Transitions

Grass on the hill was rippling in the wind like the pelt of an animal this morning, orange poppies and purple lupin poking up through it. Small patches of fog skittered past, sun darting in and out.  Dogs swirled about, chasing balls, each other, shadows, ghosts. I turned on my MP3 player and started up the hill, exchanging smiles with a woman walking down, both of us three-legged with our canes. By the third bench, I was in enough pain that I had to sit down–no great misfortune when I could listen to the wind in the eucalyptus and look out over the city. High above, a kestrel caught the draft and floated by. People and dogs wandered past.

A large black dog mounted a smallish white one on a leash and hung on for dear life as the woman holding the leash tried to pull them apart, finally succeeding with a frontal assault on the black dog, who tumbled to the ground.  White dog immediately presented her backside for further attention, but her owner yanked her away. Seeing the hopelessness of his cause, black dog withdrew with dignity and trotted off determinedly into a pine grove, demonstrating independence.

Almost a month since I wrote here last, a month of shattering violence and heartbreak all across the world, of an unexpected death in our extended family, of another year gone by, of the slow and uneven stumble to move on. I am older, sober, and slightly more mobile, but it’s been a tough month.

Selling the house is much harder than I thought.  Instead of complaining about the hills and stairs, I’m now remembering how much I like the light, the great sweep of sky from our living room window, the ironwood tree we planted all those years ago.

Downsizing means getting rid of things, but memories stick to them. I put a teacup in the giveaway box and take it out again the next day.  Since we drink coffee and tea in mugs, why not give away my mother’s teacups? Because I see her in my mind holding one, lifting the cup to her lips, smiling and talking. My father’s slide rule, my children’s early drawings, those brooches of my mother’s I’ve never once worn in the years since she died, that pile of magazines with holiday recipes…decision after decision. I am too old to tote around this load. Someone, please, just take it all away.  Every time anyone comes over–kids, friends of kids, our friends–I thrust something into their hands.  Bits of your life shouldn’t go to strangers.

The change is hard because the memories are good.  I am 73 and wake to mockingbirds. Outside my window, trees sway in the spring winds. Humming birds flit through the sunshine. My youngest grandchild blows me kisses with a pudgy hand. In this dark and chaotic world, I’ve had a lucky life.

1979: I

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
And the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
And I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

–Wendell Berry, Sabbaths

The music is back

Four years ago today, desperate and heartsick, I quit drinking. I knew I couldn’t keep on with it. It was making me too ill, too depressed, reclusive, isolated, labile. I cried a lot, life looked hopeless, I felt deeply ashamed.

But sobriety didn’t immediately launch me onto a pink cloud. Drinking had helped my chronic back pain, and when I stopped, the pain got worse. It also had given me periods of energy, elation, sociability that had gotten shorter and shorter as time passed, but without wine, they disappeared entirely. With daily blackouts and increasing subterfuge and shame, continuing to drink simply wasn’t an option; but quitting brought a load of problems to resolve that I’d been avoiding for years.  I felt trapped.

It has taken a long time, but things are improving. The latest attempt to treat the pain with medical marijuana is showing promise, and if I can get to a place where being out and about for a few hours doesn’t do me in, I’ll be content.  I think the marijuana is helping my mood as well–I find myself humming again, music is back in my life.

I’ve never been a patient soul. Had I known it would take four years to get to this point, would I still have quit? There wasn’t a choice. Drinking has its own momentum, you don’t stay in one place–and my life was consumed by it. From the outside, I looked pretty normal, but as I posted on a recovery forum this morning:

I don’t think I realized at the time how much my life revolved around it. Every day I got up with an acid stomach and trembling hands and shame and regret, swearing I’d never drink again. As the hangover passed, the strategizing began: what food would taste good with wine for dinner, what store wouldn’t remember my last big purchase, how much could I sneak into the garage without my husband noticing. Whatever else I was doing, obsessive thoughts about drinking were the background for it. I was enslaved, and now I’m free.

Or, as Bob Marley would have it,

One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.

Photo credit: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

Thursday morning

A bright and lovely morning, and we woke to the intricate chirps and warbles of a mockingbird greeting the dawn. The air is clear after a couple of days of rain, and across the bay the hills loom blue against the horizon.

In the backyard, Vong, the guy replacing the retaining wall, is mixing concrete with a shovel in a large black container under the ironwood tree. He doesn’t seem to be measuring anything. I guess he’s done it enough to know what consistency it’s supposed to be, though I have visions of the stuff hardening in place and having to be broken up with a pick axe. I watch him out the window: he works steadily and with confidence. I am doom-saying.

Because Vong has been hauling things back and forth to his pick-up, I’ve corralled the cats so they don’t run out the front door, where the street is. The gray cat was easy, already sleeping on the wicker hamper in the bathroom where the heat flows past. All I had to do was close the door. The orange cat was locked up in the study for most of Tuesday when Vong was here, and again yesterday afternoon so he wouldn’t attack my 15-month-old granddaughter, who thumps him with such enthusiastic love and joy he believes his life is in danger. (“Meow meow” is the first thing she says when she comes to visit, only it sounds more like mao mao.) Orange cat had no intention of being locked up again. When I tried to pick him up, he fled through the kitchen, the living room, and halfway down the stairs. I chased him around for awhile, then lay down on the bed and read a book. Soon after, he wandered in, jumped on the bed, and curled up next to me. I rose softly and closed the door. Mission accomplished.

In the midst of my cat-corralling, a young woman staying at the up-hill neighbors’ house knocked on the door in near hysteria, saying she’d locked herself out of the house and left the stove on. I invited her upstairs, got out my laptop, found a list of locksmiths in the area, and gave her the phone. After five or six calls she found someone who’d come out right away and went back up the hill to wait for him. Forty minutes later, she knocked again, saying the locksmith couldn’t get in and could she use my computer to email one of the women who lived there. Back up the stairs again to read the paper while she composed, then, in the interests of avoiding more trips up and down the stairs, gave her my cell phone so she could check for a response while she and the locksmith waited.

An hour later, wondering if I’d ever see my cell phone again, I went down and out and up the hill to her door which…was open! The locksmith had just gotten her in. I guess the owner must’ve given him permission to do something more drastic. She returned my phone with a hug and fervent thanks. It occurred to me that in the old days of this neighborhood, I probably would’ve had a key to their house, or known where they hid one, and how much simpler that would’ve been.

So nice to get a call this morning from a sober friend I haven’t spoken with in a while. Always good to hear from someone so firmly grounded in her sobriety–it reinforces my own.

Life and hard times in Baghdad by the Bay.

Dancing without music

Up at dawn, watching the sky turn pink, a great orange sun rising above the East Bay hills. I sleep so fitfully lately, it’s rare to wake up feeling rested, but getting up with the sun is still better than trying to make up for a restless night by sleeping in.  Yesterday, I dozed until nine and by the time I’d had coffee and read the paper, the morning had slipped away.  I am of an age where I don’t like time to pass that fast.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.–William Shakespeare

I am still grappling with the problem of how to have a life that isn’t dominated either by pain or by depression. If I do very little, the pain is minimal, but depression takes over. If I do a lot, my mood’s better but pain soars.  I’ve tried taking the pain med my doc prescribed before I leave the house, but half the time it makes me so woozy and sick I have to come home. Since all the pain meds I’ve tried have had the same effect, I’ve been feeling pretty hopeless about it all, but recently a friend told me about medical marijuana. In California, medical marijuana is legal.  I’d never explored it because it seemed like a risky strategy for someone with a background of out-of-control drinking.  But my friend, who also suffers from chronic pain, found out that strains of marijuana have been developed with little or no THC, the psychoactive agent, and higher amounts of  CBD (cannabidiol), which reduces pain and inflammation. I think it may be a solution to my problem.

The first step is to be evaluated by a doctor and get an ID card that allows you to purchase medical marijuana from a dispensary. So yesterday, with a certain amount of trepidation, I drove to a small, modest building in the Mission District, took a small, creaky elevator to the third floor, and began the process. You show your driver’s license, fill out an extremely lengthy form about your medical history, initial countless pages of statements relating to liability and receiving of information, swear you are not currently in rehab for alcohol or drug abuse, return the pages to the receptionist, and wait your turn to see the doctor. He turned out to be a pleasant man who had worked at the same hospital I had. He asked me a bunch of questions, made a bunch of notes, signed at the bottom, and sent me on to stage three: getting a photo ID medical marijuana card and forking over the cash ($70 with coupon–I know, a coupon?? What kind of tacky ‘clinic’ is this? But it saved me $100).

I wouldn’t call it a scam. Exactly. But it definitely had the feel of a high-volume, low-cost operation, and I’d be surprised if anyone is ever turned down on the basis of the evaluation.  You could say anything you want on the medical history forms, and they really have no way of checking it.  Depression, anxiety, pain, asthma, chronic fatigue, insomnia, loss of appetite are all diagnoses that qualify–as well as cancer, Parkinson’s, MS, AIDS, glaucoma, etc.  On the other hand, my fellow travelers in the waiting room didn’t look like a bunch of party animals. They looked like people who were suffering. And it’s not as though recreational marijuana is that hard to lay your hands on around here.

In the 60s and 70s, when I and practically everyone else in the area of my generation or younger was smoking pot, it was a risky business. People got busted regularly and jail terms were common. If you knew where to get pot, you also knew where to get acid, mescaline, hash, and heroin, so the whole scene had an aura of criminality.  In the early sixties, a pot-smoking young student I knew had a conversation with her dentist about marijuana. He wanted to try it and asked if she could give him a sample. The dental assistant overheard the conversation and called the police, who, by terrorizing the dentist with threats of losing his license, pressured him into setting up my friend. At her following appointment, she gave him a joint (gave, not sold), and the police hiding next door arrested her. It was a huge scandal in the small, university town we were in–front-page headlines in the local paper.  My friend was portrayed as a major drug dealer. The university suspended her, and she served time in jail. Eventually, she was able to negotiate her way back into school, graduated and became a social worker, but it took a long time and a lot of drama.  Needless to say, she found a new dentist.

Perhaps partly because of this atmosphere of suspicion and danger, I eventually became paranoid and delusional smoking pot, and quit in the early seventies. Wine became my drug of choice, and the long road to alcoholism. To be returning to marijuana now, at almost 73 years of age and nearly four years sober, seems both funny and ironic.

I won’t be smoking it, however. I’ve quit that, too. The kind I’ve tried was in the form of a tincture. I had no nausea, no mind-bending, and less pain.  It gives me hope that my life can open up a bit.  Maybe those long walks aren’t over after all. Maybe I’ll want to cook again, garden again, dance again, leap over tall buildings…or at least go out to lunch with a friend without having to suffer for it.

He that lives in hope danceth without music.–English proverb

Photo credit: “Leaping Dancers,” 1979, Gene Einfrank

Hmm. I see that I misread the proverb. I took it to mean that having hope lets you dance whether you have music or not, a kind of freedom. But now, like one of those tests for colorblindness, that meaning recedes and another emerges:  don’t simply go through the motions and hope for something better; live the life you have.  Something for everyone–take your pick.

Memories in place

A bright, breezy morning, the air full of small chirping birds and distant yappy dogs. In my neighbor’s yard next door, a long strand of bougainvillea is reaching for the sky. Soon it will collapse under its own weight, which seems like a metaphor for something immense and important, but I can’t think what. Perhaps we all collapse under our own weight in this improbable universe.

Yesterday a friend came over and worked in my garden, an act of love and charity I can only admire and be grateful for. I used to love gardening, but haven’t been able to do much in recent years, so the garden is overgrown with weeds and out-of-control plants. Gardening and cooking are among the things age and back pain have forced me to limit. But of course I couldn’t let her do it alone.

My part began by the rescue of what I think are called “hens and chicks” that had been my mother’s.  When my brother and I were cleaning out her apartment after she died, I couldn’t quite bring myself to toss them, so brought the pot back to my yard, where they clung to life despite years of neglect. Last fall, I looked at the pot and thought, I should throw them away or give them a chance, and stuck them in the ground, where they spread and prospered. Now, they were directly in the path of tramping feet of workmen who will be replacing our retaining wall next week. So, back into the pot they went,temporarily, I hope, if I can convince my eldest son and his wife to give them a home.

As I was digging up the hens and chicks, telling myself that’s all I’d do, I noticed some bedraggled chrysanthemums clearly succumbing to attack by tiny beasts and pulled them up with a single yank. Then I realized the Amaryllis belladonna that years ago had invaded from the neighbors’ were in the dirt the workers would have to remove to construct the new wall. They’re commonly called “naked ladies,” because their first sign is a great profusion of long narrow green leaves, which eventually die back and are superseded by long-stemmed glorious pink lilies. Right now, they’re in the leafing stage, so I cut back the leaves and dug up bulbs the size of my fist.  And buried amidst them, an orange cat collar with a small bell, one of a consecutive line belonging to a neighbor’s cat, Vinnie, who discards them within days each time they’re replaced.

Then there was the giant jade plant, another of my mother’s orphans,  the rosemary bush that’s gone woody and musty, and on and on. Before I knew it, I’d worked over an hour and when I finally threw in the trowel (sorry), was in so much pain I could hardly stand. But I’d done something! And my friend, cheerfully and steadily working her way through the weeds, had cleaned up an enormous area. We both beamed with satisfaction.

The places you live store memories, and working in my garden of 28 years brought back many. The bones of our beloved dog Bo are buried there. Hikes in the high country are memorialized by rocks my husband brought home that line the herb spiral.  That old stump under the ironwood tree belongs to an Australian tree fern I nurtured from infancy to a height greater than mine. It shriveled and burned when the landlord of the house next door took down a magnificent Monterey pine because it “might” become a liability; the mourning doves who’d perched in it left the neighborhood. Cutting back the bare branches of the grape vine yesterday, I found they were dripping on my head and felt a little weepy myself.

Life forgives its depredations;
new-shaped by loss, goes on.
Luther Penn, our neighbor
still in our minds, will not
come down to the creek mouth to fish
in April anymore. The year
ripens. Leaves fall. In openings
where old trees were cut down,
showing the ground to the sky,
snakeroot blossoms white,
giving shine unto the world.
Ant and beetle scuttle through
heroic passages, go to dust;
their armor tumbles in the mold.
Broad wings enter the grove, fold
and are still, open and go.

–Wendall Berry, “1985 V” from Sabbaths

Time passing

Warsaw sundial. Photo credit: Andrzej Barabasz

Yanked out of deep sleep by an early morning phone call, always that flash of fear when the phone rings in the dark–was there an accident? a death? is it the hospital? the police?–but it was only a friend of my husband’s, apparently oblivious to the time and the need of others for sleep. Ordinarily, I would have been half-awake anyway, but I haven’t yet gotten used to the change to daylight savings time on Sunday and have been sleeping fitfully.

I was too irritated to go back to bed and puttered about making coffee and feeding cats, accompanied by the mournful wail of foghorns and intricate warbling of mockingbirds greeting the dawn. Every year, I am resentful and angry at the time change, it seems so arbitrary and unnecessary. When I was working night shift, springing forward was a gift, a seven-hour shift instead of eight, but when I switched to days, it was agonizing. The shift started at 6:50 am, but for weeks after the spring time change, our bodies still thought it was 5:50 and shrieked in protest. I wished I could emulate my grandfather who, in his farming years, simply ignored it: “The cows and hens don’t pay attention to daylight savings time, and neither do I!”

When my husband and I were in the southwest a few years ago, I was pleased to discover that most of Arizona ignores it too. An exception is the huge Navajo Nation in northern Arizona, which springs forward according to federal guidelines. The much smaller Hopi reservation, entirely surrounded by the daylight-savings-time abiding Navajos, clings firmly to standard time. It must make lunch dates pretty chancy.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. –Douglas Adams

Lately,  between snoozes, I’ve been reading a book by Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women. It’s a fairly old book, but new to me, having somehow managed to live through the feminist revival of the 1960s and 70s without being more than peripherally involved (a mistake of gargantuan proportions I have lived to regret). Dr. Miller, a psychiatrist, writes with clarity about the terrible effects of a culture of domination and subordination, how the dominant group legitimizes the unequal relationship, explains it with false premises such as racial or sexual inferiority, and how this then becomes the model. It then becomes “normal” to treat others destructively and to derogate them, to obscure the truth of what you are doing, by creating false explanations, and to oppose actions toward equality. And for the subordinates, it’s a matter of basic survival.  Accordingly, direct, honest reaction to destructive treatment is avoided. Open, self-initiated  action in its own self-interest must also be avoided. Such actions can, and still do, literally result in death for some subordinate groups.

It’s very clarifying to read her writing. She floats above the particulars and sees the patterns, and soon you are recognizing patterns of your own, and understanding why you have them.

…the issues of how a person is made to feel vulnerable or helpless and what she/he then tries to do about it is probably the basic issue underlying most modern concerns in psychiatry. In its extreme form such vulnerability can be described as the threat of psychic annihilation, probably the most terrifying threat of all. People will do almost anything to avoid such threats.

If one is a member of a subordinate group, it’s no wonder risk-taking is so scary. It took me back to my college days, when prejudice against women in academia not only was overt, it was widely accepted. Smart, articulate women were routinely undermined and treated with contempt. It was generally assumed that the only reason you’d want to advance to graduate school was because you weren’t attractive enough to get married. Women who happened to be both brainy and beautiful were told graduate education would be wasted on them because they’d only drop out, get married and have babies.  It was a given that women would always be second-rate writers, perhaps good in their “genre,” but certainly light-weights compared to the men. Ernest Hemingway was widely admired.

…I learned that I had no genuinely valid opinions, since every view I might hold was colored by my sex, writes Cynthia Ozick, describing her faculty appointment to the all-male English department of a major university. If I said I didn’t like Hemingway, I could have no critical justification, no literary reason; it was only that, being a woman, I obviously could not be sympathetic toward Hemingway’s “masculine” subject matter–the hunting, the fishing, the bullfighting, which no woman could adequately digest. It goes without saying that among my colleagues there were other Hemingway dissenters; but their reasons for disliking Hemingway, unlike mine, were not taken to be simply ovarian. (from “Prevision of the Demise of the Dancing Dog“)

It makes me sad that I didn’t have the sense to join in the actions and consciousness-raising of the women’s movement. Much of it looked upper class and racist at the beginning, not something I wanted to be part of; but later, younger women opened it up to a more diversified group, and they helped each other challenge some of the ideas of inferiority they’d been raised with. How would my life have been different, I wonder, if I’d been part of that? And how would my daughter’s?

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

–Robert Frost

Quicksilver cures

Sitting here staring at the screen, wanting to write and not having a single thing to say.  Probably it means there’s something looming in the background I don’t want to think about. I’m feeling the urge to bake cookies, rush out to a shopping mall, get lost in a movie. Better than wine, let’s face it.

Next to me on the red couch, the gray cat is decorously licking herself, eyes narrowed to slits.  Two squawking scrub jays chase each other past the ironwood tree. The scene outside my window gradually brightens, as the sun breaks through morning fog. A white moth floats past.

You don’t see moths and blue jays fretting about what they should do. They just do it. Dogs, though, sometimes seem in an agony of indecision. The ball or the bone? Stay close to my human or play with the bad boys?

Yesterday I met a dog who stole my heart.   She was small, a couple of hands high, with rough black curly hair except for her chin and eyebrows. They were stark white. When I held out my hand, she shrank back, then slowly gathered courage, sniffed, licked, wagged her tail and smiled. I wanted to snatch her out of the car, take her home, and shower her with love.  Unfortunately, she belonged to one of the women I’d just had lunch with whom I like very much and who dotes on her dog.

I wonder what my cats would do if I brought a dog home? Once we brought a little black kitten home to live with our white shepherd, Bo. The kitten stood at the top of the stairs with hackles raised and hissed.  Bo, who was probably 20 times larger, cowered at the bottom, afraid to advance a single step. Eventually they got used to each other.

White eyebrows was pretty timid, I’m not sure she’d get used to our cats, especially the orange one who terrorizes small children. Sometimes he even scares me, and I’m a lot bigger. There’s a certain nasty, edgy meow…then, if you walk too close, slash! Ribbons of blood appear on your ankle.  He didn’t used to be like that–never a lap cat, but not a slasher either. I started wondering if he was getting mercury poisoning from the tuna in the cat food. They tell you not to give canned tuna to children more than once in two weeks these days, and here we were giving it to the cats every couple of days. So, I cut way back, and I think it might actually be making a difference. Now he’s only in slasher mode when he’s hungry.

Isn’t there something basically wrong with a world where you have to worry about poisoning cats and children with mercury-laden tuna?  Weird to think they used to put mercury in dental fillings, and didn’t those little silver balls we used to decorate cakes and cookies with have mercury in them? I think it was back in  the 1980s when we first started realizing how toxic it is. Even in the hospital we used to play with the little quicksilver balls that fell out when a glass thermometer broke.  Then, overnight, we had to call in a hazardous waste team from maintenance who came in suits and masks and gloves to deal with our plaything while we filled out documentation forms in triplicate.  It was more fun, but probably rolling little balls of mercury around in the palm of your hand isn’t any better for you than eating it.

At one time, mercury was a treatment for syphilis.  Peter Allen Lewis, author of The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present, writes: “…one eighteenth-century recipe called for mixing the liquid metal with hot chocolate, though the author cautioned against this exotic beverage because he felt that the ‘chocolate’ was too dangerous.”

In the great scheme of things, it’s coal-fired power plants and other kinds of industrial pollution that are the biggest contributors to mercury in the environment and in the tuna (and shark and swordfish). And now long-closed mines in various parts of the world are reopening because of the demand for mercury in producing compact fluorescent bulbs, which are becoming mandatory to reduce use of energy produced by, say, coal-fired power plants. So: miners will be exposed to high levels of mercury, mining will produce mercury-contaminated run-off, and fluorescent bulbs will contribute to the great piles of hazardous waste to be dealt with–all so we can reduce mercury contamination by coal-fired power plants?

Really, there just aren’t clean fixes anymore.