Eulogy for My Father

My father, Warren J. Painter, known to most everyone as “Lefty,” passed away on December 14, 2011. There will be much more to say about his life as time goes on, and about his marriage to my remarkable, redoubtable, inimitable Mama, the one and only Mary Alice. For now, I will simply post these remarks, which I somehow managed to deliver at his funeral. Doing so was quite possibly the craziest – and the finest – thing I have done to date.

We are here today, when all is said and done, however you look at it, because of the heart of Warren Painter.

First of all, because his physical heart, an organ which was a functioning miracle for nearly half his life, finally reached a point where it could no longer keep working.

It was 1973 when he had the heart attack that started his lifetime of cardiac care. Dad had congestive heart failure, but he had a lot of other stuff too. Atrial fib, PVC’s, bundle branch blockage, heart block, v-tach. These terms struck fear into various doctors, especially the younger ones, but to us they were simply terms for Dad’s ‘funny’ heart. In later life, hospital ICU staff would learn to turn certain alarms off lest the monitors clang without stopping.

We all learned to recognize the look that would come over a young doctor’s face when, decked out in his first white coat, he bent in with his stethoscope, poised to give a listen to Lefty Painter’s heart. His expression was at first puzzled, then disbelieving, then panicked. He would often walk quickly out of the room seeking help. If he paused in astonishment, Dad would glance up, a big grin on his face, and say, “It sounds like an old washing machine, doesn’t it?”

So we are here, literally, because of Dad’s heart, in the sense that it was a machine that finally grew unable to work as hard as it had to in order to sustain him. But we are also here because of Lefty Painter’s heart, the heart you all knew and loved so much. We are here because he had a great heart and he touched people’s lives with kindness and decency, and that is far more important than any medical terminology telling us why he is not here today.

Dad had cancer three times, in addition to his heart problems. The first cancer was a gall bladder cancer, undiscovered until a routine laparoscopy to remove it. This meant the cancer was cut into four pieces inside his body prior to removal, making it impossible to be certain all the cellular contamination had been removed afterwards.

The family was ushered into a room days later to hear the details, as a very senior staff doctor knelt beside Mom and Dad and delivered the news. It was grim – they told him to get his affairs in order, and take a few days to decide whether or not he wanted to have radiation treatments, which they said may or may not help him, and might make him quite ill and decrease his quality of life in the time left. “This is about the worst news we can give a person, Mr. Painter,” the doctor said.

We left that day feeling shell-shocked. Dad, as we drove out of the hospital, didn’t answer when we asked “What do you want to do, Dad?” We repeated it, and we didn’t mean about radiation. We literally didn’t know whether to turn left or right – to go out for lunch, or just head out to Lone Tree to Deb’s house.

Dad sat quietly, and then he said, “I want to fly my plane upside down.” I looked at him. He did not have a plane, and to the best of my knowledge none of his war experience included flying. Asked what he meant, he simply repeated, this time with a little smile, “I just want to fly my plane upside down.”

Maybe sons will get the meaning of that right away, but for the Painter daughters on hand his response was mysterious. I figured out that he was talking about something way beyond literal flight, but it took some time before I understood. I gradually came to see he meant he wanted to do something different in his life, to make a statement, to live in an interesting way all his own under the shadow of his own mortality. He wanted to fly his plane upside down, and I believe he did it.

He went on living his life – gardening, spending time with family and friends, being an advisor and neighbor, husband and friend, brother and father, until the darkest days of our lives, in 1995, when Mary Alice grew suddenly and catastrophically ill and passed away after five days. In those moments, Dad’s heart was wounded more than by any illness, yet he was a hero for his wife. He tended her at her bedside with grave sorrow and great care, always being kind to us as we talked to her in her coma, carried in her beloved objects of oceanic art, brought her flowers, and put her favorite tv shows on hoping to lure her back into this world.

None of it worked, and we were all with her as she passed, leaving Dad with the greatest sorrow he had ever known. Still, through it all, he was heroic. In the face of a sadness we could see all over him but could not fathom, he was her perfect partner in life, helping her to leave this world with a tenderness amazing coming from a man so big. He did every brave thing he could for her, and he was in those moments a hero to me and to us all. The lessons we learned then were among the most important, and terribly difficult, lessons a father can ever give his children, and Dad was magnificent. His own faith helped us to keep our faith alive after this great loss.

Two more cancers came and went, each one vanquished by Dad’s spirit and strong constitution. Each time the doctors gave him the news, and told him their recommendations, he would consult with us and especially talk with Mary, who was always his confidante then.

“Well,” he’d finally say to her – “I guess we’ll fight it. We have to fight it, don’t we?” And he’d smile that big smile of his, and we all knew then we were in for lots of hospital time, but somehow also lots of fun with Dad.

He was fun, and he made friends everywhere, even in crisis. Nurses checked in on him, and he always had a joke. This last trip he said to one of us about his nursing care, “If they leave the room laughing, they’ll come back.” At a less happy moment, he said to one doctor, “If you’re not going to do anything, you might as well go home!”

When he passed, we were all there. He was quiet, and had no pain. We got to tell him how much we loved and admired him, we got to tell him to be with Grandma Painter, Mary Alice, and his brothers and sisters who had passed before him. We tried to be for him as strong as he had been for Mama, but it was hard. You see, he had a great heart, and it is harder than anything to let go of someone like that.

Today we say goodbye to our father, our friend, our inspiration and anchor in life. We are at sea, but we know he will be there to guide us, like a blanket of stars. He was a man without material wealth, but he was nonetheless rich in all that mattered. He taught us that a man of strength can afford to be tender and merciful, that to win does not mean to subdue or humiliate another, and that if you possess strength it is your duty to look after those who do not.

As we leave here today, we must remember: We each have a heart. From Lefty Painter we learned that we should never be afraid to use it – it is a miracle within us. We can never exhaust its love, no matter how much we call on it. Beating within each of us, it is a little engine that will carry us farther and farther, just as far as we need to go and farther than we ever thought we could manage.

Thank you Papa, for all you gave us, and for all you were to us.

L’Italia: Hypocrisy in High Places

Qua la moglie e là il marito,
ognuno va dove gli par;
ognun corre a qualche invito,
chi a giocare e chi a ballar. 

Here the wife and husband there,
Everyone goes where he wishes.
Everyone runs to some invitation,
Who to play, who to dance. - Goldoni

I’ve been paying greater attention to Italy lately in an attempt to resuscitate my familiarity with the language and now it is always in my head. I’ve been tweeting about the public evils of Silvio Berlusconi, the civic virtues of Emma Marcegaglia, and assorted other personalities and issues for the better part of three months now. One of the more interesting topics to erupt there in the fall was an ‘outing’ of legislators that drove the country into a positive frenzy.

But first, this necessary word on European/American relations. One of the great ironies of the fragile personal relationships between Europeans and Americans is this: We feel immensely, achingly inferior to them. And they feel immensely, achingly inferior to us. And we feel immensely, defensively superior to them. And they feel immensely, defensively superior to us. We carry ourselves internally with the hubris and optimism of the very young. They carry themselves internally with the arrogance and pessimism of the very ancient. It is around this awful nexus of pride and humiliation that we dance through our encounters in life, politics, and culture. It makes for a damned funny picture sometimes, but it also makes cross-continental commentary something of a minefield. Do trust me when I write that I love Italy with my whole heart, and also when I lay claim to the full panorama of hypocrisy, violence, and stupidity (plus all the finer stuff, for sure) that has made American public life what it is today.

On to the story: A list of ten names appeared on a phantom blog hosted in the US as September drew to a close. The blog purported to be outing ten Italian politicians accused by the publishers of being closeted gay homophobes who use their political positions to deny civil rights to LGBT citizens.  It was the same fiasco we’ve seen unfold here in the US so many times. It was, apparently, something close to a first for Italians, at least in terms of its concreteness. Everyone was up in arms. I’ve been reading the sites of journalists, (now former) government ministers, and others concerned with the situation.  It was an interesting scrum.

The prime objection that came as a backlash against the publication was, simply, that blogging the list was in itself a crime against human dignity and the right to privacy. In addition, it was perceived as an invitation to those who would perpetrate still more discrimination or even violence against LGBT Italians. Finally, the release was itself deemed a violent and ham-handed canard by no less a personage than Mara Carfagna, Italy’s (former) Minister for Equal Opportunity.

It is always fascinating to me to see how various people cope with this type of revelation – or more to the point, how they rationalize a failure to cope. For many people – certainly not just in Italy – there is a desire to let human attraction simply be what it is: a mysterious wonder that descends and sweeps us poor saps off into various states of intoxicated bliss and misbehavior. Then there are those who wish to label everything, so they can (presume to) know it and understand it and file it away in a neat category where it will sit in stasis forever. Still others simply want ‘truth in labeling’ so they will know what they are getting in the wilder marketplaces of romance.  I understand the wish for each one of these things. But the one inescapable issue with politicians in these situations, in any country in which they’re being outed, is the undeniable stain of hypocrisy. In this case they are alleged, by the light of day and in the Camera dei Deputati, to be giving and benefitting from the impression they are one thing – presumably, straight married people. In their off-hours, they are doing who knows what with who knows whom, apparently of the same gender.

Let me say right now that due to direct experience and observation I know a little something about the fabled ‘continuum’ of human sexuality and romantic attraction. I am quite comfortable operating without the use of tidy sexual labels. I know very well a person may have a relationship with a person of the same gender without being homosexual, simply by virtue of falling in love.

Coming from this vantage point I can honestly say I don’t care if some legislator has lovers of the same gender and chooses to shield those relationships from the public. I believe private matters do exist and it is fine to make room for them in our lives. But from the moment – and I mean the moment –they cast a vote against a gay rights bill, or issue statements about the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman, they are fair game to at once be placed in the sights of the loaded revelatory guns of any and all activists possessing the pertinent information. No tribunal, no mercy, case closed. You may fire those names when ready, attivisti!

The reasons for the perfect ethical appropriateness of such a response are apparent:  these are people who enjoy the privilege of holding public office, and the regard of the people they serve. It is not the noblest thing to have a lover in addition to your spouse in any case, but it is not something I am willing to rage sanctimoniously about or, certainly, reveal. However, acting in the manner of a rank hypocrite raises the choice-making of such officials to a whole new level of turpitude.

It is a dreadful thing for a politician to harvest all the back-slapping congratulations he can get for upholding the family when he turns around and cavorts sexually with the gays in his free time. Words fail me in my attempt to render the moral ‘ew’ factor of such a thing. Anyone who does it should be turned into a public joke at the earliest possible moment and hopefully soon thereafter turned out of office. (And let there be no doubt – I feel precisely the same about heterosexual politicians with opposite-sex lovers who tout in their speeches the sanctity of the marriage they later spend so many happy hours violating. Out them, and vote them out! Say – I think I feel a slogan coming on.)

Italy is enduring a multitude of paroxysms right now, chiefly assorted economic travails and the ongoing cringeworthy high farce that is the life, libido, and now aftermath of (former) Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. These difficulties are playing out in the world’s instantaneously updated media and increasingly jittery global markets, ensuring that Italians feel to varying degrees dispirited, anxious, or downright angry. There is a lot of great humor out there too, of course, but I see more serious emotions on venues like Twitter, the comments sections of Italian dailies, and the Facebook pages of (former) officials such as Minister Carfagna.

We should hold in our thoughts our long-suffering friends in Italy. We Americans have had, after all, way more than our share of embarrassing, hypocritical leadership. We have felt ourselves to be laughingstocks of the earth at any number of points in our history. [As I write this, in fact, we have police summarily battering protestors as the “Occupy Wall Street” movement expands to encompass more and more states and locations. Our president has reserved unto himself – and used – a proviso for actually assassinating American citizens under certain circumstances. And we are apparently perpetrating torture in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, country singers compare our president to Hitler and complain about the consequences in the entertainment marketplace, and presidential candidates positively stinking with self-righteousness claim their adulteries are “nobody’s business.” Clearly, we have no room to talk.]

But the troubles of the historical moment, however mortifying, always turn around. There aren’t any shortcuts, though. Politicians who misuse their offices to degrade the public trust through infamous hypocrisy – even in their ‘private’ lives – are a great place to start in pressing for reform.

Melismatic

“I’m just waiting to die,” my father told me one August afternoon in 1987, the very month and year of his death. I often think of that moment, when I struggled not to argue with him, not to distract him. There was hopeful news yesterday on the ALS front, the slow movement toward cure. I saw it on the crawl of CNN, right after I woke with a start and sat up in bed after four hours of sleep. It was one pm and the Mineral, Virginia earthquake was just beginning to be reported. I have a long strange history of waking whenever there is a big quake anywhere. I think it has something to do with my deeply flawed electromagnetic fields. My fingerprints can’t be read and I cannot turn on water in any bathroom that operates on an electric eye. Women stare at me in washrooms as I pass from sink to sink trying to activate water and wash my hands. It is always a weird moment of tiny shame, and it is among the things I don’t understand about myself and find troubling.

At work this week I am exhausted in the night, distracting myself with as many things as I can while the patients sleep and do not require my direct attention. I am reading Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s “A Gilded Lapse of Time” and tonight have acquired the word “melismatic” in her reflections on a bee reliquary. To place bee and reliquary in a single line affects me to a degree I can hardly express even to myself.  To find out that melisma can be defined in terms of Handel’s Messiah just elevates the degree of delight to something approaching full mental collapse from pure joy. It occurs to me that my extreme fatigue might actually be operating in my favor, for it mitigates my ecstatic response to this book of poetry I purchased in 1992 and then put away until just now. Things always come for me at the right time, and I am amazed by the way this truth continues to unfold around me.

I am preparing for our twelfth year celebrating the Days of the Dead. As the time approaches I scan the famous dead and make my lists, planning the altars that will be made and the final cut that will allow a handful of the deceased to be presented to the Virgin of Guadalupe in my transformed dining room. My old colleague James Ebert will be the guardian of this year’s altar, and I’ve thought to present him in a format that will commingle his mountaineering achievements with the voyage of Dante through the dark wood up into the white rose of Paradise. Jim was the sweetest adult man I ever met, a man utterly without guile and powerful enough that he never spoke of his climbing at all while we worked together caring for the mentally ill. He was a god in that world, and I never knew anything about it until he died on a mountain in California last month. His heart burst open. Right now he stands on my kitchen altar in a white frame, but in two months he will be on the main altar with the Lady of the Americas.

The summer passes away. I am watching the hummingbirds overfeed as they prepare for their autumn journey across the Gulf. I add a bromeliad with a tiny pink pineapple to the Buddha garden. I put out solar prints I’ve made, right down in the flowers. I set out paper butterflies, in the bushes and on the old Victorian firescreens behind the three Buddhas. The white butterflies love these Buddhas, and prefer to drink from the stone of their bodies after I water the area. I noticed this last month and now I always wet down the Buddhas and watch the butterflies gather on the stone and drink as that particular smell of wet stone rises in the warm air.

Before coming to work tonight I find a huge spider in the corner of the bathroom. He’s a jumper. I’m running late but I watch him and decide the rest of the family will not be pleased to see him there. I put a glass over him and slide a greeting card underneath him. Out into the heavy night we go, and I put him on a leaf before returning to the bathroom to apply eyeliner and some purple eyeshadow and my favorite mixture of lilac and red pommade for my cheekbones. I spray my hair down with the same rosewater I use to comb the cat and which I love to force on Kim and Tim for grooming purposes, right out of the fridge where I keep it chilled. Back out into the dark which is like daylight for me, it is so ordinary. Off to the hospital to solve problems and try to stay alert and present. How much it is like that singing of a single syllable over a text of successive notes is striking and wonderful. I am sure if I could get a little more sleep I would understand everything. That is still my favorite among all my many illusions.

But She Said ‘No, No, No’

Amy Winehouse is dead today. The news comes from London, where she died, at 27, of causes not-yet-determined but certainly surmised by many.

Here in sweltering Iowa we cower beneath the “heat dome” of July 2011. I’ve just consumed, courtesy of beloved wife Jessica, a major league Julep in Amy’s honor.  It is now being followed by a beer chaser, a Sierra Nevada Hefeweizen called Kellerweis. Just because I too say ‘No, no, no.’ There is a time and a place – perhaps many times and many places – for intoxicants. It’s been known fact since ancient times. Heady brews and concoctions, herbs and ales and fermented plants and so forth, call up strong spirits and visions – creative forces both Mercurial and Vesuvian by definition. Such forces are capable of bringing forth all manner of greatness as surely as they can reduce a mere mortal to so much human rubble.

I am always unutterably saddened to see a creative force battered by excess, dying by their own hand, or some combination of the two, crazy heroes stumbling along their doomed path with as much bravery as they can muster by the sheer force of gifts the Master of the Universe bestowed upon them at birth, yet ultimately unable to rise from the ashes of their own repeated, reckless and Dionysian bonfires until finally they lie extinguished in a smoldering heap. All that creativity gone from this world. All that energy dissipated, bouncing through the cosmos and reinfusing the very fabric of space and time in some way we cannot yet understand but which I am quite certain is real and  significant.

On this Saturday of swelter where the air itself is devoid of air, is liquid and somehow smothering, I see my personal litany of greats gone from this Earth unreel on celluloid strips before me:  Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Hunter S. Thompson, Alexander McQueen, and now Amy Winehouse. All shot so much life into this world – this crappy, rude, unappreciative world, where they labored and suffered and created what they could when they could manage to rise up and do it – and all died awful deaths, deaths many of us call needless or meaningless and lament as “a shame.” I suppose they each were a shame, and yet each was also an endpoint for a specific person, a person endowed with much, who gave much to everyone they touched and who struggled to honor their talents against long odds. What is the meaning of all that accomplishment, then, on this day?

I can’t say as I know. It’s hard to piece together a wall of logic to reassure anyone against life’s random and massive ironies when, as one small example, Ms. Winehouse’s Tarot card is…wait for it…Temperance. Yes, hers is the lovely and somber card of Temperance. I am amazed and somehow humbled to know this. Jessica has created an altar here in our house, where she commemorates Ms. Winehouse with that card, and a lovely picture of her before she laid herself at the altar of various intoxicants to the point of permanent disability and ultimate demise.

Jessica's Altar for Amy Winehouse

Rehab…I am of mixed feelings there. I love Rickie Lee Jones, and think work made after her own life changes is as lively as her earlier work. She gathered unto herself all her sparks, somehow, while distancing herself from the fire’s deepest heat and saving herself from immolation. I have to respect that. But I respect Amy, too. She died and it was a hard and probably an ugly death, but it was all hers, and she had lived her own life while getting there. I refuse to dishonor that or diminish it by calling it “a shame.” It was something far more vibrant, volcanic and wild than that. It was an implosion, a pyre of perhaps her own design.

I love to see artists of all kinds who can pick up their burdens and wield them, move along, and survive, giving us the gifts only they can muster up out of the mean and rough fabric of life. I love them perhaps best of all. But I will always remember and honor the lives and work of those who do not make it through. They too struggle, they buff and burnish, shine and polish all their rough stones to present to us, and we are better for receiving them. I thank each of them, and wish them all peace, and rest.

Come Back to the Ladies Room, Michele Honey

It surely counts as one of the tortures of the damned to be a liberal, openly lesbian elected official in Iowa listening to the likes of Michele Bachmann pontificating on the matter of marriage with her Giant Gay Husband, Marcus, at her side. It is galling. Of late, the question of Marcus being a Giant Gay Husband has become something of an irritant to the wife’s campaign. Thus we Iowans hear rumors of Marcus stopping just shy of mounting her on the proverbial stump in the hinterlands, where he presses his wide, girlish hips into her backside to show What A Man He Really Is and How Hot He Is for His Wife. Jesus. It makes my teeth hurt.

Meanwhile, my wife Jessica and I deal with the daily barrage of rhetorical arrows as best we can, taking detours onto sweet, breezy summer lanes marked White Côtes du Rhône as we sit together after work, analyzing the latest. There is Michele’s alleged bathroom cornering by two aggressive Minnesota lesbians (tho’ I never like to disappoint voyeurs, you should know that qualifies as a solid oxymoron), the Giant Gay Husband disporting himself shamefully in an attempt to appear less gay, and then the matter of Iowa’s Family Leader Marriage Vow. This is a nasty bit of business, and bears a little examination.

Michele Bachmann was the first presidential candidate to sign what Gawker has called “Iowa’s delightful marriage pledge.” And what a delight it is. My careful synopsis follows. Signatories to The Vow commit to the following solemn oaths:  1. I will never screw anything that isn’t my wife or husband. 2. I will never support porn, even if it helps me in my efforts to screw my wife or husband. 3. Slaves had it bad, but at least their offspring had the benefit of two-parent homes. (Seriously – this stunning misapprehension of history was only removed days ago.) 4. Four is tricky. Four is sort of a come-to-Jesus call for politicians who have already strayed. It’s designed to provide an opportunity for light confession and public contrition over any cash-on-the-barrelhead whoring, porking of rent boys, heavy porn consumption or other forms of extramarital mayhem that may have occurred. This public penance is to be followed by a quick, no-questions-asked embrace back into the fold of sanctified married candidates seeking support in the Iowa caucuses. It’s like that craze of re-virgining yourself. Remember the delusion that one could wish oneself back into mint condition via some quasi-religious frenzy? That one was big awhile back. America is one huge, quivering, crazy nation when it comes to sex. It seems we can never holistically integrate the urges and workings of our sex parts and frenzied libidinal impulses into everyday living. Many apparently never get there, and most of that group of damaged souls self-select into the world of right-wing politics, where outrage over erotic indulgence is prized more highly than cleanliness or a good addiction recovery story. These politicians love the idea of re-grown maidenheads, sham spousal virtues or pretend marriages to Giant Gay Husbands who Probably Secretly Adore Porn.

You may sense a certain level of disgust at this stylized Kabuki of politically-driven marital purity, and if so you are not wrong. I’m fed up. Jessica and I have heard more often than two people who truly and simply adore one another can bear of all the ways in which our marriage is setting up the final, utter disintegration of the United States into a band of borderless tribal areas without minted money in which there are no longer any families at all, a land in which Michele Bachmann is forever locked in sexual torment in a ladies room full of perverse (possibly even French) lesbians. With Marcus peeking through a keyhole while a comely lad whips his giant girly backside with a flourish. It’s the Iowa caucus season, by way of the Marquis de Sade.

The news here seems to have been about The Marriage Vow forever now. I am weary beyond my power to tell. It’s a black eye to the state. Colbert spent five effing minutes on it last night. Gawker is all over it. And despite three candidate rejections of it, the state GOP shows no signs of distancing itself. It’s all Torquemada, all the time here.  Emphatic, blow-hard candidate pledging and a mad right-wing clamor for fealty oaths abjuring hanky-panky – have these married political Republicans been poking everything within reach unbeknownst to all the rest of us? It dawns on one that perhaps a whole world of spousal criminality is flourishing on the conservative political stage, an endless, rampant round of Satyricon sexual frenzy that would embarrass Caligula, barnstorming through the placid, presumably decent state of Iowa.

It’s all so-strange to me, this fighting over marriage and who should have one and how it should be honored. Jessica had three husbands before me, so I’m not a parochial lesbian or anything, and she counts herself as “a minor Gabor… a wee Gabor” due to all her marriages. But life happens, you know?  You meet someone, suddenly you start dropping the silverware and blushing and running into plate glass windows and before you know it love is professed over Neruda and bread and wine in a local eatery. There are flowers. A fully decorated Christmas tree appears in season out of nowhere in your apartment, and the love just gets bigger and bigger and pretty soon it’s moving day and you’re all in the giant house together:  her, you, your darkly suspicious, obese cat, and her dear son, the perpetual child you shall always have with you. Later there will be raccoon kits in the firebox, scaring you nearly to death. Chipmunks and possums cavort on the property. You will sit in hospital waiting rooms through two surgeries, terrified for her. She will endure the anxieties and aggravations of election cycles every four years, with the family in newsprint. She will have to hear about your stalker, who is out on YouTube in big glasses and a hoodie claiming you are don of Iowa’s Lesbian Mafia and behind every murder in the county for the last 30 years. You will worry about the inevitability of occasionally violent patients in her workplace. In short, your married life unfolds right in front of you, in all its clutter and whirl of activity, the relentless drum beat of existence. But every time you look at her, she is pretty pretty pretty. Every time you open a newspaper and find yourself excoriated on its pages, you laugh and laugh together at all of it. Never does it occur to you – not once – that your marriage, which you could not even have for the first 13 years of your life together, is anything less than everyone else’s. Then one day this couple comes riding into Iowa attacking you – frankly and without reservation, as if it were a selling point. He, a giant pantload of a girly man who has made his living in part by promising to cure gays, she a politician buttoned down so tightly she flips out when two dykes in Minnesota try to speak to her about their civil rights in a ladies room.

I don’t know how Jessica and I will get through this caucus season. I’m already angry, and anger is not something I wear well. To make matters worse, @ramonasinger has not managed to get her freaking pinot grigio into this state yet, despite my frenzied tweets. We’re patching in with white Côtes du Rhône, gin and grapefruit juice, and the occasional Julep. We’re resourceful girls. We’ll get by. But a person has every right to be angry about this theatre of the absurd when it impinges on reality every waking day.

I despise Michele and Marcus Bachmann because they dishonor their own marriage by dishonoring mine, and they are both too stupid to recognize even that much. They hardly deserve our passing collective scorn, but as she seeks the presidency every wild distortion born in the stubborn, atavistic sludge of her Cro-Magnon ideology receives an appalling level of consideration. We can only hope every rent boy on earth comes tumbling out of that giant closet, and soon.

If Ever I Would Leave You

Monday afternoon, errands after a brief sleep. I am always most exhausted on Mondays, and most of all summer Mondays. The deepest part of July and August bring me to the edge of despair, and it is only the presence of the hummingbird that has made this season desirable. I am out at the recycling center singing the songs of Camelot. The songs are brocaded, sugar icing over glass. One must hold the voice strictly to account or you slide from the natural rich ornamentation of these gorgeous pastiches, right off the ice into the muck.

If I begin with “If ever I should leave you” and briefly confuse the season that begins the narrative, this is not to say I will fail to recall precisely where Franco Nero began his montage with Vanessa Redgrave and right myself, beginning with summer and ending with the glorious springtime. It is obvious when one watches the film that Nero has either just knocked Redgrave up or is about to- and they had their love child from this time. I wonder what it would be like to be that child and understand that commingling of art and appetite. I think it might be wonderful.

I refuse to lower my voice while I fling plastic bottles into their giant metal bin and to that end I sing with a little bit of defiance: “I loved you once in silence”. I sing it beautifully despite never having known a moment of restraint in love and especially not the absence of words. In love I have always come to the feast prepared to pitch a big tent festooned with garlands and floating lights and floating words and actual food, too, since it has always seemed to me that love requires more than itself to flourish.

I am a romantic who has occasionally tried to sidestep this truth about myself. I apprehend each day a world that seems to me to be strung together loosely of enchantments, like a powerful web that will slowly occlude my ability to perceive it with any measure of accuracy. Among the bored and pragmatic young of the species I am often sad. During the night I worked with several young men who talked Lawrence. One said to the other: “Dude. I’ve been trying to read “The Rainbow” for four months.” The other replied: “I know. They say “Sons and Daughters” is his best novel.” I thought about the firefly I pulled out of a spider’s web by the back door the other night, coming in. I could not bear to see his light trapped in the iron of that web and I pulled it out, brushed off all I could, and placed him in the Buddha garden far from the spider, whom I have to admit I also love.

With the young men who have no interest in me or what I have seen or thought of, I spoke up. “Women in Love” is Lawrence’s best novel,” I told them. “And also that book is “Sons and Lovers,” okay?” They were silent, and not with love of me, either.

I finish up my medley of Camelot standards with the verses of the theme song that finish the film, and when I sing them I weep. I am crying for loss- the loss of innocence, the loss of Richard Harris, JFK, dreams of the nineteen sixties, all of that and more. I weep as I sing. That is why I cannot be a real singer out somewhere in the world, away from the recycling center. I weep when I sing what moves me. And nothing moves me more than the loss of a kingdom when it is joined to the hope of rekindling that kingdom. I’ve watched this movie countless times alone, Harris heralding the young plucky lad he exhorts to carry the story of Camelot forward- “Run, boy!” he shouts, down the corridor of endless summer. Oh, run.

etruscan places

I’m spending my summer with David Herbert Lawrence, not for the first time and surely not for the last, in my life. I read every one of his novels in my twenties and thirties, but it has taken all these years to begin to look over his travel writing. I am reading Etruscan Places and discovering in a wonderful new way that the character of Rupert Birkin in Women In Love really must have been Lawrence as an idealized self, for here he is, all over these pages.

Presently I’m about midway into this little book, and Lawrence has begun to wax manic over the beauties of the Cerveteri graves, which are easily visualized with a quick Google. There one may see that he has done a credible job of describing these ancient wonders in mere words. The photographs I see jump out at me wearing his turns of phrase and I feel again many of the same things I felt reading the Lawrence novels. In other words I feel both a sense of delight and an intermittent desire to slap him. He’s too giddy, too whimsical, too self-satisfied. He suffers from an overdeveloped prissiness. He staggers, then he embarrasses.

I will go back to the novels and allow myself to be enchanted and repulsed all over again. I’m not afraid of that. Meanwhile I pursue the other things of the summer. Over the weekend saw our hummingbird at the feeder at least six times a day if not more. I prefer him in the shadow of the redbud tree, where he remains a strange little leaf shaped darkness which touches my heart more quietly. In the sun he becomes the kind of small god Lawrence describes in the Tomb of the Leopards, all radiant with his inner fire. He is almost too much for my heart. In darkness he is more soothing. He might sit on my hand.

I am a little afraid of everything I love on this earth, that much is true. I feel it again whenever I witness this small whirring life force. I suppose the fear is simply that of anticipatory dread, the dread of separation. Meanwhile I sit at the window with my head on my hand like a child and wait for the hummingbird to arrive. I sit until my head hurts from bending to my hand. I sit until I see him and then I want to sit until he returns. An endless cycle of return like all the others surrounding it. Life as a ferris wheel, a spinning top, a child’s toy.

Then there is gin. I have finally given in to this taste and have fallen in love with the botanical urgency of it. I drink it in pink grapefruit juice with ice and it is so great I no longer need to stand in the kitchen and construct my alchemies of the cocktail. I don’t pull out my homemade vanilla, my special orange bitters, my peels and potions and special secrets. I just throw in a handful of ice and step out into the warm bath of the backyard. They call this drink a “greyhound” and that seems just right for this time in my life.

I am writing a series of short poems about the image of the ghat as a vehicle for the soul to step into itself. That seems perfect for summer too. Ghats and graves and gin and my leafy hummingbird. In some perfect storm of all of these I stir myself in and wait for the autumn to come and refine me. I have my thirteenth Day of the Dead coming this year, more than a dozen years having passed since I constructed my first triple altar. Tonight someone asked me to explain this holyday and I found to my amazement I could not reduce it to words very well at all. I could say how heavy the statue of the Guadalupe is and how hard to place her at the zenith of the highest of the three altars. I could describe how one might make an offering, and how I like to sit afterwards and write down what I have made with my hands so I can look back months and years later. But I found I did not have sufficient language to bring the scene to life. It is difficult to speak of  memorial. It wasn’t hard for Lawrence, bringing back what was made before Christ walked on the earth. I would aspire to this freshness, this flashing in the light.

Leave that puss alone

Come on, Tony. This is all I’m saying. Don’t drag the family cat into it, please. Accost yourself if you must, buddy, but leave the pussy out of it altogether. It is one bridge too far in my view to have the pet trying to sleep right next to you and your silly self.

I have been spending my week listening to others and pondering their various freedoms of expression. On the unfortunate front I agreed to read a colleague’s poetry- and critique it. The colleague is woefully young and thinks it is a good idea to write about intercourse without providing some necessary diversions into important things- like death- or the imagination. My smartest colleague advises me to be honest about the work. And to this end I am writing down my comments, right there on the page. I cringe as I write this: “You can repair and elevate this- better sex writing is both indicated and possible.”  “Next time,” warns my smartest colleague, “just refuse right at the outset.”

I read where many intelligent folk think Anthony Weiner has nothing to apologize for, while others think he is a pervert. I delight in Hitchens declaring he will label his own underwear “too big to fail” and “serving the community since 1967.” But when all the sound and fury die down, Weiner knows in his heart that he’s failed the essential test, the one that most of us will face sooner or later in our lives- we’re found out in something and we discover we lack the fortitude to own up and be truthful about it. Here is where the heart of the matter lies, for me. Aside from the way I hate the furtive more than I can say, my problem with this sex scandal several times removed from the real arena of the sexual is just this: Weiner knows as well as I do that he cannot trust himself to be honest. He knows this. And in that sadness lies the crux of it all- if he can’t own this he can’t be sure to own anything at all. He could do anything and find he needs to lie about it. That all totally aside from the collateral damage he has done to any number of good causes. Go home, Weiner. And when you get there, just leave the feline out of it. That pet deserves a nap. Maybe you could just ease on over to that armchair in the corner, right?

teacup pig

Another in a series of sleepless days following a long night at the hospital. I fall down at nine and rise shortly after noon to an afternoon of rain. I make the rounds of antique stores and craft shops surveying what might be possible for the tiny twin parties, no bigger really than a teacup pig, that I will throw here for the patients and at home for Kim, celebrating the marriage of that cute young couple across the pond. Some crank on Slate suggests anyone doing this is merely a traitor to his or her country. How deeply absurd that is. What is my motivation? All Anna and the King, all I’ve had a love of my own like yours, all when the earth smelled of summer and the sky was streaked with light and the soft mist of England lay sleeping on a hill. I remember this, despite never being there in my created body. And I always will, so there you naysayers and bitter pills. Love is lovely, in any season, in any time, in any place and I will always enjoy it.

In the latest part of the day, just before an early dusk, I creak open the door of the antique emporium just down the street. The rain is falling like November fused to a June sunshower- although it is cold rain in a bleak fading light the quality of the rain is like a shattering of angelic sugar. It is the so-called strawberry rain, too light and diffuse to bruise tender fruit. The edgy owner is sitting behind his desk and the shop is dark, all the lights off. He is closed, but the door is open. He insists I look around. I buy a tiny glass bell with a cockatiel inclining her head upon it just as our departed Baby used to do. I press this on Kim after I pick her up from work, and later as I head in to the hospital before midnight I see she has placed it on the Easter table, with the white tulips and the little candy dish of luminous miniature eggs.

At the grocery store I pull myself wearily out of the car. I’ve come for a few odds and ends and I am exhausted. A young woman pulls up behind me and lowers her window. It is clear she’s been looking at our large collection of leftie bumper stickers. Mere days ago another young woman stopped to compliment me on my Nathaniel Hawthorne sticker, a glancing reference to my favorite novel, The Scarlet Letter. This woman is of an age with that one. I look over at her and smile. “If I had a bumper sticker,” she begins in a perfectly ordinary tone, “it would say….” here she pauses for what turns out to be dramatic effect- “FUCK YOU!!!” She drives off in a roaring squealing huff. I stand in my tracks for a few moments and think about the change in her voice, which was impressive. She had gone in a second from a calm conversational tone to a sound like murder, a killing rage. I cannot imagine what she has told herself about this exchange. My smile, followed by her attack.

Later at dinner Kim and I share an English grapefruit beer that proves to be delightful. I ponder the bottle and decide it will be suitable for some stock and heather come Friday morning. She tells me about some hostilities at work among her colleagues and I marvel all over again at how angry most people seem to be these days and how openly they display this to all comers. I am not in favor of any of that, by the way. I am in favor of anything that looks like love and feels like love, and I wish Kate and Wills all the goodness and valor they can appreciate in what I hope will be a long, long time looking out at the world together.

Must Fix Rug Flowers

Vacation came and went, leaving me with a flurry of notes I’d penned to myself in the weeks before my brief time away. I find these scattered around the house and in my mystery of a backpack, that object that grows ever heavier and more inexplicable, since I seem always to be removing things from it and rarely adding items. I can’t decipher my own notes to myself and I can’t figure out why my pack gets heavier. These things seem disturbing in their metaphorical weight, as they are probably the truth of my life.

Meanwhile I wrote instructions to myself before the vacation that included the stern words: “simplify shrines/make ice in volumes and bag it/ put up the other shower curtain.” I was preparing the house for my sister’s visit. This visit was not a success. I had imagined she would tell me about her suffering and I would listen. I’d imagined there would be some light hearted times like those we enjoyed a few years ago. I had imagined I might do some things that would seem to please her. None of that happened. For me the time was sad and the sadness lingered for several days. I felt my own happiness in those several days as a thing to be disguised, something of which to be ashamed. There was my sense that I was wrong, but I could not decide how, or how to correct this. I had a terrible premonition of finality, that we would never see one another again. I’d had this same feeling the last time I saw my childhood friend Mary, who died after we met for dinner out in the wilds of Kansas, died before we could see one another again.

Meanwhile I’ve returned to work. I was able to relocate myself here within a few hours. I learned all the stories of all the new patients and settled in again to put out the little fires and the larger ones. Back at home I had nightmares of being unable to wake myself sufficiently to get my boots on. In my dream I wept in sheer frustration and fatigue. Once more, here I am, up all night long getting the news of my world here at the hospital, and sometimes outside it.  And so tonight I learn about the destruction of the Piss Christ, also called Immersion, which I’ve always liked.

Immersion must mean more to me than it does to the artist, Andre Serrano, who suspended a crucifx in his own urine and some blood and photographed it. In Paris it was attacked this week and the plexiglass in front of it cracked, the picture punctured. Serrano has said he made the photograph to protest the incivility of organized religion. For me the image is merely beautiful, looking as if it were steeped in the fallen light of a late afternoon in another time. It is for me lovely and completely innocent. How it can offend anyone who believes the divine created us and our doomed bodies is beyond my comprehension. I have come close to death in the last year in the failure of my body and in that time never felt closer to the eternal, and yet was never more physically wretched and these things do not seem to me to be very far apart at all. In fact as time unspools itself in me very little on this earth seems anything but conjoined. There it must remain for now while I return to my tribe, all of whom lie sleeping at this blessed and ungodly hour.