Breaking up with Mr. Zio

Mr. Zio is my heart monitor. We've been close these past two weeks, investigating all of the pings and rattles. Anxiety? Not anxiety? Who knows these days, right? But tomorrow, I peel him off my chest and send him packing in a box. Such wonders modern medicine provides! I'm a little fuzzy about what happens after that, but I'm sure there'll be some sort of report. How are you, dear reader? What's pinging and rattling in your life? I'm obsessed with making collages. No art background. Just pandemic online heart-saving classes. I'm mystified by the glues and finishes. I like my finished work to be smooth. I don't want wrinkles. I don't want shine. But I put together these masterpieces with all kinds of snippets, and some papers like one type of glue with other papers like another.

These two collages seem to me to be about luck. Luck feels like such a mover and a shaker to me these days. I'm planning a party--a missed major milestones party. I've ordered food and cakes (one cake for each of the four big occassions we've missed.) My son and his family are traveling from Phoenix. Hey, Southwest Airlines, I'm imploring you NOT to cancel that flight. Because 38 tacos. Because four cakes. Because I have not seen them for more than two years. I'm just so shocked every time I think or say that. More than two years. For god sake, dear pilots, I've already put the extra boards in the table.

Dear everyone, wishing you luck with your endeavors.

Sunday Afternoon Beach Report

The sand was a tangle of things this afternoon.

The ocean churned up, the breakers murky with sand, or algae, or crud washed in from the rains.

Looking back toward the dunes, clouds towered like mountains.

 A group of adolescent boys jousted with bamboo. The frightening whack and thwack of the branches was undone by their shrieks--voices still undistinguishable from the voices of little girls.

Beach goers found other uses for the bamboo too.

Some of us were content to sit and wonder at all of it.

Sometimes I wonder how things might have turned out if I'd raised my children here.

How to Store Your Photos or The Incredible Lightness of Being Divorced

Our holiday dinner table one of the last years of marriage.
Things weren't nearly as perfect as they look here--but it's a very pretty photo.

I was thrown out of my life in 2007. He wanted the house, he said, so he could raise his new family there. So I left, blubbering something about how I was taking the photo albums. The picture below doesn't quite do the situation justice. I think I moved 41 albums to my new place. And when I moved again a couple of years later, I packed up those albums again.

When the second round of devatating fires here in Southern California coincided with the realization that I can no longer afford my current house due to a reduction in my alimony, I knew it was time to crack open the covers on the record of my seemingly perfect life. We don't take pictures of the terrible times, do we?-- the creeping doubt and desperation--and I suppose if we did, I'd have happily left those photo albums behind. Though I wasn't evacuated during the fires, I could see the flames from my windows. If I'd had to leave, would I have had time to pack up a hundred pounds of albums? Probably not.

the old albums (the salvageable ones) now empty

the new photo boxes with an album on top for size comparison

Marie Kondo says she prefers to store her photos in albums, but I'll bet she doesn't have 40 of them. Or 20. Or even 10. Why do we Americans have so much of everything? I think photo albums are cumbersome for sharing in a group. Everyone has to huddle around, crane their necks, and hope the photos don't slip out of the pages if you're passing the album from person to person. These books weigh a ton when filled with photos so you need two hands and have to put down your drink. It seems easier to me to just grab a stack of pictures and pass them.

These boxes hold over a thousand photos each and have index cards where you can write the year, the subject, the place, and even make special notes or comments. The company doesn't provide nearly enough cards, but I just made copies on card stock. I made two boxes for myself, incorporating my mom's old photos as well. And I made two boxes for each of my daughters, which I will hand deliver to them when I move to Minnesota in a few months. Meanwhile if a wall of flames races from the hills to the ocean, I can get these into the Prius in two trips.

Aren't you wondering what I did with the photos of The Someone and of us a couple? I put the nicest specimens in the daughters' boxes. And all the photos of his lovely family were put into a Christmas box and mailed to his office last month. His likeness does not make an appearance in my photo boxes, but he did take a lot of the pictures. I'm grateful for that. And I'm grateful for the experience of looking at the photos--of seeing those new babies, birthday parties, proms, graduations, family vacations, and friends with their heads thrown back in laughter. I think when we take pictures, or put them in a book or a box, we are recording love.

Feeding Birds

2012, Mom's birthday 

I began feeding the birds for my mother. Housebound by the frailties of age and the attitude that going out was too much trouble, she needed a connection to the outside world, I thought.

My earliest memory is of my mother and her mother wielding garden hoes in an attempt to fend off a snake attacking a nest of baby birds. I'd awakened from a nap and stretched myself taller than the windowsill to watch the drama unfold outside her bedroom. "Get him, Ethel!" my grandmother shrieked at her namesake. "You get him, Ethel," my mom yelled back, addressing her mother by her given name instead of calling her mom. The two Ethels wacked away, and as I recall, emerged victorious although the senior Ethel's askew babushka made her look something like a pirate. My mom probably lit herself a cigarette right there in the bushes while coo-ing over the baby birds before they went on to whatever task they'd meant to do in the first place.

my babushka-wearing, gun-toting grandma (the gun and the old car was staged by one of my uncles)

We lived on the backwater of the Mississippi then in a town known for its lax liquor laws and an easier attitude toward certain recreational pursuits that were frowned upon on in its sister city on the other side of the river. I was too young to know about any of that, but I knew about the birds. Cranes soared over the water and we raced out the back door to watch them, and if flocks of geese were winging and quacking overhead, we tilted our faces skyward until they were out of sight. Cardinals and red-headed wood peckers provided breathtaking displays of scarlet against the dark bark of a big tree where my father had nailed a wooden fruit crate. It was my mother and I who kept it stocked with seeds and nuts and bread crusts.

Indoors we kept a green parakeet named Jerry. "Jerry is a dirty bird" was his only attempt at conversation. Or maybe his line was, "Jerry is a pretty bird," and it was my mother who tried to pressure a confession from him while she cleaned up his messes after a free-flying afternoon. I wonder now about our kitchen hygiene since it was there he was allowed out of his cage, an old bedsheet tacked up in the doorway to the living room to keep him from pooping on the upholstered furniture. But nobody died--except Jerry of course, eventually.

Jerry didn't make it to the next house which was on the more sedate side of the river--a good thing, probably, since we became cat fanciers and often had a half-dozen kittens and cats prowling around. My brother and I found a baby owl on a sidewalk there. My mother couldn't locate the nest it might have fallen from, so she put it in a box padded with an old towel on our back porch. I'm sure she took some measure or another to nurse it back to health, but in the morning, it was dead.

Years later when they were both widows my mother and her twin sister had an apartment with a patio and fed all kinds of birds--including a large vulture that was attracted to a suet cake meant for a pileated woodpecker. I'd had some experience feeding birds by then, but I specialized in finches that I fed from a feeder suction-cupped to my breakfast nook window where my young daughters could enjoy them. Decades later, when my mom moved in with me in a different house, I bought a similar feeder and stuck it to our kitchen window. We remarked on the birds nearly every day. Some red house finches, some orange. We welcomed the sparrows too--the white crowned sparrow, the diva of an underrated species with its flashy striped head, and the house sparrow so dapper in its dark cravat.

One of my daughters lived with us part-time then while going to grad school. She might have been the one to notice the blind finch being fed by a bird with two good eyes. Over the next few days there were more and more blind finches. "Poor things," my mother said. "How do they fly?" Fearing that I'd unwittingly committed this horror of an avian Equus, I examined the feeder and the potted tree next to it for sharp edges only to find nothing. It was the internet that educated me about bird conjunctivitis and proper feeder hygiene. Jerry the parakeet could poop in the kitchen sink with no apparent ill effects on us humans, but I had to wash the bird feeder with soap and a drop of bleach in hot water every week.

My mother and I both took to the new regimen. She could clean anything with the same fervor she employed to dispatch a marauding snake, and over time no new blind finches appeared. Occasionally we spotted a different bird--a towhee, or a warbler, and once we glimpsed a bird such a bright yellow, it might have been an escaped pet canary. The first ring-necked dove appeared some weeks or months after my boyfriend Dan died. It was one of those moments when you think your deceased beloved has re-appeared or at least delivered to you a sign that you should not despair. The bird watched us with its big dark eyes. Friends were here for dinner, as I recall. "Look who wants to come inside," someone said.

Sometime later the dove began bringing a mate, and I'd take a handful of food and lay it atop the wall between my house and the neighbor's since these birds seemed too big for the feeder. If I was upstairs and missed their arrival my mother would call, "Your doves are here!" as if dinner guests had just rung the doorbell. The doves would probably still be enjoying my handouts even though my mom is no longer here to announce them, but a squirrel began terrorizing the bird feeder just after the 2017 presidential inauguration. It was a tumble-down of decline then, as we well know. First one squirrel, then another, and the squirrels could not be dissuaded so I removed the feeder before I went away to a month-long writer's residency. When I returned my flowers were infested with some kind of a worm despite the best efforts of the friend caring for them. Since we all know that the early bird gets the worm, I put the bird feeder up again. The doves, the sparrows, and the finches  came back--but so did a hoard of pigeons, making Jerry's efforts to defile the kitchen look like child's play. While it's true the pigeon poop was outside, on some surfaces it took a putty knife and boiling water to remove it, and the pigeons' constant coital-sounding cooing had me wondering if the neighbors should maybe soundproof their house until I realized this birds and bees thing was really just birds.

Like the squirrels, the pigeons wouldn't be dissuaded either, so with strips of that rubbery stuff that you can use as shelf lining or rug padding and some packing tape, I constructed a barrier around the my bird feeder that allowed only the smaller birds inside. When it came time to wash the feeder, I had to un-tape all the strips, wash them as well, and start over. A few weeks of that led to a splurge on a feeder with a cage around it. The new feeder, though I called it bird jail at first, is working well. The pigeons are feeding at my neighbor's unsecured feeder on the other side of the house and pooping over there. But I feel terrible  about the doves. They can't get into the new feeder either. They still arrive every couple of days, fluttering around the bird jail, confused. I look into their deep black eyes staring into my house full of worldly comforts and think of Dan and my mom and how we all were here just a little more than four years ago. Four years is a long time.

Christmas, 2012

I want to say something political here. About the elapsing of time until the next presidential election. And something about jail. Who belongs inside and who should be let out, but maybe it's best not to stretch the metaphor. I'll just quote my dad when he began to worry during my teenage years. "Birds of a feather flock together," he told me.

bird jail

Eyes of Fire

It's that time of year when the windows in the condo building across the way reflect the rising sun. At first glance the place looks like it's engulfed in flames, the windows like giant eyes of fire.

In Oaxaca it's two hours later, and the sun stays up til six in the evening there. The skies are nearly cloudless all through the daylight hours, and the chill in the morning air is crisp, not damp. I love being home, but my body feels soggy and tired.

I dreamed of my mother last night. She was younger--maybe the age I am now or even in her 50s. We were all gathering somewhere for a family get-together. At my brother's house, maybe, or my son's. There were plans to sightsee and go to a concert. Picking up the tickets was confusing and my car had somehow downloaded the software to be a self-driving car. It was disconcerting, sitting in the back seat while the car inched its way through city traffic without a driver. I climbed into the front seat anyway--no easy feat to make it from the back seat of a Prius into the driver's seat, but I did it, twisting my body this way and that, and then realized it really wasn't necessary.

Wherever it was that we were, the house was full of us, arriving and deciding who would sleep where, and then changing our minds. My mom decided to drive herself back to her apartment a day early. She grabbed my older daughter in a hug and told her she lived too far away. I don't know when I'll see you again, she said.

I woke too early this morning, waiting for the first sliver of daylight before I flung off the covers. I walked toward the building that was glowing, and on the grass found a playing card. Two of clubs. What is the significance of the two of clubs? I googled. It's the card of conversation. The two of clubs person is gregarious and entertaining. It's the card of communication.

One Decade of Divorce

Monument Valley, 2007

On July 30, 2007 at 7:37 p.m., I sent out this email to my closest friends:

Dear Friends,

I hope you'll forgive the mass email approach here and bear with me.  I
learned yesterday that xxxxx is in love with someone else and plans to
remarry and start a new family.
I wish I could tell you all in person one-to-one over a good stiff drink,
but I'm afraid I'm not up to that at the moment.
What I need mostly is advice, and for those of you who are local a couple
of contacts.
1) therapist for me-not too far west
2) a divorce attorney
I know news like this can shake things up a bit for everyone, especially
old friends.
Thanks for listening.

Wish all of us luck.
I don't think I'll be able to talk on the phone in case you were thinking
of calling.


But just to be clear, my decade of divorce is not counted from the date of the decree of divorce. That happened a year later. And the division of joint assets was not in place until July 11, 2011. So there will be more anniversaries to "celebrate," but to me it's the end of the marriage that is most significant. The end of that 30-year relationship was, for me, a loss of identity and the loss of a family that I loved. This decade since the end of the marriage, I've constructed a new me--a person related to the person I was then, but also quite a bit different. I don't miss the old me. But, if I'm honest, I still miss the family. That us. That unit. I don't idealize it. It was awful some of the time, (as most families are?) but there's something lost that's irreplaceable. It's gone. Permanently.

"Really, do you want that?" I once said to a friend who was playing around with the idea of an affair. "You may never have Thanksgiving dinner with your family again." That and a million other things large and small will happen.


What I regret most is the small hurts that accumulated over the years of my marriage and not really having the skill and the strength to mend them.

I do not want to be a gatherer of small hurts.

I do not want to be a deliverer of small hurts. 

The beginning of this last decade was almost insurmountably difficult. I remember every kind thing, dear family and friends. Cups of tea, glasses of wine, home-cooked meals, your hospitality, your love, your words, your open ears, your waiting arms. I slept in so many comfy beds under so many roofs. You walked with me, drove with me for thousands of miles, held my hand on airplanes, sat with me in hotel lobbies and in parked cars, and sang to me. You told me things would be okay, and somehow, somehow you made me laugh. I have lived my life this past decade because of your help. My life has been a litany of love.

Thank you.

Spring

Poppies at Arroyo Verde Park in Ventura

My adult children and my grandchildren spent much of last week at my house. We climbed a hill to see these poppies. We went whale watching and saw at least 30 gray whales and several hundred dolphins. It is a glorious thing to survey the ocean around you and see dolphins in every direction. We kayaked; we walked on the beach and hunted sea glass, shells, and interesting rocks. We visited the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum and Planetarium. We ate out at a restaurant on the sand, had high tea on my patio on the newly refurbished teak furniture, and ate delicious food at my table. I can't think of a better lead-up to the first day of spring--all the love, conversation, and the sheer bounty of this life.

I know that spring can feel like a false promise, a let-down, a so-this-is-all-there-is, but not for me this year. Of course, perfection always eludes, but at this stage of the game I'm calling even that perfect enough.

Three of the tag-team kayakers. The other two were picked up by their mom and taken home for hot showers.

Even this bear looks happy.

Photos of sand castles in progress, in ruins, or perfect always make me happy

Happy Spring!

One Year Later

It was a year ago today that my mother left this world. I feel her presence inside of me--what she might say or do, how much she enjoyed her life on Earth, how much she loved it when family or friends came to visit us.

Family will be arriving tomorrow for a spring break visit; after that old friends will come from afar for  a visit in April, and after that, another friend. Life keeps delivering its pleasures and I am grateful for every joy, large or small.

I want to thank all of you who left your messages of condolence on my blog, or on Facebook, or by mail or phone a year ago. It meant a lot. We are all on this winding road together, and yet it can be easy to forget that. Thank you for reminding me.

The Party Isn't Over

My parents, 1950-something

I have not blogged in nearly 2 weeks--a personal low, I'm sure--offset perhaps by the 3 or 4 posts per day back in the era of post-divorce wreckage.  Those posts were medicinal, and the recent absence was too.

It doesn't feel appropriate to  blog about family get-togethers or vacations with our recluse vs extrovert family dynamic. Suffice it to say that I went somewhere, ate delicious things, and saw weird and interesting stuff.

Not Holland. Not Denmark. Not Santorini. Solvang.

Solvang is foodie paradise. I could go on, but it would take forever to describe the delicious things we ate. This is a hollow ball of chocolate filled with poached pear on peanut butter fluff. I forget what the little balls mixed with the pear are. They were fantastic, whatever they were. 

We went to an ostrich farm. Some of us wanted to eat ostrich. Some of us didn't. Some of us fed the ostriches. Some coveted ostrich feathers, one person got an ostrich souvenir t-shirt, and probably at least one person imagined herself to be an ostrich, running through the countryside, plumes bobbing.

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This Earthly Life

I went to a party last night--a birthday party for the 87-year-old father of a dear friend. We gathered on a patio in the setting sun with frogs croaking in a creek down the hill. Next door in a grassy pasture, a deer grazed, its back to us, oblivious of the humans devouring cheese and conversation.

It was a small group--a dozen people, some of whom I've know since I moved to California in the 70s. Some I'm getting to know better and better each occasion I spend time with them. Others I'd met at a party or a dinner here or there over the years, and there was a couple I don't recall ever meeting before. It was one of those evenings where the light cast all of us in a glow and each morsel of cheese, each piece of fruit, each swallow of wine seemed more perfect than the last.

I frequently feel awkward in social gatherings. I sometimes drink too much or refuse to make eye contact or conversation with anyone who is not a trusted friend. I can't remember names and write off anyone I'm meeting for the first time while monopolizing the people I already know, following them around like a insecure rescue dog.

I don't know why exactly, but last night felt different. As if we were all there for a reason, intertwined whether we really knew each other or not, as if the ghosts of beloved departed ones were whispering in our ears, telling us how lucky we were to be at this earthly gathering in the company of one another's warm bodies, enjoying the creatures and fruits of this earthly life.

Report from Pillville: the last report

Ethel Catherine MacDonald 9-18-1924 to 3-13-2016

My mom left this world in the wee hours of this morning. I was in Iowa at her side. In the days since her decline a few days ago, her room was full of family and friends. We visited and told stories, and even though she couldn't join the conversation, we think she was listening. 

I was alone with her as her breathing slowed just after 1 a.m.. "You've had a good long life," I said. "Lots and lots of people love you." Her breathing became so shallow it was barely noticeable, then she left us.

Wednesday Morning Beach Report

Back to blue. The wind has settled.
You could make bigger waves in your bathtub.
All day I thought what a perfect day to be out on a boat.
Still no response to my application to be a volunteer docent for the Channel Islands National Park.

Once upon a time I had a husband and young children.
We took a vacation to Cornwall and there was a church buried in the sand.
In this time before my beach life, I wondered how this could happen. Who/What/How would a church become buried in the sand?
This is not a church. It's a bathroom.
I understand now.
How the wind moves the sand and we get tired of putting it back.

The tide was out when I walked on the beach today. I could walk/swim a little to the breakwater, I thought. I love my impulsive urges and I'm glad that I act on fewer of them.

When I got home, the marina looked like a bathtub that someone had pulled the plug on. How deep is it, I wondered. What if someday, I looked out my window and saw the boats sitting on the ground?

I still pick up heart-shaped rocks and beach glass. The hearts are so numerous now they are stacked two and three deep. There is a tower of hearts in the center. . And today I found an orange piece of beach glass. Not amber. Orange. Orange is my favorite color.

Beach glass. Heart rocks. I find them lying at my feet. How lucky is that?

Happy New Year! Tiny Sandwiches, Table Tennis, and the Beach

What did I do last New Year's Eve? I asked. I had no idea. Did I drink champagne? Martini's with my mom? Watch the ball fall in New York on TV and then go to bed at 9? Did I kiss anyone at midnight?

Answering questions like that is easy when you're a blogaholic. I read ALL ABOUT IT  this morning. Things didn't get any better in January. I considered getting back on anti-depressants. I talked to my doctor about it--though I didn't follow through. I suspect things weren't much better in February either.

I have been showered with good luck and blessings and love as 2015 has drawn to a close. (It would have been swell not to have fallen off a ladder the night before Christmas Eve, but even that has gone well. My ribs are healing. After three days of misery, every day is a little easier.)

I hope I remember this New Year's eve forever because it's been fabulous.

Sand castle time.

Sophia tries sushi before high tea.

More beautiful grandchildren and the fancy New Year's Eve day high tea.

Girl filled with light.

Son vs Son-in-law ping pong.

I'll say it again. I hope I remember this New Year's eve forever because it's been fabulous.

And family back in Iowa tells me that my mom is doing well. I'm thrilled. With her fall Thanksgiving night in 2014 and the pain that followed, 2014 didn't end well for her either. Here's to 2015's final hours. I hope you have someone to kiss when the clock strikes midnight and that 2016 is kind to you.

This Rocky Place: They Have Fire Pits Here

I've driven up the coast  a bit from my piece of paradise to this rocky place--a paradise all its own. Colder. Wilder. The motel I'm staying at with my friend Linda has fire pits. It sounds fabulous, but it's cold. For this morning's trip to Hearst Castle I wore two pairs of pants, a tank top, a long sleeve t-shirt, a turtleneck, a down vest, a wool coat, and two scarves.

Last week I was in Arizona with my son and his family. It was cold and rainy there for the most part and my attire was pretty much the same--minus one pair of pants. I am fixated on the weather. Or perhaps more accurately the climate/climate change and our California drought. The drive north to the central coast is spectacular. The ocean stretching out next to the 101 and then the curve inland where, normally, the hills and their soft curves would bring to mind the tawny coats of giant sleeping lions. This trip there was a pallor beneath the tawny hills. Lions undergoing chemo. What green there is in the shrubbery has a black undertone. The uber-elegant Hearst Castle has no running water; the parking lot is clustered with port-a-potties. How long before all of our southern California indoor plumbing takes a crap and port-a-potties are perched on our patios and porches,while hand sanitizer is preferred instead of soap and running water? Maybe El Nino will save us.

In the meantime, art is alive and well. This ancient Greek torso at Hearst Castle has survived centuries.

The elephant seals are still here.

And the sunset is no less remarkable.