Statement of Principles

The thing that sometimes troubles me about sometimes typing some of the things that I sometimes type on this blog, is that I sometimes worry that some people will think: "So what makes your feelings so special?! So what's so unusual about you?!"

Because that's not why I type it. I type it because I think a lot of people must feel this way, because I can't possibly be alone, and maybe by typing it I can do some good for myself, and maybe sometimes someone else will see it and think, "That's just how I feel."

So -- if I have a mission for this blog, it's to reassure me that I am not alone, and to reassure others that they are not alone.

I've just been watching a heckova lot of British television tonight, and so the Asperger's part of me that wants to mimic everything I see wants to refer to my father as "me da'".

Anyway.

Me da' wrote back to me tonight, based on two previous posts: "I worry that you are still so far from healed"


Yah, so do I. But that just puts me in the same boat as millions of other people. 


I've heard it said, here or there, "We're put here to suffer." 


There's a lot to think about in those five words, especially when, dating back to Biblical times, there's always a class of people who emphatically are Not Suffering while the rest of us writhe.


Answers? I don't have any.


Apropos to nothing, last night I spent nearly $90 on 100 daffodil bulbs. I will make good use of them. In the garden? No! They will go all over my lawn. I will have daffodils next spring. Can't afford it, but, damn it, it's a Quality of Life issue.


Tamam Shud!


-- Freder.

The End is Nigh!

Ah, so tomorrow there is to be Rapture.

I didn't learn about any of this until just this afternoon. Yeh, it's true -- The Rapture is coming tomorrow and millions of Christian Bible Thumpers are going to be taken to Heaven, leaving the rest of us down here in an Apocalyptic setting to duke it out with the Devil and his Minions.

Who decided this?

I did a little (and I mean a little) research and discovered that it was decided by some evangelical cracker who plans on watching the whole thing tomorrow as entertainment on the telly.

Well, you know, if he's right, then I'm fine with that. In the year just past, the year that began for me on 14 May, my world has come to an end at least three times. There was losing Mom, then having the auctioneers come into my house over a period of three days and freakin' rape the place, then having it sold out from underneath me just when I was restoring some order.

So, you know, for me this would be just One More Thing.

In fact -- it would be good, because it would mean that I wouldn't have to make any more decisions about work, about the car, about the plumbing problem in my basement that I made worse by trying to fix it myself, about ANY damn thing. All I'd have to do is duke it out with Demons, and Baby, that is something I feel that I would excel at.

My message to God and the Devil at the End of the World would be, you guys have been feeding me shit for so long, and you expect me to go quietly into that not-so good night? You got a little bit of a surprise on your hands, you Cosmic Bullies! I've been bullied by the best of 'em, and you clowns have created a Right Angry Dude! Bring it on!

Unfortunately, the world is not going to come to an end tomorrow, and I'm going to have to focus and make some decisions sooner or later. I'm going to have to come to grips with the future and try to make a new life.

One of the posts that I haven't written, because I've been avoiding it, is titled "Gifts my Mother Keeps on Giving Me."

One of those gifts was a sign that she painted to hang outside our home at Turkey Hill Farm in Cape Elizabeth, all those years ago.

It was hung outdoors for a long time and is badly worn. It hangs inside my back entry hall now. It reads "D. Thornsjo" under a picture of a Phoenix being reborn. Of course the D. Thornsjo that she painted it for was my father, and she could never have imagined the significance that the sign would one day have for her then eight-year -old son.

There's a reason why the Phoenix is reborn in flame.

Starting over again hurts.

Thanks, Mom.

The end of the world? Been there, done that. Bring it on. I'm ready.

-- Freder.

My Hands

... look like the hands of an octogenarian.

Like the hands of someone who has been around the block many more times than I wish I have actually been.

Like the hands of someone very much older than the rest of me looks, at least I think, maybe, thank goodness.

... look like my paternal grandfather's hands, and heaven knows he did more honest work with his than I ever did with mine.

... look a good deal older than I feel.

Except sometimes, when I look at my hands, and think of everything that's happened,

And everything that's changed

And everything that's gone.

Walpurgis night is about the seasons, and the seasons are about things falling away --

In my own hands, finger hugs finger trying to hang on to what the seasons take away.

Yellow nails.

Painfully dry cracks ready to spurt blood onto the checks that I write.

"I'll write you another," I said

...

Until I realized that I had run out of checks.

All Those Years Ago

John Lennon was assassinated on my twenty-second birthday. The first words that I heard that morning came from my mother, hollering up the stairs, "John Lennon's been killed."

Happy Birthday.

I had already lost two grandparents by then. My fraternal Grandma Agnes had suffered a stroke years earlier, and died a vegetable in a nursing home with a feeding tube forcing mush down her throat. My fraternal grandfather Adolf had been killed several years later coming out of a Stamp Collector's show. He was hit by a young moron driving down the road with a girl on his lap.

Both of these deaths came to me with a sense of detachment. First there was the physical detachment, in that my family had moved to Maine when I was six years old and since that time I saw my grandparents only when they came to visit, once or twice a year. I was not a part of their deaths, I lived half a continent away from them, and my parents did not even see fit for me to join them at the funerals.

Beyond that, I was just so young. I hadn't begun to ask the big questions; hell fire, I did not even know the words to express the concepts in those big questions. I'm still not sure that I know them. Religion? Up to a point, my family went to church every Sunday. Then, suddenly, we stopped. I know that religion was never anything more than an abstract to me, and my sense is that my parents were starting to feel the same way about it.

When I was very, very young, and we were living in Minnesota, my mother taught Sunday School at (I think) the Lutheran Church. I remember only one particular lesson. She told of how they nailed Jesus to the cross, and I asked, out loud, "Didn't it hurt?"

I was so little that the concept of somebody doing something like that to anyone was unbelievable to me.

Now, all I have to do is turn on the television and hear about what's happening in Mexico and other places, things so horrible that crucifixion seems mildly invasive by comparison.

This is going off on a tangent. Here's where I wanted to go in the first place:

John Lennon was another thing. I believe that Lennon's murder was the first time I started to know at some level that this is real, this is all there is, and it's not permanent, it can be taken away from us at any time, if you leave your house at the wrong time (or even if you don't) you can be snuffed out just like that.

When George Harrison released his memorial song, "All Those Years Ago," I confess that I didn't understand it.  The thoughts and emotions that it expresses are a good deal more complicated than what you encounter in the average pop song, and the deceptively upbeat, bouncy tone of the melody is in one sense misleading. The song is by no means a dirge -- and I suppose that was my problem with it.

I didn't begin to understand the song until I reached the age that George was when he wrote it. The joy of the music and the pain of the words started to come together for me. Harrison's relationship with Lennon was not always the rosiest; that's the way friendships and partnerships are.

Harrison was a much more religious man than I am. As I've written in other posts, I believe it when I can see it, and sometimes not even then. But there's something awfully compelling in the very harsh, angry thought behind the lyrics:

They've forgotten all about God

He's the only reason we exist,

Yet you were the one that they thought was so weird

All those years ago

Now I'm more than a decade older than Lennon was when he was assassinated, and George has been gone an awfully long time, too. Both of them lived significantly shorter lives than anyone in my family.

Shortly after Harrison's death, I believe that I wrote a series of emails to friends, in effect asking: What's going on here? Where has it all gone? Why does it have to be like this?

My very pragmatic friend BC replied to them saying, "George Harrison isn't dead because [I honestly forget this part]. George Harrison is dead because he smoked six packs of cigarettes a day."

And he was right. Actions have consequences. The same thing is true with my mother, who shouted up the stairs to me on my birthday that John Lennon had been killed by a madman.

Her death should not have come as such a shock to me. I was paying attention, but I was running away from what I saw. I was pickling my fear and dread in a sea of alcohol. I couldn't face it. I didn't want to know.

Grief Expands Exponentially in the Universe

Last night after nine-thirty I finally unloaded the car from Sunday. It was just about the last thing I wanted to do, but, y'know, it wasn't going to unpack itself.

After that I fell asleep on an episode of UFO, and the only reason I mention it is because whenever that happens I know that I'll be wide awake once I get to bed.

So I figured it was going to be a long night, and it was, and that was okay because I puttered around and got some unpacking done that wouldn't have been done otherwise.

Shortly after two AM I was bringing an empty box downstairs, and through the library's bay window I noticed a lot of light in my driveway. I thought, Damn, fool! You left the deck light on again! and went out to shut it off, or so I thought. Actually, I turned it on. All that light was coming from another source.

When I opened the back door, I saw an ambulance parked in my back neighbor's driveway.

I live close enough to the hospital so that I hear the wail of the ambulance virtually on a daily basis, a constant reminder of how vulnerable we all are, and how close we all are to trouble and, potentially, grief. I've had more than enough encounters with ambulances myself. They are good things because they're there to help, but you never want to see one sitting in your own driveway. I feel so strongly about this that I hate even to see one in a neighbor's driveway.

I don't know any of my neighbors, except by their habits, and which rooms of their houses are lit up at night. My neighbor in back is the only one I've seen, a white-haired man who smokes a lot and seems to have a lot of free time on his hands.

I came down the back stairs and stood at the pile of snow at the end of my driveway. The back of the ambulance was closed, and the medics were working inside. The lights were not flashing. It drove off slowly.

My neighbor came out of the house and stood on his porch, smoking in the dark. His car was already running in the driveway. After a short while, a much older woman with a stroller came out, with some difficulty. He opened the porch door for her and they both came slowly down the stairs.

I was sure he had seen me, and he didn't seem surprised when I hollered at him over the snowbank, "Anything I can do to help?"

I know, it was a stupid question. But what else can you say when someone is in trouble? He called back, "No, thanks. . . my father. . . not breathing and stuff. . ."

I said, "Hope it works out all right for you."

"Me, too. . ."

That was it. I went back into the house and worked some more until almost three AM. My neighbor's car wasn't in his driveway this morning.

You never want the phone to ring in the middle of the night, and you never want to be the one who has to make that mid-night call. I don't have anything more profound to say than that. I don't hold with people who use the phrase, "sooner or later it happens to all of us" as a sop, as a reason not to grieve.

*

Now here's something funny: I no more than typed that last sentence when I received an email from one of the faculty requesting a book called Tear Soup: A Recipe for Healing After Loss. Its description goes like this:

In this modern-day fable, a woman who has suffered a terrible loss cooks up a special batch of "tear soup," blending the unique ingredients of her life into the grief process. Along the way she dispenses a recipe of sound advice for people who are in mourning or know someone who has suffered a loss.

How odd. I ordered two copies, one for him, and one for the store. I have a feeling that someone, some late night, is going to need it.

-- Freder.

The Importance of Milestones

The walk to work is not bad, when the weather is good. On the other hand, the walk home from the supermarket (which is actually shorter) is not good at all.

It's not just that coming home from the supermarket I generally have a heavy load to carry. It's that C____ Street is a long straight street with no landmarks or milestones, just one anonymous side lane after another. It's possible to get a third of the way along and  feel as if you haven't made any progress at all. Only at the very end do the landmarks pop up: The Water District, the Nursing Home where my mother stayed for four months following her amputation, the church; but all of these are right next to each other. Once the stoplight starts to come within range, you can measure your progress and I know that I'm getting close to home. But that doesn't happen until the walk is nearly over.

By contrast, the walk to the college is filled with landmarks, milestones, stages. W_____ Avenue starts with two gentle curves; S & C's house is at the apex of the first. Beyond the second, a stoplight comes into view at the intersection of W_____ Avenue and First Rangeway, which I cross, and start up to the top of a small hill that marks the halfway point of my journey. The avenue is quite narrow at this point, but just beyond the hilltop it takes a sharp right turn into what I think of as a funnel and then suddenly opens up for two-lane traffic. A short walk down to M______ H_____ Drive, then I turn left and start up the broad curving slope that ultimately takes me to the campus.

Humans need to know that they are making progress when they take on a task. That's what milestones are for. Without them, it's a long slog in darkness.

-- Freder.

Time like a river

All I could think last night was, how can we really be halfway through President Obama's first (and hopefully not last) term? And that, when we both listened to his first State of the Union Address, I would never have believed that my mother wouldn't be around to hear the second.

I'll digress from the main subject here to say that I felt President Obama knocked another one out of the ballpark last night. Best State of the Union address ever. But it was just a speech. A brilliant one, perhaps, but will it take? Will positive change come out of it? That remains to be seen. It was, I must say, deeply refreshing to see the Democrats and Republicans sitting together, sometimes rising in unison, sometimes in waves, but never in that awful lopsided "one half of us likes this, the other half is going to sit here with frowns on our faces and our arms crossed, glowering" stance that has been the norm in recent years. At least the Republicans gave President Obama the respect that he is due, and didn't shout "Liar!" from the Peanut Gallery, or talk back from the Supreme Court section.

Now then. It's time -- for Time.

I have been saying the same thing to friends -- and recently to students -- for years now. It's my favorite quote that I ever invented: "Nothing in the first twenty years of your life prepares you for how fast the next twenty go by."

I might add, the decade that follows goes even faster, and as for Twenty-Ten (and Eleven, so far), it's just been a blur of disastrophes flowing by at about a million gallons a minute.

I'm so involved in the move, with no real down time, that January has made that Phhhhhhitt! sound in passing. I missed paying my credit card bill entirely, and was late with the oil bill and the insurance bill and the DirecTV bill and gawd knows what all else. When I got dunning emails from two of those companies, I thought to myself "What? What day is it?"

I thought it was somewhere around the eighteenth. In what I laughingly refer to as the Real World it was the twenty-third.

The fact is, I never even opened the DirecTV bill. I thought I had more time, and one thing I do not have time for is paper mail.

Ten years ago I never dreamed I would type a statement like that. I loved getting paper mail, I loved sending and receiving long letters. I guess if I got mail like that anymore,  I would make the time for it. I did receive a nice card from my Uncle (Mom's brother) and Aunt in Florida. I opened that and it made me happy.

But the rest of it? I don't open a bill until it's time to pay it (that was my mistake with the TV bill: it was the first one, I didn't know the due date), the majority of what remains is Junk Mail, and as for the steady stream of envelopes that I receive from my father, they get scaled into the bill stack unopened as well. I know what it's going to be: either a "Friends and Family" letter in which he will reveal things about me that I don't want revealed to his entire list (a perfect example: at first I did not tell him that I had moved out of the old house, because I didn't want The Wolf to know. When I did tell him, I swore him to secrecy and even said "You can't even put it in a friends and family letter!" -- so of course, that was the first thing that he did), or it will be newspaper clippings on subjects that I'm either not interested in or already know about. I appreciate that he's thinking about me, and I believe that is the message that he's really trying to send, but I don't need to open the envelopes anymore to get that message, especially now with so much on my plate.

It will be February before I know it. I wanted to be completely out of the old house by then. But that is not going to happen.

Just as I was not allowed to take any time off in the month following my mother's death, now, with the move in its last stages and the need to close it off so urgent, I am not being allowed any time off to bring it to completion. In fact, I'm being asked to work six days and extended hours for the next two weeks.

It seems that the big events of my personal life are all coinciding, lately, with the big events at work It is Book Rush coming up, that busy time when the students return to campus and mob the bookstore for one week. My boss wants me here. I can understand that, but would one weekday towards the end be such a horrible thing to give me? It's not merely the emotional and physical stress of the move, but I have to heat that house until I turn in the keys, and it's costing me a small fortune.

I am contractually obliged to be out of that house by the end of February. When I signed that agreement, I thought: No problem! I'll be out before that!

But Time gets past us. It's the real golden rule.

One thing I have decided: I must, in future, make the attempt to use my time in better ways. Blogging has helped. It's given me a focus that I did not have. Many thanks to all those of you out there tolerating it.

One guy I know doesn't have to worry about time getting past him, but he's a fictional character: The Doctor. One of my favorite quotes of all Time is his:

"One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine."

-- Freder.