While waiting for something to happen today, I ate a half-pound of cheese.
If I could write you a love song,
something I made from all that’s passed
and gone, something that speaks our language
now, that lies in the center
of a fingernail. It’s the wanting
to be contained, to be held in
by some shape, to live
in the center of wherever the fuck we are
immobile and inside.
Something I could know the name of, and
call the name of, and by calling its name bring
into being.
It’s too hard
to chase the seams as they’re ripping, even if only
to watch, like you were a farmer walking
the fences of the pasture.
Something going before you like a tornado
over the horizon. I want to write
the poem that will save our lives,
the song that will save our loves, something
mentioning the goodwill of God
and the depth of suffering,
mentioning like the cleaving of soul
and spirit. A mention
gentle, sharper than any honed edge.
I left JP’s this morning in the cold clear blue, sunlight glancing off the snow like arrows. I’m caring for her three nights a week for several weeks and this means staying in her guest bedroom, filling up her insulin syringe, coming like a shot when she calls in the night, listening mostly to her self-deprecating humor, unselfconscious wisdom. This woman is becoming dear to me, and when I told her that I was going to show proof of (decreased) income to Interfaith today, hoping they wouldn’t kick me out of the program, she said ok, oh honey I know that’s hard stuff, I’ll pray for you today I really will. When I got to Interfaith and handed over the two Ackermann check stubs and the copies of the two most recent G checks, the lady told me that I still qualified … by three bucks. I make $503 a month, now. You can’t make less than $500/mo. to stay in the program. This change of income had been a worry, but a small one, since I haven’t had room to doubt, these past months, that I’m going to make it. That my finances are going to make it, my body is going to make it, that I’m going to make it. After this I pulled into the Regions parking lot and waited with the other riffraff for the bank to open, deposited checks, and drove home under this sky, the cold clear blue.
I’ve forgotten what it was like to ponder death, or the unexpected. But unexpectedly I keep my insurance, unexpectedly I make so much money that I can think about spending it (instead of paying it), unexpectedly I’m friends with an eighty-year-old woman who takes Darvocet (my old friend!) and is slowly leaving life, whose life has been larger than I can ever understand, who told me tonight after I put her to bed that she loved me.
My life has changed so much in a year. Of course, the only thing about life that you can be sure of is that you never know what will happen, and letting go of what’s passing (I could call this “growing up”) and trying to not be afraid of what may be coming … is a new way to live, for me. The uncertainty of cancer & recurrence is like the uncertainty of relationships, all their inexplicable webs of pain and the inexplicable entrance of forgiveness, which in turn is like the uncertainty of bonds, to places or people or whatnot. I’m thinking about all this. How I never thought I’d get cancer, never thought I’d leave East Tennessee again, never thought anybody would stick around long enough to thank me “for being fragile,” and when I said “why the f-ing hell would you be thankful for that,” to say “I love you.” He said that. As if fragility had honor, as if I had honor.
After a lot of thought, today, I’ve decided I’m up for it. I know — the recklessness of it — but today I’m up for life. Which means of course, I’m up for suffering. I’m up for learning to be as patient as JP with the length of life. Since it is so very long, so long, so long. This after watching the mourning doves crowding the seed/breadcrumbs/wildlife feast the neighbors left out this morning. The towhee came back, too, isn’t it strange? No sparrows or titmice or chickadees? Just the doves, the towhee, and a female cardinal. Anyways sorry blah blah, but they milled around with the snow sparkling around them while I read about the older brother in the Prodigal Son story, I watched them and thought about my total frustration with my lack of fatted calf party, my reluctance to believe that I have the sort of honor that would make God say to me “you are always with me.” Somehow I am with God and He is bringing so much change to me. Humbling me & stuff. Which, as Mom said, is a gift, a sign of favor. I have wanted to be favored …
I just wanted to post a blog saying that I have A) made the most money in the past two weeks than I’ve made in any other two-week period in the past year, which is exciting, unless I have to pay all of it in taxes, and B) I unclogged the bathtub drain this morning, and I can’t wait to get done cleaning at Katie G’s because I will come straight home, clean my own bathtub, and take a shower, which will be the first shower I’ve taken in a couple of months during which the tub will not begin to fill up with soapy water in the first thirty seconds. After this, I’m getting Natalie’s birthday present done and maybe some birthday scones, and will go to her house, where we will get snowed-in. Furthermore, I had the idea to make a quilt, this morning, and that’s also a good thing. & last night was wonderful. There’s a lot of hope for me, today. Yes there is.
Today is about admission (and I believe that days are about things, if I can pay attention), my admission to myself and the Lord — the only two for whom it matters supremely — that I’m bankrupt. If flowers
are growing in the garden of my life it is because they’ve been charmed to repel my wintry winds and all my neglect, all my destructive tendencies, because they were the planting of God. I can’t find any other reason they’d still be blooming, and I admit this with a clear heart.
I’m destructive, ultimately, and when I read Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, “so I take pleasure in infirmities, reproaches, in needs, persecutions, distresses, for Christ’s sake, since when I am weak, then I am strong,” something enters my mind, that admission of failure can be admission into a new arena, a place where I don’t expect great things of myself, but expect all things from God.
——————
My white-haired neighbors — the only ones on the street who care to paint their house — always feed the squirrels and birds in winter. They throw handfuls of bread or seeds on the stump of the hemlock that was cut down last year, cut up and lowered in chunks by ropes and pulleys, gingerly. This morning a feast of corn on the stump has drawn the usual crowd of jays, doves, cardinals, and sparrows, but also
a towhee, a single black and red bird with white stripes underneath and on his wings. Lovely, that poverty is not shameful to the birds, who spend most of their days resting their weight on the air.
Someday I will know what it’s like to fly, and by that I mean I’ll know what it’s like to lean forward and spring into the void, finding the molecules supporting me paradoxically because I will have decided fully to let the one who feeds the birds of the air feed me. Or, more likely, someday I’ll see I have been in the air and didn’t realize it. I hope I’m working toward that. All this weakness coming out.
Tonight, I’m alone for the first time in what feels like days. Listening to the rain, to more of The Sea & the Rhythm, and wearing a shirt from Katie Gray that is changing my mind about hipster fashion. The baggy cut, the unabashed stripes — it’s not something I’ve been interested in, but since I put it on, I haven’t really been able to take it off, even though it smelled like stale Winstons for many hours today. It’s wearing off, I’m wearing it, took a shower and am still wearing it. I like it. I don’t know why. And I’m wearing my hair long, now, a lot more often, partly because Aunt Betty tells me it’s pretty every time I do.
Last night I took care of an elderly woman at St. Mary’s, partly because I was getting paid, and partly because I have health. I’ve been thinking about Haiti, all the terrible suffering, the physical pain, all the horrible impotence. Mine. I’m impotent to help them, well, with my own hands at least. So when DP called to see if I could help his mother at the hospital, I said yes, because I could. It’s the least, the very least I can do, and I did the very least, moving her from the chair into bed, from bed to the bathroom, lifting and walking slowly and saying things like, “How’re you doing now?” and “You’re doing great.” I want something I do to touch the surface of things, break the tension with a moment of relief, and if we have learned anything, anything, we’ve learned that this happens with the single moment, the one we’re inside, doing the work that we find in our hands. I hope this is right, because I believe it. And I hope to believe it more.
I wish I wasn’t so impotent, that I had something better for this woman than Bio-Freeze, or patience. Like I wish I had something for every broken & still un-set bone in Port-au-Prince. I wish for Lucy’s healing cordial, for some touch that uncurls the osteoporatic spine, some anti-cancer that goes crazy knitting and meshing all broken connections and easing pain, strengthening arteries and organs like the riotous swarm of light that takes over the castle at the end of Beauty & the Beast. I keep looking at myself and wondering what power I have, whether it reaches beyond the limits of my skin, or gaze, or knowledge. Maybe I will become powerful someday … somehow, that seems promised, light a part of my future.
My blogging self keeps having identity crises, which means primarily that I don’t know what to blog, so I blog nothing. Who is WhatWhileWeSlept? What is her audience? What is her purpose? Or is it just me, here? Could it possibly be just me, just writing? That would be the simplest thing, and probably the best, but would I be a writer if I were just me? Is this a real conversation? Maybe Floury and WhatWhileWeSlept should get together and argue about their selves. Today, I’m going to throw self-conscious reservations out the window. Even though, yes, I did just type two sentences and then erase them. But I’ll call that editing, not self-conscious reservation.
I’ve been getting out of the house to work, lately, and that’s been so good for my work. I love my house, but trying to do work there has been getting increasingly difficult, as I have to keep getting up to turn on a light, or turn off a light, or make some tea, or look through my records, or angrily kick my records, or go clean the bathroom. All these things must be done — understood — but what must be done more is work. I would like to get three grant proposals written by the end of February, and the sooner I can do that, the happier I will be. I need to change my employment information at Interfaith, I need to file my income taxes, I need to file a FAFSA. The sooner, you know, the happier. Maybe when all this is done, I can get another paying customer, or start my Etsy shop again, and make some more money. Which will justify my coming to a coffee shop to work more fully.
Today I noticed that Regions still hasn’t applied an ancient deposit to my checking account balance, which means that after buying a cup of coffee an hour and a half ago, I had $2.64 in the bank. The thrill, you know, of discovering that. Just now. The jump of the heart, the sting of the fingertips. Maybe I could sell my hair. For twenty dollars, to Mme. Sofronie, Hair Goods of All Kinds.
In other news, the boy across the table from me is reading Gravity’s Rainbow, and when he asked if I was reading anything, I said Harry Potter. Rather proudly. There aren’t many books I’d be proud to volunteer when a flannel-shirted young man asks what I am reading, while he is reading Pynchon. “Oh, just something I picked up — letters of Derrida and Cixous — just a little light reading,” I should like to say. While I have definitely been using these stories lately as an excuse to not face certain painful matters of the heart, to sit instead alone and (the most shocking episode) drink wine and eat cookies, they deserve a better sentence about them here: they are adding a spice, or a breath, to my consciousness. The last book I read had one of the most moving atonement/redemption motifs I’ve ever come across, and I’ve come across a few. I’m reading them faster than I’ve ever read anything (that I remember), putting the current 700+ page book on its front cover in just a few sittings. The series is involved, intricate, complex, and it’s only now, four books in, that the story is beginning to unfold.
I started this series in order to acquaint myself with some pop culture, I’m really out of the loop, and to find out why most of my best-loved friends dress up as McGonagall and Snape and stand in line for the next book to be released … or the movie to open … or send their husbands to stand in line for the book after their water just broke & contractions are starting … anyway, I’m finding out.
Update on the Remote Area Medical shipments to Port-au-Prince from The Compassion Coalition:
Thank you for your great response to our earlier email regarding Remote Area Medical using their plane to fly medical supplies to Haiti. There will be other flights going to Haiti, so if you are not able to donate on such short notice please consider donating supplies in the days or weeks to come.
There are a few additional things you need to know:
1. Due to a wonderful response, the folks at RAM are overwhelmed with the logistics of sorting out and organizing donations. Starting immediately, please drop donations off at Digital X-ray Specialist (3700 Pleasant Ridge Road) instead of RAM’s South Knoxville location until 9:00 p.m. tonight or 6:00 p.m. tomorrow.
2. There are two additional items that RAM is in need of:
a. Flashlights with batteries
b. Headlamps with batteries
3. RAM will begin accepting donations again after Digital X-ray closes at 6 p.m on Friday, until 10 p.m. They will be open on Saturday, January 16th from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Sunday, January, 17th from 1 p.m. – 5 p.m. and will continue to stockpile provisions to fill the plane as many times as possible. Because their parking lot is small, if your church or business could bring everything in one or two loads it would help to avoid gridlock.
4. RAM’s staff is overwhelmed by phone calls, so if you have questions, please call Chris Caldwell, pastor at Hope Community Church, at 865-599-1044. You can also call Angie, a member at Hope Community Church who has offered to assist with phone calls. Her number is 865-455-9635.
*If you hear of the FAA banning incoming flights due to an inability to refuel them, please be assured that RAM has alternative plans to get the supplies delivered.
I drove J home after she and a friend studied together at Panera for two hours, a productive two hours for them, a lonely two hours for me. I didn’t know when I came to pick her up that we’d be in Bearden till after five, so all I brought was Harry Potter, which I’m worrying more and more is fixing itself in my consciousness as a constantly-available distraction. From anything and everything. So far these books have only stirred my soul once, but they’re tasty and always happening … I think my only hope is to finish them soon so I can start The Brothers Karamazov.
Marshall made me a bookshelf, lovely, beautiful, small heavy bookshelf of straight lines and shallow curves, a hundred reinforcements, oak stained a reddish-brown, bright color. We rearranged my room to give it the best home possible, and it’s here on my right, holding all the best books in my library. The poetry, the mystics, the liberation theologians, the British fiction, the Shakespeare. It’s a beautiful shelf, did I say? It’s maybe the best present I’ve ever gotten, because he made it and because it’s somehow expressive of his sensibility, his hands, the structure of his thoughts, his love of beautiful wooden things. Expressive of his love for me, which I can’t understand at all, especially in my moments of utmost fragility and completely incommunicable griefs. Which are many and often.
Oh I’m full of a thousand things. I’ll be so glad when today and tomorrow are over.
The Compassion Coalition is sending out emails to everybody on their mailing list about a Remote Area Medical airplane headed to Haiti tomorrow. If you want to donate stuff, you can take it to the drop-off in South Knox (1834 Beech Street) or give it to me TODAY. I don’t have a lot of money to buy stuff, but I’ll be taking something & have a car to take it in. And if you want to call RAM with any kind of question, their phone# is (865) 609-1876. This is what they’re saying they want:
- Aspirin (as much as possible)
- Ibuprofen / Tylenol (liquid for babies, tablets for adults)
- Anti-diarrhea medication (like Imodium) tablets or capsules (not liquid or liqui-gels) – as much as you can provide
- Anti-itch cream
- Vaseline (they could use up to 20 lbs)
- Antibiotic cream (Neosporin) as much as you can provide
- Ace bandages – as much as you can provide
- Ziploc bags, all sizes
- Fine-tip sharpies
- Alcohol in plastic bottles up to 50 bottles
- Wash cloths – will be lower priority so will be one of the last things packed
- Dish towels (flour sack cotton, not washcloth type – basically those that would leave less lent) these are for use by docs when treating patients
- Empty bottles with multi hole pop up caps various sizes (these can be filled with water to flush debris) you can find smaller ones in travel item section at Wal-Mart
- Crutches – have an old set at home you aren’t using? If stoppers, handgrips and arm pads are in good shape – we can use these.
- Eye drops – non-medicated (saline….liquid tears) as much as you can provide.
- Gauze pads – 2×2 and 4×4 sizes
- Band-aids – 20 –30 boxes
- Bandages
They say everything donated needs to be boxed and labeled on the outside of the box as well as the inside of the box. If you buy a number of Ace bandages, for example, put them all in a cardboard box and write “Ace Bandages” on the inside of the box as well as on the outside of the box.
Please be generous!
