Oh, Henry

At last, here is a portion of Henry, the hospital dog.

I hope that his magnificence comes through - or that your facile imaginations will assist you in knowing what a fine fellow he is.

With his mom, they make hospital rounds, assigned, as I understand, to a particular unit on each of their visit days. What they do is stop and connect with as many people as they can, not only the patients. They listen to people as they wait to be seen and, likely, admitted. They sit with families of patients in surgery. Henry also poses for photos with doctors and staff, for many of whom his loving presence may be the brightest moment in their work day; hospitals are not always sources of good news. They meet patients in the halls as they exercise and, at least once, have met a patient again upon his discharge, a man who spoke emphatically about his earlier encounter and how he would never forget it. To all these moments of happenstance, Henry brings his gift of mystical empathy and his trick, the extending for a shake of one paw, then the other. Repeat as needed.

Henry was rescued from what his mom calls "benign neglect," not outright abuse but a chain of events that wore him out, wearied his spirit, yet somehow did not diminish his ability to give from a reservoir that had become periously low. He is part of a lively, fanciful home where his unknown backstory becomes more elaborate and textured with each telling.

I will guess that it might be likely your local hospital has an animal visitation program. It would be worth a call to find out. If you are the parent of a zen-calm, people-loving pet - and inclined to enjoy the company of people who may have something to get off their chests - the two, or more, of you could become bringers of restoration. We can never have too many of those.

There must be some kind of way out of here

(2:30 p.m. PDT update: Los Angeles breaks all-time high temperature record at 113. Since records have been kept, there has never been a hotter day in L.A. And you thought I was imagining it.)


Here we are, Angelinos and more distant correspondents, stewing, toasting under a sun that seems to have moved closer.

Questions arise: are we in the crucible of transformation? Is weather that turns us witless meant to cleanse the mind like the refreshing sorbet I'd rather have?

On the heels of equinox and the full moon of whatever description you care to use (Pointy Stick Moon, Body Dysmorphia Moon, Moon of Vanished Motivation, Weasels Ripped My Flesh Moon, Couldn't You Just SCREAM Moon and Moon of Who Ate All the Leftover Pasta), anyone entirely comfortable in their skin and head should be lighting candles and offering platters of expensive, out-of-season fruit to gods known and unknown.

What sort of ill-signposted path does it take for one to become lost so easily? I will blame it on the heat - triple-digit temperatures are up to mischief, check your numerology...or just step outside. All I know is that the way ahead seemed open, free of treacherous debris and now, I feel as though I tripped the secret panel in the old library and have been spun into a state of WTF?

If this evaporates (likely for most substances, given the lack of humidity) when the heat wanes, I will have identified the source. But if, when the air cools, I am still here in the cobwebby backside of shelves filled with annotated works, a chamber dim and soundproof, and if Abbot and Costello or a Nancy Drew nemesis are sitting in my favorite chair, please send someone with finely developed investigative skills to let me out. Send a team, Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law would do nicely. They may even leave their shirts on.

STEP.AWAY.FROM.THE.BOOK.

Sept. 25 through Oct. 3 is Banned Books Week. Don't ever relax. The thought police are relentless. I say, let's make trouble by reading or rereading as many as we can, carrying copies with us in public and talking about their content where we think it will provoke unease.

Background on the observance and The List may be found here. I have not read every one of the top 100, and then there is the need to read again what has been, in great part, forgotten.

With some of the offending titles I developed a more personal relationship. I was in junior high when I read many of them - some of them, even younger, for the list includes Charlotte's Web and Winnie-the-Pooh. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, turned me away from family staples, the bologna (or baloney) sandwich and the hot dog for several years. After On the Road and, in honesty, ever since, part of me remains a closet beatnik.

As a junior in high school I was on the newspaper staff. I was asked if I'd like to write a book review column, a first for the paper. It was by far my best assignment, I took it seriously (as a 16-year-old can) and one of the books I wrote about was The Catcher in the Rye. I remember encouraging comments from friends, one was a senior who'd been in the commercial art class I dropped to move to journalism and I took his approval very much to heart. I wondered, though, why he seemed to feel that the column was, in some way, an act of bravery. Soon I learned that by discussing Salinger's book, my expulsion - not suspension - was being considered, the paper's advisor was chastised and the book column, out there where actual, impressionable students could read it, was cancelled.

The Grapes of Wrath gave me a truer picture of history in the San Joaquin Valley, where my father grew up. He could point to sites of Hoovervilles where Dust Bowl families such as the Joads had landed as their options ran out. California was far from the only state where such transient communities grew.

Whatever we once read from this collection of literature deemed unacceptable, we were affected by it, possibly shifted to a depth that lingers still. We were informed, awakened and altered. A mind opened to lives and worlds wider than our front door is still a subversive agent. The revolution continues, choose your side.

Equinox

Posting preamble. There is not time right now to complete the post I started two days ago. It will be perfect for Friday or Saturday.

Yesterday, forgive me if all this seems like old news, was the full moon and the autumnal equinox. My mother, whose birthday was September 23, used to claim the equinox as her own...what's a day between friends?

And on the day of the full moon and the autumnal equinox, I had a visit from Henry, the hospital dog...Henry and his mom have been trained to do visitation at Cedars/Sinai. I will write more of the visit, with photo of himself, very soon.

Henry is, as his mom describes him, a Buddha. He is an empath; when one is speaking of sad or difficult things, he sighs and rests his chin on the ground. He is fellow of size - 145 pounds - of gentleness and healing in a red fur coat. He and his mom are my blessing, my glorious deliverance as we launch ourselves, full of hope and harvest thoughts, into fall. May the new season open doors to the rooms your heart longs to visit, perhaps rooms in which you will take up residence. The world, as we call it, grows wider every day.

Being in-between

Rachel wondered if there was a name for the in-between of seasons. In reading her words, I wondered if we might want names for other in-betweens. I thought of time being a form of alchemy, a process by which this becomes that.

We - and circumstances - can be in transition, which conjures stock shots of locomotives or stoking the engines of fabled steamships. Transition speaks of going. The in-betweens I picture stay in place while they become.

Indian summer describes a brief warming before fall settles in for the duration. Caterpillars come with stages of evolution clearly identified. Humans have the predictable range from infant to old.

But within ages we may move from clueless, sleepy, stuck, wandering or adrift to aware, energized, enlightened, purposeful and vibrant. We may come to our senses, see with new eyes, have our world turned upside down or, suddenly, get it.

We may shed our lethargy for focus, our blocked creativity for words that pour out faster than we can write them. There must be a stage, no matter how brief, before we leave one to enter the other. Canals have locks that raise or lower ships in increments when a waterway goes from one altitude to another. I can see us morphing as we let the water lift or lower us, lock by lock, to the level we seek, then sailing forth, easy and smooth, on the next leg of the voyage already under way.

Standing in line is an in-between. So is being pregnant, though it is a named condition. When we wait for an answer, either one that comes externally or a wise, quiet internal voice that urges us along, we are in-between. Jobs, marriages, homes, vehicles, projects, reading - all are opportunities to be somewhere that is neither here nor there.

Anticipating, hoping, dreading, ignoring, we are held in a place that is just before whatever is next; we have mentally and emotionally left what was before.

I seem to have answered my own question, found something to call that spot that is not this and not that. From now on, I declare myself to be in a fluctuating state of being in-between, for it will always apply to something. I may be found here until further notice.

Yielding

There is grace in adapting.

Adjusting ourselves to what is, prying our fingers from their death grip on life as we think it should be, we learn to bend.

Flexible is not one of the words on lists of classic virtues, yet would any of those serve us better?

It doesn't unfold the way we imagined when we wrote our scripts in the air or in our minds. Parts of it don't unfold at all, they are tin foil balls where the edge is lost in mishmash. Nothing flat and untorn will ever again be made of this.

For all that seems without answer, more remains that can be understood but using a different template. We give wheels to what is unable to move on its own.

There is strength in releasing fixed notions. We fall back and reconnoiter. Plan A becomes Plan B, and so on. We keep moving forward.

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.