MY DARLING GIRL

My girl is sick. My darling girl. My beautiful child all grown up and broken- and I am powerless.

She is not sick like sick find the right medication- convalesce and get your life back sick. She is unwell in the extreme. She has an array of symptoms and problems and manifestations and abnormal shit that has her doctors bringing in all the big guns, all of the “ologies”. From cardiology through neurology and pulmonology and right up the elevator and to left why not see endocrinology (with a strong dose of WHAT THE F#&K-ology and we-don’t-know-but-there-are-a-lot-of-scary-things-it-could-be-ology) they are all lined up trying to answer the questions of why she can’t breathe and her heart doesn’t seem to respond normally and- and- and AND DAMMIT….dammit…dammit.

It’s happened before. Actually it happens maybe once or twice a year (for the past six or seven years). It has seemed to be episodic and cardiac related and she always scares us all; gets on the meds (that in the past have always fixed it) feels awful for a couple weeks and then gets better. Except this time… This time there are new symptoms and it’s not responding to all the stuff that used to work, at least not so far, not yet. Could do tomorrow- but that won’t mean it’s gone- it’ll be back (will it be even meaner next time?), it always comes back.

She’s not alone in these symptoms (but this is MY child). Others are in this place (but this is my CHILD). There is always a multidisciplinary approach to this array of disabling crap. The problem (but THIS is my child) is that they don’t know the why and the wherefore- they only know the what and some of those “whats” suck more than others and some of those “whats” have no answers at all (which maybe sucks most of all) and this is my child, my darling girl.

So you see, here, on paper (on screen? in cyberspace?) in this corner if my brain, this is where I have decided to allow the worry and the fear to dwell and erupt and play itself out and be done with it. Here, knowing (hoping) that your far-flung ears and hearts are there to listen, I will scroll out my terror, because there is comfort in the knowledge that I am not simply railing into the wind but rather into distant ears, if you will have it, the distant ears.

This is the place where worry lives. I’ve thrown it out of every other spot where it has tried to entrench itself. I will not give it power but sometimes it demands voice.

There! Now I can feel a bit of the weight off my lungs.

Now I can go back and be (for my daughter) the person who remains clear-eyed and certain that it will be all right; the person who knows that, what ever comes, we (she) can handle it and that if she is afraid than I am not and that will be enough for both of us. I can be the person who laughs and picks up her three year old and swings him through the air certain in the knowledge that Mommy will be able to do it…next time. I can make the bad jokes and whistle my way past the haunted house because I have let worry scream itself out and put the bitch in her place.

UPDATE:

Recent tests have actually evoked resposes like "Oh, honey...that's not normal." Life, however, has normalized a bit...again...this time. The full blown manifestation of all the signs and symptoms has subsided and rears it's ugly face in fits and starts. Testing continues apace and answers seem to keep just beyond the questions and worry remains in levels more and less acute depending upn the day.

We all have hopes and fears that the next "ology" will have the answers...better to know, right?

I WANT DRAGONS (and YEAST)

A Determinist’s View of Miracles (and maybe faith)

I believe that I have the tools to shape my own destiny; that my life is in my own two hands and not bobbing on a sea of luck and chance and random events. I know that luck. (good or ill). has nothing to do with how I came to be where I am. I am aware that mythical creatures are just that: mythical. I get it that refraction and droplets and angles and pollution and light (and other science stuff) coalesce to create a spectacular sunrise. I have never felt at the mercy of (or for that matter particularly comforted by) the will of a supreme being (and yet, in those desperate moments when even hope seems to have abandoned my own small self, I find my eyeballs rotated franticly upwards peering at the inside of my skull and hear my own tight thoughts saying “please, please, please! Let her, me, it, everything be all right.” and I haven’t a clue who [or what] I’m petitioning).

SIDE NOTE:

Does anybody else remember the Burt Reynolds movie where he thinks he’s going to drown and as he swims for shore he’s promising God “if I make it Lord I’ll give 90% of everything I make to charity” and as he gets closer the percentage gets lower till he finally stumbles onto shore saying “10% Lord, like I said 10%”? I find myself thinking about Burt’s character often in those eyes rotated moments. Good ol’ Burt kind of keeps me honest.

I believe in Karma (well, I think I believe in the 1960’s “hey man it all comes back in the Karma…what goes around comes around” version of Karma. I’d have to do some research to find out how close that is to the actual, really Karma so for our purposes here we’ll call it Karma and I’ll do the research later) in that if you do good then good is created and. (eventually) comes back. I believe that the infamous squished (or flighted) butterfly meeting its own destiny on a windshield. (and here good ol’ physics comes into our story: Car at top speed meets said butterfly and well, squish; car parked outside Starbucks and the butterfly impacts the world in a whole ‘nother way.{One could say that the Starbucks butterfly is indeed luckier than the poor, hapless, top-speed butterfly and get into a whole thing about butterflies and butterfly luck and does luck ever really exist as more than a concept that embodies all the circumstance in a particular subset but – I digress} ) may truly be the unforeseen beginning of my own apparent luck (good or ill) but that it’s how I react to it that will matter.

Yup, these are the things I believe but what do I want?

I want miracles and magic and dragons and serendipity and, and, and I want know that yeast is all science-y but accept that bread is a little tiny miracle.

THE CURMUDGEON

As my father got older, it seemed to me that he was getting more curmudgeonly. He complained about the state of the world, our society, our culture - just about anything he had read or seen in the news. Well, I've gotten a little perspective with my own advancing years. I figured out that what bothered him wasn't CHANGE, but the lack of it. The fact that you can "fight the good fight", put your life on the line and change the world - but only for awhile.

My dad was in WWII, he was shot down, a prisoner of war, tortured, and had PTSD, all-in-all, an un-fun period in his personal history and the history of the world. At least, he told himself, his sacrifice had meant something. He had been actively engaged in saving the world and stomping out Nazism, and its terrifying racist evils.

Fast forward: Rwanda, (that not-so-important holocaust), and a brand new resurgence of society's "go-to" move: racism. There is suspicion and harassment of Muslims, Arabs and Hispanics, all made to seem legitimate under the guise of "Homeland Security" and "protecting our borders." Suddenly illegal aliens are THE WORST PROBLEM in the world.
Never mind the rapacious greed of the banks and mortgage lenders that did more to undermine the security of our country than any "illegal." (AND took more real dollars out of your and my pocket than a whole passle of muggers and petty thieves.)

Or, as my dad said, upon hearing about "Gitmo" - why did we fight the Nazis if we were going to become like them?

No, he wasn't upset by change, he was near despair that people NEVER really seem to change. There's always someone willing to hate and to stir up others by dressing their "cause" up
in euphemisms. The same fear-mongering that worked in Nazi Germany, works just as well now.

Although we DID seem to learn something. Apparently someone said: "We gotta stay away from that whole gas-chamber thing - REALLY bad P.R. Let's just go with illegal
detention, no Habeas Corpus, and water-boarding! We'll put that ol' Constitution on the shelf like the relic it is."

NEMESIS

I have been thinking about Miss Marple lately and about evil and goodness for it’s own sake and a little about Professor Dumbledore and his whole love-is-powerful-magic-thingy (I don’t know if this will get as far as the Dumbledore part) and I’m also thinking about moisturizer (but that’s only because I just got out of the shower and my face is all pinchy).

Back to Miss Marple: Miss Marple believed that evil was very real. Not just evil deeds and evil doers but evil it’s ownself; out there waiting to be tripped over, encountered, flirted with and embraced and that she was evil's Nemesis. Gray haired, sensibly shod, elderly Nemesis armed with a sense of justice (and a carpet bag with knitting in it) and an unlikely visage. How cool is that? I want to live next door to her, I want know her. I want to have tea with this lady. (Okay, before you ask, I do know she’s not real { and, pssshhhah, she'd be like 160 years old by now} and that all that stuff was really Agatha Christie but it doesn’t seem like it does it? It seems like it belongs to Miss Marple.)

I wonder why Aggie assigned Nemesis and the pursuit of evil to the little old maiden lady. She gave Poirot the “little gray cells” and his powers of observation and massive ego and Tommy and Tuppence got the flip and devil-may-care “aren’t we too-too clever?” (Well, and they were! I really do love them and wish there were more stories which makes me thinks about the “classics” and why they are supposed to better and ‘must reads’? I read Canterbury Tales and Moby Dick and To Kill a Mockingbird and most of Shakespeare and I pretended to read The Iliad when it’s assigned??...okay, maybe you went back to it but COME ON as a sophomore? Again: “gack”.> In a long lifetime of reading I’ve found that good writing is good writing. Maybe some are called classics because they have endured over time, but that brings us back to Aggie. She certainly endures and is rarely counted among the 100 ‘must reads’. Perhaps a subject for another essay - Who would like to take it on? Volunteers?)

ALRIGHT! Now is the time to show patience an understanding not the time to scream “GET TO THE POINT! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD"* (*I always think that adds a little drama so good on you for using it appropriately here.) I’m heading right back there.

So Nemesis and Christie: why Miss Marple as Nemesis? Why the elderly lady as the Avenging Angel? (I wonder when Aggie decided that it would be Miss Marple and not any of her other characters? We know when she writing these stories but when did she think of it? Was she a young woman or did she come to this later? When did it make sense to give this to Jane Marple?) Originally I thought this was going to be about evil and goodness and choices but now I think it might be about old women and their place in our world, our notions, our literature and our movies- Dumbledore will have to wait.

We meet Jane Marple and see what she presents to the world and then we are surprised to find the steely inner core of resolve and the ruthless Avenging Angel. We are programmed to be surprised by her power. She doesn’t have the steely gray hair pulled back into the severe bun and the steady gaze and the harsh features that might make us believe that she is ‘man enough’ to take on evil. She’s fluffy, and pink and drinks tea and she knits for god’s sake (another good use of the deity to underscore a point don’t you think? I didn’t make it up so if you don’t like it you can say so.) and she’s frail! We are however not at all surprised to discover that Yoda (frail and bent as he is) is compellingly wise and extremely powerful. We are not surprised that Dumbledore (aww, he did get in here) turns out to be ruthless as well as powerful in spite of all of his maundering (I know – not really maunderings – I had a point to make here - apologies all ‘round) on about love and his extreme age - but the Jane Marples of the world – they surprise us.

The ‘wise ones’ of fiction are rarely the old women. They are more often the gossips, the couch bound and the busy bodies. They don’t save the world or fight for justice. They don’t summon up their waning power for one last crusade - they never had the power to begin with so it could hardly wane. They aren’t secret ninjas. They are rarely Nemesis.

What an unlikely thing Christie did here and how lovely.

(I had a bunch of other crap about stereotypes and flip-sides and waning powers and truth and fiction but I sent where it belonged coz, well it was crap. The Marple stuff, I’m pretty happy with that part so there y'all go)

Our Boom With a View: Our View

OK, we admit it. We're Baby Boomers (hence the catchy name). We're the "Me Generation", the grab & gimme snot-nosed brats that killed innocence and Bob Hope - OK, maybe not Bob Hope.
Apparently we never learned to share, (although with 76 million of us all wanting to climb on the monkey bars and swing on the swings, you'd think we'd have learned a thing or two about sharing.)
This blog is not about Boomers - we didn't invent that dumb title, (a brief pause: generation X'ers we feel your pain). We didn't fuck ourselves into existence and we didn't raise ourselves.
We were raised by "The Greatest Generation" and Walt Disney, (M-I-C ... K-E-Y ...), and, as Billy Joel said: "We didn't start the fire."
So this isn't a "Boomer" blog, the name just tells the reader that we're older than we used to be and we were born before computers. (but not before TV and fire).
Now let's talk about something trivial and important and fun and sad. We welcome your comments and feedback, (Oooo - a "sharing circle.)