Memorial Day Weekend: a signpost to vacation like pausing my library holds, arranging on-line bill pay, another storm of cottonwood pollen and another Northwest Folk Life Festival for the annals of The OK Chorale.  Our first official appearance at Folk Life, fifteen years ago, was on the Intiman Stage under dramatic lighting and it gave us a rush.

I remember sitting quietly in the green room and feeling assaulted by one of the altos who was on some sort of nervous talking jag.  I remember thinking that as the director, I had a responsibility to stay calm and focused—especially since the last time we sang, a physician in our group suggested I look into getting beta-blockers for myself.  I was floating on a beta-blocker there in the green room and considered offering my second one to the chatty alto.  Instead I told her, “I need some uninterrupted quiet,” a bold, even rude statement for me at the time.

How things have changed.  We never got to sing on the Intiman (now the Cornish) Stage again.  The last statement I ever made to the alto who has now thankfully left our group was, “You could have taken some responsibility for yourself.”  (Pretty good story here)  I no longer need beta-blockers. I don’t get nervous anymore; I get excited.

We’ve sung at the Charlotte Martin Theater where they said they had a piano and it turned out to be an old upright pushed to the edge of the stage apron and impractical for what I needed.  There was a flurry to get to my car, drive to the loading area, and get my keyboard out of the truck. I wafted on like nothing had happened.  That was in the beta-blocker days.

After Intiman, my favorite venue is the stage below what we –back in the 60s–called the “Food Circus” but which now is referred to as the “Center House.”  The stage is officially called “The Armory Theater,” but I call it the Black Box under the Food Circus and no one knows what I mean but I say it anyway because I think they should know by now.  It’s the home of the Seattle Shakespeare Company.  I love seeing Shakespeare performed there and I loved singing there.  The acoustics are exquisite.

The past several years we have sung in the Cornish Courtyard in the open air and the emphasis has been on audience participation.  I love being at the keyboard as I was yesterday with the Chorale on risers above me because I can see their faces and watch them sing.  Another thing that has changed over the years is that we have somehow acquired Pitch and can go a cappella without a downward slide.  I stopped the accompaniment many times and enjoyed what we all created together this quarter.

All Present spring quarter has also ended:  I’m about to begin three weeks in England; something I have looked forward to for six years, ever since I got back the last time. At our last song circle I wished I could take our little group of singers with me.

It’s more than sentiment.  Part of the richness of All Present—to me–is the hovering presence of death.  I get to know the singers who come to All Present and they get into my heart.  It reminds me a little of teaching pre-school.  The folks in All Present have a joie de vivre and an openness that enchant me the way my preschoolers did many years ago.  But little children leave for the great adventure of their lives.

In All Present we watch them decline and then we lose them to hospitals, to memory units, to death.  It can happen so fast. One day they are there, vibrant and smiling and then they don’t come back.  They take something of me when they go and I never know what that will be until they’re gone.

Bob in All Present has dementia.  Two years ago he and his wife Ilana danced at one of our concerts when The OK Chorale and All Present combined to sing “Shall We Dance?”  It was one of the highlights of the show.  Then Ilana’s body almost folded in two from M.S.  She came with Bob using a walker, and then a wheelchair. The two of them propped each other up at home, struggling with their health.

Months passed and Ilana came out of the wheelchair, and then she moved without a walker.  This past week she was steady and light on her feet.  As we sang our way through our songbook we got to “Shall We Dance?” Our last song circle for spring quarter ended with Bob and Ilana dancing together again.

“Shall we then say good night but mean goodbye? .  .  .

On the clear understanding that this kind of thing can happen,

Shall we dance, shall we dance, shall we dance ?

On Intiman Stage, Seattle

Julia, Violet, Midge

Susan with Vivian

Helene, Dennis, Jim, Bill

Gwen (my neighbor who knows something about just about everything) and I went to Costco last week.  We go twice a year and the spring trip is the most important one to me because it’s when I get my cheap vodka to make my raspberry liqueur. I’ll get to that in a moment but first I have to say that I love these excursions with Gwen.

We take Gwen’s Murano.  My Toyota is 21 years old: the driver’s side door handle is broken and in order to unlock the driver’s door I have to crawl in from the rider’s side—so I only lock it in dodgy neighborhoods.  The seat belt recently got so frayed that it got itself permanently stuck so I cut out one of the back seat belts and rigged it up to the front. The trunk leaks. The electric system is screwy and the brake lights come on when I turn on the headlights so until I get that fixed, I can’t drive at night.

None of those things especially affect a trip to Costco on a weekday morning but you can probably imagine that Gwen’s Murano is more comfortable.  Costco opens at 10:00; we leave at 9:45 and get there shortly after it opens.  So do a hundred other people.  We each grab a cart.  We’ve already had the following conversation:

“How much time do you need?”

“Half an hour.  Forty-five minutes at the most. You?”

“Twenty. But you take the time you need.  Did you bring your cell phone this time?”

Once, before I had a cell phone, I asked Gwen if Costco didn’t have a clock.

“A clock,” she said. “How quaint.”

We both take off.  I try to be as single-minded as possible because I can get into a lot of trouble at Costco.  Forty-five minutes is really too long for me.  It gives me time to linger in the candy, liquor, and seasonal aisles.  I get my vodka, toilet paper, jar of avocado oil and bags of frozen chicken. Gwen and I meet at the registers. Gwen pays and while she grinds her coffee beans, I write her a check (A check, how quaint) for the amount of my purchases.

The reason for bringing all this up is that I have a small window–raspberry season—to start my liqueur and this year that season will most likely begin the day I leave and finish the day I get back from my trip to England.  Two of the things on my To Do list involved getting the vodka and then finding someone to strip my raspberry bushes twice, rinse off the berries and plunk them into the alcohol.

It feels like no less than three dozen people need to get into my house while I’m gone. I’ve had to get keys made for everyone. There’s Tim who takes care of the garden.  He’ll be over to water, to stir the compost, and to mulch everything within an inch of its life. Sue will be over to clean the house. Madelaine, who is storing most of her worldly possessions in my back cabin, is moving to her new place when I’m gone and will need to get to her furniture.  The raspberry ladies need access: the aforementioned Sue and my friend Andrea who I go out “drinking” with once a month.  Drinking is in quotes because Andrea has a Rusty Nail and I drink a Scotch.  That’s it.  We call it Drinking.  Or to indicate that we might this time get really wild, we say “Drinky-Poo.”

In addition to supplying my friends with keys, I have concerns about the permanent residents in my house, the cats.  So far I don’t think they know anything is up.  I brought the suitcase down weeks ago and it’s been standing innocuously in the bedroom.  I brought it down mostly for me.  Even when I was a little girl I packed and unpacked and packed again for weeks before the departure date.  But this weekend I think I might open it.  It’s gotten to that point in preparations when it makes more sense to toss something in the suitcase than to write it down on the list of what to pack.  The cats aren’t going to like this phase.

The big trade-off for my cats when I’m away is that they get their cat flap back. When they were younger and could come and go as they liked, they liked to bring wild things into the house.  Inside my house I have caught many birds in my bare hands and set them free.  I have also trapped many a rat, picked it up with a hand covered with two gloves and two plastic bags and deposited it still in the trap into the garbage –all the while screaming.

The deal-breaking incident was the night Winston brought in a huge rat that the cats played with until it was exhausted and wounded but still managed to crawl up the shower curtain and fall into the bathtub where I found it the next morning looking very dead.  I suited up to dispose of it but when I pulled the shower curtain away, it jumped up in fright and ran down the length of the tub.  My scream opened the skylight above my head. Read my full Rodent Incident Report.

After that incident, the cat door was permanently closed and the cats were forced to go through security before they were allowed in the house.  When I am out of town, I re-open their old door so they have some recompense for losing my services as doorman.  My biggest concern about the cats is not that they will bring in wildlife.  For one, they are too old.  Secondly, if we go with the theory that the rodents are gifts to their owners, I’m not going to be around.  My biggest concern is that Winston who is something of a Costco size cat will not be able to get through the cat flap in which case he will drive the house sitter to distraction with his whining, not to mention his leaving Costco size deposits in the litter boxes for her to clean up.

All this cuts into the anticipation of a trip.  Give me enough of this kind of stuff and I start to think, “Well maybe I just won’t go.”  Then I say to myself,  “One of these mornings you’ll wake up and it will be the day you leave for England.  You’ll get on the plane and settle in with your book, your writing, your knitting, your snacks, and all your paraphernalia and if you’re lucky, drive your seat mate to ask for another seat.  You’ll fuss around, eat dinner, take a xanax and pass out until the plane lands at Heathrow.  All this will be behind you.”  Then I take a deep breath and carry on.

Winston, the Costco Cat

I leave for England in less than a month.  I am in the most delicious phase of anticipating the trip, the one where departure is actually in sight.   The next most delicious phase is after you’ve come home and slept a few nights in your own bed. The actual travel is arguably the least fun part. One of the souvenirs of my last visit was sciatica.

It’s not just my age and train wreck of a back.  My former voice and piano student, the young, brilliant, beautiful, and in-shape Anna Ellermeier (remember that name for future world events) who is now in law school at William and Mary has a riff about the glamor of travel. She described to me her trip to England and France after she graduated from high school.  I paraphrase:

“We spent most of the day trying to find something to eat, my stomach bothered me, I didn’t sleep well and when we got to whatever we came to see, I could only stare at it in a sleep fog.  The further away you get from a trip, the better it is.  After six months at home, it’s the most idyllic vacation you’ve ever had.”

This will be my sixth visit to England.  I thought I would never again be able to go.  For one thing, I never thought I’d be able to afford it—and it remains to be seen if I can afford it.  I’ve also wondered how much longer it would be physically feasible.  However  last year I was practically eaten away by envy when two of my closest friends went to England.  I decided that I would somehow make it work: I would go to England.

I remembered a very funny e-mail my cousin in England sent me about her village fête a few years back —something about one of the organizers acting like she was  Queen of the May.  I smelled BBC mini-series.  I was also reminded of a block-watch captain in my neighborhood who took herself way too seriously.

When I found out the Butleigh village fête is in June, I immediately decided I would make my visit in June so I could be part of it.  On June 11 I’ll be selling raffle tickets at the fête and I hope to God that America doesn’t do something so spectacularly stupid on the world stage that the fête organizers won’t let me participate because my American accent would be a deterrent to revenue.

I’ll be in Butleigh for the first week and in Burnham-on-Sea for the second week, where another cousin and a friend from a previous visit live. I’ll fly home after the third week spent in London.  Those first two weeks are mostly about being part of village life although we going to do some touring around on the weekends.  The last week I’ll be a tourist at large in London.  There will be lots to write about when I get home, but currently I am in anticipation of things to come.

The other day I was in my pajamas till noon, absorbed in figuring out how to get from my London hotel to the places I wanted to visit.  I want to stay off the tube this time because I want to see the city as I go along.  It’s disorienting be thrust underground from one end to the other and it seems a waste of a great city.  This means I have to learn the buses and I am doing as much homework as I can.

In all the time I’ve spent in London I have never visited The Tower.  After reading all of Shakespeare’s plays a few summers ago as well as Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (by Hilary Mantel in case you’ve not been on earth recently,) I feel hungry to see this famous place.  I want to approach it from the Thames, though.  I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out if one can just ride a boat on the Thames like a water taxi.  It turns out one can and one might want to look into getting an Oyster card if one wants to be able to afford it.

Before all this was clear to me I had emailed the folks at The Clipper to ask how I could go to the tower the way people did who were to be be-headed.  They wrote back promptly indicating the embarkation stop closest to my hotel. There was no comment about whether or not I could also be be-headed.

I alternate between whirls of activity and paralysis over all there is to think about.  I have a cat/house-sitter and I need to condense all the things I think are important for her to know into a manageable few.  She needs to know the odd way the front room light turns on but she doesn’t need to know where to get a hot water heater in the unlikely event that mine would need replacing while I’m gone. Paralysis has set in even as I write this—because I am writing this– so I am going stop and call my house sitter to make sure I didn’t just imagine her.

Then I need to make the critical decision of what book to take on the plane.

“I’m Wonder Woman!” Susan held out her arms and we hugged.

“Yes, you are!” I enthused.  “What are we talking about?”

I hadn’t seen Susan in three weeks. She’s a longtime friend, indispensable assistant and librarian for All Present; copy editor of my memoir and occasionally of something particularly egregious in one of my blog posts.  And now she’s Wonder Woman.

Susan and her husband Mike had been in Connecticut to move Susan’s 102 year old mother into an assisted living facility.  Cecile had refused to leave her home where she had lived alone—and blind– for the 15 years since her husband died.  Militantly refused.  And she didn’t want anyone living with her either; the aides that managed to visit for more than two days before they were fired are an exclusive lot.  Cecile would have welcomed Susan, but that was a bit of a problem since Susan lives on the other side of the country.  The biannual trips Susan and Mike made to Connecticut were becoming harder for everyone including those of us who had to hear about them.

Susan could have been put up for Daughter of the Year just for getting Cecile moved to a place where she was tentatively content.  But in ten days’ time she also managed to clean out Cecile’s house and sell it!  Let’s all take a moment so those of us with experience with elderly parents can bow our heads in awe at this amazing accomplishment.  And then spend a minute reflecting on the iron will of a redoubtable 102 year old blind woman who could take care of herself, thank you very much.

I know a lot of Susans.  I distinguish the Susan of this essay as the wittiest woman I know.  She’s full of throwaway lines that leave me snickering for weeks.

The oldest of my stories goes back to when Susan was living on Bainbridge Island in a townhouse her kids bought her so she would babysit for them.  They also gave her a cell phone so they could call her when they needed her but she only turned it on when she wanted to use it.  Anyway a bunch of us went over for a house warming.  When I used the bathroom, I spent a little time looking at things in there, you know how you do.  OK, snooping.

When I came out of the bathroom and for no other reason than that I thought I was being funny I said to Susan, “I hope you don’t mind but I used your rubber tip to get something out of my teeth.”

“Oh that’s OK,” she shot back.  “I just use it to clean toe jam.”

Next oldest favorite story:  a bunch of us were talking about yoga.  I had just started a class in Viniyoga as distinguished from Hatha yoga, from Bikram yoga, from hot Bikram yoga.

“Bikram yoga?” Susan interjected.  “It would be faster and cheaper to just lie down in the parking lot and let a truck run over you.”

Susan has a striking pair of earrings: elongated silver leaves that dangle from her ears.  She was wearing them one day when a man came toward her pointing and saying, “Those would make great fish lures!”

“I tried it once,” Susan said. “But I couldn’t hold my breath long enough.”

Since I am posting this on Mothers’ Day weekend it seems appropriate to tell you about a Mothers’ Day card Susan received from her son who I will call Tim.  It read:

“Thank you for letting me push my bulbous head through your lady parts.”

He signed his brothers’ names to it.  I’ll call them Jeff and Brian.  When Jeff saw the card with his name attached, he was appalled.

The next year, in spirit of not fixing what’s not broken, Tim signed his brothers’ names to a Mothers’ Day card that read:

“Thank you for excreting me.”

Susan is a good friend and a fun person to know.  But oh, what I wouldn’t give to have had a mother I could talk to like that!

On the corner of NW 95th and 6th NW in Seattle is a duck pond. I’ve known about it since 1987 when I bought my first house in the Greenwood area of Seattle, not too far from where I live now. Back in the 80s, three of my piano students –known by the child whose lesson came after them as The Three–rode their bikes past the pond on their way to lessons. In the spring the day always came when The Three trooped into my house, dropped their jackets and music on the floor, and announced, “There are baby ducks!” Later in the evening, I’d make a pilgrimage to the pond to see the ducklings.

The Three consisted of two sisters, Alix and Robin, and their friend, Jocelyn. Jocelyn is now 38 years old and has a baby boy. I have known her since she was two years old. When I taught music at the Perkins School, Jocelyn was in the Pinkers, the two year olds and then graduated to the Orange Group when she turned three.

She was an intense child. She took the singing of silly pre-school songs seriously. When we made our fingers and noses be a stringed instrument and sang “Vio,vio,viola,” she made sure she did it correctly. But she enjoyed herself intensely, too. That was so interesting to see in such a small child.

Every afternoon Jocelyn’s mother fetched her daughter. She arrived in what I can only describe as A Determination. She came through the door onto the playground like a force of nature and then abruptly stopped, rocking back slightly in her Birkenstocks and looked for her child. This mode of bodily conveyance has become familiar to me because Jocelyn’s mother is now my dear friend, Nina–rhymes with Dinah. But that was years in the future. I still try to not mix Parents with my relationships with students. At that stage in my life, I wanted nothing to do with anyone’s parent full stop.

When I went into teaching private music lessons, Jocelyn was the only student I solicited. She was in grade school by then but I had never forgotten her. Nina started her in lessons with me and we stayed together for ten years until Jocelyn graduated from high school. She did her senior project on Piano from the Romantic period and played a recital she had put together herself. Home from her first year of college, Jocelyn and I did a summer of voice lessons.

I’ve followed Jocelyn’s career as an actor. I went with Nina to see all the plays in which Jocelyn participated at Franklin High School and to all the summers of Shakespeare in Seattle. My first visit to New York City was made in order to see Jocelyn’s senior performance when she graduated from New York University School of Drama. I’ve seen her in a few independent films and in one exciting part in The Middle, which I made Nina play 15 times, rewinding it over and over to see Jocelyn’s part and then to see her name in the credits.

Jocelyn witnessed me singing “Lasciatemi morire!” (Let me die!) in my room at the Waldorf Astoria at the beginning a long trip through upstate New York and a crossing on the Queen Mary II to England. I had sold my mother’s house and was feeling flush. Singing “Let Me Die” at the Waldorf Astoria was my idea of a funny thing to do.

I sang at Jocelyn and Abe’s wedding. I flew home from my extended trip just in time to get over the jet lag and get my voice warmed up. And—here’s my favorite part—I got to sing a classical piece! True, I did it with guitar accompaniment because we were outdoors in the Woodland Park Rose Garden, but I sang Handel’s “Alma Mia” as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Love Changes Everything.” I was so pleased that two of my favorite songs also appealed to Jocelyn.

Jocelyn and Abe now live in Los Angeles. In addition to her acting jobs, and being a mom, Jocelyn tutors students in math in preparation for their SATs. And she has started a business, Home Place Beef, with the tenant and caretaker of the family ranch in Montana. You can order beef from grass fed cattle here:

Now instead of a singing with a Pinker with her fingers in her nose, I watch videos of the exceptional antics of baby Hugo. Of course there’s never been as wonderful a baby as Hugo and everyone knows it. Still I limit Nina to showing me only one video per week and no more than five photos in any one day.

These memories come back to me because it’s April and there are ducklings at the duck pond. My daily constitutional is currently routed past the pond. I stand at the fence and talk to the ducks. There’s mama and papa and the eight ducklings. When I first started greeting them, the mama was protective of her brood and herded them to the other side of the pond. (Query: Do ducks herd and brood?) Yesterday she paraded them out of the drain pipe where they had apparently been playing when I came to the fence.

One day they were all in a pile under the mama and remained in place when she stood up: a little mat of down with the odd beak or eye showing. The papa climbed up the bank and picked at the ducklings for no reason that I could see except it caused all of them to get up and move en masse two feet away where they rearranged their beaks and eyes and matted up again.

There was some agitation the other morning that seemed connected to the presence of two extra male ducks. I always think of the male ducks that cluster around in a group as The Uncles. They are like the uncles at Christmas who sit in the front room and observe the goings-on but do nothing to help. One of the males at the pond had a dark green, almost black, velvety head. He seemed a little menacing, not like anyone’s uncle. I called him the Black Prince. The other was an everyday green mallard who seemed to not quite know what to do with himself. I called him Uncle Vanya because I have been reading Chekov.

This morning I took my camera because I wanted to take a picture of the ducklings before they got much bigger. There was only Uncle Vanya, preening.

“What have you done with the ducklings?” I asked.

He looked at me contemptuously and swanned (Query: do ducks swan?) to the far end of the pond.

The duck pond is empty now except for Uncle Vanya. When there are babies, it always reminds me of The Three, especially The One, Jocelyn, the beautiful little girl with the intense intelligence and sensitivity. I would never want to be 40 again but I do miss a time when kids rode their bicycles to piano lessons and ducklings were an event. Tomorrow is May Day. It’s early yet. There’s still time for more ducklings.

The Duck Pond

Uncle Vanya

Eighty eight degrees in Seattle in mid April.  This is an unremembered occurrence, if not unheard of.  I was out wallowing in the earth during the weekend, trying to get ahead of weeding the garden outside the front fence and tending to the peas that I am training up the fence.  It took me years to get it through my head that peas won’t vine up the fence with the unerring migration of salmon swimming upstream to spawn.  Peas don’t have even very little brains let along GPSs.

Too much time goes by between my visits to the garden thus far in the season.  I get out there just in time to have to weed the same area I worked on two weeks prior.  I put in quite a few hours this weekend just to get ahead of the peas.

Tim and I have a compost bin this year.

“Put all your kitchen scraps in it,” he told me. “Everything except meat products.”

So I did.

Then it was, “Our compost isn’t going to get hot enough to break down citrus peels.”

I started sorting out the peels of heirloom oranges that I eat like candy this time of year.

Then I was told, “It’s best to break things into smaller pieces so everything composts evenly.”

I started chopping the wilted celery stalks.

Then, “I’ve never seen marshmallows in a compost bin.”

“You said everything except meat products and the marshmallows are just the right size,” I said.  “I also feel the need to say they are left over from Pajama Week.  I got them for my students.  I only eat artisanal marshmallows.”

It’s weird having someone comment on my garbage.

There’s a mental composting that goes on when I weed.  It’s one of the things I love about it—following the thoughts that go through my mind.  For example I was planting more peas and I remembered the little song I used to teach my preschoolers when I worked in Head Start:

Four seeds in a hole,
Four seeds in a hole;
One for the mouse,
One for the crow,
One to rot
And one to grow.

We sang it while dropping four pinto beans in a little ceramic pot.  They could sing it all day.  Everyone had to have a turn with the pinto beans and then they wanted to do it again.

Memory is like an eye floater.  Memories float to the front and continue on their rounds.  I have a shady woodland area to the north of the house that’s full of violets, lily of the valley and oxalis.  I gave a flat of oxalis to my analyst once.  His office had a sliding French door opening to a little garden, which to my mind needed more plants.

“These are oxalis,” I told him. They are invasive and you’ll never get rid of them.  I thought they would remind you of me.”

On the other side of the house my raspberries live in danger of being choked to death by Bindweed, more elegantly called Morning Glory.  I spent an hour grinding my teeth while I went for their extensive root system.  Fortunately the roots are easy to find.  They are big fat white things, no nuance whatsoever.  It’s either stupidity or arrogance on their part.  On the other hand it takes a long time to finally choke the bindweed to death.  They’ve got tenacity.  So do I though my aforementioned analyst called it stubbornness.

“You’re no one to talk,” I said.

He once told me that he was trying to garden at his home and he kept looking in magazines and talking to people and he didn’t know how to proceed.

“Why don’t you just get in there and try things?” I asked

“Why can’t you do that with your life?” he shot back.

I planted carrots last spring.  I planted them all over the garden to see where they grew best.  They mostly didn’t grow at all.  I got several the size of a thumb that were tasty nonetheless.  There is nothing like the sweetness of a carrot pulled out of the earth on a warm day, rinsed off with the hose and eaten with a little dirt still on it. As I went around the garden last weekend I found big, sweet carrots in all the locations I had planted them.  They had come through the winter . They had flourished.  I ate every last one.

When I’m out in the garden, I like it when I have a cat for company.  I like to look up and share their contentment or see what they are sniffing or batting at.  Cats never oblige. Still I have found a way to get Artemis to at least come for a visit.  I call her sworn enemy Suli, the cat across the street. In fact any time I need Artemis I call for Suli and within a few minutes Artemis has shown up.  Suli never does.

The last thing I did in the garden was to put the forced hyacinth bulbs in the ground.  Round about October I set hyacinth bulbs in an elegant ceramic trough my mother made.  I anchor them with rocks, pour in a half inch of water and put them in a cold dark place.  This tricks them into thinking it’s winter a few months before it actually is.

I water them periodically until January when actual hyacinths start to appear.  At this point they look pretty jaundiced.  After few days in a warm, lighted area, they get color in their cheeks and scent in their bloom and are cheerful and fun to have in the house. I cut the hyacinths down to the bulb when they come to the end of their cycle.

The bulbs will never bloom again after they’ve once been forced but I still put them in the ground as a kind of burial.  It’s a bittersweet habit, forcing bulbs.  They are lovely but they also remind me that when people, especially children, are forced to do something they aren’t ready for, it can mean they will never do it again.

“Why don’t you just get in there and try things?”

“Why can’t you do that with your life?”

That’s compost for us all.

The bittersweet forced hyacinths

“The garden is a lovesome thing, God wot.”
Thomas Edward Brown

As I walk around my own garden in early April, I feel like I do when I unpack the Christmas tree ornaments and see my old friends:

Sweet violets in the spring.  I have a lot of them this year: patches of sweetness all over the garden.  I see them every morning when I go through the gate into the cemetery, which is how I begin my morning constitutional.   Soon that morning walk will be one of the few times I have shoes on my feet as I am mostly barefoot from May to October.  My feet turn green from the grass stains and I go to bed happy.

On the other side of my path to the cemetery the kerria japonica waves its unruly orange stems.  I don’t know what happened to the kerria except that my gardening companion, Tim, pruned it to the ground two years ago very nearly over my dead body and it’s taken it that long for it to stagger back to its feet.

Tim is a baritone in the OK Chorale who moved to my neighborhood five or so years ago.  For the first time in his adult life, he did not have a garden.  He asked me one day if I had any large gardening projects I wanted done; he missed the garden.  Take a minute to digest the wonder of this request: he missed having a garden to muck in.  He wasn’t asking for work.

My situation was that what used to be a lovely garden had become overgrown and unhappy as I got older.  Arthritis has made it impossible for me to spend eight hours a day in the garden, something I used to do regularly.  I was thrilled with Tim’s request.  He and I embarked on a collaboration that’s been working –mostly smoothly– for three years.  And the garden is not just lovely, it’s magnificent.

We’ve planted fruit trees (Santa Rosa plum, Italian prune, cherry) to keep company with my fig and my old Spartan apple tree.  The fig tree is a revenge plant.  It and a Japanese maple were given to me ten years ago by a friend who was going through a rancorous divorce.  She had no place for the trees herself but she didn’t want her ex-husband to get them so she gave them to me.  The maple is supremely happy, the fig is still having a little trouble recovering from the divorce.

Tim and I have planted blueberries, blackberries, currents, gooseberries and strawberries.  There were raspberry bushes when I moved into this house in 1997.  Every year I strip the bushes three or four times and put the berries in vodka to be made into a liqueur in the fall.  This is the extent of my “canning.”

Many of the garden’s plants have come to me by way of the Garden Fairy down the street, another windfall I don’t know how I was so lucky to acquire.  Annette works at a local nursery, which shall go nameless.   Plants that lose their cultivar tags or start looking puny get marked down and put on the Table of Shame in back of the flourishing plants.  Soon they are moved into a free pile for employees only.  Annette loads her car.  Flats of vegetables, vines, perennials—anything I ask for really—appear like magic on my front steps once a week for the entire growing season.

I planted the yosta berry –gift from a student—years ago.  Yosta berries are a cross of gooseberry and current and they give my raspberry liqueur a zip and a tingle.  I have had one too many squirmishes with sawflies, which devour the yosta’s leaves.  I refer you to this:After the Tilth, the Deluge.  I told Tim—in full presence of the yosta –that I had had enough and I wasn’t going to spray, dust or squish ever again.  If the yosta wanted to live, it could do so without me.  I think I scared it into participating in its own life because it’s flourishing joyfully right now.

Today I weeded the herb garden while chicken bones simmered their way into a broth.  I’ll use the broth in sorrel soup.  My three sorrel plants are big, fluffy and just about to bolt.  I learned about sorrel when I spent a weekend at a friend’s summer home on Camano Island.  She sent me into the garden to get sorrel to make the soup.  I loved tramping in the wet grass with Gus the terrier to cut the sorrel and I loved the soup. I learned that people call it Weed Soup because sorrel is indestructible and grows in vacant lots and on parking strips.

And so begins the gardening year: seeds to plant, grass to mow, weeds to pull, flowers to deadhead, trees to prune.  But this year no squishing of sawflies.

sorrel

yosta berry

sweet violets in the spring

I’m on Whidbey Island for four days at Windhorse, the retreat center I visit every year when the Buddha House is available because the meditation cabins don’t have toilets and I’m sorry, I don’t leave the house to use the toilet. I need a modicum of comfort and the cabins, though lovely inside, don’t leave room for a lawn chair, which I have learned to bring with me. I can open it on the balcony outside the meditation hall or put it on the front porch depending on the situation with wind, rain, and sun.

Also depending on where I am most likely to see the deer. Tommie (who owns the retreat, and is also my beloved voice teacher) told me there were “deer everywhere,” but I think that when a property owner says there are deer everywhere, hers is a different perspective than that of a city girl who hopes she’ll have to thread her way through a herd just to get to the front door.

As far as I can make out, there are exactly two deer here. I think of them as “that lovely couple from Burien” as one of the caregivers from All Present once called my assistants –and friends– Susan and Mike. At first light and at dusk, I am either out walking (stalking really) or stationed at one of my vantage points to get a sighting of the lovely couple from Burien.

Last June there were twin fawns running around with a harassed doe barely able to contain their exuberance and I saw a lot of them. This year there are three baby goats at the farm across the road. I stand at the fence several times a day and wait for them to get curious enough to come over. So far they are being very cautious so yesterday I used my close-up lens to get some photos. In doing so I discovered which part of the fence was electric. There’s an enormous white dog the size of a cow with enough drool coming out of him to water a small garden. He barks and wags his tail and backs up when I reach through the un-electric part of the fence with a dog biscuit.

An insistent meow made me turn to find a black cat about the size of Suli the cat across the street in Seattle who knocks on my door when she’s bored and comes in to sit on top of my refrigerator and incense my cat Artemis. She was friendly, rubbing against me and letting me pick her up, purring her profound feelings, whatever they were—one learns to not speculate about these things with cats.

There’s now a path from Windhorse into South Whidbey Island State Park. There have been some terrific windstorms lately that have toppled at lot of trees in the area. There’s a notice in the Buddha House to not walk in the woods if it’s windy. During my first venture into the park, I followed a trail until it felt unsurpassable due to the trees, branches, puddles and mud in the way. The second time I walked in the woods, the sun shone through the trees even in the deepest part of the woods. When the sky is cloudy the woods feel safe and womblike; the sun illuminating this but not that is an enticing invitation into another world. Out of the corner of my eye I see a structure—a fairy house?—but when I turn to view it straight on, it slips into the other world. The same thing happens with a little foot—a wood nymph maybe?

At the bottom of the bowl of the retreat center is a little pond populated by frogs who have regular choir practice. Every time I visit, though, they are on a break, and I have yet to see one. I haven’t seen a frog since I was a child. We caught them in Lake Washington and took them home in shoe boxes. We tried to make them be pets. We freed them into the fish pond outside our house and never saw them again.

Every day I walk the mile and a half out to the highway. Yesterday I saw one rabbit. On the walk back I saw at the top of a pine tree an eagle so enormous I spontaneously sang “Oh, beautiful for spacious skies” but stopped because it immediately felt a little weird. That’s where all the rabbits have gone—into that gargantuan sitting atop the tree.

I brought a ridiculous amount of things to do during my few days here: three books of poetry, two novels, one book on tape, a history and a book about Buddhism. I brought painting and drawing supplies, several notebooks, and the computer though there’s no internet service at the Buddha House. I almost brought music because Tommie has a studio here, but I knew I could find anything I wanted to sing or play amongst her stacks. As a child I wanted to pack half my bedroom into the car for a car trip. How did I know what I was going to want to do? Last June the car was full but I ended up doing nothing but read two novels and watch for the twin fawns.

It’s colder now than it was in June so when I sit outside with a book, I wear two shirts and a windbreaker. With my lined-with-fleece wool jacket tucked around me and my feet in the hood, I can stay comfortable for about an hour. I’ve been reading The Magic Mountain because it had been recommended to me twice in the same week, one person telling me he thought it was the greatest novel of the 20th century. It’s 850 pages and I am up to 260, reading a little bit every day. I was afraid if I stopped for four days I would lose the momentum; it is so slow-going that it could take an entire century to read. Which reminds me that I really want to finish the last hundred pages of Ulysses.

I brought Christopher Buckley’s The Relic Master because it came in at the library the day before I left town. I read that in the afternoon when I can’t concentrate on anything heavy; it’s very funny and I snort tea out my nose at unexpected asides. I’ve got poems by Stephen Dunn and Fernando Pessoa and a notebook of poems I’ve collected. I read those in the morning after Thomas Mann and before Keeping the Faith Without a Religion, by Roger Housden, which I highly recommend, by the way. I highly recommend the poetry books, too but hardly anyone reads poetry anymore. We’re a strange little coterie, those of us who love poetry.

At night I put on The Phantom Tollbooth which I have listened to before but now I am also reading along. I marvel that I never read this book that was published in 1961 and must have been an offering of the Scholastic Book Services, which my mother was glad to shell out money to. On the other hand I don’t know that I could have appreciated a fraction of its cleverness when I was a child. For example: a car that goes without saying. Meaning everyone has to stop talking to get it started. One of my favorite characters is the Spelling Bee who spells the occasional word in all his sentences. S-e-n-t-e-n-c-e-s. “Years ago I was just an ordinary bee minding my own business, smelling flowers all day, and occasionally picking up part-time work in people’s bonnets.”

It’s been a week of walking, reading, reflecting, and watching for deer. It’s hard to think about leaving but as the time gets closer I feel pulled toward home knowing that I always take some of Windhorse with me until I need to come back for more.

Doris is moving but I don’t think she’s going to notice. Doris is my friend with Alzheimer’s disease.

Over the years I have spent many Friday evenings with Doris.  My first visit set up a pattern: I walk in and introduce myself. She graciously responds. We chat about singing, music, and teaching. We watch MSNBC until the news shows end and the weird Lockdown part of their programming begins. I fix her a peanut butter and banana sandwich and a bowl of ice cream. We begin at the beginning of the Schirmer edition of 24 Italian Songs and Arias of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century and work our way through to the end. She plays the accompaniments and I sing the arias. I do a little water painting and she watches. She doesn’t want to try it herself. We watch the KCTS Arts channel until time for me to leave.  I make sure she gets her evening medications before I go.

“Doris, will you know who I am when I come back?” I asked at the end of that first visit.

“I don’t know who you are now,” she said.

Every time I visit, Doris claims to remember me but I can see in her eyes that she doesn’t. She searches my face. There’s a glimmer of panic that goes away as soon as I smile and tell her how good it is to see her. I like to think that something in her heart recognizes me, but I don’t know if it does. That’s really not what these visits are about. We aren’t building a relationship.

Doris is the mother of Tommie, my (beloved) voice teacher. She lives with her son, Rich who is a hospice nurse. I started visiting when Doris’ husband died and her dementia was progressing. I didn’t know much about Alzheimer’s disease, but I grew up with a mother who was mentally ill and I know how to roll with unexpected behavior and disconnected thinking. I just wanted to help. I didn’t expect to come to love Doris.

Doris is delightful. She’s funny, out-spoken and kind. There was no odd behavior or disconnected thinking in the beginning, except that her memory loss meant I had to answer the same question 15 times in an hour. I don’t mind that except when the question is “Do you have a family?” That feels a little brutal. I mean I do have a family, but it’s of my own making, not one I was born into or that came out of my body. When I explain this to Doris, she understands (and often has a few choice comments about the drudgery of husbands and families) but then I have to keep explaining it.

Conversations now are like being in Wonderland. Sometimes her husband is alive, sometimes he is dead. Sometimes we are in her home, sometimes we aren’t. Sometimes she is living with her youngest son, sometimes with the oldest. Sometimes she isn’t living with anyone.

One December I exclaimed, “Oh Doris, you got a Christmas tree!”

“Oh, no” she said. “That’s not mine.  I don’t live here.”

“This is only where you spent the last 150 nights, right Mom?” Rich asked.

“Where do you live?” I asked.

She thought for a while. “Someplace else.”

We always travel through the various places Doris has lived: Born in Prince Rupert, she grew up in Fremont, Nebraska, and as an adult and mother lived in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, and Iowa City. She lived in Seattle once but she’s not sure when that was.

We talk about her career in music: singing, teaching singing, teaching public school music, being a church organist. I tell her about my teaching and performing experiences. She enjoys and sympathizes and comments with astuteness.

We sing a song she used to teach in the classroom: “Singing is fun, singing is fun, let’s all sing together each and ev-er-y-one.” I feel for Rich and Tommie; I am truly sick of that song.

She’s tells me about her parents, brothers and sisters. We go over the names of her children. Looking at a collage of photos one day, I remarked at how pretty Tommie was.

“She’s not pretty,” Doris said. “She’s cute.”

“And your son here—he’s quite handsome.”

“No, he’s not. That’s just a good picture.”

“Doris!” I laugh.

“Well, I do love them,” she said.

She’s never sure what I am doing there. Am I one of the aides? Am I her guest? She should be serving me a banana and peanut butter sandwich.

“I’m your friend, Doris,” I say. “I’m here because I like being with you and I don’t care for peanut butter and banana sandwiches! But I’ll eat the last half of that banana.”

I really do enjoy the time with her. It’s an alternate reality that I find restful and occasionally fascinating.

But the last visit was different. It started out as it always did and we went along for a few hours before it turned a corner. It bothered her that I was in the kitchen. What was I doing in there? It bothered her so much I had to hurry things along and left a mess. Then she objected to my cleaning it up.

She didn’t want me to paint. She was adamant about that. Why was I in her house?

Finally she said, “I am tired and want to go to bed. I am going to excuse you now.”

I looked at her for a long time, trying to decide what to do. Finally I said, “Doris, I understand ‘I’m excused,’ but Rich wants me to stay here until he gets home. If you want to go to bed, I can just read a book until he gets back.”

“I can’t do that. You’re my guest.” She looked at me as though she wasn’t
at all happy that I was her guest and composed herself to be a martyr.

“Where is Rich?”

“He went to the movies. He’ll be back soon.”

Doris became agitated. “No one discussed this with me. They shouldn’t make plans without talking to me.”

“Oh look,” I said picking up a box of photos. “I can’t leave before we look at these.”

It took about ten seconds to distract Doris from whatever suspicions were cycling through her mind, and we spent the rest of the evening in a détente. I felt sad on the drive home. Doris’ condition is always changing but this was the first time I had seen such a departure from what I was used to. To me it signaled the end of our fun evenings together.

“Don’t worry about it,” my friend Susan (and author of Old is Not a Four Letter Word) told me. “It’ll be different next time. She won’t remember.  Nothing will carry over.”

Susan was right. I saw Doris last week. I walked in and introduced myself. I kissed her cheek. She graciously responded. We chatted about singing, music, and teaching, and all the places she has lived. I made her a peanut butter and banana sandwich. She asked me if I had a family.

Doris is soon to be moved into an adult family home.

“All the other people are practically comatose,” Tommie told me. “She’ll be the life of the party.”

Oh Doris, you are already the life of the party.

Three weeks ago I set out to write another blog post about grief. It was going to be a calm, wise little reflection on a remark my (beloved) voice teacher Tommie had made. We were talking about the abysmal technical support that’s available for anyone over the age of 40 who is trying to cope with computers.

She said, “Teachers and tech support people need to understand that they are talking to people who are grieving.”

I didn’t understand what she meant until I emerged from what I am about to relate. I was already grieving other things. I was sad from the deaths in the OK Chorale, from the death of the cat of my heart last summer, from the frightening near death of my college friend in November. My world felt precarious.

Christmas week I finished with choirs and teaching and was looking ahead to ten days of doing nothing except what felt good at the time. Then Christmas Eve I broke my partial. It snapped in two like a cracker, denying me a quarter of my teeth. It was five days before I could get an old partial adjusted. I was philosophical about it. It’s not like I hadn’t eaten enough all month long; a friend and I had been talking about doing more juicing so here was a good time to start.

Three days after Christmas, I dropped my laptop and cracked the screen. Insert one day of hysteria. I took it to Seattle Laptop and borrowed an old Dell from my friend Mike who made me a document folder and helped me access the internet and my email so I could do some of the things that used to require stamps and phone calls but now I do exclusively on the computer.

Seattle Laptop reported that it would cost as much to fix the laptop as it would to buy a new one. Insert another day of hysteria plus hyperventilation. This was my vacation. The idea was to relax and not have to think. I was mad at the world when I marched into Best Buy. I stood sulking at customer service until someone summoned the courage to approach me. I had on a piece of paper the name and model number of a Toshiba Satellite laptop. Gwen had suggested I look at it, that it might be what I wanted. I handed the model number to the agent.

“I want this computer,” I said.

“Do you want to know anything about it?” he asked.

“Nope,” I said.

“Do you want to see one? It’s set up over here.”

I hesitated.

“I’ll get you one while you play with the display model,” he said.

I pushed a few keys listlessly. I was hard pressed to describe how much I didn’t care.

He was back with my computer and a gleam of excitement in his eyes.

“Let me show you the touch screen,” he enthused. “This will be ten times faster than what you’re used to.”

Oh god, I thought, please don’t show me anything. It never occurred to me to say I didn’t want a touch screen. I just assumed this was the new technology being foisted upon us all whether we wanted it or not.

“Listen, does this computer have USB ports and a CD drive and can I stream Netflix and do email? Can I use Word? Because that’s all I care about.”

“But just look. . “

“I’ll take it,” I said.

Then came the warranty pitch. This is what I heard:

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, 6 months, blah blah blah, protection, blah blah, blah geek squad, blah blah blah.”

“How much?” I asked

He started circling things on a sheet of paper. “Blah blah blah, two years, blah blah, blah, comes with blah blah. . .”

“I don’t want the warranty,” I said.

I took the computer home, set it up—that’s one thing that has gotten less complicated—and then took it straight over to Seattle Laptop where My Life on a Hard Drive sat in a Samsung laptop with a cracked screen. I left the Toshiba with them to transfer everything from one computer to the other. Then it was New Years and I was able to forget about it for about 24 hours—not because I was drunk although that might have been a good strategy for the entire holiday season but because the shop was closed.

I got the Toshiba back with my files and a third of my email addresses intact. I moved in, deleted everything on the Start Page that didn’t look familiar, began to personalize and set preferences. I started the blog post about grieving. That’s when I realized there was something wrong with the space key. It stuck. Sometimes it stuck and wouldn’t make a space. Sometimes it stuck on space and ran down four lines before I could get it unstuck by pressing down on the keyboard frame at different points. I shut the computer and thought seriously about just going off the grid. I was about to anyway, in a manner of speaking.

A student emailed me to ask to change her lesson time. I had to start teaching in one more day. Everyone who walked into the house would need something from me and I would have to be able to think straight and be fucking gracious to them. I immediately burst into tears. I decided to take another week off to recover from the week that just was. I calculated that I could still get a good five days of rest.

I am old enough to remember when we thought it was clever to say that the light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be the headlight on the locomotion. On the first morning of my fresh new week off I called Best Buy to inquire about getting the space bar fixed.

“Just bring it in and swap it out for a different one.”

“But I’ve already moved all my stuff into this one. Can’t someone fix it?”

“You can bring it to the Geek Squad.”

“Can you transfer me over there?”

“They don’t use the phone. You have to bring it in. They’d have to check it and see if the bar is sticking because of food caught in it or something.”

“This is a computer you sold me and fresh out of the box, the space bar sticks,” the pitch of my voice was creeping ominously higher, if the poor sales person only knew.

“I’ll run over and ask them,” she said. This wasn’t part of her job. She was being helpful and nice.

Back on the phone this was her report: “They say they won’t fix it here. They’ll send it to Toshiba who also won’t fix it but will advise you to swap it out. It’ll take a month.”

I swamped up with panic. Ahead of me stretched my second week of intended rest and it, too, was going to be eaten up by goddamn technology.

“Are you fucking kidding me? This is your customer service? You people. . listen . . . I hate computers, I hate Best Buy!” I hung up.

I paced the floor and heaved anxiety around the house for a while. The cats disappeared. By the time I had ratcheted myself down to mere hysterical sobbing, I called my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything. Gwen came over and reset the computer back to its original settings.

Meantime, my friend Nina (rhymes with Dinah) had gotten the voice lesson cancellation email and had inquired twice as to what was going on. “Don’t make me come up there!” she said in her second message.

Nina drove me and the stupid Toshiba to Best Buy the next day.

“I may embarrass you,” I said on the way over.

“I doubt it,” she said. She’s a good friend.

We got a very calm and reasonable sales person who listened to my story, helped me pick a computer –an Asus– better suited to me. There was no talk of touch screens or warranties.

I set up the Asus and took it over the Seattle Laptop. When Alex at Laptop heard my story he said, “Oh, I am so sorry!”

“You’re not half as sorry as that woman at Best Buy,” I said.

Alex transferred all my stuff a second time. He also spent an hour and half with me making sure I could get to everything I needed. He didn’t charge me anything. So there’s one good thing that came out of this. Seattle Laptop is now where I will go for everything computer related, including my next computer should I live so long as to need another.

I think computers are marvelous in some ways, but I am not interested in them as things in themselves. To me the computer is a means to an end and I just want it to work. I don’t enjoy spending day after day reveling in its latest dazzle. I would rather do almost anything else. When everything is working reasonably well, it’s great.

When Tommie said that tech support people need to understand that they are talking to people who are grieving I thought she was putting it a little dramatically, but I have changed my mind. Every time I open the computer I am actually grieving for a world that is gone, the world I grew up in, and knew how to navigate. There are still pieces of that world lying around to enjoy. I’m going to do just that as soon as I post this.