Warning: Political opinion

Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?

William Blake: On Another's Sorrow, from Songs of Innocence, 1789
(from Tom Clark, Beyond the Pale)

Once the 9/11 observances were over, media types and political spokespeople stepped up and began sticking forks in the economy. My belief is that way more people are no longer even part of the economy than anyone will acknowledge. We have been here before.

On his blog, Tom Clark has been sharing researched and collected photos commissioned by the Farm Security Administration when last America was in (let's call it by its name) a Depression. His postings go back several months (certainly back to July 27, the topics are listed along side the posts) and illuminate, sometimes with photos alone, sometimes with accompanying text, who and where we have been. As the child of parents who grew up during the Great Depression - what would they call this one? - and a reader of Steinbeck and others who took up the cause of the afflicted, I saw in the photos the stories we are not meant to forget.

There may be nothing that makes me angrier than being mistaken for a fool. I know our government lies to us, I'd hate to see just how much dirt they've tried to sweep under the rug and I have no idea who will ever be able to clean it up.

The photos tell a far more compelling story of lessons unlearned than I can. We may not have answers, Congress may block President Obama's every attempt at repair, but we can still know how deeply too many of our countrymen have been wounded by a government that implied it cared for them and would see them through hard times.

One thing we can do is recognize how far from our national purpose we've drifted and at least share our hearts with those whose only constant is jeopardy. We may have no answers but we can, we must, care that such is the case.

A theory

My relationship with time is a one-sided affair. It has no awareness of me and I think about it constantly. Perhaps time infatuation is an identified disorder. It is really a matter of where we look for meaning. I find meaning in time.

Last Sunday's Los Angeles Times Book Review section offered, on the same page, an interview with historian Sean Wilentz on his new book, Bob Dylan in America, and a review of The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, here.

The page featured a quote from Wilentz about Dylan, "He had this sensibility that the past wasn't the past, that the past was the present." He further said of Dylan's early days in New York, "He was living in this world where Edgar Allan Poe was living around the corner...a phantasmagoria of American history." Times reporter Charles Taylor referred to Dylan's CD of holiday music, Christmas in the Heart, as Dylan's love letter to the holiday music that was part of the American popular music he grew up hearing.

A time slip.

When Dylan returned to the Newport Folk Festival in 2002, where his electric debut elicited boos and jeers in 1965, Wilentz said, "There were ghosts all over the place. You could feel them." Wilentz told how he sensed the ghosts take form, many of the pivotal musicians from the American tradition, "...they were all kind of assuming shape again."

My interpretation of this information is that others, including a respected historian who teaches at Princeton, find that the past lives in and through us. We bring it forth in our thoughts, in works we create. It is not a dead thing, immobile in some unreachable long-ago, but alive, its influences at work on us through memories, either individually or collectively.

In his review, Michael Moorcock said that the Hawking-Mlodinow book suggests that physics and metaphysics are growing closer. Robert Oppenheimer is said to have proposed that physics and poetry were indistinguishable.

Moorcock described, "In an environment that includes black holes, super black holes, dark matter, dark energy, string theory, M-theory, alternate pasts and alternate futures, we can no longer assume there is one universe or even a set of universes with a single group of natural laws applicable to everything from the domain of atoms to that of astronomy.

"Models of the universe are changing radically. We now live in a world in which many physicists have come to believe there are not merely three dimensions (plus time) but 10 or possibly 11.

"Even laws we have taken for granted, like those relating to the speed of light, might be at odds in different realms of a near-infinite set of universes."

Those review excerpts and the remainder of the article suggest to me that anything is possible.

What I believe is that, if we pay attention and look inward frequently, we learn to identify our truths. They don't need educated, scientific validation to be true for us, but it does take some of the lunatic self-labeling away to have credible sources appear to think along similar lines. What I feel, what I experience, is the fluid quality of time (yes, I HAVE mentioned this before) but also the real yet intangible way that what has gone before is not gone.

Juggling 101

On the one hand, there is the importance of gratitude, acknowledging all gifts (or, according to some teachings, acknowledging all things as gifts). In contrast is the necessity of allowing our less than glowing thoughts and emotions to surface and be noticed, for word is, they fester if we try to ignore them.

Here I am, in my one and only human, aging and drifting mind, trying to make peace between these combatants. Their feud is ancient, has, at times, involved throwing very pointy sticks and always, always unpleasant words and slapping gestures - or worse.

As I am the only candidate for middle, I am chief among the usual suspects when this pot begins to boil, again. In most days there is - or ought to be - time set aside for attempts at detente. Had I known this was how it would play out, I might have studied diplomacy or joined Ken Kesey on the bus and said to hell with it all. Sadly, balance, or the seeking thereof, is a part of my nature that I just can't flick off.

Since childhood I have been able to go to the cupboard, eyeball whatever remains and know how to prepare something from those unlikely bedfellows that will actually taste good. It must come from a different part of the brain. What I try to fashion from these incompatible tins is something the trolls wouldn't touch.

But those grim thoughts, barbed and rusted memories, are not docile when the lid is tightened. It may take years, lifetimes, but they plot and wait, marking their days on the seeping walls with yellowed talons, knowing they WILL be heard.

What would it be like, a tidy life? I doubt that one has ever existed. I have never met anyone completely free of issues, so no matter how swell it appeared, there must have been...imperfections. Still one can embroider, think the "what ifs" and imagine arriving in advanced middle age as solid and untroubled as a beloved, well-trained, good-natured dog.

That is the angst du jour, not as large as an iceberg nor microscopically pesky as a hangnail or hair that didn't turn out in the back, but still clingy and keening. Heartfelt thanks for every blessed thing versus all those years of...whatever. Would it be so awful to give each faction great helpings of cake, ice cream, pizza and sweet fizzy drinks and send them to their rooms while I go take a long nap?

Mike

There you are, plinking and dinking along in your everyday life, quietly sure that you know all the drawers, secret and otherwise, within you and just what they contain. And then you are inundated by a version of amazing grace and what you didn't know had been lost is found.

Forty years ago, I was friends with three Michaels. One of them was my brother, back in America for a time after his move to Australia. The others were friends he made once here and I got to know them as well. To keep this from reading like a game of three-card monte (which Mike is under which card?) described by a woman who can't learn to knit, I will try to keep it simple.

We lived in the same neighborhood, two of them were my neighbors. We spent time together, I think mostly laughing and eating, and I took for granted the fun of being part of their group. There were other friends with other names whom I met. We all had day jobs but, looking back, it seems we had ample time to visit and eat at the late-night coffee shop a few blocks from us. Sometimes I cooked.

My brother returned to Australia and I remained friends with Mike and Mike. Not too long after, I got married and we all spent time together, even when we moved out of town. Then somehow, we slid out of touch.

Saturday I had an assignment from brother Mike. He had a lead on one of the (presumed to be) lost friends, hoping he would also know the whereabouts of the other. I will simply report that all are now accounted for and the domestic ones are as near as they once were.

In talking with first one, then the other as I collected information for my brother, I had no sense of years, decades passing. My occasionally porous brain could reach for and hold facts, bringing them forth without the familiar...wait, let me think...

In talking with them, I was not remembering what the time had been like, I was reliving it. I was suddenly 40 years younger and could feel, in mind and body, a youthful, unencumbered happiness. It had been gone so long I had forgotten it ever existed, thriving and free of expectations. I re-experienced the ease of their company, and myself as alive and alight in their presence. How I have missed them, the person I was able to be among them, perhaps a true self that long ago. And here I thought she was just freshly unearthed, a new find. What distraction and distress had taken up residence in my days that I let all that get away?

That so much time had passed we would not have recognized each other in passing was of no consequence. My phone-it-in detective work was all but done for me; the timing was perfect. Had I called a few weeks earlier, all the parts might not have come together. The symmetry was surprising, yet organic. Of course, how else could it have gone.

My brother is now able to reach out and know they are there. They can begin to tell their stories. I can do the same. For the moment, awareness of grace so profound it makes the top of my head feel as though it is opening like a 1960s convertible, is a fragile artifact I wish to hold and shelter. I awake at night and gratitude spreads across me like a family reunion picnic table; is it possible that this silly joy is mine?

I am aware of needing to decompress from having flown so high after so long. I am entirely clear about happy milestones that were reached during the past nearly half-century. I am also readjusting to sharing my clothes and hairbrush with a missing twin who disappeared into forgetfulness, who went out for a loaf of bread and turned up nearly 40 years later, looking to my eyes the way she did the day she vanished. I am still absorbing the fact that a vague emptiness has been filled. I didn't realize it would be filled with me.

Body/Mind

Post traumatic stress disorder is real. It gets kicked awake by things like Christmas lights and, recently, a schemer's try at grabbing money for a bill long since paid.

Three and a half years ago my son, then 27, was ill. What we thought was bad bronchitis or pneumonia was congestive heart failure. The ER doctors thought it likely he would code. He had no health insurance. Two young residents worthy of being trailed by documentarians, deserving of gifts of luxury automobiles from grateful patients, finally diagnosed myocarditis. It is an auto-immune condition in which the body perceives the heart muscle as an intruder and attacks it. Organs begin to fail.

He spent 8 days in the ICU, then was the youngest patient by decades in the CCU for another two weeks, during which Christmas passed like just another day. He was off work for 10 months. His medical bills were a substantial portion of a million dollars. Through more than 2 years of hearings, applications, appeals and legal representation, his acute disability was acknowledged, benefits were awarded for a finite period and all his bills were paid. Because the process began when he was still adjusting to being alive, I put my years of administrative skills to work and dealt with the business aspects of his illness.

Two weeks ago an alleged attorney sent a threatening letter in an attempt to collect for part of his treatment. I knew the bill had been paid and had copies of all documents to prove it. In telling a friend of this new plot turn, we learned that this is something that happens all the time, that crooks find information - like cars that changed hands many years before - in data bases and see if they can frighten regular people into sending them money.

Two days ago a woman's recorded voice, an English accent to lend a touch of class or legitimacy, no doubt, called demanding payment. I was shaking when I phoned to tell them no money was owed. I am shaking as I write of it and I realize that unease comes from two sources. I am saddened and horrified by the magnitude of fraud, or attempts of it, around us and anything that yanks me back to those frightening weeks slaps me stupid.

The arthritis which had a clamp on me before this emotional time escalated into near immobilization once the adrenalin subsided. The connection between mind and body has been clear to me for more than 20 years. This wasn't my first encounter with traumatic stress, after which disorder sets in. Time does smarten us up. I am taking a long look at the ways in which I respond physically to so much fear.

I believe that, as our minds have the power to bring us to our knees, they are also capable of lifting us from the trenches where we've been huddled. Grudgingly, I acknowledge that a notice from crooks illuminated an aspect of life that I want very much to see become better, to heal as much as it can. Awareness is a beginning. I have no defense for not connecting my infirmity with events that preceded it until now. I was occupied being relieved by and grateful for his recovery. We know when we know. But Christmas is another beast. I have accepted that it will never look or feel the same again.

Words, time and words

Paintings by Kristin Vestguard.

There is a shipwreck aspect to writing. Surrendering to the call means other pieces of life are abandoned. The tighter its grip, the farther I drift from ordinary. I hadn't thought of writing and me in these terms until today, until a ship I hadn't known I was waiting for sailed into view.

I am so thankful for the writers I have met recently through our blogs, yet it is still a solitary, lonely business. At times the connections make it feel more remote for I see where others have found the thread they need and I, in my own eyes, am stumbling around, getting my foot caught in a bucket, stepping on a rake, having misplaced the last known pencil. I find it impossible to explain the writing desire - or is it a compulsion? It is not like anything else that I can name...a day's work can produce pages of words, but if they are not the right words...

So much about life I find to be acts of faith and writing is surely one of them. So is getting out of bed in the morning. A writer has a place she wants the writing to take her - and those who read the words - but, at least as I practice it, the act is much closer to interpretive dance, I don't know which way I will bend until I do it, than to, say, something for which I have created an outline and have a...plan. I haven't done an outline for anything since junior college and what I remember is writing the outline after the paper. You can guess what that did to my grade.

The left side of my brain gets a lot rest. It is never invited over to play when I write; the times when it has popped in to see what we were up to, its suggestions made me feel like I was trying to swim while zipped into a sleeping bag. While taking part in a fiction writing workshop, someone asked (not the classic "where do you get your ideas?"), "How do you know what happens next?" The only, the honest answer was, "When the car pulls up, I wait to see who gets out and then tell about it."

My rescue vessel arrived in the form of a writer friend who has taken some time away from writing to do the work for which we rely on that other side of the brain. Life, rude and intrusive or the opposite, sometimes needs us to talk to attorneys, reduce soaring piles of magazines and mail, make arrangements, show up. But in talking to her, feeling our mutual urgency about whatever it is that we're doing - for neither of us is sure, we just know we have to do it - I wept for knowing that this is not madness and that fact could be confirmed.

Drama in my everyday world is, in my opinion, something loathsome and to be avoided. When I use a word like madness my self-regulator tries to give me the stink eye. I look away, knowing this isn't the exaggeration it might seem. Pushing forward with a body of work that is not a novel, not a collection of poems or short stories, more a gathering of thoughts from heart, mind and spirit, is not a wholly rational act and, because of its solitary nature, becomes a questionable investment of all the resources, down to those dollar coins the post office machines give as change.

It may be a measure of commitment, the single mindedness that makes it possible to float so far from known landmarks without having a clue that I am no longer tethered. The work may be epic, the work may be one paragraph that builds upon another, or one word, followed by three more, but the force it exerts once the call is answered could pull a bulldozer out of quicksand.

One of my core beliefs is that each of us is called to something and as long as it does no harm, the possibilities are infinite. I wobbled and waffled for years, trying to understand the call, trying to meet its expectations, halfway trying to dodge it and substitute an activity like writing. It now has me for however long it takes or however long I last. There are far more meanings to the word surrender than waving the white flag.

Weather report

If I haven't tackled it over the weekend, my first task on Monday mornings is writing my weekly retail paragraph. This morning I got to welcome Halloween. In the paper crafting world, as with retail in general, holidays begin early, though card makers have a reason for the head start. Creating one-of-a-kind greetings takes time.

Southern California's weather, following days hot enough to leave our brightest citizens panting and witless, did a sharp U-turn with its usual false promise of autumn. It is a tease we know well, yet those of us who long to put the fans back on closet shelves think, just maybe, this could be it. As my sister, a Virginia resident, describes it, "The morning when you feel the snap in the air." Northern Virginia will be snapping while Los Angeles is still wriggling out of its sandy bathing suits.

The notion of back-to-school clothes was usually absurd. We picked styles we saw in the stores or Sears catalog, outfits that would bring on heat rash in a Pasadena September, yet there were years we wore them anyway. They were NEW clothes. Too many times the hottest days of the year coincided with the start of school. That spilled over into October when the Santa Ana winds kick up, often bringing fires. But by Halloween there were leaves to rake nearly every afternoon and the need of a costume-spoiling sweater - or the unthinkable coat - for trick or treating.

It is ungrateful to complain about our weather; this may have been the mildest summer on record and I certainly became spoiled by so many sweatless days and nights. After living in Washington, D.C. for one summer and visiting Raleigh, North Carolina, one July, I know I do not have the right stuff for that kind of heat and humidity. I used to reread Southern writers during the summer: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote. Acclimating was the only possible way for a mind to wander along creative paths rather than spend hot days and nights in a stupor of writers' block. I admired and envied their flexibility.

Today the Los Angeles temperature was 57 degrees at 6 a.m., expected to reach a high of 74. Five days ago 74 was the overnight low in Pasadena. Our fluctuations seem more than meteorological; many of us, I among them, judging by our postings and conversations, seem to be commuting between other highs and lows, between quavering doubt and sturdy optimism. If climate changes have such an impact on something the size of our home planet, why would they not exert some power over lesser bodies? I can't swear that my glaciers have begun to shrink, but I intend to keep them under surveillance. They've become too unpredictable for my comfort.