Ducks on the Run

The jailer man and sailor sam are still looking for the band on the run, but I'm more interested in the ducks that cut a swath outside my back door a few days ago. I don't know what got into them--whether it was fear of a hot wok or the rumor of good birdseed down the block--but those avians were covering some territory. They were young ones, too, hadn't mastered flying yet, were still at the bobbing up and down in the water, rump up phase. But they moved fast on land. I hope they found what they were looking for, those ducks on the run.

Disappointment

Disappointment matures when anger and sadness come to sit side by side, in silence, instead of each scampering off to make its case heard and maybe even won. What disappointment knows is that there is no winning, no forced fading of the bruise, no taking back of the wince.

Sadness and anger typically take turns on a seesaw, sadness focusing on the loss to the self, anger concentrating its attack on the guilty other, both getting out of breath and sweaty, even tearful if too tired. Disappointment can empathize, casts no stones, sometimes even would prefer to indulge itself like them, but latterly prefers the calm of taking in the situation as a whole, melancholy and tart, to one-sided and premature venting.

Not long ago someone disappointed me. This is a person to whom I have given my trust and of whom I asked a small consideration, a consideration that I found was the next day denied. There was no practical negative consequence, though I thought that there could have been, which was the reason for my asking.

I think of William Blake, who wrote, "I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow." I will tell my friend my disappointment. In the necessary meantime I seem to learn a certain silence.

Some days later. . . I broke that silence when I talked to my friend. "My wrath did end," and our bond continues, strengthened.

Freshlets

One of my dearest friends had exploratory surgery yesterday. She's been told she'll be three days in the hospital and will likely have a painful, weeklong recouperation. I know it will be a while before she checks her email, but I still sent this picture to her this morning, with the wish that this freshlet of beauty, like the drops of water that speak to where we are parched, bring her ease and comfort.

And I got to thinking: freshlets. Little moments that catch the eye and heart, that may stop us and even turn us around.

Today, for me, it was going at 6:30 in the morning to the Coke machine at the pool of my apartment complex to get my daily kick-start of Diet Coke. The light was still new and the air was just cool enough to announce its presence. I hadn't even begun to indulge my habitual nattering that I shouldn't have so much caffeine, that I shouldn't spend the money on expensive individual cans, that I shouldn't. . . .

And there they were, these purple flowers whose name I do not know still clothed with remnants of the day's watering. I stopped and looked. "I have to get my camera." In the few minutes I was gone the light did not change, the droplets did not dry up. And I came back to see more clearly, to play with light and air and color and form, and dials and settings and exposures.

The bejewelled flowers were a freshlet, as was the interlude, as is something it stirred in me.

Cracked Egg

Fragile egg, cracked but not broken open. Hard concrete. Green grass that might have been a cushion but wasn’t. I select the picture, a recent one, not sure where it will take me, and list what I see. Then I know this piece is about my sprained knee—approximately 7:45 p.m. on Monday, April 19. Never let it be said that it didn’t make an impression on me.

My left big toe got stuck as I was transferring back into my power wheelchair. The chair and I—everything but my foot—were moving away from where I had been sitting. In those few seconds before the brain could interpret the knee’s pain as a direct order to remove my hand from the chair’s joy stick, my foot was pulled to the right side at about a 30 degree angle. And it hurt. It hurt bad, and all I could think was “gravel,” imagining as I did that the bones in my kneecap were being pulverized. (I fracture easily.)

911 call, ambulance and emergency personnel, hospital emergency room all night, where I find out that knees are governed by ligaments, which I’ve pulled badly, and that nothing is broken. “It hurts as much as a fracture at first but gets better faster.” I turn down the ER doctor’s offer to put me in a splint, saying I’ll wait for the orthopedic technicians in the morning, who put me in a lightweight full-leg half cast with secure bandages. Picky, me? Damned straight.

And almost two weeks in a rehab hospital, learning to transfer myself with a leg that at first spasms every time I move it, a leg that is clunky and awkward though finally almost pain-free. And that is the easy part.

Then I go home, where I cannot transfer myself onto the toilet with my stiff leg and so must use a slide board to get into and out of bed every single time I have to “use the bathroom” on a bedpan. It is tiring and it is awkward and I basically have to take care of it by myself. My home health aide was required to quit when I went in the hospital because she can’t be paid when I’m not in residence. (It took more than a month to hire a new worker.)

And I was lonely. After the rich “people broth” of the nursing home, having only minimal contact with people made the situation even more difficult. And it was hard, hard as concrete I might have said if asked. But I was only cracked, not broken open, and unlike Humpty Dumpty I was graced to be put together again. Though it felt so far out of reach at the time, I regain a sense of that vibrant green cushion.

Two Tables

Happy Valentines Day!!

Happy Valentines Day!!, originally uploaded by Darwin Bell on Flickr.com.

I've been wondering what I'd write about, what would pull me out of my literary torpor--and this image by my Flickr friend Darwin Bell did it.

I am a fan of hearts, both emotional and physical, and in fact try to live guided by the clarity of "the diamond in the eye of the heart." To remind myself I wear a white gold ring with a diamond in the center on my "wedding finger"--third finger left hand--even though I have only married my own heart.

My heart has been tender lately, a little on the achey side. If I were plotting the story of my life, I'd be pondering the open book that is the last major section. At 65 I need to learn to lay skillful offerings at the altar of Janus, as I look back at a past that delivered disappointments on the order of the proverbial elephant that demands to be eaten and as I stay open to a future that can still offer solid satisfactions and surely some pleasant surprises.

Staying in more than usual because of the rainy weather hasn't helped my heart. When I stay in too long, I get over-frugal with my own energy and don't venture out to the new places that excite my eye. I don't meet the strangers I so enjoy, and too often I pull back from deepening with the people already in my life. "They're too busy," I say. "I had him to dinner once; I don't know if he'd want to come back." Or I don't issue the invitation to the new acquaintance whose friendliness is already giving me so much pleasure. "Better leave well enough alone," I mutter to myself.

But Darwin's tincture of pink may be just the restorative I need right now. Accessible, imperfect, actual, off-center, it invites one in, says, "Come closer, you don't have to be afraid of me."

Things Are Looking Up