to hug a chest

Leaving mom's place 4 what's likely the last time I know somethings i-ll never see again ....whpere will they go? Best not to ask. A mahogany chest where daddy's starched white shirts lay in their laundry boxes. In a triangular tray for years he kept his wisdom teeth, the navy took them out and sent them home w the sailor who valued learning maybe wisdom & so couldn't let the ivory go

They're gone now...but where .


We end up anyway blown w the 4 corners of the earth.

I looked at the brass pulls where his hands had been ....wondering if his ashes lay in. Crevices deep within.
What will happen now to the chest he owned and used to dress his young self?
Sold given away
With a couple of my streak tears diem the front of it
no one will ever know

Daddy
Iii

Besotted

Sitting in mother's soon to be sold living room w Hector I cannot help but be amazed at all the lost world's of talent that there are .Never met a man so savvy ...sexy...suave ...cashmere sweater, shorts & crocs in the drafty, dusty room....this is at once the most sophisticated but kindly person. How kind he's been to my mother! Breaks my heart he didn't get a fairer deal in this life. But he did get to play his horn for the prez when he was a kid in USAF Band of the West. He did get to go up to the stars in a swing with me in OLDE Virginia as we listened to a pondfull of croaking frogs one summer night. There has been so much magic .

flying rapedly

Before leaving I carefully considered each item...minimal packing...few accutrements...so to speak. Mostly black, gray, going for elegant, comfy, refined. I wrapped my suede shoes (worn twice) in tissue paper , pearls in plastic baggy ,.stockings and camisoles carefully rolled. All I did was. to.avoid discord, for above all, I loathe contact with strangers. Even hugs from family & friends are not for me really .So.being violated by a government official came as a shock. Days later I still cringe .... feel the shame. This has changed how I feel about my country & its government. At 62, after years of faithfully voting, paying taxes, public service to the poor, determined to live a decent l ife, I felt.the hands of the state on my BODY.

groped

Retreating to my mother's house where she no longer lives ...cannot help but think how she'd have reacted to some stranger's hands on her privates! I also wonder my dignity was sacrificed on the altar of political correctness and how many burka s were lifted...how many Muslims were thus violated . Yes, ma'am, they pick the low hanging fruit guessing (wrongly) that a meek, mild mannered 62 y/o catholic school teacher would simply comply.But I am outraged at this profiling. I renounce the govt & political caste that imposed this abuse, no assault on me.

Hummer 4 Me?

Since the BP Disaster, I've begun to KNOW that the world as I knew it really is ending.

I'm sorta giving up. Yes, after 40 years of being as green as could be in the context of my world & times, I'm now calling it quits.

I feel like Chill Wills riding the Nuke in that old Kubrick movie, 1966. What was its name? I grow old, I grow old...shall I wear my trousers rolled (Eliot)Have CRS disease.

So my VW is giving me shit, along with everything else in my life. No AC, again. In So TX, that is a death sentence. The only way to survive a trip to the grocers is to drive real fast w all windows open or else its suffocation before dinner. SO HUMID!!!

+, One more yr of payments to go, & 155K miles.

Why not get a Hummer and become a Humman Being. Just say, f it.

I Can Eat Sausage!

I Can Eat Sausage

I look around and see no path. Nothing leading me where I want to go. What I’ve been thinking is that religion is a search for who or what is responsible for the deplorable state of the world and all its sorrows. Who or what takes all this beauty and brings it to rack and ruin? Who is making it so that many of us cannot draw an un-medicated breath? I am in a New York frame of mind, when it comes to what is called ‘the environment’. There is no environment, there is a world. I feel like being very direct with myself and with you.

For whatever reason, maybe it’s just all I know, I see such relevance in Christianity and other religions in the BP Gulf of Mexico crisis. I see parallels. I see suffocation, I see suffering, I see death, I see the Slaughter of the Innocents. I imagine what it is like to be a fish or a turtle or a bird, just minding my own business and then being washed over by the oil… and I die gasping. I see Everything that never had to be destroying everything that ever was.

I have come to see the useless destruction of a blameless victim. I look around and I say, “Who’s in charge here?”, and I realize that I am. And it is you, whoever you are. I say, looking at the dying bird, “Who smothered this wonderful creature?”, just as I said, as a child, who killed Christ and why, and what does that mean to me. Historically, when bad things happen to good things, we look around for someone to blame, a poor, miserable, confused scapegoat running pall mall through the storm of accusation and blame, this sort of thing can turn into a Holocaust. Unless I realize that I am responsible.

I look around and I say who, dear God, who is to blame? And I realize that I create and sustain a thing like a British Petroleum through my own stupid consumerism.

I know that since through my actions I uncorked the well that sends the black cloud through the sea, I know I am the only one who can put it back. I can use less of everything starting with my car and my dwelling. I have been in the throes of doing this and by God, this is really hard to do. Trust me. I have no where to set my ‘stuff’…it is suffocating me! I am hiding my shame under a giant pile of things I haddahave. What does the suffering and death of a bird say to me? It says, yes…


You can eat sausage.

Yes, sausage. I was raised to be a carnivore. But not a mindless carnivore. My father and other New Yorkers of my youth ate the whole thing…tongue to tail. They ate tongue sandwiches and sipped oxtail soup. Liverwurst was big. Bologna.Something called Taylor ham. They boiled every chicken carcass. My Dad made not-so-toothsome concoctions after the holidays---Big pots of grey soup. He had been hungry before, you see. He was implacably opposed to the wasteful ways of his children.

The making of a mindless carnivore took an advertising industry working with me, a complicit and lazy carnivore. I have always felt that I deserved a break today, not a beak today.

I do not have a thing about meat. But I think eating a pile o wings off of 16 probably tortured birds is a little buggered up. I can choose to be responsible for the whole thing that sacrifices (doubtlessly unwillingly) for my sustenance. I can eat the whole thing through my choices of foodstuffs. I can get real and eat sausage, for example. I can no longer conscionably pick and choose to consume only parts of what I have caused to be killed. Like a good Indian.

To me, suffering as I do over the Gulf Crisis Du Jour, and as I am sure you do, over the Gulf Spill, over having to have a Memorial Day for the Gulf of Mexico and the Turtles and Birds who gave their lives (we need an Eco Gettysburg Address to honor these noble dead) I must now make choices in every aspect of every day of my life. Nothing less can be expected of one to whom so much has been given.

Yes, I cringe over my own hypocrisy. I blush to toss away that bit of plastic that I should never have had in the first place. I cannot believe I am cooled as a corpse in a morgue twenty-four seven. I know that no make up covers the multitude of my vainglorious sins as expressed through my consumerism.

But I can become deeply conscious that how I treat this planet and its flora and fauna, is a spiritual, a deep soul issue. It is all about mindfulness.

So I cry on and do my best, and make myself see what I have done and am doing.

I remain a “Little Sister of the Wilderness”….

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