barely a year. Guess the technology’s moving extra quick these days. Or something.

Renovations can be fun, as long as the dust, mess, and expense aren’t my own. I’m especially interested in the view from the street. The house next door transformed from butter yellow to cornflower blue, while the house kitty-corner to us went from navy blue to tan with Tudor windows. Since July I’ve been watching the renovation of the Sleeping Beauty house. This house has stood empty for the entirety of our 15 years living here. It’s a split level single family dwelling from the late 1960s with white siding on the upper left, gray on the upper right, and a stone facade along the bottom. More aesthetically pleasing than the description implies. There are bushes lining the brick walk to the front door and more bushes in the front garden.

Neighbor Nancy, who knows everything and everyone, told me that the house’s owner had moved to Florida, years and years ago, but hadn’t sold the property. Snowbird, I thought, and expected lights and people during the summers or around Thanksgiving and Christmas. But the lights stayed off. The only people I saw on the property were neighborhood kids shooting hoops in the driveway. The place always seemed dormant rather than deserted, almost as if time had frozen inside, so I thought of it as the Sleeping Beauty house. I liked the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty, which I saw when I was a kid, with its singing, silly fairy godmothers.

There was no sleeping at the Amazon warehouse, an ugly building which operated 24/7. Research indicated that the spokesperson had been a teeny bit disingenuous in characterizing Amazon’s plans for the facility in our town. There was no intention to reopen it. I had never quite understood why Amazon set it up in the first place, given that there’s another Amazon warehouse less than a quarter of a mile away. A C-suite executive recently admitted that Amazon thought the extra business spurred by the pandemic would be permanent, so it over-expanded. In the turbulent November of 2020, I suppose it was simple to convince the town council that this was a fabulous idea. Think of the construction jobs that would result from this $10 million project! Think of the jobs with benefits—upwards of 100, maybe even 200—that would be added to the local economy!  Nine-to-zero the councilors said sure, go ahead. So Amazon laid out more than $40 million to buy the property and evicted the two stores who’d been tenants for years, Bob’s and Ocean State Job Lot. 

 I was a semi-regular customer at both of those stores. Bob’s had a nice selection of athletic and casual shoes and clothing. Ocean State was not particularly scenic, but it was great for items like solar lights and garden ornaments. Those of us not in the know wondered mightily, once the chainlink fence went up around the perimeters, what might be replacing them. To hear that it would be Amazon was a deep disappointment. I rarely buy anything through Amazon, as I like to get the actual product I ordered rather than a knockoff or no product at all, and I hate what Amazon has done to the book business. And my town’s streets already have enough potholes in them without big trucks making more. Ah well.

It was better than letting the lot go to seed, I suppose. That had started to happen at the Sleeping Beauty house over the past year. A lawn service cut the grass but no longer trimmed the bushes or whacked the weeds. The bushes, especially, spread upwards and outwards, blocking the windows and overgrowing the walkway. It looked to me as though the greenery was trying to hide and protect the house, like the ring of thorns and brambles in Sleeping Beauty.

It’s been busy at the Sleeping Beauty house. Last month the roof was replaced. A few days ago workers took out the front door and windows. The interior of the home has been gutted. I took a peek inside and saw what looked to be the original carpet on the staircase. Vertical stripes in salmon pink, black, brown, and gray, even less aesthetically pleasing than the description implies. Meanwhile landscapers have chopped all of the bushes, dug up the stumps and roots, and whacked the weeds.

 I’m not sure that things will go well for the Amazon warehouse employees. The spokesliar claimed that every employee of the five shuttered warehouses will be offered a job at another Amazon facility, some as close as seven miles away. Guess that means that there aren’t any vacancies at the warehouse down the street. Who knows what’ll happen to the building itself, whether Amazon will be whistling after that $50 million or make a tidy profit somehow.

The Sleeping Beauty yard looks dusty and forlorn at the moment, but the landscapers aren’t done. New bushes are probably on their way. I wonder if the new owners will stick with the white and gray color scheme for the home’s exterior. Have to wait and see! By year’s end, I expect, the house will be filled with lights and people. I suddenly realize that I’ll need to rename the house run my head. The legend is no help: fairy tales end where the story gets tangled and complicated. What’s the princess calling herself now? Briar Rose, Aurora, something else? A morning thought that brings me up short (and which Channel 4 news will not report).

Boosted, part deux

There were Three…

The Shaw’s Plaza in our town—to distinguish it from the Shaw’s Plazas in various other towns in Massachusetts, of which there are many—has had a tough time of it for a while. When we first moved here, 23 years ago, there wasn’t an empty spot in the eight-store strip. The crash of 2007 took a slow, steady toll over the next decade. FashionBug, Papa Gino’s, Rite-Aid, Dress Barn, Dots, and a couple of hole-in-the-wall food joints have closed their doors. The grocery store remains, along with a Vietnamese restaurant, a shipping store, an athletic clothing store, and a bank. Three empty storefronts. The sight makes me a little sad whenever I visit, which is at least once a week, most weeks.

I miss Rite-Aid the most. Back when this drugstore was called Osco I bought some novelty coffee cups and soup bowls for two dollars each. Bright colors inside and out, with expressive faces painted on them. Happy, sad, grumpy, bored, sick, perplexed, amused. They would show up in the center aisle displays every once in a while. Sonny loved them, and so did I. I would pick up one or two at a time and planned to add to our collection slowly but steadily, since each restock featured new designs. Of course we broke almost all of them over the years, with just a couple of soup bowls remaining. Rite-Aid seemed to have discontinued the line, but I was always a little hopeful that I’d find some tucked away.

Then there were Two…

At the beginning of the summer of 2022 the Public Health Department turned one storefront into a clinic. A sign outside said “walk-ins welcome,” so I entered. Receptionist, registrar, and three nurses; I was the lone customer. I asked for the Pfizer booster, and less than ten minutes later my arm was being swabbed. Quite a difference from Covid shots #1 and 2!

Way, way back in the spring of 2021 it took nearly a week just to book an appointment for my Johnson & Johnson shot. A month later I visited the drive-through clinic at the rec center. I arrived as instructed, exactly 10 minutes before my appointment time, to find a line of cars that stretched at least a quarter of a mile, with police directing the traffic and answering questions. It took 45 minutes to travel the two blocks into the clinic proper, which was several stations set up under a big white tent. I rolled down my car window and rolled up my sleeve. After the jab one of the attendants directed me to a lane in the big parking lot behind the ice hockey rink, where I listened to NPR for about 25 minutes, shivering—we were supposed to keep the windows cracked, and it was a cold April day—until my lane was released into the wilds of traffic.

The nurse at the Shaw’s Plaza clinic asked the customary screening questions about drug allergies, heart conditions, and whether I’d had Covid recently. She offered free take-home tests, which I declined, as we have seven boxes of them following my husband Dave’s bout of the illness. (He’s fine, fortunately!) She also offered me some post-shot tips.

The tips were new to me. It’s probable that some of this information was included in the small-type paperwork I got with my other shots, but I hadn’t exactly studied it. My reactions to the J&J injections had been a slightly aggravated tendency to nap and a little stinging in my arm. My J&J booster shot was also at the rec center’s outdoor clinic, on a November day about as cold and damp as the April day had been, but it was significantly faster with only about 10 cars in the lot rather than dozens.

The nurse recommended that I take it easy for the rest of the day, wave my arm around a lot so it wouldn’t get as sore, and drink lots of water. The needle part was quick. She stuck a bandage on my arm and walked me to the recovery area for my 15 minutes of observation, pointing me to the table with free snacks and water bottles and various health leaflets.

As I waited for the clock’s display to reach 9:05, I wondered about one of the nurse’s tips. She’d said that lots of water would “help circulate the medicine through [my] system.” I googled. Apparently she was referring to circulation of the antibodies the body produces in response to the vax, as the circulatory system works better when the body is well hydrated.  I still had 10 minutes, so I looked up the word “booster.” In North America in the 1800s, this term started to denote people who enthusiastically promote and support their town, Birdsburg, say (for any Wodehouse fans reading), or their athletic team, or, as it’s still used in my town today, their band or drama program. I closed my eyes and pictured rah-rah antibodies brimming with arterial energy, visiting every organ, shaking hands with dignitaries and promising that Jean is truly an up-and-coming concern, yessiree!

Then there was One…

At 9:06 I left the clinic and visited Shaw’s for a cookie and a little bouquet. The bouquet was comprised of daisies dyed purple, pink, orange, and red. Sunset colors. On the way back to the car, waving my arm like I was conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, I noticed that a martial arts studio had opened next to the Pho restaurant. An apartment complex being built across the street, almost finished, except for the balconies, will probably provide lots of potential customers for the Plaza stores. As it turned out, all of my arm waving didn’t seem to help much. As the hours passed the arm got pretty sore. I took it easy, drank water, and imagined Shaw’s Plaza with no empty storefronts.