See Spot

I'm not sure my eyes are working properly anymore. Of course, they never have. All I have to do is take my glasses off for a moment to realize how lucky I am to be alive now because in another era I would have blundered into a tar pit. I would have been stomped into salsa by a mastodon. I would have died young but at least I would never have seen it coming.

I should have my eyes checked again. But it's been less than a year since the last exam and I can wait. It isn't any one thing, anyway. Seems like I'm always trying to navigate around the smudgy bits and exploring my trifocals for areas of clarity in any given situation. Supposedly I have a cataract that no one is in a hurry to do anything about. I also have enough floaters that in certain lights it's like I'm living in an aquarium, which isn't so bad. The only place it's really annoying is at the piano. I wonder if I can get sheet music the size of the old Dick And Jane book we learned from in first grade. We sat in its shadow. Four kids could make a fort out of that sucker without even using blankets.

I like to think of my eyes as having "let themselves go." That's the expression people use to describe old people who have flat-out given up on trying to be something they're not. I guess it's meant to be derogatory. Seems to me if you're an old woman who rolls out of bed and into a muumuu and scuff slippers, you've got a good grip on things. Mostly no one describes me as having let myself go because it implies I was holding it together before, and there's not a lot of evidence for that. Comfort, Sloth, and I are a mighty team, and Vanity doesn't have a shot against us when we stick together.

Some things I can see more clearly now, in this life pause we've been given. Our isolation is not without its blessings, especially with the stripping-away of diversion and trivial pursuit. So much of what we do is designed to distract us from our eventual, unimportant demise. We acquire mindlessly, we manufacture conflict. We're desperate and diligent in filling up our lives, we feed our rage and our fears. We complain about our busyness and yet we feed that too. We don't like to think about our lifetimes contracting. But there's no getting around that. There's something to be said about knowing what's important, and a lot of unimportant stuff needs to be moved out of the way to see it.

What we need to do is let ourselves go. We're the ones in our way. Every best joy is simple. We all need things for simple survival, and we should do our best to see that everyone gets them, because right now the winners and losers are determined by a game of dice. But we don't need much--not nearly as much as we imagine. Rejoice in good food. Rejoice in food at all. Go outside. Stay inside. Play music. Play at all. Make art. Make out. Make up. Everything is bigger than we are, and that is the biggest comfort and joy of all.

I rejoice in weak eyes that can still see, and I rejoice in you, and in everything that still wings and still slithers and still sprouts on a still-green earth. And I'll fight for all of these tomorrow, but today I'll let my thankfulness for it all roll through me. Gratitude is another word for peace.

That much is clear.

Safe At Home

Dave and I can't watch post-season baseball when the Chicago Cubs are doing well without thinking about his Mom. Murry was a huge Cubbies fan.

Right now, though, she's in a small ceramic pot. At least some of her is. We got custody of the pot of Murry after another death in the family, not that we asked for it: we did not. But we reluctantly took the jar in, and it was immediately followed by two good-sized golden cardboard boxes full of the rest of her, in case we ever need to top up the pot.

We don't want to top up the pot. We never wanted any ashes in the first place. We are rational people, and ashes are ashes and dust is dust. Once someone has been rendered to a vacuumable condition, we're pretty much done with that person, except for the love and gratitude and regret and maybe a good recipe. The problem with ashes is you can't just throw them out, unless you do so with ceremony in some meaningful fashion. So they're a burden.

And we know what we're supposed to do with Murry's ashes. We're supposed to sprinkle them on Wrigley Field. Memory is unreliable, and reality comes down to whatever you've managed to make up over the years, so we no longer know if we promised her a home in Wrigley Field or if we thought it up after she died. I'm quite certain we imagined the ceremony as a spray of fairy-dust in the breeze, a flick of the fingers, and not the bucket-dump in the ivy wall it would have to be. They frown on this sort of thing in Major League Baseball anyway, and if we were to let fly with both golden boxes and the pot, we could blind a fielder.

I resent the way inanimate things like bone dust or sorrow insinuate themselves into your life and start ordering you around. Streaks do the same thing.  They have power they shouldn't have. There is something sacred about a good streak, and the winless streak of the Cubs, who have not prevailed in a World Series since 1908, eight years before Murry was born, is as sacred as they come. My own Red Sox had a good streak going too, but it was snapped in 2004, and they've done rather well for themselves since. I'd be happy for Cubs fans if they win this year, but it would ruin the exquisite purity of their suffering. And they'd miss it. I know this. I still root for the Red Sox, but success has diluted my fervor, and now I don't care as much if they win, as long as the Yankees lose.

Neither one of us believes Murry is now in any position to celebrate a Cubs victory. We're rational people. That will not stop us from giving her credit for having some kind of influence if they win. And that is even though we never blame her when they don't. And even though we don't think she's anywhere inside the pot of ashes, we can't throw them away. Rational only gets you so far.

In 1989 Murry slipped out of the sphere too early, but with no struggle or fuss. She was found sitting up in her chair, the newspaper in her lap, her coffee cup by her side, and the Cubbies on the TV. That is either completely true, or we made some of it up. We don't know anymore. But sometimes you true a story the way you true a wheel, so that it rolls smooth. Murry loved us and her grandkids and coffee and the Chicago Cubs. We trued her life.

Go Cubbies.

The Physics Of Murr

So, I skinned my elbow up pretty good, there.

On the surface it's pretty easy to explain. I had a pitchfork and I was turning my compost pile, flip flip flip, which leans up against a block wall, and I uncovered a layer of some kind of little eggs--ant eggs? Fly eggs? I needed a closer look. But I had my bedroom slippers on and didn't want to put a foot in the actual compost pile. So I gauged the distance to the wall and decided to lean forward and put my hands on the wall, which would put my face directly over the eggs.

Unfortunately, the wall was further away than my body anticipated, and when my hands hit it, my arms sort of caved in and my elbows were on the wall (blood ensued) and I was (also) now at such an angle that I didn't think I'd be able to press out from the wall and get back upright, so I was stuck, unless I wanted to soil my slippers, which I didn't.

Anyone observing would have seen me flip, flip, flip, and then pitch forward onto the wall like dead timber. It wouldn't make any sense. That's because it doesn't make any sense.

This kind of shit happens to me all the time. I never was any good at physics. I know two laws of motion: "down" and "scabby."

This is why my friends once saw me charge flat-out into a small sapling. I thought it was bendy, and it would bow forward, and then fling me back. Wheee! It didn't. It didn't move. I just crumpled up into a wad at its base.

Or there was the time I folded up the legs of a card table. I'd gotten two of them snapped up, and then, to save time, instead of flipping the table 180 degrees to get the other two, I just leaned over it because I thought I was a whole five foot nine, which I'm not, and then an unscheduled somersault occurred, and the table fell one way, into a vase, and I went the other way, into a wall, and checked (first) for witnesses, and (then) for broken bones.

They were ant eggs, if you care.

All of which has led me to a new appreciation for humans,  a species with which I am often peeved. I don't know how to turn animals into meat. My tomatoes aren't reliable. I always have to look up how long to cook a potato. I'm not handy. I fall down a lot. I often forget how to swallow. I sometimes dream I can't breathe, because I'm face-down in my pillow not breathing, and the only reason I'm not dead is my head doesn't weigh much. I routinely make decisions with my physical self that are clearly, in retrospect, flawed. And yet I am alive. I am thriving. All my genes should have been edited out of the collective stash long ago, but here I am. And that is because other people pick me up when I fall down, and wipe me off, and invent penicillin, and slaughter vegetables, and arrange for clean water to show up at my very house, and (in some cases) are Mozart.

Thank you, people.