Sudsy Bubbles

Tonight I am thinking about suds.  I have spent a good deal of the summer days looking at the suds of the ocean as the crashing waves beat each other up,  on their way to oblivion on the sand.

Then of course there is beer and its' lovely suds.  Guinness Stout has the most amazing waterfall of rich tan suds.  If the waitperson is excellent at what they do, your Guinness will be placed before you in mid cascade so that you may marvel at the amazing dietary show of brewing prowess.

Next, suds for cleaning, tonight everything from dishes to cat poo (not in the same place thank goodness).

Suds are also responsible for the removal of hair from our bodies and therefore for most of the amorous successes of the human race in this and the past century.  The reduction of smells, from suds' close contact with skin, is also a great boon to romance, and to appetite in general.

I will leave you with chaotic, delightful, tasty and refreshing suds.  Next time you want a bubble bath, grab your old fashioned egg beater, some liquid soap and go to town in the bath.  Be sure to take a Guinness with you.

A G-G-G-Ghost?

Every once in awhile I hear rational people telling stories about encounters with ghosts.  I respectfully have listened to them wondering what on earth they have experienced.  I didn't to want to believe them for two reasons;  I had never felt anything akin to their descriptions and I felt it was so unlikely to be real as to be absurd. Yet, they were not absurd, so in my mind a grey area of respect mixed with superior doubt, existed.

My studio, that I am using for the next six months, is a single room on the third floor of a former hotel building from 1871 which burned almost to the ground and was rebuilt in 1890.  It was used as a hotel for a very short period of time before it was converted to a school building.  Rumor has it that a ghost has lived there for decades.  When I was a child the ghost was supposed to be on the fifth floor attic level.  In the last twenty years she supposedly roams the third floor near the hand-bell choir rooms. I have always pooh-poohed this notion. The archives, where I have spent many hours the last fourteen months, have a door which moves every time we approached it, but the building is drafty and obviously the door rattles from imperfectly sealed windows. We used to say that Mr. Nobody opened the door, when doors slowly opened or closed, which happened several times each school year.

I have been in my studio for one week and it had been delightful to have a private space in which to paint, draw; make risky attempts and grotesque errors without witness.  Errors are the key to new horizons which flourish in the safety of privacy.  It has been grand. Today, after working effectively for several hours, I had to attend a meeting from 6- 8:20 PM.  I planned on cleaning up and going home right after the meeting, which was one floor below my space.  At 8:30, I climbed the stairs to the dimly lit hallway leading to my studio.  The light is not bright, but it is my space and comfy.  To get to the sink in the bathroom, I have to pass through two other rooms and there is yet one more room past the bathroom. They were all pitch dark, but I know the layout well.  As a poor sleeper, I frequently wander through my house in the dark and I have spent much of my life alone in empty houses.  I am not afraid of the dark, nor of being alone.  I was not alone tonight.

I have experienced many sensations, emotions and experiences; this was unique and new.  I felt very clearly that presence of a woman, likely Victorian.  She was not fully comfortable with me.  I saw nothing, thank God, but I got about my business and got out as quickly as I could. I do not ever want to see anything up there.  The bell teacher, who has worked with her presence for years,  calls her Priscilla.

I have never felt so creeped out in all my days.   I will; not be up there again in the evening.  As winter draws colder and darker, I may find myself in the dark again, but that really doesn't matter as she is there all day as well. I don't know what changed in me, that allows me to sense this now when I did not before, but it is changed and I am not too happy about it. Ignorance was bliss, real bliss.

I may move back home to my house if this keeps up.  Yikes.

An Unusual Child

Tomorrow my child shall be discharged form the care of her physicians at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).  She will be twenty three in October and a patient in their care for twelve years.

It is wonderful to be in the one percent of the wealthy, the intelligent, the gifted, the sublime, the secure.  She has been and remains in the one percent of patients at CHOP. Her ear surgeries failed, and failed again.  Her ear drums, simultaneously recalcitrant and weak, refused to stay in place; either bulging or retracting with infection after infection. Pierced by tubes, they refused to heal and close. Finally her right ear drum angry and exhausted simply vanished.  One unfeeling pediatrician upon seeing the depth of her ear and all the tiny bones therein, exclaimed "Where were you when I was studying the bones of the ear?"

When she was all of nine, the year her drum disappeared, her teacher, in some mad effort to attain control, struck her when she, in pure and unrelenting  isolation, would drift into her own thoughts, too tired from straining to hear to pay relentless and worthless attention to lessons.  When I withdrew her from speech therapy, where she was drilled in what to say over and over again, the same teacher screeched so loudly at me, that her students turned in horror to see what on earth had made their teacher so insane as to make such a noise. I knew then, a mere part of the pain she suffered daily.

In years of effort, headaches, illness fever, disbelief, frustration and tears we came to Children's where after six more surgeries, she finally suffers a mere moderate hearing loss, which cripples most adults. This is the "success" with which she lives in the one percent of CHOP patients. We have wept that she could order in a restaurant with out asking "What?" I have wept when at parent teacher night a teacher asked me what was different about her, she answered a question this year. She has been appalled that the cruelty showered upon, what she thought was only her, was in fact drowning all the middle school students, once she could hear the conversation in the halls.

Tomorrow all that history is passed out of the hands of the physicians of children and into the hands of physicians of adults.  I pray that they have the compassion and kindness that she has had at CHOP. I cannot imagine that any group of doctors will ever understand the journey that she and these surgeons have had together.  I pray that they will come to know and respect her capacity for setting and unyieldingly attaining a goal.

I have an enormous amount of respect for my daughter, who has walked through a life of suffering, pain, prejudice and isolation with a determination I have have never come close to possessing.  She remains an individual  dedicated to peace, love, happiness  and compassion, married with a fierce and unyielding rage at injustice, inequality and cruelty. She writes beautiful books, stories and music dedicated to encouraging self determination, evaluation and growth.  She could have wallowed in self pity and fury but she as chosen another path.  She has my admiration.

Where Were You?

The school my children then attended, had demanded yet another meeting about my child.  My hard of hearing child, who was treated so poorly, every day at this irrational school.  I dreaded these meetings, where they told me all the things wrong with my child; when I told them again and again, "She can't hear."  The hearing tests were inconclusive, so we met again and again and I complied; foolishly.

The morning was clear, their heads were not,  my heart was not.  Half an hour into the meeting the bells began to ring in the school.  The head of the lower school, who knew this was going to happen and scheduled our meeting in the middle of it anyway, said "Fire drill." I was outside lining up on Tuesday September 11, 2001  for a fire drill.  I was glad to breathe fresh air and to be away from the ignorant conversation which would quickly become a part of the past.  We filed back in and completed the stupidity. I went to my car and drove away.

I was headed home, but had to stop for dog food, because my puppy was a very picky eater and we had not successfully found something she would eat every day.  She was three months old and her ribs showed.  after finally negotiating the puppy food issue, I climbed back into my obligatory mommy mini van and turned on the radio.  You know what I heard. I called my friend Nancy, while I was driving home and she was narrating the TV reports,  the first building fell.  I was five minutes from home.

Once home my phone chains began, checking in with my mother and then my husband. I was unsure what to do about my children, their school was not close and I did not want to disrupt their day, nor did I want to scare them. When I spoke to my husband and he said he was coming home because Independence Mall was being evacuated, I went into action to retrieve my children.  Others did not do this; they felt that the children should feel safe in their school.  To me safety evaporated that day with the towers, the Pentagon, the field and the planes.

Safety is relative; it is always an illusion.  Some of us live with extreme danger every day, others are more protected by location, wealth, good luck and choices.  I am unspeakably grateful to those in our society who face danger every day, on my behalf; police, fire fighters, soldiers.

I remember looking at pictures of the ash, knowing that some of it was people.  I remember the silence of the country's planes all being grounded and of being comforted by my family gathered in the same room, preferably in my arms.  I remember the photos, walls and walls of them of lost human beings.  Photos family members desperately posted in hopes of finding their loved one, somewhere.

The end of the movie, The Bridge On The River Kwai" ends with two words "Madness, madness."   What else is in our world, but madness and love?

Nothing bad happened to me or to mine on that day; not directly.  I am tonight where I was that morning, watching television footage from that day; my head pounding, my heart breaking, again.

                                         "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?"

Where have all the flowers gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the flowers gone,
Long time ago,
Where have all the flowers gone,
Picked by young girls every one,
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the young girls gone,
Long time ago,
Where have all the young girls gone,
Gone to young men every one,
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young men gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the young men gone,
Long time ago,
Where have all the young men gone,
Gone to soldiers every one,
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the soldiers gone,
Long time ago,
Where have all the soldiers gone,
They've gone to graveyards every one,
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone,
Long time passing,
Where have all the graveyards gone,
Long time ago,
Where have all the graveyards gone,
Gone to flowers every one,
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

-Pete Seeger-

A Pause

On this eve of the thirteenth anniversary of 9/11 let us pause to remember the injured and the dead.

I picked my kids up from school that day, early.  I went right after I spoke to my husband who told me that his office, which never closed, was closing.  He worked on Independence Mall and said there were snipers on the roof of the Federal building across the street.  I wanted my children next to me.

I told them I was there to get them because the world changed that day.  Other parents did not come. I wanted my children to recall that day, and for us to all be together.  The world did change that day; it is not the same.  We are changed.

We want to pretend that everything is the same, but that is a lie.  If we cannot face the truth,  then how can we live in the world and how can we move forward?  

One day at a time is the mantra of change;  tomorrow I will take as it comes.  May tomorrow come and go in peace and thoughtful memory of too many who have suffered and died.

A Day in the Trench

Today was a rocky day in the studio.  I have been having a great time setting up and painting on my own.  I have had to face the time and the fear of messing up a painting in progress, but each day has been a delight of delving into the work.  Today...today, was a test of my strength and character.

I was not in a good frame of mind to paint today, so I had a choice, I could do nothing or I could face the demons and work.  I spent a great deal of time looking and a bit of time using a brush, but I worked.  For a while, I felt that all I had accomplished was to lose the decent qualities of what I had on the canvas a already, but I did not quit.

Sometimes in life we must destroy in order to build.  Today I was the forest fire, in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, which allows the trees' seeds to burst out of their cones; without the devastating heat of the fire, new growth cannot occur.

Today was trying and painful, but there is a future.  I was tenacious and must continue so to be.

Tonight, I sit with a purring cat and a soft coated hunting dog.  Tomorrow I retrieve a birdhouse from a show (yes, a birdhouse)  and head back to the painting.  We will work it out together, that canvas and I, or I shall wrestle it to the ground like Jacob wrestling the angel.

To OZ?  To OZ!

Emptying Out

Everybody I know has a house to empty out.  Either they are moving or a parent must downsize; it is very stressful for them, all of them.  I was spared all that by a house fire (in which no one was injured.) That was stressful too, but I knew what to do with all the stuff; nothing.  When they tore down the house they tore down the stuff too.

I have watched and helped people go through lifetimes of accumulated treasure, which turns out to be worthless after the life is complete.  The things were of use to the living, and wonderfully full of hope when new, alas are merely the remnants of a completed run. They are sad reminders that stuff is as stuff does.

That having been said; I am a saver. I am trying to throw away debris in our house to avoid the day when someone goes through my junk and says "Why? Why on earth would anyone save THIS?" When my husband, who throws away anything and everything, says we don't need this, a wave of panic, rage and defensiveness runs through me.  It isn't so much of a protective act, as it is a moment or two, or a year or so, to get used to the idea of living without something. "Something" is connected to the actions from which it came, to the shared experience, to the energy and youth it absorbed; now so precious as it wanes.

I remember the day my kids discovered that we could make a tuba from a flexible hose and a funnel. I remember going to the store to get those items and constructing the tuba.  I remember playing it and dissolving into gales of laughter; again and again.  We, of course, keep the memories, but it took me about eighteen months to let go of the tuba.

I let the Wicked Witch of the West's hourglass go today too.  I built it for my daughter in 1996, for a play.  It was constructed out of two large soda bottles, red sand and a tornado tube, mounted in a wooden bracket, which I also constructed, and held in place with burlap string and wood glue.  My daughter used it for a nightstand until this year.  I kept the tornado tube, they are hard to find these days.  Ding dong, the Witch is....grown up.

The kids are grown up and the house is getting clean(er).  The kiddie books went to a hospital library, the clothes to the thrift shop, the toys as well.  Yards sales, dumpsters, charity, eat all our old days, whether recent or not. I like touchstones, but I do not want to live like a hoarder. Letting go of the stuff is freeing. Today I passed an old tree which had been hewn down; usually I feel very sad. Today, I allowed myself to realize that I have no control over the actions of others and that my memory of the landscape with the tree, will stay with me forever (hopefully). So I went on my way to create new days for me and for others.  Perhaps it is time to plant a new tree.