A Snowman in the Freezer and Other Snow Dreams

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, where some years, even on Christmas Day, we’d be outside in shorts, flying down the sidewalks on skateboards. Though I’d never lived anywhere else, somehow the heat just seemed wrong, so I dreamed of snow – wondering what it would be like to stand outside and catch snowflakes on my tongue like I’d seen people do in the movies.

One year, we did make a snowman, although technically it wasn’t made of snow. We awoke to an astonishing sight: a thick, white, frozen blanket covered our front yard…just like in our dreams. Unusually cold air had delivered an historic, predawn frost. We thought it had snowed, even though it had been clear all night long with not a cloud in the sky – what did we kids know about what was needed to make snow? All we knew was that it was white and cold: snow. A bunch of us kids scraped the frost from the entire yard and made ourselves a small and very sweet little snowman, which we stored in the freezer compartment of our refrigerator. For months, neighbor kids would knock on our front door saying, “Can we look at the snowman?” We’d take a little field trip to the kitchen, open the freezer, and with tendrils of frosty air pouring out, we’d sink again into our dream of SNOW, until the tragic day that we discovered that water evaporates, even when frozen.

At age 42, after spending my entire adult life in the moderate Pacific Northwest, I moved east to Iowa, which as you may know, is anything but moderate, especially as far as the weather goes. My Iowan friends looked after me and as the first major blizzard approached, one of them called to announce its pending arrival at 2 pm. He didn’t say, “At about 2 pm”, he said “At 2 pm”. “Give me a break,” I countered, “How can you say exactly when the storm will hit?” Where I was from, due to the extremely complex effects of the Puget Sound combined with both the Olympic and Cascade Mountain ranges, weather reports were almost always just mere suggestions of possibility. “Look at a map…there’s nothing in between Canada and Iowa to slow a storm…they can clock the wind speed and predict EXACTLY when she’ll hit.” And it was true. Two o’clock on the nose, snowflakes began to flutter.

The storm was a “screamer”. Unbelievably high winds careened around any suggestion of an obstacle; all through the night it wailed and all through the night I continued to get up and check the storm as it raged. Each time I looked out at the one lone streetlight, I saw snow swirling crazily, casting an eerie, dense glow through the amber light.

I awoke expectantly that first morning, just at dawn, and was out in it, in the glory of it all, almost before I knew it. Standing outside, the view was spectacular and there before me was wind, frozen in time. Snowdrifts had piled up between the house and the small, rickety old wooden garage, tilted from the force of half a decade of blizzards. I could see where the wind had come charging around corners, squeezing through the slightly angled, trapezoidal space between the house and garage. There were huge tunnels carved out here and there where some small object had caused the wind to shift, bearing down with the force of a freight train, literally moving mountains of snow into ridiculously small spaces.

I made my way toward the garage door, and for some reason peered through a small hole in one of the wooden slats of the old, hinged, double doors locked with a rusted padlock. I let out a squeal and a small clutch of birds took flight. There, on the black-dirt floor of that old, sagging garage, was a snowdrift INSIDE a locked building that had been completely empty the day before. The storm had poured that drift right through the spot that held my gaze.

THIS was absolutely insane. My mind was reeling from the incongruity that existed between the obvious force that had created this interior snowdrift, remembering the screeching howls that accompanied its creation, and the absolute, cathedral-like silence that I now stood within, as dawn moved through its exquisite coat of colors. I laughed long and hard – I could never have imagined that this is what I would receive from my long years of calling out from my childhood heart, for SNOW!

When The Rule of No Mistakes is Over

When I wasn’t at my “day job”, anyone who knew me knew they could find me in the “hot shop”, or glassblowing studio, at a publicly funded arts center in Seattle. It had quickly become my second home. I was a new glassblower and passionate about the work. I’d landed a work-study position there, answering the phone on the weekend when the main office was closed. Sitting at a centrally located desk gave me the opportunity to meet jewelers, printmakers, bronze casters and, glassblowers, from truthfully all over the world thanks to the close proximity of the Pilchuck Glass School. It was a fertile crossroads that I sat at each weekend and I loved it…every minute of it.

Eventually a second work-study job became available and I jumped at the opportunity to offset the enormous cost of renting blowing slots. The job was that of charging the glass furnace: each night a wheelbarrow filled with broken, chunked glass needed to be shoveled into the furnace assuring that plenty of molten glass would be available for the next day’s blowing slots.

At this point in my life, I was still under the false, and also heartbreaking belief that it was absolutely inexcusable for me to make a mistake or, not know how to do something. If I did make a mistake, it was best if I found a way to keep it QUIET. Just writing these words sounds insane, and it is insane. I had carried this belief around for a long time and had become skilled at appearing to know how to do all kinds of things. If you live with a rule that says no mistakes are allowed, it’s important to try and convince everyone…especially oneself, that you know how to do whatever is needed. This is such an irrational predicament, it’s hard to explain it…but I bet you know what I’m talking about.

This strategy served me at times in my life, but it definitely DID NOT serve me well when it came to learning how to charge the furnace. The one and only night of training was the proverbial “perfect storm”: there I was, feeling like I needed to already know how to charge a furnace, even though I didn’t have the slightest idea of what that consisted of, listening to a teacher who was completely exhausted after having already been at the “hot shop” for twelve hours. He wanted to get home and I wanted to appear knowledgeable.

This particular furnace was equipped with a fairly new and state-of-the-art computerized control panel that could be set up to run through an entire firing cycle automatically. My instructor, relieved that I seemed to pick up the process so quickly, asked hopefully, “Got it?” and when I nodded my head in agreement – because, really…what else would someone like me say? He left me alone to take care of the charging for that night. I set about the task of shoveling glass into the furnace – the seemingly straightforward job, turned out to be not that straightforward. Instead of being outside somewhere shoveling, say, gravel…I was standing in front of a glass furnace with the door wide open, doing my level best to throw shovelfuls of glass into the white-hot cave of a furnace which operated at over 2000° F; a kind of heat that puts all human systems on high-alert.

With the charging finally complete, I pressed a combination of buttons on the control panel that would set the furnace up for the “high fire” cycle, as I’d been directed. After a momentary pause something happened that seemed terribly wrong…dangerously wrong. All of a sudden, even though the furnace door was shut, flames began to seep out on all sides, and continued to lick up the sides of the furnace as the seconds ticked by. It seemed like I was standing at nothing less than the Gates of Hell, with appropriate sound effects to go along with the visuals.

WHAT HAD I DONE WRONG? A little too late, I realized it would have been a much more valuable training session, if my instructor had stood by while I went through this cycle. But he was long gone, and I was fairly certain that if I left things as they were, the whole building would be burned down by morning. So, I pressed another button, and just as quickly, the flames subsided. There. That seemed more like it. Tired and mostly confident that all was good in the world of furnace charging, I rode my bike home, and fell into a deep and flame-free sleep.

I arrived home late the next afternoon from my “day job”. I hadn’t given the fiery Gates of Hell that I’d witnessed briefly the night before any thought and was grateful that it was Friday, which meant I would have two, whole, glorious days to immerse myself in the world of glassblowing. But wait…my answering machine seemed to be having a nervous breakdown: the red light that signaled new messages was flashing like crazy. I had only recently moved to Seattle full-time so I didn’t really know very many people – certainly not as many people as the machine was indicating. At first I absentmindedly assumed it was broken, but then some tiny, gnawing voice told me to check the messages before I began my winding-down-from-work routine.

“Strange,” I thought, as I listened to the first message. It was from the program director at the arts center wondering how the charging went the night before. Why would he call about that? Then the next message was from him as well. This one was a little longer, and he asked if everything went okay with the charging that night. It turned out that ALL the messages were from him: over and over, he just kept asking how the charging went.

In hindsight, I realized that it must have taken him a great deal of self-control to keep his voice calm – because he was anything but calm. His last message wondered if maybe I could call him when I got home. I tried calling, but it was after-hours and the phone went to voice-mail. With a small but certain ache developing in the pit of my stomach, I decided that maybe I would just ride over to the “hot shop”. I had no idea what was going on – but some part of my body or mind knew something was.

Arriving at the arts center as Friday afternoon was just turning to evening, I was surprised to see so many cars, and indeed trucks, in the parking lot. Still mostly in my little world of oblivion, and again, looking back, maybe truthfully it was more that I was desperately clinging to whatever shreds of oblivion I could find, I rolled into the parking lot on my bicycle just as the program director that had left me all the messages entered the same parking lot through the back door of the building. We just about physically ran into each other as I dismounted my bicycle. He asked the same series of questions he’d left on my answering machine, one last time. I said that everything went fine. He asked if I’d had any problem with getting the program to shift into high fire. I said no, and then said, “Well, something strange happened at first, but then I got it to the right place and everything was fine.” His body shifted subtly, when he heard my words. “What kind of strange?” he asked as he still desperately attempted to remain calm.

After only a few words of my Gates of Hell description of the fiery furnace, his face scrunched up and turned the wrong color – then he drew himself up, way too close to me and went into a tirade of…I can’t tell you what he said, first, because I instantly blanked out all of it, as it was so terrifying for me to be yelled at in that way and at such close range, and secondly, because the director of the arts center, luckily, probably for all three of us, had just entered the parking lot, and she grabbed him and physically pulled him away. She walked him to another part of the lot and all I could hear was, “She didn’t KNOW that she was turning the furnace OFF…she didn’t do it on purpose.”

Remember, I’m the one who lived under the rule that no mistakes were allowed, and if I did make a mistake, somehow I was supposed to keep it QUIET.

OFF?????!!!!!! I turned it OFF?

When the glassblowers had arrived that morning to start their blowing slots, they discovered the furnace was almost completely cooled down. Luckily, not cooled enough for the glass to become solid: if that had been the case, it would have been the end of the furnace. All day long, scores of people had been frantically trying to figure out why the furnace had shut down – what circuit or gas jet or whatever, had malfunctioned to shut the thing off. There was a strange dichotomy: folks were relieved to hear that I’d turned it off because that meant there was nothing wrong with the furnace, but, I had turned it off, and that was still a major catastrophe. From that day on, I became THE ONE WHO TURNED THE FURNACE OFF.

As I said earlier, my other work-study position was answering the phones on the weekend, and this weekend was no different. There I sat, in the crossroads of this arts center, the center of my world, witnessing a whole team of people working literally around the clock for 48 hours, to remedy a situation that had occurred by my hand. I could not resort to any of my old ways; I could not help them, I could not fix the problem, I could not do anything to make them feel better or happy. I just……….had……..to………watch. Oh yes, and answer phone calls about when the furnace might be up and running. The furnace temperature had to be manually brought back up by increasing the temperature in very small increments, day and night and day and night. Nine blowing shifts had to be cancelled, which meant 27 different blowing teams lost out on their precious studio time. It was excruciating.

Most of the blowers instantly knew how heartbreaking this was for me when they heard what had happened. There were also glass blowers that NEVER spoke to me again. Eventually I worked there as a “full-time” glassblower, and there were some blowers who just looked right through me – would not, or could not, acknowledge me; my blunder. They could not forgive me; forgive my confession of the greatest of glass blowing sins.

I unknowingly confessed to a mistake – was completely unaware of any misdeed on my part. Once I discovered the enormous mistake I’d made, and as I lived through the agonizing confession, something began to shift in me.  Because of the depth of my love and passion for glassblowing I did not do what I would have done in some other situation: I did not simply disappear, run away, or hide. In times past, I would have chosen that course, rather than be exposed for making such a grave mistake. But love and passion, and that river of life that roared through me were so great that I endured the terror of being exposed for what I was: a fallible human. Talk about sitting at the Gates of Hell: what a blessing, this biggest mistake of my life turned out to be, and set me on a path of knowing the beauty of my utterly human fallibility…welcome to the human race, Lauren.

PS It is still fairly common for me to make a public pronouncement when I make a mistake of any import. I am still testing out how it feels to make these public confessions…to be seen, as I live under the new rule where mistakes are allowed.

Maybe that would seem obvious to you; it wasn’t to me.

I am something of a rebel with a dash of wildness about me, like the kind of dog that always seems to have a few random blackberry brambles in its coat; the kind of dog that seems to roam around on its own, taking itself for a walk without its owner. I have the instinct, like many of these animals, to attempt to bolt almost instantly once I’ve discovered I’m fenced in, an instinct often activated long before the fence posts are set in the ground. It turns out that I come by these ways honestly.

For most of my life, I didn’t realize that these traits came directly from both my mother and my father. Maybe that would seem obvious to you; it wasn’t to me, not until somewhat recently, years after passing into my fifth decade. Talk about role models: I spent so much of my life looking way out at the edge of the horizon for the ones that would teach me about how to be this sort of person…this sort of wild and rebellious person that I knew I was…all the while galloping right past the truth of who both my mother and father were. SURPRISE! It turns out that they were my role models all along…I just didn’t know it.

After all my declarations and determinations that my parents had no clue what it meant to be someone like me, I have to say that in so many ways, they are the ones I was searching for. I hope you can hear this mom, dad. I know you can. “Thank you” is just the quiet beginning of my expression of gratitude to honor the glistening gems that you actually placed in my opened, aching hands and heart. What a blessing that I now know, even though it seems like it took me so very long; thanks be, that I finally do know it.

As a child, my father’s voice and actions were the loud and obvious ones. My mother’s nature, that is to say, her true nature, was much more carefully hidden. I suppose this was so, in some ways, with my father’s true nature as well, but he was a bit more apt to let things slip. Like his stories to us kids about his adventures riding the rails in an empty boxcar across the country from Detroit to Los Angeles after he left high school in the early 1930’s; like when my folks came to visit me when I was in my 20’s and living in western Oregon in an old farm house on a big chunk of land that snuggled right up against the coast range foothills. Dad and I went for a walk up into those hills and he told me, in the midst of the crazy riot of forest underbrush, like some kind of holy confession; he told me he always wanted to live out in the country. What? My born-and-bred-in-the-city father? What? Is that why, from the age of a young child, as the story goes, I told my parents I wanted to live on a farm, even though I’d never seen one, nor had they, except for a few brief visits that my mother endured while in the Army – but she is not the one who whispered to me of a yearning to live out in the country.

Then there was my mother’s tale that she signed up to be a radio operator when she enlisted in the Army, (she was a member of the WAC – Women’s Army Corps) because she wanted to go overseas…somewhere in Europe…anywhere in Europe…anywhere away from her childhood home, and in a way, did end up in a foreign country, but not the one she had hoped for. She was stationed in Kansas City, Missouri for the entire two years of her service, and every time she went out on “leave”, this daughter of New York City, would stay with one of her friends out on a farm.

I learned persistence from these two rebels disguised as mild-mannered 1950’s parents. My father’s persistence was right out in the open, and oh did I learn about it from him. My father believed in it almost as a form of religion. Like how he decided to teach himself to play the guitar…not so well…but he just kept at it. Or much later in life when he decided, in his 80’s, that he was going to learn how to draw. Whatever the task was, he’d pretty much always say the same thing: “How hard could it be? You just have to practice every day.” And he did. He took drawing at the local Senior Center – took it for so long, and worked at it so diligently that finally the instructor encouraged him to take a more challenging class, so he began taking classes at the nearby community college. Picture it: a class full of 18 to 20 year-olds, many of whom were there only because they thought they could get an easy ‘A’ from an art class, and there in their midst, my 80-something father, who worked so hard at every single assignment. What would it be like to share a drawing class with him?

Underneath it all, what I really began to learn from him was that it was possible to change. Dad gave the impression that he was quite rigid, and in many things he was. But he decided to learn to draw at age 80 and in so doing, he changed his worldview; opened his awareness to both a brave and a new world. His specialty was charcoal portraits, and early on he shared with me that young people’s faces were not nearly as interesting as those of the elderly, whose wrinkles and creases illustrated their incredible life stories. This was a way that my father was able to begin to appreciate his own value as an elder in our culture – something that was not easy for him to accept. This was a subtle but beautiful shift as we witnessed the way that he spent time working on the dramatically aged and expressive faces that he drew.

And my mother…I have had a sense of her for a very long time, as possessing the kind of persistence that is exhibited by the flow of a river that wears down a rock gradually, imperceptibly – yet the power and force is unmistakable. She attended a school in New York City that is still in full swing: Fieldston School, run by the Ethical Culture Society. She attended Kindergarten through 12^th grade there and over the years I have come to know how profoundly that education shaped her life philosophy. In this school, ALL students, both boys and girls, in the midst of all their many and varied academic classes, also took sewing, cooking, drafting, and shop – think of it – my mother was born in 1920 and that’s the kind of education, the kind of view she had of how things should be.

A co-worker of mine, originally from New York City herself, curious about my mother’s childhood, helped me to tease apart my mother’s formative years: progressive schooling in the 1920’s, her first attempt at escaping her family’s wealthy and repressive lifestyle by going away to college, then upon graduation, enlisting in the army. After she returned home from her military service she flat out told her parents that she was moving to California. My friend generously shared with me her unbiased perspective, which enabled me to see the truth of my mother and her unquenchable thirst for freedom and adventure, something that from my vantage point, I simply could not see. She held a mirror up for me to see that I was much more like my mother than I had ever imagined – and I was proud to be like my mother. This was a monumental shift for me.

Mom had deep and abiding beliefs relating to language: she believed that all English speakers, of all ages, had a right to literacy in their language, and she worked toward this end especially for adults who had somehow missed out on this opportunity in school. She also believed that all children, all people, who lived in this country, no matter what their ethnicity or economic station, had a right to a well-rounded education. To that end, my mother worked early on as a volunteer librarian wherever she could. Later she became certified as a Spanish translator working for the Los Angeles School District, at a time when Spanish-speaking children began flooding into the school system. Much later on in her life, she continued her love of language and shared that with others as an ESL instructor (English as a Second Language) working with each wave of immigrants who landed in Los Angeles; first Spanish speaking immigrants from many different parts of the world, then immigrants from eastern Europe, then Asia; the list only continued to grow. My mother did not travel herself, but she came to know, in very personal ways, the joys and sorrows of the world, in spite of her shyness, through her deep and lasting connections with her internationally based students. What a profound gift we received at my mother’s funeral when several of her ESL students shared the enormous impact that my mother’s persistence with their teaching gave to them.

So my father believed that anyone could teach oneself to do anything, and my mother believed that everyone in this country had a right to an education. I suppose there were parts of their beliefs that did overlap, but my father had deeply drawn lines about who…what “kind” of people…should be given these gifts. My mother on the other hand, believed that these were for all the peoples of the world. To this end, for much of their voting lives, my father was proud to declare that he cancelled out most every vote my mother had the opportunity to cast. This ferocity about his voting record changed, when, from his perspective at age 90, the moral character of the Conservatives that he had stood so proudly behind began to crumble. I will never forget the feeling of heartbreak that I sensed in my father when he declared, two years after my mother’s death, as I sat next to him during George W. Bush’s State of the Union address in 2005, “Don’t believe a word he says…he’s a liar.” For a man of my father’s generation and belief system, what a blow it must have been to come to the conclusion that the President of the United States was a liar, and what an act of nobility to speak of his disillusionment to me, his daughter who had so fiercely battled with him over politics for most of my adult life.

In regards to the part about not being fenced in: my mother demonstrated her resistance to fences in many of her decisions as she left her family home…but I wasn’t there to see her in her rebellion. It was something that I directly witnessed with my father, I saw it with my own eyes and it was eerie to behold. As his body began to wear down…as he approached his nineties…his hearing and vision began to diminish, and dementia began to move in. He loved to walk to the donut shop every day: once a day, twice a day, even three times when he forgot he’d already gone. Over time, it wasn’t about the donuts anymore, or the bagels, or sometimes even the most important part, the coffee. It was about getting out, about being free to go where and when he wanted to go. Of course he would want that; we all would, we all do. But my dad really wanted it and he wanted to go BY HIMSELF…did not need or want anyone to go with him. REALLY. When his hearing and vision were bad enough that it became a safety issue, he still refused company, and I mean REFUSED. Loving caregivers instead simply followed him, allowing him his deeply loved freedom. His hearing was poor enough, coupled with the noise of a busy street, such that they could follow right behind him. It took all of his concentration to get to his destination and he didn’t notice that he had chaperones. He wanted to do things his way. Sure sounds familiar to me.

When we finally, after years of an extremely creative regimen of caregiving, found that we just had to move dad out of his home of sixty-some years, he spent most of his time at the “secure” assisted living facility finding a way to escape – which he did, after only two days. When I watched how he was always looking for a way out, how he just kept trying, I really saw how much I was like my father. And gratefully, luckily, blessedly, he and I came to know that about each other, face to face, in a most gentle and subtle way…while he was still alive.

When I began my search for who might be role models in my life, I kept coming back to the feeling that the most profound role models are the ones whose lives we know the most thoroughly as that is how we discover how people’s beliefs impact their ordinary lives…for most of us, that’s what we have to work with: our ordinary lives. And that’s how I came to realize that these two seemingly unassuming folks who brought me into this world are the ones I bow to most deeply. Even as I write these words, I can see my mother really working hard to brush off all that I’ve said and I see just the smallest hint of a smile emerge on my father’s otherwise stern face.

No Stopping Him

My dad was the first resident in ten years to escape from the “secure” assisted living complex that we’d moved him to a month or so after his 94^th birthday. My sister and I had taken a preliminary tour of the place and then my brother joined us for a more detailed inspection before meeting with the Director. Aside from standard requirements about staffing, livability, etc., we were looking for places where dad could make an escape; because we knew him, we knew that he’d try.

He was a fighter…here’s what he used to say about death, although he’d never use that word: “I’m gonna fight it to the end” he’d snarl. And he did. Underneath this story of the man who broke the ten-year record, is woven the tattered fabric of our collective heartbreak: a glimpse of what life is like for millions of our elders…many of whom can’t or won’t attempt an escape like my father…they’ll just quietly waste away, right before our eyes.

Dad was just plain tough: he was the eldest of the four children still at home, who lost their father to tuberculosis when dad was eleven. They lived in dire poverty in Detroit during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. At age ninety-four, my father was strong and relatively healthy despite the fact that he had dementia, incontinence, was mostly blind from macular degeneration, and fairly deaf, although he didn’t think he was. With all these seeming infirmities, his daily routine right up to the day before we moved him from his home of sixty-one years, included walking one-mile, round trip, to the donut shop once or twice a day, or three times when he’d forget he’d already been there earlier. He was stubborn, cantankerous and basically unstoppable. It had gotten to the point where we could no longer find a way for him to remain in his home and be assured of his safety. That’s before we realized that no one could really give that kind of assurance, even when they said they could.

After our reconnaissance of the assisted-care facility, we met with the Director of the complex and told him we’d found two places that we thought were weak, as far as security went. Already he was eyeing us with a particular kind of look. We described a place in the backyard where the hilly landscaping was so close to the concrete-block fence, we knew dad would drag a metal patio chair to the fence and climb right over it. You should have seen the Director’s face when we told him of the problem. He assured us that no one had escaped in ten years, that they had a “state of the art” alarm system, and that dad would be safe. Next we told him that we’d found a gate that didn’t have a lock on it and dad would jiggle it until he figured out how to open it. Again the director made his assurances. He still wasn’t getting the picture, so we gave him examples of dad’s problem-solving technique, knowing that dad’s new problem to solve would be how to get out of there.

My father had refused to leave a house key hidden somewhere outside his home because he was afraid of an intruder finding the key and getting into his house, and truthfully he wouldn’t have remembered the key when he needed it, anyway. When I asked dad what he’d do if he locked himself out, he said with a bit of a growl, “I’ll just kick the door in”: this from a man in his nineties.

The day finally came when he did lock himself out. The back door was a lightweight, inexpensive hollow-core door and at first he tried to kick it in, but weighing only about 115 pounds fully dressed including his shoes…he just couldn’t bust the door down. That didn’t stop him: he wandered around in his garage and found a crowbar, somehow dragged it to the back door and smashed a hole in it. Then he reached his hand through and unlocked it.

The next time he locked himself out, my sister got a call from the neighbor across the street saying that she had just happened to look out their window to witness dad standing on a 5-foot aluminum ladder just about to climb in through his kitchen window. Luckily her husband was able to interrupt dad’s attempt, which if successful would have landed him right in the kitchen sink.

His third “problem-solving technique” was the proverbial last straw. After the crowbar and ladder incidents we scoured the garage and removed all the tools that we could find, along with anything else that seemed like something dad might hurt himself with. The next time he locked himself out, even after our precautions, somewhere he found a hammer and used it to break the window next to the front door, reached through the broken window and again, let himself in. The same neighbor just happened to see dad reaching his hand through the window and called us. Miraculously, he was not injured.

We knew, as soon as we heard about this last episode, that we had to move him out of his house. We’d been walking a fine line for months by then, trying to find a safe way that he could stay in his home, and with the help of some loving, dedicated caregivers, we had come up with many creative solutions for taking care of this rowdy old man. Even in our frustration and concern for his safety, we all loved that dad simply would not give up.

After hearing our stories, the Director realized that maybe it wasn’t just that we were overly protective children, but it seemed like he still thought we were exaggerating, and maybe nuts. One more time, he repeated his line that no one had escaped in ten years and that they’d take good care of him.

Dad wasted no time and began casing the joint the very next day after his arrival. He took the easiest route – forget climbing the fence. Here’s how he worked it: on the morning after he arrived, the first thing he did was simply try to get out the front door, over and over. Every time he pushed on the door, the alarm would go off. The employees got to know him quickly, knew they needed to keep an eye on him, but they weren’t prepared for quite such a rascal. He spent most of his time that first day, in the lobby, and noticed that sometimes the front door was locked but other times it was unlocked, to allow guests to come and go.

Although he did not completely understand how it all worked, the next day, he made a point to stand around and schmooze with the receptionist, while keeping an eye on that front door traffic. Subtly, he edged toward the door until an opportune moment arrived when there were four or five guests coming and going and dad simply blended himself into that little crowd and walked out with them. Luckily the receptionist realized what had happened right away, and dad only made it about 20 feet from the front door before one of the staff escorted him back inside. So, just two days after we moved him in, my sister got a call saying that he had escaped. Luckily he didn’t get far…he just got out. When my sister phoned with the news, she and I both responded in kind: we cheered. He did it! He broke their blasted ten-year record! But the elation was short lived…we knew he was not safe out on the streets and we knew he would keep trying.

Of course we were pissed off at Mr. Director for not believing us in the first place. We were also secretly quite proud of dad for being, well, for being that fighter that made it so hard for all three of us kids to get along with him, but in this case: “Way to go, dad.”

The next day when we went to visit him, he was right there in the lobby, scoping everything out again, no doubt looking for his next escape opportunity. We walked in, and I could tell that he recognized us, but he didn’t make any effort at a greeting. He was leaning on the reception counter with one elbow, looking intently down one of the long hallways. I went over to him and said, “Dad, aren’t ya gonna say hello to us?” “Shhh!” he whispered loudly, and nodded down the hall, not wanting to draw any attention by pointing with his long, thin finger. “See that guy rolling that cart? Shhh! Don’t let him know we’re looking at him. He cleans up around here. I know him. He’s a pretty good guy. See that garbage can on his cart? He must roll that cart outside to dump it somewhere, don’t ya think? I’m thinkin’ I can just climb into that garbage can and hide in it, and then when he rolls it out, I’ll just jump out and take off! Wha’ d’ya think?”

Even as I was concerned for dad’s safety, I loved that he was still not giving up. It was so much who he was. My brother, sister and I later on that day joked that clearly dad had watched the movie, The Great Escape, too many times. He wasn’t giving in. Not just yet anyway.

What we learned was that Assisted Care facilities are not really set up for patients like dad. Much later I learned that he would be classified as “ambulatory with goal-directed wandering”. I laughed out loud when I first heard that term: “goal-directed wandering”. “Goal-directed”…that was dad, for sure. Most residents were unstable on their feet at best, or, used a walker, were in a wheel chair or bedridden: translation – easy to control. And, truthfully, the great majority of the residents were women, who, in a gross generalization, were from a generation of women not inclined to plan out escapes.

We ended up moving dad, trying two other facilities…each time smaller. Over and over we’d tell them how dad was. Each time they’d give us that look, the one that said we were just over-protective children, and that we shouldn’t worry – they’d take good care of him. But they couldn’t. He was too much of a handful for any of them. He needed constant attention because he was strong and healthy – and he was always on the move, when he wasn’t asleep. They couldn’t keep a close enough eye on him – they weren’t used to having to keep track of a man who actually moved around on his own, and they didn’t have the staff to handle someone so active. We couldn’t afford to hire a private caregiver that would be solely responsible for him and sadly, there was even less of a chance that he was going to consistently take directions from any of his children. I could see the writing on the wall.

As there is an ending to each of our lives, his life ended according to his own particular style. In his uncanny way of sensing when there was a possibility of escape, he got up and wandered to a door during a few moments when someone in the third, and much smaller residence that we’d placed him in, had forgotten to reset the door alarm. He wandered outside, enjoying the freedom and fresh air that he so loved…and fell. He broke his hip and when they x-rayed it, the doctor said that the joint had completely shattered…he would never walk again.

He left his mark on the hospital in those first days. While heavily sedated with pain medication, he was approached by what appeared to him to be strangers who were about to mess with him and he kicked not one, but two nurses in a row, with his good leg: a fighter to the end. Less than two weeks from the day of his fall, when on some level, he knew that it was finally, truly time to go, he went so quickly that the caregiver that was sitting with him didn’t even have time to call for medical help. Even with death, in the same way we’d known him to be in every situation, when dad made his mind up to do something; there was no stopping him.

What Have You Been Up to Lately?

After the fire, after settling into the unsettling routine of living in a motel, still not knowing if my beloved cat, Tucker, was alive, dead, or injured and holed up somewhere healing or not healing; I was trying my best to cope.

One thing I can say for sure – I LOVED going to work each day and I never thought I’d feel that way about working at Williams-Sonoma. I had taken the job several months before the fire, to give myself a steady paycheck; the pressure of supporting myself as an artist had begun to wear me down. But I never thought I would LOVE going to work at a fancy kitchen store, in an upscale mall. Now I did, for the simple reason that it brought me unbelievable comfort within my completely unstable, not-knowing, house-burned-out, world; a comfort that came from order, consistency and time spent in surroundings that did not reek of smoke.

The work brought me a routine. I could spend eight delicious hours in a world of total, artificial constancy. The music that played over and over; now I loved even that ridiculous soundtrack. The detailed and sometimes inane instructions describing how to build a product display, complete with exacting numbers for every product, several color photos to illustrate different versions based on what our stock levels were, mailed OVERNIGHT from corporate headquarters in San Francisco: I now looked forward to all of these things that used to drive me crazy. I could hide inside them and forget my life.

My life that was a mess: I did not know how long the Red Cross would continue to pay for my motel lodging and food vouchers, I had no idea where I was going to live or even if I could find a place that I could afford.

Each night I would leave work and return to the scene of the fire: sitting on the back porch of the burned out house I would whistle, call, sing, or wail for my cat. I had to keep returning, had to keep calling out for him; I couldn’t let him down, couldn’t just give up.

Later when I returned to the motel, I would turn on the TV and find something, anything to lose myself in. Me, someone who had, pre-fire, developed quite a big, fat attitude about people who went home after work, sat in front of the television and blobbed out. I did not own a TV and had not lived in a home with one for close to twenty years. I used to wonder why “they” couldn’t see that “they” were wasting their lives away…how “they” could watch such garbage. It was one of my favorite rants. When I walked into that motel room each night, returning from another unsuccessful attempt at trying to find my beloved cat, heartbroken and close to homeless, I wanted to feel nothing. Television worked well for me.

Even in my unconsciousness I saw what I was doing; saw that I was using television to numb my pain, to hide inside of it, so that I did not have to think about my life, or feel it. It allowed me to forget the pain for just long enough to wind down and hopefully go to sleep. Over and over, the routine was the same and I liked it like that. I had the shows that I watched each night…I was turning into “one of them”. Nothing like walking the path of one whom I’d judged so harshly. I was living the American way: go to work, come home, watch TV and go to bed. And I was relieved that I could lose myself, grateful for a few hours to forget that my life was a shell, and just barely that. It was a mere gauze veil of a life that could so easily unravel. With any scrutiny at all, me, my life, could be reduced to random threads blown about in passing air currents.

On the evening of a day off, I gave myself an enormous treat and took myself to a movie. There was a comedy film playing at a theater on the way back to the motel. And it was a film I knew I would love – one with wit and grace and beauty all wrapped up together. Here was an opportunity for two blessed hours of escape in a big dark theater. I could go in and completely dissolve into the story of someone else’s life. And it worked. I forgot; forgot that I did not have a home, forgot that Tucker was still missing, forgot that I had not much more than a few changes of clothing. And most importantly: I laughed, long and hard. I laughed so much that my face hurt. I laughed so much that I began to relax into that one sweet moment of laughter and joy. There was only that moment; all other moments of my life were utterly and completely forgotten. Because I did not try to forget, or practice forgetting, because it just came so gently, it went deep inside me. I forgot all that weighed so heavily, all my fears, my heartbreak, and my terror that soon I would end up on the streets – all of it melted away in deep belly laughs. My body relaxed as if I’d been in a sauna or had a massage; only this laughing was much better.

Eventually the movie came to an end. I floated out to the lobby, still completely wrapped up in my luscious moment, right there with my laughter and nothing else. I bumped into a woman, an acquaintance, and she repeated words that many of us say to each other as a way of greeting: “What have you been up to lately?” Often the asker does not hear the answer or even the question, for that matter, as it can just be a mindless greeting. But I heard the question. Clearly. Everything in me slammed on the brakes. My in-the-moment laughter and lightness came to a screeching halt and there was nothing after it. I was at a loss. She asked me what I had been up to lately and for a few moments, I had no idea. I could not answer her question because I did not know.

It took me a little too long to respond and she began to feel uncomfortable, not realizing that this was going to be such a difficult question. I had dived so deeply into the present moment of the movie and the laughter and complete relaxation – all so separate from the reality of my life – I actually could not, or would not; remember what I was “up to lately”. My brain refused to allow me to know, just quite yet. It was trying desperately to hold onto a few more moments of peace. And then it all came screaming back. I had completely forgotten my life and with her seemingly innocent question, I came back from forgetting. I returned to remembering. I was crushed.

She watched all this play out on my face in a matter of moments. She had seen way more in those few seconds of a very long pause than she had bargained for. We were, after all, only acquaintances to begin with. Her question meant nothing to her, and everything to me. We never know who it is we are really speaking to…what they are carrying, what they have lost, what they’re trying to forget, or remember.

About a year later I was standing at the cash wrap at Williams-Sonoma one weekday evening. The store was empty of customers until a very nicely dressed woman wearing one strand of pearls at her neckline stepped across the threshold. She approached, carrying a subtle but deeply familiar trauma within her heart that she was doing her levelheaded best to disguise. In her hand she held a sheaf of dog-eared, typewritten pages. She had the presence of a traumatized, domesticated animal that had become suddenly feral – I saw it in her eyes. She handed me her papers, with an almost invisible tremor in her hand. “How much would it cost for these?”

She held a stack of single-spaced, typewritten pages: a listing of household items. My fingers touched the papers and for a moment we both held onto that list: coffeemaker, frying pan, kitchen knives, dishtowels…the list went on and on. Again I looked into her eyes. Fire!

Softly I said, “My house burned too.”

With those four words, she saw that I had made it beyond a terror that quaked in my body every time I smelled smoke, even from a match being lit. She saw that there was something else taking root in my soul that was beginning to push out the homelessness that haunted me, lived in me, even after I found a new home. Our situations were so different, but it was all the same. She was wealthy, she had homeowner’s insurance, the fire had happened only two weeks prior and the insurance company had already told her to just make a list of what was destroyed and they’d replace it – it was just before Christmas, after all. They, she and the insurance company, all thought the look in her eyes, the devastation in her heart, could be buried, or better yet erased, under a mountain of new things. When she looked into my eyes she knew it couldn’t. She also knew that it was possible for new life to sprout, right up through the ashes.

 

URGENT: PLEASE CALL ASAP

While attending last year’s writing workshop sponsored by The Sun magazine I made a commitment to myself: from that day on, I would submit a piece of writing each month, to a section entitled “Readers Write”, where the magazine’s loyal followers or someone like me who’s recently new to the venue, share a bit of their own writing. When I saw the prompt for this next month, my heart sank: The Internet.

With any small amount of pondering over this one word, this mostly incomprehensible concept, with all its power to connect, to announce, to shame or defame, to make trash into glory, to tell stories of intimacy or revolution, for me when I let myself wander in the word, I still come up with death: the death of my brother and his younger daughter. The almighty Internet was the obedient messenger that carried a small electronic envelope holding a brief collection of letters, words and punctuation, and when the stark symbols were slowly strung together and my brain would enable the words to take on meaning, it would lead me to learn of their deaths.

I did not receive a phone call, which is probably still a more common, albeit equally excruciating way, to learn of a tragedy. The actual day of their death came and went like always, for I knew nothing. Yet. The following day, Saturday, was lovely at its onset: a glorious summer day with sunshine – not something to be assumed in the Pacific Northwest. My Saturdays almost always began with a very local yoga class taught by our gifted and sometimes hilariously funny yoga teacher, a visit to probably more than one farmer’s market, because that is my most favorite social activity, and then finally I ended up at work. I know that sounds like a strange way to spend a lovely, sunny Saturday but I had my reasons. At the time I did not own a computer. Sometimes on the weekend I would go into the funky, round yurt that housed the herbal medicine business where I worked, pull up a chair in the office – a space that has no exterior windows so it is a bit like a cave, and find a space in my heart and soul to write. Newly processed medicinal herbs transitioning from fresh plants to herbal medicine infuse the air with a layered aroma that speaks of medicine, yes, but also fresh cut oats, and mints and best of all, mountains of handpicked rose petals – their fragrances all woven into the countertops and walls; into the air itself. For me it was a comfort smell, a calming smell and I could settle in and write.

There I was in my Saturday reverie. I sat down, signed on and began to write. La-la-la, still in my reverie. As sunshine streamed into the main space of the large, circular, semi-permanent structure, I could hear a gentle breeze combing through the tall cedars. Now and then the eerie cries of a red tailed hawk would be directly followed by krak-krakk-krakkkk! screaming out of the ravens as they chased the intruding hawk out of their airspace. After a while, I decided to check my email.

Here is what I saw in my inbox:

URGENT: PLEASE CALL ASAP

The email was from the older of my two nieces. Something was terribly wrong. I could not see myself, but I knew the color had drained out of my face. My entire body was quaking at an almost imperceptible, but very high frequency; to an observer I probably would have appeared calm. I was anything but that.

I stared at the subject line of the email. I wanted to know, didn’t want to know, wanted to know, didn’t want to know – couldn’t’ find the courage to open the email. Something made me press the key that opened me to a world I never thought I would enter.

“There has been a very tragic accident and I need you to call our house.” My eyes found these words and again: The World stopped. The email was signed by my sister-in-law and my older niece. Only the two of them. There were two other members of their family, of my family, but their names were not on the email. MY BROTHER AND HIS YOUNGER DAUGHTER. Why were their names so achingly absent?

What happened? WHAT HAPPENED? I called their number and the trembling increased. A young man’s voice answered the phone with the kind of tone that happens when you’re barely breathing – when it feels like letting any but the smallest amount of breath escape would cause a total and utter collapse. And it would.

I did not yet know what had happened but with this short message that the mighty Internet had carried from Maryland to Washington State, my life was about to both implode and explode, with the utterance of a few brief sentences that were somberly forced out of the mouth of my older niece’s sweetheart.

But why didn’t they call me? Why would an email be the way to communicate such a dire emergency? As I listened to his unimaginable words, these questions were overshadowed by the shattering of the very ground that my life was rooted in, and remained unanswered for days, in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

There was an accident, a car accident. Hearing this, I knew we were approaching a subject I did not want to hear about and most of me shouted to run, sprint, as far away from these words as I possibly could. I did not move, did not utter a sound. They were passing a semi-truck and something went terribly wrong. They didn’t know too many details yet. They were both killed instantly. Don’t you wonder how anyone knows this last detail? It’s what we all want to believe because the alternative to this is too much to bear.

Our conversation was brief. What could either of us say after those few sentences? This very dear, twenty-something young man had become the Gatekeeper for my family. He took all the calls, and continued to speak in the shallow-toned voice of someone who is attempting and mostly able to just barely hold tragedy at bay. Bless him. What a weight he carried and in some ways, continues to carry to this day.

What I learned in the weeks that I spent back east with my family, all of us walking in a place that is between life and death, is about the things that we never think about. I am not speaking here of the big things, that one of your siblings or your father or your beloved is going to disappear in one brief moment of everything going wrong, or insanely that two will die together, but the little things. Like for example, that my brother who was so enamored with the power of the Internet, spelled Google, and of computers, spelled Macintosh, lived in a universe where he had all of my sister’s and my contact information stored on his laptop, and only on his laptop, nowhere else: not in some raggedy-edged address book or on an outdated address list, or as a collection of words and numbers scribbled in his classically illegible left-handed scrawl, on a piece of paper that miraculously remained in one corner of his desk blotter that he always meant to put in a more permanent location. “N o      P r o b l e m       ,” is what my brother would always say in a characteristically slow, sing-song kind of way about all manner of questions or concerns, but specifically here aimed at his particular method of perceiving the mundane world, categorizing that world, explaining it, and storing the trivial bits of information that it is comprised of in only one, insanely fragile place. This does not seem like anything to be concerned about, UNLESS you are trying to reach the sisters of this brilliant, charismatic and larger than life genius of a man, and unless you need to tell them that he and his younger daughter have just been killed in a car accident. Then it is a problem, and a big one, if that computer is inside the car that has just been all but run over by a semi-truck.

Now here’s the rub: eventually “they” were able to track down my sister’s phone number using all the usual methods available for sleuthing down we, unsuspecting subjects of the kingdom of zeroes and ones, whose entire personal stories can be so readily available on the Internet these days. But not me: “they” were able to locate the small town (pop. 3500) that I lived in AND my post office box number in that small town post office, BUT THEY COULD NOT FIND MY PHONE NUMBER. Isn’t that remarkable? Unthinkable? Being that both my brother and sister-in-law lived and worked just outside of Washington DC, they knew all sorts of people that either were directly connected to the far-reaching tentacles of our behemoth government, or knew people who knew people who were: people whose job it was to FIND people.

And they could not find my phone number. This I did not learn until the day of the “viewing” at the funeral home. After we’d been receiving hundreds and hundreds of heartbroken visitors all afternoon, held their hands or their entire broken selves as they wept and wailed, when the crowd had thinned out and there were, more or less, only family and very close friends remaining, one gentleman gingerly approached me inquiring if I was indeed the elder of my brother’s two sisters. Nodding yes, he looked at me with his head slightly tilted and then, shaking his head said simply, “How’d ya do it?” “Do what?” He was the person who tried to track me down. To me it seemed simple…obvious: I’d had an unpublished/unlisted phone number for a very long time, but again he shook his head. All these years I thought that made me invisible. Nope. If certain kinds of people with certain kinds of access want to find some regular, slightly cynical, maybe a bit paranoid person like me, those flimsy phone company protections don’t stand a chance, they’re almost, but not quite…worthless: except for this one time, for some completely inconceivable reason. They could not, with all their new fangled, fancy, high-tech, spy vs. spy, code-breaking software, find a “normal” person like me, even in the face of a family tragedy.

By this time we were both shaking our heads and I felt, in some tiny, aching way, triumphant: over the Internet, over the insane and enormous lack of privacy that we 21^st century global citizens are increasingly exposed to. This triumph was a kind of miniscule but not completely unimportant little gift that this man placed in my outstretched and trembling hands, the same hands that had been clasped and held and tenderly patted for all those long hours as the newly informed mourners came to share their shock and grief over this tragedy that we had been carrying now for seven long and nightmarish days. Just a little gift, no bigger than a robin’s egg, he placed in my hands and every now and then I savor it because some days it feels like that’s all I have.

To Dwell in the Kingdom of the Pomegranate

I grew up in the 1950’s… “mid-century” I believe is what that era is now called. I, like so many of our generation, was fed on a sad, sad, diet of lonely, canned vegetables. Not everyone was fed this tasteless, lifeless fare, but many of us were. This means carrots and beets that plopped out of the can as small, identical cubes, peas that were slightly grey in their greenness, green beans cut to exactly the same length, sometimes corn which was the least worst, and then the grand finale, “vegetable medley” which was some of each of these worn out vegetables. I think that once and a while my mother got adventurous…maybe lima beans, which caused my mind to shout out to me: “Danger, what ARE those?” or even more frightening: boiled, frozen spinach. We always had one of two versions of potatoes, either mashed or baked, which as I grew older my father forbid me to eat, saying they were fattening. As I have recounted these dining choices to friends my age, I have learned that this was a common theme in many parts of the country during the fifties.

Now that you know my background, you will not wonder, why, at age nineteen I was shocked and slightly uncertain when my childhood friend who had grown up during the same years just down the street, served me FRESH ARTICHOKES one evening in the apartment we shared in Corvallis, Oregon. I had never seen such an exotic vegetable, nor had I ever heard of it until that moment. She served them with mayonnaise AND melted garlic butter and OH THEY WERE SO DELICIOUS. What was going on? I was eating vegetables and they were good. AND they were FRESH. ?

It took some years for me to really appreciate the strange irony that existed in southern California in so many homes during the 1950’s. Here we were, living not far from an incredibly rich and diverse agricultural tradition, but the “modern era” had fallen upon us, and industrial agriculture was freeing women from the drudgeries of cooking, which meant out with fresh vegetables, and in with canned.

I tell you all of this so that you will understand why it is that I have only just discovered pomegranates; THIS WINTER. I can tell you how many I have ever eaten. That number is FOUR. With my first encounter in December, while out of town, I fell in love. I found some at our local grocery and plunged into their world.

I am not the first to be utterly captivated by the incredibly rich and sensual experience of breaking open a pomegranate and slowly making my way through the translucent, ruby-red seeds that are as rich as any jewels I have ever laid eyes on, or dreamed of. Each time I open one of the russet-red, roundish fruits, I fall in. Deep. There is a part of my personality that revels in the small, tiny and glorious details of such things. My dear friend and Astrologer Extraordinaire, Johanna Mitchell, helps me to understand this part of myself. I recall her saying that it is no coincidence that I create intricate, finely detailed artwork: think stained glass and beadwork, or now, handspun yarn using a drop spindle, as opposed to wild and crazy splatter painted Jackson Pollack compositions, and why I tumble head first into all sorts of intricate patterns, be it watching the painstaking motions of ants moving tiny specks of sand from one place to another in their enormous ant castles or the breathtaking formation of a flock of geese flying across a dusky sky.

Or the structure of fruits and vegetables: I was a natural for falling into the heart of the pomegranate.

For several years now, I have had the honor and great, good fortune of gathering with dear friends for their Christmas dinner. Not only do I love these folks, but also as luck would have it, they, and all their guests are excellent and passionate cooks. This year the meal included chicken stuffed with a mountain of pomegranate seeds and loads of chopped, fresh mint, that were then basted with concentrated pomegranate juice (pomegranate molasses). Yes, you are right. This was a gorgeous and mouth-wateringly sublime eating experience. As soon as I heard this part of the menu described, I volunteered to take apart the pomegranates; all three of them. If you know these fruits as I do, you know that would be no small task. My hosts were thrilled that I volunteered for the job, which at that particular moment, spelled out sheer tedium for them. Not so for me: I was in pomegranate heaven. Yes, it took me a while. I am not known for my speed, but rather for my way of being slow and deliberate: definitely the tortoise rather than the hare – but you know how that story ends. 

I began my task immediately. I wanted to make sure that I would have enough time to dwell in the rich kingdom of pomegranates without making my friends nuts. From time to time one or the other of them would stop and offer deep thanks that I was the one carefully taking apart the fruits, seed by glistening seed. My pace did drive some a bit crazy…not because we were short on time…but because “there must be a quicker way”. Two methods were suggested and demonstrated, and interestingly none were any quicker; although at first glance it seemed that either method would certainly be faster than me just standing there gazing at each seed.

Tonight I again returned to that kingdom, to dwell with the jewels of the pomegranate. It is January now and their season is about over. I spoke with the Produce Manager at our local grocery and he showed me how to find the best fruits in the large pile with a sign that read: 5/$5.

While listening to a story on the radio this evening, I indulged myself by painstakingly taking apart this mysterious fruit. I am as captivated by the texture and patterns of the thin, cream-colored connective flesh once I separate out the seeds, as I am by the exquisite garnet-like mass of this interior world that is revealed with the careful prying open of the hull.

As with so many of my small, but large, adventures, one of my friends will nod toward me with a loving smile and say, “It doesn’t take much…” What a life I live.

On This New Year’s Morning

On this New Year’s morning I traveled to the veldt…the edge between the domesticated and the wild. It is a place of great wonder and transition; for some of us it’s hard to notice. For me, here in this lovely spot where I live, that means I walked down to the water…to the Puget Sound. I have not begun my day by wandering down to greet and thank the one who arcs across the sky each and every day, for many months. When I murmured the question “Why?” in my heart, the answer revealed itself in the way of a slow and graceful, shy reply.

Recently I returned from a trip back east, visiting my family: my sister-in-law and older niece. That journey is still a hard one; to the home that used to be so full of exuberant life spilling out of my brother and younger niece who’ve been gone for over two years now. That very same home is still often filled with palpable grief, and jagged anger. Standing on the outside of the anger, as I do when I travel there, it has been puzzling, heartbreaking, hard to witness, but this morning when I arrived at the gently lapping in-breath and out-breath of the great swollen Puget Sound, I began to understand that it was the same in my own home. It takes on a different form from theirs, so it is only now that I begin to name it.

There in the immense stillness of the morning, the answer slowly came. This stillness yet more captivating as signs of the recent storms were apparent everywhere: large and small sticks floating at the water’s edge, another slice of the cliff having slid, heading back to the sea, to the source. Seeing the waters so calm after a stormy high tide feels like walking into a room when you know that some great mischievous adventure has just occurred, know it because you heard it, but the moment you cross the threshold everyone in the room has a look on their face like, “What? Why are you looking at ME?” The only give-away is the fact that there is one vase still slightly trembling from all the commotion that you just heard but did not arrive in time to witness. That’s how it felt when I saw the water this morning, like the last bit of great swelling had calmed JUST before I turned the corner. And the great beauty of the waters turned to look at me, only slightly smiling as if to say, “What?”

Back to my question, “Why has it been so long since I have visited the ones that I love?” and finally the answer began to unravel. The searing pain that burned through me, the great loss, the great clutching of life that occurred in my family caused me to strike out at the ones closest to me. For me, that is the wild ones, this wild place. It is nature. That is whom I have the deepest, most intimate connection with. What I profoundly understood is that when there is a devastation, the blinding rage and heartbreak, the grief, that pours out uncontrollably, of course strikes the ones closest first. Only because they are the closest…they are right there.

I keep seeing the image of a lion striking out toward anything that comes near it when it has been injured – an image only, as I have never been near a lion in this state. I have been in very close proximity to domestic cats traumatized by house fire, and when I tried to catch one of them, it bit me HARD on my outstretched hand. In that moment, I knew that cat had nothing against me specifically; it was simply protecting itself in the only way it knew. The eruption of the volcano clears everything; all the beauty that lives just at its edge, not because it wants to destroy those sweet and tender plants, but simply because they reside…right…there…on the edge. And they get scorched, blasted, burned, incinerated. Some go quickly, others have a slower death. But what I also know is that it, life, almost, almost always, does come back to those places. It is not destroyed for good. Because we are such a motley crew…we humans, there are many, many different faces and phases of grief. Sometimes people hold each other up together as they grieve, sometimes the weight is so enormous, there is initially, just collapse. If there is no one to catch us, all in the path will be taken. Down.

My anger, or maybe ferocious grief, did not take the form of striking out at nature and thereby destroying it, but more subtly by my withholding it from myself, and I suppose, disallowing nature to have visits from me. I have also often, literally been feeding myself in a way that does not feed me, but instead does everything but feed. I have, in some way, been withholding life from myself. This is a way to numb the pain…or to use another phrase: a way to deaden the pain. Interesting, hunh? That seems, in a way to be what I’ve been doing…deadening my life. Is this an unconscious urge to walk a parallel path as my brother and niece who no longer live? When I write these words so clearly, I understand more of my wandering heartbrokenness these last years.

When I walked down to the water this morning, the view was exquisite. Mt. Rainier was partially cloaked in her luscious cloud cover; with one shoulder exposed to reveal the big snows she has received in the last few days. The Olympic Mountains were also almost completely “out” of their cloud cover…beautifully blanketed with fresh snow as well. Stellar jays and Kingfisher were ratch-ratch-ratcheting at each other, at me, at the day. At this moment, the one whose shining face I greeted at the water’s edge this morning, is shining brilliantly through the window I face as I write. A lovely advantage to neighboring these young woods in the wintertime is that most of the trees are deciduous and by now have dropped their leaves. When we have the great good fortune to see our bright shining orb in the winter, he beams right directly into my little cabin. Because I initially moved here in the summer, this delicious little secret was not revealed for many months and is such a gift when it happens. It is so bright right this minute that as I gaze out the window, the slender strands of random spider web lead threads are glistening here and there, as deep as I can see into the woods. This is magic. This connection is indeed part of my nourishment and noticing how deep my wonder is as I gaze gives me a sense of how devastating it is for me when I close my eyes, my heart to this that is right…next…to…me.

When the World Stopped

I have been out of town most of the month. Here is a piece I’ve been working on…see what you think………….

The Pow Wow at Seattle’s Indian Heritage High School ran New Year’s Eve through New Year’s Day; it was an annual tradition. I couldn’t think of a place I’d rather be on the first evening of the New Year. The singing and dancing was moving toward the finale, still a few hours off. The arena was packed with dancers; brilliant colors flashing, feathers gliding this way and that. I was standing around one of the drums as they wailed their heartfelt song. Slowly, absentmindedly, I gazed across the dance arena and there, standing at the opposite side across a world of sound and color, was my housemate. In our two or three month association with each other this was the first time that I had told her specifically where I was going; any other day she would not have had any idea where to find me.

In that moment, as our eyes connected, time stood still. All sound and motion stopped. She had a look of horror and heartbreak on her face. I knew she was screaming but I could not hear her – all sound had stopped – the entire world had stopped. My attention was riveted to her lips. What was she saying? I knew I had to understand her but how could I? Then, everything started up again, slowly and outside of time, all in a quiet whisper, except for her voice.

I heard her words coming from some other world, “The house burned down! Hurry! Come with me! The house burned down!” She was screaming at me across the gymnasium, across the drums, across the dancers, and her words fell on me as a whisper, as a wail, as a scream, and finally as a dull, lifeless declaration. Then time sped forward and everything was racing by. The words became daggers that sliced through me until my brain and heart burst. I ran to her across that chasm and we who barely knew one another, momentarily held each other for dear life.

I rode home with her, my brain exploding. She was speaking but I could not listen. What she said, that the house had burned down, threatened to erase my entire life; I could not allow the information in. All I could think about was Tucker. Tucker: my cat, my companion, my closest friend, my indescribable connection to life. Had he been inside or outside when I left that day? He was all that mattered. All that mattered.

As we neared home, a sea of red lights flashing against the clear, blue-black, starry sky of an icy winter’s night announced the corner where we lived. Recently the weather had turned unusually bitter cold. Wet, rainy days were replaced with temperatures in the teens, and packed snow and ice on the ground for days on end. The lights pulsing on the glistening ice and snow were mesmerizing and also heralded a kind of danger that I had not encountered for a very long time. Fire trucks ringed the scene, but the sense of extreme urgency that I expected was nowhere to be seen. And. The house was still standing: that beautiful, old, sturdy, white, Victorian house was still there. On closer inspection, I saw that although it was still standing, it was almost completely gutted.

The firefighters were “mopping up”, as they say…moving around, and in and out, collecting equipment, rolling up hoses. It was over. As my eyes poured over the scene, my brain desperately tried to make sense of it, and then it flashed back to TUCKER. I attempted to run inside to find him and was blocked by men still wearing gas masks. “You can’t go in there – too dangerous.” I was in full adrenaline mode, had to find Tucker, and they were not going to stop me. It took several strong men to restrain me in my hysterical, grief-stricken state. Finally the fire inspector, and I bless him to this day, cautiously approached me. I was still firmly planted in a wild fierceness. Bravely, he wondered if he could assist me.

Somehow I was able to put words together to form a sentence, and made him understand that I had to look for Tucker inside that house. I could not leave without trying. He understood…he had a cat himself and said he would help me as best he could, within the confines of serious safety issues. “You can’t go in there without a gas mask on.” Again I made it clear that one way or the other I had to go in there. He agreed that we’d go in together. We had five minutes…the air was bad inside. Five minutes was all he could allow.

The downstairs was completely gutted from the fire. It felt like walking inside a dead body, somehow sacrilegious. Passing by the bathroom, I saw melted porcelain fixtures and my whole body started to tremble with the force of uninvited images that hooked themselves to that scene. He later told me his best guess was that the fire started in the bathroom, as clearly the heat was most extreme there.

I had been sub-letting the upstairs, which was more like an attic. As we were about to mount the stairs the fire inspector asked if I’d left the door at the bottom of the stairs open, or closed, when I went off to the Pow Wow. “Closed. Tucker did not get along with her cats (of which she had five).” “I bet that he ran out when they opened the door to get upstairs. I bet he escaped out that door and found some hiding place outside.” I couldn’t believe or disbelieve him. I was in shock.

Although the downstairs was completely gutted, the upstairs was not. That door was what they call a “fire break” – its mere physical presence caused a slight pause in the tremendous appetite of the flames, slender as it was, and limited the immense draft of the fire that was sucking out all the oxygen in the house; it’s probably what saved the structure.

We climbed the stairs into a bizarre scene of a space that was not gutted by fire, but only barely spared. As we entered the attic I became hysterical as I called out for Tucker. I had never quite settled in to this room, so there was no furniture other than a mattress on the floor with boxes randomly stacked here and there along the walls. Tucker was nowhere to be seen. But I had come to search for him, and search I did: I began picking up boxes that were taped shut, as if somehow he could be hiding underneath one of them, flattened into a cartoon-like image of himself. I could, in some compartment of my brain, grasp the level of insanity that was driving my actions at this point. This is when the inspector pointed out the blistered walls, proof of the intense heat that had existed in the space, only hours ago. The walls of the stairs and my attic room were blistered but not burned. He said those blisters told him that the upstairs had been about three minutes from flash point, meaning that if the fire had burned for three more minutes the whole house would have flown apart in a firestorm.

A chill racked my entire body.

The inspector yanked me out of my insanity when he placed his hand on my arm, and said gently, “It’s time to go; Tucker’s not here. I bet he ran out the door when the firemen opened it and ran right through the fire. I bet he made it out alive.” His grasp was firm, as were his words. I could not find the strength to move the muscles in my body but somehow walked down the stairs and past the melted bathroom fixtures. He gave me his card and said to call if I needed anything. Soon enough they were all gone. She and I were alone with ourselves, with each other, with a skeleton of a home.

I had never been able to comprehend images I had seen of people wailing over the loss of loved ones at a funeral and had never heard such a sound in person. Through my deep connection to this nine-year-old male cat named Tucker, I came to know about wailing. In my life, I had learned that the safest posture was to be quiet and mostly invisible. But now, deep and heartbreaking wails began flying from the center of my chest. They took on a life of their own.

I could not bear not knowing what had happened to him. Each night after work, I went back to the house. It reeked of acrid smoke, yellow tape still draped around it declaring, “DANGER – FIRE LINE – DO NOT CROSS”, although the tape was beginning to crack and flap around in the cold north wind. The ice storm persisted. I would bring what winter clothes I had, along with a blanket or two secreted out of a motel room, so generously provided by the Red Cross. In the stark, silent and crystal clear freezing night I would walk around to the back porch of the house. No matter what time I got off work, no matter how I felt, I went there every night.

It would always start the same way. I would wrap up in a blanket, and initially, to keep warm, I would hug myself. First, I would whistle for him. I had one particular whistle that was our sign. Each long, lonely night I would whistle for him, always followed by a cold silence. Then I would begin calling him in a singsong voice: TUHHH-KURRRRR, TUHHH-KURRRRR. That always gave way to rocking and sobbing and then finally wailing that just poured out. Even in my deep grief there was a part of me that was poking, “Shhh! You’ll bother someone with all your noise!” I bow deeply to what came through me in those long, lonely nights. Tucker gave me a tremendous gift: I was beginning to learn how to grieve.

Finally one night I had a dream about him. It was the first and only dream. It was more like a nightmare, because he did not look well. In fact, he looked more like he was dying. In the dream, he was curled up on his “doctoring towel”, a threadbare, maroon bath towel that I always used when he needed medication or care for a cut or a wound. In the dream, I was so happy to see him, but as I got closer I saw that he was not in good shape. He was missing teeth, his fur was dry and bare in spots, and he was skin and bones. I awoke out of the dream and at first thought I had received a sign that Tucker was alive, but as I began to remember the details I wondered if I was receiving a sign that he was gone, or close to it.

That night with even greater resolve I again returned to the back porch to find out, one way or the other, good news or bad, the fate of my old friend. I fell into the wailing. In the midst of that deep, middle of the night, I whistled for him. It was a quiet whistle as by then I was hoarse. “??? What? Was that a cat?” I heard it again. But there were a lot of cats in the neighborhood, including several of my housemate’s that had escaped the fire, were still alive, but too traumatized to allow anyone near them. “There!” I heard it again. I whistled and there came another meow in response. Again a whistle, again a meow: plaintive, small-voiced. I could not allow myself to think that it might be Tucker…it was too risky for my broken heart to even imagine such a thing. But, there it was again and the sound was slowly coming closer. It shifted and was coming from some place high up and to my left. I whistled again and clearly heard a pitiful meow way up high. The sound had moved up onto the roof of the garage next door. One of my neighbors heard me outside and hollered, “Lauren, is that him?” “I don’t know!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????????” I yelled back.

“OH MY GOD!” I shouted as I saw the silhouette of a quivering, fuzzy creature up on the roof. “TUCKERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!! Is that you?” By now my neighbor had brought a ladder, and another had a bag of cat food. Carefully, the ladder was set to the edge of the garage roof. It was a long climb. Whoever this cat was, it was terrified and skittish, but. It was also purring. Loudly. Tucker had a VERY loud purr. Slowly I climbed the ladder with a handful of dry cat food in one hand. As I finally reached the top of the ladder, perched at the bottom edge of the roof, I could see the cat standing, huddled, up at the roof ridge. It was as far away from me as possible, but still in plain view. IT WAS TUCKER! And he had all his teeth and all his fur and all his limbs. HE WAS ALIVE! His tail was quivering, and he was so, so incredibly skinny, clearly starving. And terrified.

He knew who I was, he wanted to come to me, and he wanted to eat the food that

was in my outstretched hand. He’d take a few steps toward me, and then scrunch back to his safety, out of my reach, at the peak of the roof. I had definitely learned my lesson about rushing traumatized cats, when, a few days after the fire I had tried to catch one of my housemate’s cats who struck out at me in fear. I kept talking to Tucker, whistling softly under my breath.

By now, several neighbors murmured around the base of the ladder. THIS was a MIRACLE, plain and simple. It had been twenty-five days since the fire. The ground was still covered with ice and snow. Where had he been all that time? Finally, miraculously, courageously, he came close enough to lick one of my fingers with his rough tongue. Purring, purring, purring, he’d grab a crunch or two of cat food and then run up the roof and out of my reach. Slowly, he’d settle closer, but not too close. Eventually he curled up in my arms against that cold, hard ladder. I was weeping, everyone around me was weeping and they could still all hear him purring from the ground. Carefully, I gathered him in my arms and he let me hold him. One rung after the next, I maneuvered my way down the ladder holding him with one arm, clinging to the rails of the ladder with the other. He weighed next to nothing. And, he was still purring, purring, purring.

A friend generously loaned me a car and somehow I found my way to a 24-hour, emergency, veterinary hospital. I held Tucker gently in my arms. He was so slight I was afraid of hurting him with any amount of pressure. We walked into a waiting room filled with people with horrors etched across their faces. Tucker was still purring. Loudly. As we entered, all of the mostly tear-filled eyes were upon us. I sat down on a hard, cold, grey metal chair and Tucker curled into a small ball of tan and white fur.

He began to drift in and out of sleep, purring softly and then loudly as he’d move between sleep and awake. Shortly after we arrived a receptionist came to inquire about our particular trauma. She could not believe her ears or her eyes and over the course of the next couple of hours, each member of the loyal staff that worked those long and often heart-breaking night shifts there at the emergency clinic came to feast their eyes on Tucker and I.

We were like a newlywed couple on some sort of bizarre honeymoon. I sat there with him in my arms and he just purred and purred and purred. All through the night, one by one, each staff member would come and taste a bit of our great, good fortune, drink up a bit of our love, to quench their thirst from so many tragedies, one after the next.

Eventually he was examined and given fluids for dehydration. As I sat in the hard, grey chair with him purring away in my arms, here’s what they theorized: as our dear fire inspector surmised, Tucker must have run out that door when the firemen opened it, right through the fire…THROUGH the fire. The pads of each of his toes were cloaked in brand new, delicate pink skin, which the doctor told me would have taken about three weeks to form, after being so badly burned by the fire. As he escaped, he ran out into the below-freezing night, right across the ice and snow and his burns were iced down – one of the simplest treatments for burns. He then imagined that Tucker holed up somewhere, in some safe place, waiting for his feet to heal up enough so that he could walk again. He reckoned that the night I found him might have been the very first night that he was able to put pressure on that new, tender skin.

Finally we were released from emergency care and I smuggled Tucker into my motel room. I placed him on the bed and held up the bedspread so he could crawl under it. He had become such a small little guy that there was hardly a lump where he was curled up under there. He purred most of that first night. I closed the room-darkening drapes, hoping that I would finally be able to have a good long sleep. When I awoke the next morning, it was not morning. It was well into the afternoon. I opened the curtains and could not believe my eyes. There was an insane wind and rainstorm going on outside. It looked like a hurricane, and I later learned that it probably was, technically, a hurricane. I, we, had slept through many hours of that storm, soundly. Since then, it has been named the Inauguration Day storm, as it was the day that Bill Clinton was first sworn into office. It was also the first day of the next part of Tucker’s and my life. Late in the afternoon I got a phone call (when the power and phone service came back on) that my rental application had been accepted for our new home and we moved in, one week later.

Here’s another gift that came: it seemed that somehow I, too, had been given another chance, a new life. Starting over, I was profoundly aware of the impact of each and every thing, and person, for that matter, that I brought into our new home and although all these years later, that initial clarity has blurred, there is a certain way that I still consider what AND who I bring into my home. It’s the fire that brought that to me.

traveling, death, life and going to the game

I have been on a journey traveling through time; touching and tasting parallel lives that I live, have lived. A writing workshop initiated a leap which carried me across and through my aunt’s ninetieth birthday luncheon, my fortieth high school reunion, a visit with my goddaughter and her family…meeting her two children for the first time, a visit with my sister and her sweetheart and finally the writing workshop that got me out of my cabin and inspired and encouraged me to keep writing. All in ten days. My trip began in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles and ended on the cliffs of Big Sur above the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean, before returning home to the gently lapping, salty waters of the Puget Sound.

Writing is pounding inside me and still I am astonished at what it takes to let it pour out. Below are two pieces: a poem, whose seeds were planted and germinated in the midst of the workshop, and an essay that was born in the very first days of my return home. See what you think.

 Return to Life

my sister-in-law still wears black

husband daughter stolen away death comes knocking

day in day out weeping wailing

probate never ends

husband daughter stolen away death comes knocking

 

words

wool

call me call my soul deep into the dark night

brother niece stolen away death comes knocking

the voice in my head sneaks in again

you are wasting your time

brother niece stolen away death comes knocking

 

hands seeking grace plunge into steaming hot water

raw wool stinking wool pressed down and down and down

mountains of curls strewn with sticks with hay

submit submerge drown

bubbles shoot to the surface then slow then stop

open close under water in water floating sinking

death comes knocking

 

clouds of wool carefully lifted

clear water streams between my begging fingers

down into the depths of the ocean

ocean of my heart

life pressed gently below the surface

death comes knocking

 

breathe in breathe out

rinse after rinse

drowning

soft silver pillows carefully cradled

death comes knocking

 

she weeps

I wash

she wails

I press wool curls

slowly push down

steaming water

over and over and over

death comes knocking

 

in the end

there behind the woodstove hanging

yarn pieced together from the first

daring precious

wool spins into yarn miraculous yarn

clouds of silver ringlets

heave out from the wall

in a frenzy we return to life

Are You Going to the Game

The three of us sit in a lonely row on a long wooden bench. The cushions are lean as if to make sure we will not stay long, and no one will. My sister sits on one side, me on the other. We bookend him in this way to comfort him and ourselves, but we also sit on either side to keep tabs on him a bit, in case he gets out of control. Although it’s not really possible to control him, we always try.

“Where are we?” he asks in the kind of whisper that is louder than regular speech. His brother and sister-in-law turn and give him the Look. “Haven’t I been here before?” he whispers with more volume. Now his younger sister, who sits in the bench at the front of this small, family section, turns with a horrified look – a heartbroken, heart-wrenching look. “What’s WRONG with him?” she begs, whispering even louder.

Yes. Yes he’d been here before. We’d all been here before. Two years ago we’d been here twice: once to bury our mother…my father’s wife of 56 years, and then four months later we buried dad’s youngest brother. And here we are at the cemetery again. My sister and I, we sit with our ninety-one-year old father, possibly in the exact same spot on this long, lonely, bench. Back then my father was not whispering the way young children do, causing everyone close by to stare with their eyes or their entire bodies. Back then, he was so utterly crushed with his wife’s unexpected death, he sat between us, silent. His brother’s death followed so quickly, he was mostly just numb.

We each held one of his baby-soft hands, just like today, but only for comfort, not control. Before mom crossed over, there had been a few times when dad had completely forgotten something important he’d said, or we’d said to him – like a slice of time had been thoroughly removed with a small sharp knife. But since Mark’s death, something seems to have snapped.

He’s whispering again, louder than before, “What are they talking about? Where are we?” How do you tell someone who’s brain has already completely refused the information, how do you tell them again, whispering, in the midst of a funeral? It would be hard enough if he was a two-year-old boy, which sometimes is the best model for working with my father these days. We are not working with a two-year-old, but with an old man who often has the attention span and sense of time of that of a young child. We are working with someone whose tired mind simply cannot receive this information; that his strapping young nephew once a top high school swimmer, prize winning triathlete, City of Los Angeles Harbor firefighter, has dropped dead of a heart attack, not on the job, but simply at home.

How can we whisper to dad while Mark’s sister is giving his eulogy, that this generous hearted man who always kept the wiffleball baseball game going at our annual Mother’s Day picnic, even if he had to play all the outfield positions, so that the next generation of little kids could have a game, how can we whisper to him that we are about to bury this man?

My sister calls to say that dad is acting strange. He keeps asking her if she is going to “the game”. At first she starts all over again, and tells dad that no, we aren’t going to a baseball game; we’re going to Mark’s funeral. Each time she tells him, he hears it as if it was the first time.

Finally we tell him yes; tomorrow we three will go to the game together. And when it’s time, my father somehow knows that he needs to put his good suit on, and tries to remember how to tie his tie, wide with broad but subtle diagonals, and that he has to put his wingtips on; men’s dress shoes with laces, purchased from a younger brother’s shoe store some fifty years ago, black leather with small, delicate perforations in curved designs at the toe and heel. Shoes with real leather soles that weigh so much dad has trouble picking them up, being just 116 pounds fully dressed, including his shoes. Somehow he knows that today he has to wear his dress suit to “the game”.

“Are you going to the game with us?” he asks hopefully, when I come into the living room, dressed in black. “Yes, we’re all going to the game.”