The line beneath explains why it took Brahms so long to write his lullaby.
Just finished, ‘Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott & Her Father,” by John Matteson. At first I was suspicious. The book is footnoted and I suspected it of academia (oh cursed word) but it turned out to be simply scholarly, objective and a great quoter of their work by someone with a close knowledge of who they were.
Thoreau was Louisa’s teacher, Alcott’s friend and lived in their future house on Main Street in Concord. Dabbling with the Transcendentalists has been one of my life areas. Matteson’s take on Fruitlands and the struggle to understand Nature between Father & Daughter bears some resemblance to mine with my father. From start to finish ‘Eden’s Outcasts’ is as engrossing as a good novel. I couldn’t put it down.
This is a picture of my grandmother after whom I am named and her sister, Great Aunt Sarah (Niece Sarah, are you seeing your namesake?). The two old ladies who came as teenagers to the Bellingham Washington area over the mountains in a covered wagon from Kentucky, squabbling with their mother all the way. Dunlaps, they were in those days, mother’s side of the family, believers in every omen and superstition that came down the pike.
I suspect Sarah of chin hairs if not actively sitting for the original witch masks of Halloween while her sister, Roseltha Dunlap Bouck has that ‘don’t-hit-me-I’m-harmless’ smile which she always used just prior to zapping you with a zinger!
But they are family and I’ve just finished reading a compelling tract on how that works out in the long run.
Yesterday I went to see this near-mythologized doctor (he’d blown up in my mind over the years to less than human) – and here he was, courteous, semi-retired and getting on with the paperwork. No memory of me, at least at first.
My husband reminded me when I got home that this was the only doctor in his life he’d threatened to punch in the mouth (on an entirely unrelated matter involving our son), my gentle, non-violent, pipe-smoking husband. So it wasn’t just me, since he believes in the essential goodness of everyone and provocation that would cause him to say something like that had to be extreme -
So here I was, alone in a room with him. (Imagine him in the empty chair, knee to knee) I no longer lie helpless and undressed in bed. Now we were equals, except I am still younger and I had the advantage of memories. And, for pete sakes, I find myself feeling SORRY for the guy, grown older, greyer and thinner. I see him just as a misguided human being with a big mouth. I would make a lousy executioner. I tell him my version of what happened and how I’d disliked him since.
“And now?” he says, as though he doesn’t care about the answer.
“And now I see you’ve mellowed,” I said weakly. Not quite the gunfight I’d envisioned. Still, he decides to put me off on another colleague in the future, dim memories of some of our encounters probably seeping back. Good to have done it, gotten through it with no unkindnesses or malice. Glad it didn’t come down to throwing things or shouting (though I had a whistle in my pocket and was wearing a bracelet with minature covers of banned books to remind me of all the pain writers have had, standing up before me).
Staring our villians down, only to see them diminish, maybe never actually the threats we first believed.
Some 12 years ago, I was in a hospital ward of mostly older and old women, lying in bed, totally trapped by the Crohn’s diagnosis of the doctors for the past 20 years, I’d vomit and ride the porcelaine pony, sick as a seagoing varmint. particularly spring and fall though generally all the time in between, just a little less so… (No, wait, hold on – this isn’t going to be another of those testimonals about finding a cure with vinegar and honey – but it IS surprising). Yes, I surely wanted relief from the cycle of doctors-pain-hospital and steroids without me having any say.
Outside in the hall I could hear the residents coming in a cluster, listening to the head gastro as he talked about all us, ‘bed blockers,’ women with nothing much to do but be sick, women who wanted a doctor’s attention so they elevated their symptoms, silly women who put on makeup before each visit the doctor would make to the ward. Hospital are such LONELY places.
I just wanted out (though pain free) with some sort of guarantee about not returning. But here he was saying we women didn’t have anything outside the walls of the hospital, glossing over my three kids, my bookselling business, the novels I was in the midst of writing, my excursions into city politics, the cats, my dogs, my garden, the pool – there weren’t enough hours in the day!
When they came in, trying to keep straight faces, talking in that special voice idiots reserve for older women (and I was Lots younger then), I let them know I’d heard every word and written it down and I was sick to death of the lot of them. I could read the looks they were exchanging (”some of them will be cross and crabby, the old fakes”).
Released a couple days after I went straight to my family doctor, reported the whole hopeless, helpless episode – and he, Nicolas Christoveanu said – ‘Okay, I’ll take over your care for awhile,’ which was the single most hopeful statement I’d heard – maybe ever.
Of course I went immediately to the net and began to research all the new things that popped up daily about Crohns. To make a long story short, I was CELIAC! Hooray! Hooray! Which mean I HAD SOME CONTROL over what was happening to me. Talk about your good news! Whether in fact I even ever HAD Crohns was debatable. Or maybe Crohn’s isn’t even a disease. Maybe it’s Celiac all along and the Crohn’s merely doctors having made a specialty of the disease, lots of heavy research grants and nobody willing to back down and concede.
Oh, it took about a year before anyone believed me. I wouldn’t even go back to be tested since obviously the pain was gone, truly forever, as I write this.
EXCEPT – today I have a clinic appointment, more or less routine, but all these years later, it is again with that old woman-baiting-doctor and his opinion of older women as fakers. Uninteresting, less than human pretenders. Using Dr appointments as a sort of a hobby. Some may. But that doesn’t mean everybody for pete sakes!
It was too late to change by the time they told me yesterday. I envision it as sort of OK Corral only without visible weapons.
I’m going in with a plan, wearing my best hat, planning to leave all my clothes on and converse as equal… Stay tuned.
If nations and provinces can identify a bird as representing them, then cities should be able to as well. I opt for the tough-guy sparrows muscling their way into crumbs, barely hopping aside when the feet of passersby stomp down the street. Everyday after my work at the downtown Kingston Community Credit Union, I save all the crumbs from the cookie plate and sprinkle them in inobtrusive places. The sparrows, who keep a sharp eye on me, know where to look.
Let’s hear it for the hardworking crumbpickers!
Despite one book being unfortunately PINK, Purves lets you into how women feel in mid-family raising. In these novels you’ll get it too. (Free Woman, Casting Off). She shows you how a family operates, what can tear it down, build it up. A modern Dickens but not as long-winded, Purves KNOWS who these women are.
Census articles, this week, give us 63 categories of family by income. Purves takes a more human, colourful, compelling approach.
Had hoped to upload a current strip here to show you how good this guy is! I’m especially fond of his cop. His characters seem to have but half a head. Their eyeballs often go right up to the top with the actual head being slightly lower. His lines are pithy and accurate. The whole cartoon is sparse and feels as though you could catch a bit of one of the lines and pull it all unraveled. Seems so real. One of the truly great artists in cartooning!
When you start to blog, they tell you the only way it will succeed is if you make it about one single thing. If you’re a writer who begins to design umbrellas, you have to make a separate blog for that. Which means your life is diced up into little compartments like those plastic serial pill boxes they sell in pharmacies. Henry didn’t do that. His life was altogether in the text.
Thoreau just set down what was happening in his life day by day. His NOW. So I named this, SLICES OF NOW to emulate what he did in real time.
Also to answer the question older women get asked all the time: ‘What on earth do you find to DO all day?” – in that phoney, patronizing, talk-down voice used exclusively for the elderly as though, rather than upright and dressed, anyone over 65 should be propped up in a nursing home bed somewhere drinking through a straw. They invented that ghastly word, ‘fiesty’ for those of us who aren’t.
Thoreau and I turn out to have much the same topics, go figure. Both of us write seasonally about nature and our gardens, what we’re reading, the passersby or the neighbours (and there’s LOTS about them I haven’t said) or philosophers that get it, or what we’re writing or trying to understand well enough to write about with a smattering of politics that we can have a say in. He wasn’t consciously trying to influence the world’s leaders – but he did.
Louisa May Alcott said he had a ‘neck beard’ that served as a good barrier to keep the women away. I illustrate what that looked like by the one on the man in my life which most emphastically does not keep me away.
He wrote – I write about the current slice of our NOW. In this century I’ve added in the influences with which technology gifts us, often wondering what he would’ve made of them: Mine are often comic strips reflecting on popular culture, a large part of which is facebook and designer coffees that cost more than he spent in a week on groceries. I don’t wish to travel any more than he did, neither of us out of fear but indifference.
Often I feel him looking over my shoulder and nodding. Both of us wander into politics now and then but only the stuff we think we might be able to do something about. We both write poetry and I think he probably wrote songs too but there isn’t any evidence. Anyone tends to sing when they’re by themselves. Both of us continually strive for simplicity. Hence my free table, loaded with books.
I’m going to try and link to some of his on-line journals.
I use this sign for privacy. It seems to work among those who can read and are not too hotheaded to ignore it. For quiet Sunday afternoons.
This ones on the lid of my green bin so that I don’t come home and find recycling hasn’t taken it due to some oaf tossing a half-drunk smoothie cup with plastic straw into the contents, pretending they think it is a garbage can. While reycling has a point, how can you prevent someone throwing stuff on top of your carefully selected compost ingredients, other than with bear traps?
Finally this sign has been on my door for 15 years. It works on and off. Those with intellectual pretensions don’t seem to recognize what they are. However, you can solve many other problems with a good sign.
Last Sunday a children’s story I wrote, adapting from a Greek myth, appeared in the paper under someone else’s byline with nary a mention of me. While it had been somewhat rewritten, it had the same title, illustrations and good chunks of my text. It also told the same story, that of iris and sleep. There would’ve been many other angles from which to tell this story. It was surprising to see the ‘writer’ had decided just to redo mine.
On a brighter note, I have a FREE table out on my corner for this three day holiday weekend, including a spongebob backpack sitting on an orange folding chair that has seen better days, crockery and a large volume of Canadian history & scandals, suitable for use as a great doorstop! I have my fingers crossed for a good home for the stuffed bunny! Watching such a table is part of an urban summer fun.