Questions and Answers

St. Petersburg Painting, originally uploaded by Lynn Park.

This morning I spent two hours figuring out how to send pictures directly from Flickr.com to dailybenigneye.blogspot.com, because I can't figure out how to pick up my most recent photos with the Browse function, something that would be a piece of cake for any self-respecting autodidact, who would of course have a systematic overview of the field under consideration.

No, I'm more like a terrier--nothing as massive as a pit bull--something smaller that can get down low, dig frantically through the underbrush and dirt, till I get a grip on what I'm looking for. Then again, it's nothing systematic, but more a worrying the problem to death, shaking it back and forth in my "jaws" the way a small terrier dog will till it wrests its prey to submission.

And it occurs to me that in many ways I am worrying something larger than the answer to a discrete technical question. Aging, fragile health, acceptance of solitude only interrupted, plaguing economies when it comes to means--these pose a question I have not yet answered in my heart and in my bones. A purely rational approach, lists of pros and cons, good reasons and bad, even stating the inevitable leave me unsatisfied and afraid of the inevitable and the difficult. And my mind jumps from "jaws" to this quotation from writer Annie Dillard: "I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you," which occurs in the context of an essay on weasels and the fierce purity of their tiny jaws that will not let go.

Sometimes obedience and purity are their own reward and the only near-certain answer.

Making Space

A month ago I woke up without my gall bladder. This morning I woke up to a significantly more serene apartment. As well as letting go of a seriously inflamed internal organ, I've let go of 15 bags of books, 7 large bags of yarn, 8 years of back issues of knitting magazines, 1 garbage bag from each of my 2 desks, 1 small table in the living room, and assorted trivia. I'm not done yet. I still have to go through clothes, costume jewelry, kitchen drawers, the catch-all area around the computer, 1 giant stack of old magazines, 1 filing cabinet, the bins where I store old photographs and collage supplies.

The apartment "looks" pretty good right now--and if I could keep my living space at this level of neatness, it would be an accomplishment. But I want to go below the surface, into drawers and minutiae, so knitting needles are all in one drawer and I'm not keeping any old batteries. I want the same feeling of pleasure when I open other drawers and cabinets that I get when I open my underwear drawer and take out a perfectly folded slip. I want blank note cards all in one place and a modicum of order to old family snapshots.

Years ago, when I lived in Washington, D.C., I read a book about an American woman's experience in Japan with Zen: Sun Buddhas, Moon Buddhas by Elsie Mitchell. Her teacher told her something along the lines of, "You Americans think you care about people and don't care about things. But not possible. Can't care about people until you care about things."

Even then despite my self-image as an aesthete and a bohemian living in a verdant clutter, I felt the call of spaciousness. Taking on my entire apartment felt like too much, so I tackled the bathroom. I made sure to fold each towel and washcloth, to align my bedroom slippers just so, to put the soap in the soap dish so the edges were even--things I would have before criticized as anal and railed against as taking too much time. But contrary to my expectation, just the opposite was true. I felt a sense of lightness whenever I entered that room and found myself taking an easeful pleasure in keeping it orderly.

I don't know what happened. The bathroom got messy again, along with everything else. I was young, and maybe it was too much to ask for a taste of spaciousness to "take," but I think I'm after something of the same thing now, though on a larger scale.

And it does not seem unrelated that the traditional associations for the gall bladder have to do with anger. Certainly I still get angry, but I don't think I'm making it up to say I feel less inflamed, more open inside to the calm I am trying to create around me.

Gall Bladder Tsunami

By the psyche's own arcane schedule of markers and indicia, "it"--this recent journey into the netherworld of death and rebirth occasioned by my successful gall bladder surgery--began two weeks ago today.

During the day my inner Imperious Queen, far more a tyrant than the Queen who so intimidated poor Alice, had been forced to accept, with mewling good manners and a semblance of calm, a situation that called for hysterics and upheaval on a continental scale. Later, in the night, in Dream Time, my inner Dutiful Daughter, a timid creature who makes much of keeping secrets from herself, took quite a charming step toward self-recognition and frightened herself into a panic of equilibrium-altering proportions. What can I do?, I then asked myself, feeling both beset by Queen and betrayed by Daughter. I can EAT! and proceeded to consume the grain foodstuffs of three small duchies and later the meat leftovers from several municipal feasts. Ah, sweet satiation, as I drifted off to sleep.

NOT, as I awoke to burning pain lodged somewhere in my right chest near the elbow. And NOT during two days of increasing discomfort, as breath becomes increasingly difficult and speech almost impossible. But the pain is on the right side; I can't be having a heart attack, can I? By Friday I am scared and call the Kaiser Advice Nurse. "We think you should come in. It could be a pulmonary embolism, and we can't rule out something with your heart even if the pain is on the right."

But I don't have transportation today; I can make it tomorrow. Then I begin to dilly-dally. Should I, shouldn't I? I mean, after all, how serious can it be? But what if I wait and something Really Bad happens? Maybe I can find someone to take me, but that's such a hassle. Then I call 911. "I'm having difficulty breathing."

Emergency medical technicians here in minutes. Ambulance. IV. Emergency Room. Tests, more tests. Foley catheter. Nothing by mouth "just in case." Hurry up and wait. Ten p.m. Inflamed gall bladder, surgery tomorrow. Ten p.m. Saturday night. Into surgery, finally.

I wake up in my room, can't find any bandages, wonder if they've done the surgery, go back to sleep.

The surgery went well. Five small bandages, easy for benumbed fingers to miss in the dark. Liquid diet for breakfast, normal diet after that. Sunday in the hospital, home Monday.

"Your gall bladder was so inflamed it disintegrated every time I touched it with my surgical implements. You would have died if we hadn't operated when we did." This, from the surgeon Friday when he removes the drainage tube.

I think about my Imperious Queen and my Dutiful Daughter, the day before the first attack. My therapist tells me that thoughts just happen, that dreams just happen, that I didn't "cause" the gall bladder attack, that it also just happened. I'm not so sure. I think about the reports of altered behavior of wild creatures before earthquakes and tsunamis, and cannot but wonder if the melodrama, imperial and diffident alike, that prompted my own inept response wasn't somehow a good thing. The Imperious Queen seems less fearsome than she did. The Dutiful Daughter's devotion seems a finer, stronger thing than I had thought. And I go forward into what will surely be the latter years of my life newly pregnant with possibilities I had not known before, possibilities that reach to join the inner and the outer worlds in a way that seems both to anchor me here and to call me home.

I Wanna Play Now

My church is setting up an online social networking group for members only modeled loosely along the lines of Facebook. There are application and approval procedures, and it's not yet clear how things are going to work. There's no reason it should be clear yet as the new site has been up less than two days. And I'm amazed at how much feeling this change is stirring up in me.

I applied yesterday, at which point the screen greeted me by name and informed me that administrative approval would take a day or two. Now them's fightin' words. I know intellectually that "administrative approval" is a gate-keeping function, the cyber equivalent of paperwork--and bells go off in my head are about inclusion and exclusion, and power that someone else has, and being on the outside wanting in.

This morning I go to the site, where I am again greeted by name but discover that I cannot make a blog entry, so I must not have been approved yet. I see that Joe Blow left a note for Jane Doe. "Interesting," I think, "I can at least keep up till I'm able to post." Not. Jane Doe's site is private because I don't have administrative approval. I know it's "yet," but it still stung and the kid in me thinks, "How come they get to play and I don't?"

Yesterday the emails had begun flying back and forth through our regular channels, the pros and cons of the new site and what risks the changes it entails might be. I felt myself get caught up in the not knowing and how it reverberated with less successful incidents in the past, incidents both personal and corporate, and started to fire off my own impassioned, editorially slanted plea for information.

Then I did something radical. I picked up the telephone and called someone who would know what was going on and found out directly what was involved--the history of the new site, why we were changing some long-standing approaches, the potential it offered for the life of our community. Everything made sense. I could and did sign on. I wanted to play, and I didn't want to wait.

And maybe I can have a little bit more bemused affection for the part of myself who so quickly feels left out, who is so certain that the "other kids" are going to get the good stuff first, and there'll never be a place for me.

Every Single Thing

every single thing is both:
ended and begun

possibility rises like a camel's hump:
which side will you ride?

all is lost:
begin again

all is begun:
this is the end

every single thing is both

Snowball, This One's for You

I've been trying to learn Nikon's Capture NX2 photo editing program, which I have installed on my computer on a 60-day trial, a week of which remains to be used. Before I shelled out the more than $140 to buy it, I wanted to have a sense of whether I'd be able to use it, whether it would be too much or two little for my needs.

At first I felt as if I'd been dropped into Advanced Potion-Making at Hogwarts with no preparation.

I either got no result or a result that wasn't what I was looking for. The online help was definitely inadequate, so I picked up a trade paperback and went through that, which helped. I know now that competence, the kind that can move without pondering first, is a matter of months, not of weeks, and that I'm liable to get discouraged during the process. But already I've been able to achieve effects that please me, and I will purchase the full package eventually.

I'm pondering the similarity between photo post-processing and active processing, as it were, of experience, a processing that goes beyond memory into an emotional, visceral, intellectual engagement with something that happened before. "Oh, I remember that." We've all said it--and the memory returns to the shelf unchanged. And we all have the themes and situations from our past to which we return over and over again, as if we have not yet gotten them into focus, as if we cannot yet see them clearly enough to lay them to rest with other accomplished recognitions.

So we hold these experiences this way and that, consider possibilities of blame and expiation, and cannot let them go, unsatisfactory as they are, till something shifts and we have a new way of seeing the situation whole, entire.

When I was a little girl, my most beloved dog ran into the wheels of a truck, he was so glad to see us. The truck driver was upset but there was nothing he could have done to prevent it. Obviously Snowball was injured. My mother carried him home, put him in his bed to see if he would get better. Three days later, when he hadn't, she took him to the vet, who said his hip was badly broken and put Snowball to sleep.

All these years I have held anger in my heart toward Mama, that she didn't take Snowball immediately to the doctor, that he had to suffer any moment longer than necessary. And I know that things were different 50-some-odd years ago in the South, that even loving people didn't necessarily take the same kind of care of their animals. But this didn't ease my heart, till a dear, trusted friend said, "Lynn, have you ever thought that perhaps she could not face giving him up?" I don't know. Tears still come to my eyes, but now they are more complicated tears and even the past has been somehow affected.

Today's picture was quite drab when I started to work on it. Somehow it seems this version says more about what was "really" there.

Blow Up the TV

I just left in my wake a small swath of discomfiture at a major American corporation that will remain nameless to protect the guilty. You see, after my final bill for cell phone service, said corporation said I still owed them $1.99. I thought about not paying it, but I did.

So today I receive an adjusted final bill that showed said corporation owing me a credit of $1.77. I call to request a refund and am told variously, by four different employees moving higher up the organizational chart, that $1.77 is not enough to warrant a refund, writing the check would cost the corporation more than it was worth, and they only issue refunds for $4.50 or more.

My blood boiled. I announced, quite clearly, that I was not angry with the person on the phone but the corporation. . . . Well, let's say that's a different matter and that my conversation was sprinkled with "petty larceny on a corporate scale" and "class-action lawsuits" and "who gave you the right to decide how much of my money you get to keep?" Each time I was told no, I said, "I want to speak to your supervisor."

Finally I got a young woman who as much as intimated she was breaking the rules by authorizing a refund for such a little amount, "but because you're so upset," she would do it. When I cash the check, I'm planning on sending back a note of thanks and saying that while I appreciate the corporation's belated sensitivity to my upset feelings, refunding the money because it wasn't theirs to keep in the first place would have been a much more satisfactory solution.