Bill in Bed

        Bill in Bed

Bill tells me he is having a crisis of faith.

Tears slide into his beard.

 

He lives in a hospital bed on the glassed in

porch of his home. His dog

 

dozes at the foot of his bed. The tv sends

lively ghosts from the corner.

 

He tells me he is afraid he is never going

to get well again. I decide

 

not to cry. I see creases in the skin

of his bald head propped

 

on the pillow. I wonder if the radiation

caused them. I remember

 

my father’s death, a death I missed. 
Bill tells me

 

late last night a friend said it is

all right to lose faith

 

but not all of it. I decide not to cry.

I picture the tumor locked

 

into Bill’s brain, tentacles inching into

the wet folds, squeezing,

 

with pitiless eyes and a beak. Bill says

he envies my trips out west.

 

I decide not to cry now.

 

As we talk I stroke Bill’s unparalyzed hand.

I rub his foot, but

 

I’m uncertain about touching his left hand,

still indented where his rings

 

were removed. The nurse arrives, takes

Bill’s blood pressure, gives

 

him a shot, checks his skin and the response

of his pupils. Sue

 

joins us, kisses Bill’s forehead. Tells

the nurse and me she sleeps

 

here with him, likes to cuddle in bed,

jokes that they make out

 

heavily when people aren’t around. I rise

to leave. Sue asks

 

the nurse to make room in the bed for her when

she turns Bill over.  Sure.

 

I say it’s OK they are married. Sue and the nurse

lift, using some leverage tricks,

 

relocating the tube leading to the urine bag hooked

on the frame of the bed.

 

I try to stay out of the way. I’m uncertain

about touching. I’m having a crisis

 

of faith. Sue leans down

 

to arrange Bill’s head on a pillow. His good arm

reaches to circle her neck, holding

 

her in a fierce headlock of an embrace. I

can not see her face or Bill’s.

 

I am jealous of this broken dying man. I see

now the death I missed.

Homecoming

            Our homecoming was joyful, but not without some apprehension. We parked in the driveway to save us a few steps hauling all of our stuff to the front door, and we saw that the folks who had plowed our driveway in the winter had plowed our gravel – a lot of it – into the garden. I imagined what it would take to get it out from its tangles in leaves and mulch, especially since the garden featured some large sculptural rocks.

 

            And then all that stuff in the car to deal with! We both carried boxes and bags in from the car, and Kim was in charge of unpacking and putting things away, as I didn’t remember where anything went, and she didn’t want to be ordering me around. I did put a few of my things away – clothes that Kim would re-hang properly and drawers for my toiletries (not my favorite word) that Kim would re-organize for me.

 

            Mainly I retreated to the basement, where I intended to reactivate our internet and television service. Fortunately, I had called Spectrum to end our vacation hold status. But unfortunately, I had called for that reactivation to begin the day after we returned, so I had to call them back. The Spectrum guy was patient with me and said it should be on within the hour, but it might take a day. It was an hour.

 

            This was only a partial solution, as I still needed to know how to use our two remotes (one came with the television, the other from Spectrum) to watch regular television and to stream Netflix, Prime, and Hulu. I was able to do the streaming, and I did manage to stumble upon the ABC network, but I’m not sure how. We do like to watch Sunday morning programs on CBS. I’m writing this on Saturday – will let you know how it goes.

 

            My next challenge was to hook up more electronics so we could tell Alexa what music we wanted to listen to. I hoped plugging it in would do the job, but Alexa told me she was having trouble locating my internet service. After a bit of searching online, I learned that what I needed to do was to hold down one of the two buttons on top for 15 seconds, and then a yellow light would go on, and a few seconds later I would be good to go. It worked! I gave myself a big pat on the back. Kim was too busy opening and emptying boxes to give me a pat until I asked for one later.

 

            So, for me, the initial joyfulness was mixed with an awareness of all the work that we had to do – not just unpacking and then finding things we hid from people who might be examining our house, and finding things whose regular location we had forgotten, and setting up electronics, but also in our daily routine of housekeeping and yardwork. We were planning a major grocery shopping trip – about an hour away. We needed to get new bird feeders as we had sold ours in a garage sale, thinking we were going to sell the house and move away. We needed a new leaf-chopper to replace the one we had sold, so we could recycle our leaves as mulch. 

 

            On top of all of this was and is the Spring Cleanup of our property – all the weeds in the gardens and the leaves covering gardens and bushes. And the beach needed maintenance – sticks and some big logs. In the few days we have been back we have put in maybe ten hours dealing with the driveway gravel in the gardens.

 

            But then, after a three-day flurry of activity, we reawakened to why we love this place. Aside from having a kitchen that works well, and (thanks to me) a television that works well, we sat on our warm porch and watched the birds discover our new feeder. We have seen twenty species as I write this. And we sat at breakfast, watching the sunrise and seeing a blur that might have been an owl whiz by our dining room window. And while I was working on the garden gravel, I heard a pileated woodpecker hammering high in a large dead tree, and I heard an eagle overhead. We saw the brilliant blues of Torch Lake, and at night the full moon’s reflection on the still waters. And I heard the call of a distant early-morning loon.

 

            And we thought – this is not Atlanta. We are seeing and hearing birds at breakfast, not motorcycles and fire engines. Our windows show lake and birds – this morning a male turkey strutting his stuff for three females – not Atlanta’s traffic zooming by, or stopped in a jam. We love it here. Yes, we are going to need some help – people our age do. We are going to try out some people next week.

 

            Yes, there is a lot that we miss in Atlanta – mainly being close to family, but also our very cool loft space and the friendships that we were starting to build. We miss the great vibe of the Stacks and Cabbagetown – artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, etc. (in addition to the occasional vandals who climb the fence to get in). And we miss Atlanta’s warm weather in April, especially after coming home to a bit of snow and thin ice on the lake. And we do feel a bit isolated here, though it’s an easy one-mile drive to our local market, with some speeders flying by, but the roads are open. We miss having good restaurants within walking distance, but we have the Torch Lake Café a mile away, an OK restaurant that will be open all week in a few days.

 

            But every day we are here we are reminded, despite all the work, how much we love this place. By “this place” I mean the Bark House – its beauty and livability (thank you, Kim), and our place on the shore of Torch Lake – the sunrise, the birds, the deer (even though they ate a lot of flowers this winter), and Michigan itself – hard to love a complex state, but still – it’s our home.

 

            Tomorrow we look at a condo for sale in Traverse City. It’s located in the old mental institution where we lived while building the Bark House. The plan, at least for now, is to rent it out in the summer and live there the rest of the year – close to shopping and the hospital and a short walk to restaurants in the Commons (as it’s called). It’s not big enough for full-time living. We’ll see how it goes.

The Trip Home

            The first part of the trip home to Michigan was packing. Kim’s part of the job was doing all the packing. My part was carrying stuff to the car. She has a great special sense and can picture how things fit – into boxes, and then the boxes into the car without sliding around. I don’t have that ability, though I am good at opening jars and reaching things on high shelves.

 

            We decided to make this trip, as much as possible, an adventure. What we (Kim) had in mind was – as much as possible – to get off the Interstate and onto smaller more scenic roads. We had to take I-75 out of Atlanta, and we left by 6:30 in an attempt to beat the traffic. And we stayed on the Interstate for much of the first day, but a surprise near Knoxville reinforced our small roads decision when we encountered a large truck stopped in the center lane (ours) while the traffic on either side moved relatively freely. I saw it in time and applied the brakes, but I had under-estimated how the weight of our loaded 2015 Toyota Highlander would increase braking distance. With the help of some urgent warnings from Kim, I stopped our car about six inches short of a collision. Some of the stuff that I had loaded in the car without Kim’s supervision shifted a bit, and I felt something hit the back of my seat.

 

            We made it to our motel in Lexington, Kentucky a little after 3:00. We had been snacking on cookies, peanuts, and, frankly, anything Kim would hand me, so we weren’t hungry for dinner. The Hilton Garden Inn features a bar and restaurant, and we chose the former, where I had the best Manhattan ever – even better than mine. Back to the room, a brief struggle with the tv remote, and then to bed. We slept for eleven hours.

 

            We awoke to rain. It rained all day.

 

            It was time to shift our trip into small-road adventure mode, so after a little map-study we saw how we could get to highway U.S. 127, which we figured would take us all the way to Northern Michigan. Just a brief drive on I-75, with trucks splashing water all over our windshield, confirmed our decision.

 

            Traveling on Highway 127 turned out to be just the adventure we were looking for. We drove through beautiful farmland, flowering trees in dramatic cliffs where the road was carved through mountains, and the occasional Amish wagon. We also saw evidence of the terrible flooding that hit Kentucky – fields under water, and trees down from the wind. Fortunately for us, none of this impeded our travel. What did impede our travel was trying to stay on Highway 127, since it led us to downtown Cincinnati, where it merged with a number of other roads and changed names a few times. While looking hard for the “127” I managed to drive the wrong way onto a crowded one-way street. Fortunately, Kim’s arm-waving from the front street got the traffic to allow us off the one-way. We hopped back onto the Interstate, figuring that would take us to a motel.

 

            It did. But it was dismal in ways I won’t describe here. We bypassed the fast food restaurants and headed toward a small town a couple of miles from the motel, where we found a restaurant/tavern and had a martini with dinner. The problem was that we did not know how to get back to our motel. We did not have an address to tell Gertrude, the name we gave to our GPS voice. We drove around a bit, hoping to see something familiar. Nope. We saw some people on the sidewalk and, hoping for more information for Gertrude, asked them what state we were in, Ohio or Indiana. I don’t like to imagine what they were thinking, but they told us Indiana, which was no help. We finally saw some familiar landmarks in the form of about a mile-long string of fast-food restaurants, and we made it back to the motel for another good sleep.

 

            The next day we instructed Gertrude to avoid the Interstate on the way home. It was our best day of travel – farmland (often flooded), swollen rivers and streams, the occasional Amish wagon (seldom seen on the Interstate), small towns featuring a four-way stop sign or maybe a traffic light. We found a small breakfast place somewhere in Ohio (or Indiana), populated by a few farmers and no strangers, where we enjoyed home made corned beef hash and eggs, plus coffee and juice, plus two slices of lemon curd cake that the waitress’s mom made, for $20. It was a friendly place with the personable small-town charm that seems to be disappearing from America. It was one of many highlights of our trip.

 

            Warm feelings when we crossed into Michigan, and warm again when we hit familiar roads just outside of Traverse City. Some apprehension when we drove in and saw all the fallen trees cut and stacked next to our little dirt road.

 

 

More on our homecoming – and our departure from Atlanta – in a future post. Still digesting it all.

 

            

Drownings

            I wrote “Drownings” years ago. Everything in it is true.

 

            Drownings

 

From fifteen feet above myself unbreathing

there on the dock I evaluate those feet,

mine, splayed on the boards I painted.

The camp nurse bends over me to insert

the hard S-tube down my throat. My cool

eyes consider the restless boat,

the waterskies aligned, the tow-rope

a heap. No waves move onto the shale beach.

A benign Lake Champlain accuses me

under a Vermont sun, and I want to disappoint

all these people by dying out from under them

on such a smiling day.

                                       Fifteen years

after my drowning, Jeff chases ducks off

a dock's edge. He sinks beneath the tidal

sheen of Five Mile River. I know he must bob

soon to the surface. I pass my son going up

on my way down.

                               Phillip's drowning

finds him clinging half swallowed beneath a dock

in the Fox River. At dinner in the cottage

I almost too late hear his cries above the voices

of aunts and cousins. I pull my dripping boy

from the suck of the lazy river.

 

In a film a child falls from a high window

bounces to his feet, runs off. We can

do that on our good days: drowning

through a late spring afternoon held

to my desk by a student's whine, or

through the bed my wife avoids

like my eyes, or through a drive

to scare the boys with my braking:

to be saved, emerging into changed air

and light, or to drown down through green

water into a deeper world where we breathe

through our wounds and join all the other

drowned children alive at last.

 

            Not exactly sure where “breathe / through our wounds” came from – except, perhaps, the feeling that it’s our wounds that make us alive, like “all the other / drowned children” with whom we share the wonders of being alive.

  

Curse

 

            We recently watched a series on television where a Sicilian grandmother places a curse on a man’s family for mistreating her granddaughter. And sure enough, a couple of generations later, two identical twins are born, one of them psychotic. Their lives are miserable. The curse worked.

 

            My questions are, Why did it work? and How did it work? The simple answer, of course, is that it worked because it’s a movie. And I believe that in real life, a curse can work if the person upon whom the curse is inflicted knows about it, and he falls into some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I get that. And I understand that some people might believe other people are cursed, and they treat them accordingly, fulfilling the curse. Racial prejudice may run in this vein.

 

            But what about a curse that is uttered to the universe, and no people know about it? Does it have any power?

 

            The opposite of a curse, I suppose, is a blessing. Setting aside the semi-automatic “God bless you!” after someone sneezes (a practice that started, I read, during the plague years as a way to ask God to prevent the sneezer from getting the plague), how is the blessing supposed to work? Divine intervention? If so, is that the enforcement mechanism for curses as well? Again, it may be that if a person knows he or she is blessed, that may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, driven by optimism. And if others believe a person is blessed, well, they may confer the blessing in the way they interact with him.

 

            (And of course there is a great southern expression I learned in Gainesville: When you say to someone, “Bless your heart” using the right tone of voice, what you are really saying is, “You are pathetic and need all the help you can get.” Those of you from the South may want to confirm this . . ..)

 

            What about curse words? It’s easy to see “God damn you!” as a curse, in ways we have been discussing. But how about “Fuck you!”? If that’s a curse, what’s the intended outcome? I assume that “curse words” are words used when cursing someone, but I’m not sure how “shit” fits into a curse, unless there is a missing verb in the imperative mood.

 

            (By the way, isn’t it charming that the word “mood” is used as a grammatical term? A question can be posed in “the interrogative mood,” and questioning is indeed a mood – as evidenced by my opening questions. And don’t you tell someone what to do when you are in an imperative mood?) (Please forgive this English teacher digression.)

 

            Back to cursing. (Instead of typing this, I should have written it in cursive . . ..) Despite the uncertainties about whether and how curses work, I still think it useful to issue a well-placed curse from time to time. What can it hurt? And I know from personal experience that it feels good to lay down a curse or two.

The Decision

 

            Our decision to sell our Atlanta loft in the Stacks and move back to Michigan is a difficult one. (Note that I say “is” rather than “was,” as the process is raw and new.) We have imagined a number of different scenarios, most of them starting with “What if . . .?”

 

            There is a lot to like about where we live in Atlanta: the neighbors we have met, the striking architecture of the Stacks and, especially, of the unit where we live – and it would be even better if we went ahead with the kitchen and bathroom remodeling that Kim has been planning for weeks. We have also, thanks to Genne´, discovered some really cool places not too far from here – the Beltline, for one, with its wide sidewalk lined with restaurants, bars, and interesting people cruising by on skates, scooters, bikes, or on foot. And today we visited a great farmer’s market, open Saturdays year-round. My new friend John, a long-time resident here, shows me a new lunch place just about every week. And as we’ve said before, our Cabbagetown neighborhood just has a good vibe.

 

            But still, there are some strong negatives for us. One of the main ones is the traffic. No accidents yet, and the problem might be my 81-year-old brain navigating unfamiliar streets, but I am afraid I might feel stranded in our home, unable to get out for simple shopping – though I am confident about access to groceries.

 

            Another negative is the heat. True, we have not yet experienced it, but Atlanta summers are, from all reports, still a concern – and that might make us hole up with our air conditioning.

 

            A third major negative is the missing connection with the natural world. Out our living room windows – the only ones we have – we see traffic, which includes quite a few ambulances and fire trucks. Yes, a tree outside our windows is about to put out its spring leaves, and we see the occasional robins, but it’s not at all like what we saw daily at the Bark House. Kim spends time looking at her bird and butterfly photos on her computer, as we are unable to see them in person.

 

            And a fourth negative is the lack of space in our condo. Kim has no room to do her artwork – and she is an artist at heart. There is no room for her collections. We have known for a couple of months that this cannot be our one and only home, though if either one of us dies first the other might possibly live here. But there is simply no storage here, and we have a house full of stuff in the Bark House on Torch Lake.

 

            With both the Bark House and our Stacks condo on the market, we have a number of “What if . . .?” plans:

 

PLAN A: Keep the condo here and the Bark House and become snow birds, driving back and forth. The problem is that it’s a 1,000 mile drive, and though family members and friends have offered to drive us, it’s still a long ride, and we’d still have to deal with the Atlanta problems.

 

PLAN B: Sell the condo, move back to the Bark House, and buy a condo in Traverse City where we would live in the winter and rent out in the summer. We have been looking hard at the Commons – the former mental institution where we lived for a couple of years while building the Bark House. So far, we have not seen one that would work, but we will have to look in person.

 

PLAN C: Sell both the condo and the Bark House and find another house or condo, probably in Michigan, that will architecturally interesting and livable, and with room for our furniture and our stuff. We’ve been looking for over a year, including in North Carolina and Ann Arbor among other places, and we have yet to come up with one that works for us. We have made the sale of our house contingent on our finding a suitable place to live, which is a lot like taking it off the market.

 

PLAN D: Sell the condo, move back to the Bark House, find the help we need, and just live there. The house works for us in so many ways. Help is hard to find – for what we need both inside and outside the house – but the money we get from selling the condo will allow us to pay what is needed.

 

            Of course, all of these plans make it sound like selling the house or condo are decisions we make, but of course, buyers are required, and that might be out of our control.

 

            Thinking, planning and (for me) worrying about all of the above, each attached to a “What if . . . ?”, has led to an increase in my level of stress. It’s hard to make a decision with so many unknowns at play, and moving itself, as we know, brings its own dose of stress. I find that having a to-do-list helps, and it helps knowing that Genne´ will be here looking after our condo while we are in Michigan. We (Kim) are starting to pack – mainly small stuff and essentials for the car. We’ll need a mover if and when the condo sells, and if it doesn’t, we may drive down here for the winter.

 

            Who knows?

The Triumph of Icarus

            Lately I’ve been thinking about the fall of Icarus. The myth is usually taken as a lesson about the danger of flying too high, as the sun will melt the wax holding your wings together, and down you go. Moderation is best.

            But there are other ways to see the story. First, Pieter Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus:

(You can see the legs of Icarus just below the stern of the ship.)

            

    Auden’s take on the painting:

Musee des Beaux Arts 

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

Our suffering, even our death, takes place, for the most part, unnoticed: “how everything turns away.”

            And from William Carlos Williams:

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned 
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

The landscape is “concerned / with itself.” Not us.

            But then there is this, from Jack Gilbert:

Failing and Flying

 

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It's the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

said it would never work. That she was

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming,

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her

while we ate lunch. How can they say

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.

 

            I sent this poem to a recently divorced friend. He said it didn’t help. But it’s not about marriage and divorce – like the other two poems, it’s about how we see our endings. Everything will “turn away,” and the world, natural and human, is “concerned / with itself.”

 

            None of this, however, diminishes the triumph. The challenge is to identify and appreciate our triumphs.

            I am posting this now as we are planning to sell our loft in Atlanta, as much as we love it, and move back to Michigan and the Bark House. I’ll get into the reasons in a later post – still doing a lot of processing. But our decision to go on this adventure, and the creative energy we put into it, is our triumph.