I just want to make things

My stress levels have been ratcheting upwards this week. Instead of sleep there's tossing, turning, and heart thumping. Maria Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill are living inside my TV and my brain. I try to write and there are 10 million ideas or no ideas. Either way the screen stays blank. I just want to make things. Why not make paper? Maybe I need more blank pages to sort out my thoughts.

At my internship, I made paper from old t-shirts.

I formed the sheets in the workshop and brought them home still damp.

They match my desk. I'm not sure what I'll do with them. Journal pages? Book covers? Collage?

Last night when I couldn't sleep I was googling portable paper beaters at midnight. 

And I googled Gordon Sondland's watch which let to some rich attorney flashbacks. Which lead to divorce flashbacks.

Both of these google forays were bad ideas. I don't need a portable paper beater (and I certainly don't need a $50,000 watch) because I have THIS PLACE blocks away and a paper making internship with a papermaker who is a genius. (Cave Paper will be part of an exhibition in 2022 at the MET in NYC called Paper Legacy.) 

I feel like an idiot on many days and yet life leads me to amazing people.

Little Victories

I had it all figured out at the beginning of the week. After the four ER visits in one month with my mom, it was clear that I needed to change everything.

I ordered the fall detector button. My mother and I went adult day care shopping. "The second one is the best one," she said enthusiastically, her smile for the camera smile frozen onto her face. I told various people, including the social worker at the day care place that I needed someone to come into my house a few mornings a week as well. Following what seemed to be other prudent advice, I bought keyed doorknobs for my bedroom and the daughters bedrooms--what with "strangers" coming and going--and made arrangements to have them installed. The schedule for the day care place was worked out including the pick-up and drop-off. My world cracked opened so wide I almost felt agoraphobic. What would I do until 2:30 on Tuesdays and Fridays? Would the placid silence inspire me to write? Would I be able to read without getting up to see if the moaning or swearing or banging around was something more than crying wolf? Would I go out to lunch with a friend? Take off early for a weekend away if M could come by on Friday afternoon? I could do anything I wanted for six straight hours, knowing that someone else was responsible for my mom.

Friday evening she told me she wasn't going to get on a bus so early (9:00 a.m.) in the morning. She simply was not going to do it. The therapy chairs, the hot packs, the massage for arthritis pain, live entertainment, other ladies to crochet with, physical therapy, dancing--none of it could change her mind. "Well, great," I said, Now, I'm a prisoner."
"Then have someone come in to babysit me," she said, obviously not happy about that either.

Meanwhile the man who loves me and I were squabbling. "But you said..."
"That's not what I meant...."
"You absolutely said that."

In a completely black mood all day yesterday after the glow of yoga quickly dissipated, I raged and mulled unable to do much of anything except walk around and around my neighborhood. I woke every hour last night asking myself what sort of a person picked fights with old ladies and guys with lung cancer doped up on pain killers.

Today I decided I would read in my room with the door closed and some non-distracting background music to muffle whatever was going on downstairs. An easy book. Something engaging. So I picked up an Elmore Leonard novel and napped every ten pages or so feeling like perhaps I should be the one going to adult day care, and asking someone to accompany me on my doctor's appointments. At 4 p.m. I woke in time for a sunset walk.

I didn't jump in the marina or stop a boat and ask to get on. I didn't go to a bar and drink ten margaritas.

Les Plesko 1954-2013

It sinks in slowly-- this thing called death. And it's different somehow, losing a writer who's left behind his books. All those words. His notes on pages of my own writing. Lists of of books to read. His own little booklet of rules and instructions that he handed out in his classes.

The memorial was a writerly comfort. Readings of tributes. Readings of Les's own work. Pictures, stories.

Death frequently carries a suitcase stuffed with regrets. I truly wished that I, with all the money I had to spare in those days, had offered to foot the bill for fixing his teeth. He was beset by health problems--especially this past year, people said. And there were people who did come to his aid.

He was tortured by insomnia, others said. Last night was the first I slept without waking several times in the night since I heard of his death. That waking a small connection to be grateful for. A space to lie in the dark and stretch out a hand.

I am thrilled to have known him.