Gift from my other daughter.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Listening Up
"What is your favorite?"
I had only time for one question; the great author was only signing his name, only three times per person. Those were the rules we agreed to before we got in line for his autograph. Five people before the signing table, we were told to "nest" our books so that there would be no delays in the execution.
I understood that. There were a thousand people in attendance to hear him read, and most of them wanted autographs. I've been to dozens of readings in that hall and none that were so well attended had even allowed signings.
But I couldn't just stand there while he scribbled his "John Updike" and gawk. I came to the reading with knowledge only of what he'd written, not any personal experience, other than a short story here or there. I'd looked down the list of his publications, and listened carefully as he'd described stories and their history. His credits page is long. Where would I begin?
So I asked him. He smiled, ran his fingers through his hair and laughed an almost nervous little laugh. "That's a hard question," he began, "they are all… "
"Like your children, I know. But which one really? I promise not to tell the others."
"You knew I was going to say that."
Hey, we have the same number and combination of children. It made sense that it would be the same comparison. Only a writer understands that each story is jealous of the one before it and the one that followed. Stories are living creatures!
He stumbled a little more, wrote his name my allotted three times, and the person behind me had his books on the table. I was moving away, when he finally replied. "Coup" he said. And then turned away, redirecting his attention so as not to dwell on his disloyalty. That book, after all, was not available for signing tonight.
The interesting thing about his answer was that he'd already described that particular novel as the one least in his style, the one that made him get out of his comfort zone. Something to think about.
I had only time for one question; the great author was only signing his name, only three times per person. Those were the rules we agreed to before we got in line for his autograph. Five people before the signing table, we were told to "nest" our books so that there would be no delays in the execution.
I understood that. There were a thousand people in attendance to hear him read, and most of them wanted autographs. I've been to dozens of readings in that hall and none that were so well attended had even allowed signings.
But I couldn't just stand there while he scribbled his "John Updike" and gawk. I came to the reading with knowledge only of what he'd written, not any personal experience, other than a short story here or there. I'd looked down the list of his publications, and listened carefully as he'd described stories and their history. His credits page is long. Where would I begin?
So I asked him. He smiled, ran his fingers through his hair and laughed an almost nervous little laugh. "That's a hard question," he began, "they are all… "
"Like your children, I know. But which one really? I promise not to tell the others."
"You knew I was going to say that."
Hey, we have the same number and combination of children. It made sense that it would be the same comparison. Only a writer understands that each story is jealous of the one before it and the one that followed. Stories are living creatures!
He stumbled a little more, wrote his name my allotted three times, and the person behind me had his books on the table. I was moving away, when he finally replied. "Coup" he said. And then turned away, redirecting his attention so as not to dwell on his disloyalty. That book, after all, was not available for signing tonight.
The interesting thing about his answer was that he'd already described that particular novel as the one least in his style, the one that made him get out of his comfort zone. Something to think about.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
intensity
That is the word I'd use for the concert last night. I'm trying to decide what it is about it that makes me feel today like turning over rocks and telling all the bugs of the world to move along, but I'm not sure if that is the music, the presentation or the "package" that went with it.
What do I mean package? Well you know, all the details of a night out. What to wear, what to do with the 13 year old, do we eat first, last, not at all, where to park, buy t-shirts or cd's or beer?
Suffice it to say that we don’t go to concerts of this variety very often. Symphony? Sure, Opera? Occasionally. Theatre habitually. But the music of Sigur Ros is not in any of those categories. But then, it is.
You may not have ever heard the group. I'd heard only the songs played for me by my daughter, who'd given us the tickets to the concert for Christmas, and she tends to have offbeat taste. I liked what I'd heard: haunting melodies, interesting combinations. None of that prepared me for the intensity of the live performance.
I should have had a clue though, from the quiet. The crowd of mostly 20somethings was sober, calm. No one passing joints around, the occasional cigarette was the only disruption to the air. A bar in the lobby, but no line, no one really all that interested in the offerings.
We found our seats, and listened to the opening band, young women from, I assume Iceland, because they didn't speak English very well and their sound had those haunting, wide open tones that seem to come from that part of the world. For their "big" number, one woman played the saw… a real live cut wood saw, with a bow, and it was so beautiful it could bring tears … mournful and full and a touch wild. Two others played what looked like service bells from a hotel, while the other played water glasses. All of this orchestrated by a computer, incidentally the same brand and model as the one I type on this morning.
I wasn't completely sure these girls weren't the band. I hadn't adjusted my attitude appropriately yet, and still thought we were in for the kind of good time we used to have at rock concerts years ago.
I was ready not to be my age. Had on my jeans, which fit well thanks to all the salad, white shirt and had straightened my hair. Okay, if one looked close, they'd see that the concealer doesn’t really deal with the dark circles around my eyes, and the texture of my skin beneath them lately has me trying every kind of anti wrinkle cream I can get my hands on. I won't say we were the oldest people there, but we were in the top ten percent.
My husband was just as bad. He's been to more rock concerts than I ever dreamed of, was actually part of that generation of students who did things like close colleges with protests, went to war. You know, real intense situations. I was always in awe of them, being just a few years too young for it in any capacity but tagalong. He'd already made me promise that if it was bad, we could leave, and just be polite to our daughter should she ask.
So we invited my son's best friend to spend the night… leaving one thirteen year old alone seemed wrong, but the two of them together was okay. (Best friends parents were home, just five minutes away.) Ordered them pizza, decided not to eat before the show. Got directed to four parking lots before we could park.
The second clue that things weren't going to be as we expected was a line in the men's room. But not the women's. Any woman who's ever been out to a public place knows there is something wrong there.
We found our seats, high in the second tier, in the next to last row along far aisle. I will have to ask my daughter if that was intentional… I suspect it was. We really were able to fade into the theater and observe.
The music… electronic and vocal and gifted. Bows used on guitars, I guess that is a new thing, but I'd not seen it. Behind the band, a constant light mural, changing from the faces of the most innocent looking little girl you could imagine, all bright eyes, round cheeks and braids, to, by the end of the set, army boots marching through puddles. The audience was quiet, (and for the most part, there were a couple of inappropriate whoops) respectful. And once I got through the mindset that this was supposed to be a fun concert, and listened, just listened, the intensity of what this little group of people from Iceland were doing struck me. I looked around the room and realized this is the generation that has to deal with things almost harder than that Vietnam group. These people have the legacy of what we've …their parents… done to the Earth, to the world. They don't take anything as lightly as my apathetic generation did. Even their music is intense, and meaningful and what felt like, important.
I can't say I enjoyed it. But I was moved.
The group took no intermissions, did only one curtain call, and returned the standing ovation that carried on for what felt like ten minutes to the audience.
They didn't speak one word. It was all the music.
We left the hall and I realized that I had found something of "not my age" after all. I realized I used to feel that intense about what was going on in the world, that I used to carry a torch with me wherever I went. That was the stake that drove through hearts of my family members. They didn't want to know about global warming or overpopulation or hunger or racial cleansing or back alley abortions and welfare mothers and homeless people and HIV and all the other atrocities that were going on all over the world. It was the Seventies man, and they wanted to hide under rocks and live the lives they were given in their safe little corner of the world, run off to Wal-Mart and Target and buy cheap electronics and country western music cds. They wanted to just be, while I burned with the injustice of it all.
And I'm ashamed. I became more like them, less the idealist. And under what excuse? I had children, a marriage, a job, a career! I could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of labors, not only my own, but those of the rebels before me, who'd won me the right to work for equal pay, to take time off for maternity leave without losing my job, to send my children to free public schools that addressed even their exceptional needs.
And what did it all come down to?
Going to a concert where I wanted to straighten my hair, recapture my youth and rock out, but finding instead, that recapturing youth isn't about sexuality or looks or what to wear… we knew that then…it is about recapturing the fire, the intensity of feeling, that let us have the courage to at least think we could change the world.
And realizing what gifts my daughters have really given me.
What do I mean package? Well you know, all the details of a night out. What to wear, what to do with the 13 year old, do we eat first, last, not at all, where to park, buy t-shirts or cd's or beer?
Suffice it to say that we don’t go to concerts of this variety very often. Symphony? Sure, Opera? Occasionally. Theatre habitually. But the music of Sigur Ros is not in any of those categories. But then, it is.
You may not have ever heard the group. I'd heard only the songs played for me by my daughter, who'd given us the tickets to the concert for Christmas, and she tends to have offbeat taste. I liked what I'd heard: haunting melodies, interesting combinations. None of that prepared me for the intensity of the live performance.
I should have had a clue though, from the quiet. The crowd of mostly 20somethings was sober, calm. No one passing joints around, the occasional cigarette was the only disruption to the air. A bar in the lobby, but no line, no one really all that interested in the offerings.
We found our seats, and listened to the opening band, young women from, I assume Iceland, because they didn't speak English very well and their sound had those haunting, wide open tones that seem to come from that part of the world. For their "big" number, one woman played the saw… a real live cut wood saw, with a bow, and it was so beautiful it could bring tears … mournful and full and a touch wild. Two others played what looked like service bells from a hotel, while the other played water glasses. All of this orchestrated by a computer, incidentally the same brand and model as the one I type on this morning.
I wasn't completely sure these girls weren't the band. I hadn't adjusted my attitude appropriately yet, and still thought we were in for the kind of good time we used to have at rock concerts years ago.
I was ready not to be my age. Had on my jeans, which fit well thanks to all the salad, white shirt and had straightened my hair. Okay, if one looked close, they'd see that the concealer doesn’t really deal with the dark circles around my eyes, and the texture of my skin beneath them lately has me trying every kind of anti wrinkle cream I can get my hands on. I won't say we were the oldest people there, but we were in the top ten percent.
My husband was just as bad. He's been to more rock concerts than I ever dreamed of, was actually part of that generation of students who did things like close colleges with protests, went to war. You know, real intense situations. I was always in awe of them, being just a few years too young for it in any capacity but tagalong. He'd already made me promise that if it was bad, we could leave, and just be polite to our daughter should she ask.
So we invited my son's best friend to spend the night… leaving one thirteen year old alone seemed wrong, but the two of them together was okay. (Best friends parents were home, just five minutes away.) Ordered them pizza, decided not to eat before the show. Got directed to four parking lots before we could park.
The second clue that things weren't going to be as we expected was a line in the men's room. But not the women's. Any woman who's ever been out to a public place knows there is something wrong there.
We found our seats, high in the second tier, in the next to last row along far aisle. I will have to ask my daughter if that was intentional… I suspect it was. We really were able to fade into the theater and observe.
The music… electronic and vocal and gifted. Bows used on guitars, I guess that is a new thing, but I'd not seen it. Behind the band, a constant light mural, changing from the faces of the most innocent looking little girl you could imagine, all bright eyes, round cheeks and braids, to, by the end of the set, army boots marching through puddles. The audience was quiet, (and for the most part, there were a couple of inappropriate whoops) respectful. And once I got through the mindset that this was supposed to be a fun concert, and listened, just listened, the intensity of what this little group of people from Iceland were doing struck me. I looked around the room and realized this is the generation that has to deal with things almost harder than that Vietnam group. These people have the legacy of what we've …their parents… done to the Earth, to the world. They don't take anything as lightly as my apathetic generation did. Even their music is intense, and meaningful and what felt like, important.
I can't say I enjoyed it. But I was moved.
The group took no intermissions, did only one curtain call, and returned the standing ovation that carried on for what felt like ten minutes to the audience.
They didn't speak one word. It was all the music.
We left the hall and I realized that I had found something of "not my age" after all. I realized I used to feel that intense about what was going on in the world, that I used to carry a torch with me wherever I went. That was the stake that drove through hearts of my family members. They didn't want to know about global warming or overpopulation or hunger or racial cleansing or back alley abortions and welfare mothers and homeless people and HIV and all the other atrocities that were going on all over the world. It was the Seventies man, and they wanted to hide under rocks and live the lives they were given in their safe little corner of the world, run off to Wal-Mart and Target and buy cheap electronics and country western music cds. They wanted to just be, while I burned with the injustice of it all.
And I'm ashamed. I became more like them, less the idealist. And under what excuse? I had children, a marriage, a job, a career! I could just sit back and enjoy the fruits of labors, not only my own, but those of the rebels before me, who'd won me the right to work for equal pay, to take time off for maternity leave without losing my job, to send my children to free public schools that addressed even their exceptional needs.
And what did it all come down to?
Going to a concert where I wanted to straighten my hair, recapture my youth and rock out, but finding instead, that recapturing youth isn't about sexuality or looks or what to wear… we knew that then…it is about recapturing the fire, the intensity of feeling, that let us have the courage to at least think we could change the world.
And realizing what gifts my daughters have really given me.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
No words, but looking up
Blogs without pictures get boring. These are just in my files. It is too dreary to leave them there tonight.
Skyfire, in South Haven, Michigan.
Skyfire, in South Haven, Michigan.
Saturday, February 04, 2006
the power of touch
Sometimes I take out memories, and just think about them, about what they meant then, what they mean now.
When my mother was lying in the hospital, trying to recover from the heart attack that led to the stroke that caused her kidneys to shut down, her lungs to fill and eventually, her death, I was lucky enough to get to be with her, at least some of the time. It took nearly two weeks for death to finally claim her. In that period of time many moments stand out as extraordinary. The most intimate moment between just she and I, perhaps any time since maybe infancy, was the night I was alone with her, and massaged her leg.
There was less than half of the leg left, she'd endured so many amputations in that last ten years, and I never touched her before that. I wondered if massage would help increase the circulation that she lacked, the absence of which led to each successive operation. But I didn't live near, I saw her four times a year or so, and she had a husband. It wasn't really my "place" to offer to rub away the pain.
I suppose I was in denial all those years. The last nights in the hospital made me understand that all the people who were close around her those last years were not there out of concern for her, but out of their own needs. Needs which she, even in her compromised state, filled without complaint.
But she was lying there in a hospital bed, unable to move, unable to breathe without assistance, denied even ice chips for fear of aspiration, and the people who'd surrounded her in her years of need were down the hall in the lounge, eating pizza and having a party.
I stayed in her room. It was cold. So cold. Probably sixty degrees, and she was still feverish. The medication they'd given her to regulate her heart rate had the side effect of something thermal, overheating her. The nurses knew this and dialed the thermostat down as low as it would go. But we were dressed for summer, and easily chilled. They gave us blankets to drape over our shoulders.
She moaned; the pain from her tubes, her afflictions surely awful, but it wasn't that. It was the phantom pains that woke her crying in the nights. Pain in the limbs whose circulation had shut down and killed the tissue.
I can handle crises. I don't fall apart when immediate danger threatens, or when someone is hurt. I forgot all about my denial, and went to her. Her leg was bare; she'd pulled the hospital gown up as high as she could to feel the blessed cool air. I'd never really looked at it, and when I placed my hands on the skin of her thigh, she quieted. I kneaded the muscle, soft and pliable, more like the feeling of those water tubes we get at conferences with advertisements, to handle for stress.
The connection was immediate. I knew that it felt good to her, to be touched, to feel my hands working the pain from their memory. I didn't mind, and unlike the way my fingers get when I'm giving a massage I'm not really in the mood to give, I didn't tire. I didn't stop until the nurse came in to do a breathing treatment, and to sedate her so she could rest.
Before I left the room, she took my hand and squeezed it.
I looked in on her the next morning, but they'd decided her best chance was to be drugged to a state of unconsciousness, so that they could perform the next procedure needed if she was ever to come home. Her husband gave consent. His right, his responsibility. She never woke from that state, and a week later we had to turn off the machines.
I wasn't the last person to touch her, there were people in and out the whole week as she slept, but I'm pretty sure I'm the last one whose touch she knew. No one else was with us, we didn't speak, but the power of touch between us reaffirmed a connection that isn't explainable without the experience of it. Parents know it, it is the same one that settles a child's nightmares when he doesn't quite wake up, the
I will always wonder, if I'd been there more, if I'd been there to touch her legs, rub her feet before the doctors began their surgical solution, could her life have been better? Could it be so simple?
This isn't about my mother, or me for that matter, but about the power that humans hold in their hands with such simple things. A soft voice, a kind word, a simple touch, given without obligation or expectation. It astounds me really.
When my mother was lying in the hospital, trying to recover from the heart attack that led to the stroke that caused her kidneys to shut down, her lungs to fill and eventually, her death, I was lucky enough to get to be with her, at least some of the time. It took nearly two weeks for death to finally claim her. In that period of time many moments stand out as extraordinary. The most intimate moment between just she and I, perhaps any time since maybe infancy, was the night I was alone with her, and massaged her leg.
There was less than half of the leg left, she'd endured so many amputations in that last ten years, and I never touched her before that. I wondered if massage would help increase the circulation that she lacked, the absence of which led to each successive operation. But I didn't live near, I saw her four times a year or so, and she had a husband. It wasn't really my "place" to offer to rub away the pain.
I suppose I was in denial all those years. The last nights in the hospital made me understand that all the people who were close around her those last years were not there out of concern for her, but out of their own needs. Needs which she, even in her compromised state, filled without complaint.
But she was lying there in a hospital bed, unable to move, unable to breathe without assistance, denied even ice chips for fear of aspiration, and the people who'd surrounded her in her years of need were down the hall in the lounge, eating pizza and having a party.
I stayed in her room. It was cold. So cold. Probably sixty degrees, and she was still feverish. The medication they'd given her to regulate her heart rate had the side effect of something thermal, overheating her. The nurses knew this and dialed the thermostat down as low as it would go. But we were dressed for summer, and easily chilled. They gave us blankets to drape over our shoulders.
She moaned; the pain from her tubes, her afflictions surely awful, but it wasn't that. It was the phantom pains that woke her crying in the nights. Pain in the limbs whose circulation had shut down and killed the tissue.
I can handle crises. I don't fall apart when immediate danger threatens, or when someone is hurt. I forgot all about my denial, and went to her. Her leg was bare; she'd pulled the hospital gown up as high as she could to feel the blessed cool air. I'd never really looked at it, and when I placed my hands on the skin of her thigh, she quieted. I kneaded the muscle, soft and pliable, more like the feeling of those water tubes we get at conferences with advertisements, to handle for stress.
The connection was immediate. I knew that it felt good to her, to be touched, to feel my hands working the pain from their memory. I didn't mind, and unlike the way my fingers get when I'm giving a massage I'm not really in the mood to give, I didn't tire. I didn't stop until the nurse came in to do a breathing treatment, and to sedate her so she could rest.
Before I left the room, she took my hand and squeezed it.
I looked in on her the next morning, but they'd decided her best chance was to be drugged to a state of unconsciousness, so that they could perform the next procedure needed if she was ever to come home. Her husband gave consent. His right, his responsibility. She never woke from that state, and a week later we had to turn off the machines.
I wasn't the last person to touch her, there were people in and out the whole week as she slept, but I'm pretty sure I'm the last one whose touch she knew. No one else was with us, we didn't speak, but the power of touch between us reaffirmed a connection that isn't explainable without the experience of it. Parents know it, it is the same one that settles a child's nightmares when he doesn't quite wake up, the
I will always wonder, if I'd been there more, if I'd been there to touch her legs, rub her feet before the doctors began their surgical solution, could her life have been better? Could it be so simple?
This isn't about my mother, or me for that matter, but about the power that humans hold in their hands with such simple things. A soft voice, a kind word, a simple touch, given without obligation or expectation. It astounds me really.
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