Monthly Archives: February 2025

Blessings and elevator scare

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The blessing of ice. Of a good night’s sleep.

How a simple sandwich can make a day. Or a good book.

Finding the ground beneath me by turning on the iron — a good thing, long overdue.

The infinite varieties of sun and shadow speak. You are alive, they say. With eyes to see!

Stray dogs can break your heart and so can a cadre of wrecking balls. So much wreckage! The scared little beagle we saw two days ago still has not been reunited with his owner. Will we ever know what happened to him? The courts are working triple time thank god but still we must wonder, what will happen when Mango Mussolini defies a court order. What then? The commentators ask. What then?

The lost and the ruined cannot be neutralized by a club sandwich or a prize-winning novel but I still feel gratitude. I don’t know how to sit with things. If this isn’t already a constitutional crisis, I also don’t know what to say.

And life keeps rolling on.

Today I went to PT and the elevator I was riding from four to ground stuttered suddenly and yanked to a stop. Screech! Clunk! Weird wobble. Somewhere between floors three and two.

The other passenger and I gasped, looked at each other wide-eyed. Are we gonna die? She hit the alarm button. Once. Twice.

I was carrying crutches. The ones my PT had just adjusted for me. The ones I’ll use after my hip is replaced next week.

And you know, it’s been a year. A year since I asked for an MRI (and got an order for an X-ray instead, which added about four months to the process). But never mind that — it’s been doctor visit after doctor visit, a year of PT, two cortisone shots, and finally an MRI and then another X-ray. And another. A cardiac work up. PCP sign off. Surgery scheduled. Cancelled. Rescheduled.

And I couldn’t escape the irony. What if after ALL THAT, I died in a heap of malfunctioning metal and cables, dust settling on crutches never put to use?

Noting irony is better than feeling terror, but I do wonder: Was that weird of me?

We heard the other elevator whisper in its adjacent chute. Senses on triple alert. What would happen next? Would anyone come to save us? Could they? Save us?

Then ours resumed. We held our breath. We held our breath. But it was as though nothing had happened. The doors opened to the lobby and we both walked out into our day. I, to grocery shop, she to who knows what.

UPDATE

DNF

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Digital collage from last night. Winter.

It’s cold. Still. A lot of ice has disappeared but to walk the dog continues to mean going from sidewalk to street and back again.

We headed down Jackson Street today so that I could add a novel (a DNF) to the curbside library kiosk. The Kitchen House.

In case you don’t know “DNF,” is lingo for Did Not Finish.

I read less than ten pages before getting intense Gone with the Wind vibes. “Nope! No more!” After metaphorically flinging the book onto the floor, I consulted a dozen or so one star ⭐️ reviews on Amazon (yes, I do this on occasion). Bingo! Impression confirmed.

Somebody will grab The Kitchen House and probably enjoy it too. It’s one of those titles that’s a perennial favorite among readers of historic fiction.

Another recent DNF was a little more problematic because it’s literary fiction by an author I admire: Let Us Descend, by Jesmyn Ward. In a nutshell it’s about an enslaved character being sold down the river. The epically awful journey down to New Orleans is described in gruesome detail, but that’s not why I stopped.

I stopped because I don’t love magic realism. It’s a preference thing, like not liking horror or sci-fi. I can deal with a little — like the amount in Ta Nahesi Coates’s novel, The Water Dancer, for example. In another Ward novel Sing Unburied Sing, there are visitations from the dead — appearing as dreams to one character and as a ghost to another. They never interfere with the pacing of the story, however.

But in Let Us Descend, a baffling spirit shows every other minute.

Is the entity benevolent or malignant? A weather pattern or ancestral energy? Initially, I was interested, particularly in the descriptions of the thing, but fairly quickly got annoyed.

Why? Because the exchanges between spirit and protagonist, while exalted and poetic were also opaque and therefore eventually meaningless. Or maybe it’s just that they didn’t move the story along at all. To use John Gardner’s phrase, “they interrupted the dream.” I started skipping their interactions and then just said, “Nope! Done.”

I have one more DNF to report (boy! I’m on a run!) — one by the recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Han Kang.

Scene: couple quietly reading. Wife reads book husband recently finished.

Wife: She goes on about snow, doesn’t she?

Husband: Yeah, there’s a lot about snow.

Silence. More reading. Then wife encounters another description of snow, this time three pages long.

Another metaphorical flinging away.

Wife: You can return it to Libby early.

Is this what being 68 feels like? Being past caring what other people think? Having the freedom to disregard stupid, self-imposed rules like: you must finish every book you begin? Maybe it’s also the freedom of being an author who is not now and never will be famous, so I get to express my cavalier critiques.

(However! Would never opine thusly on Instagram, Amazon, or Goodreads, so maybe I care a little about what others think? Or more specifically, after getting a three star review this week (just stars, no words), maybe it’s that I don’t want any author to read my negative takes on their work).

The Wedding People is fun. I will definitely be finishing this one. See it there below in the photo? With mine nearby? (Yes, Dee. You’ve only posted the pic six times). It’s living up to the hype.

Blurb: a newly divorced, depressed woman goes to a fancy hotel in Newport, Rhode Island with the intention of killing herself. Instead she ends up interacting with the people gathered there to attend a wedding. Things ensue. Lots of great observations about marriage, academia, wealth, grief, and family.

2/14/25 Boston Common

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In spite of cold temps and intermittent gusts of wind blasting in off the Atlantic, the Valentine’s Day protest on Boston Common was well-attended. Three hundred? Maybe more? Ken thought five, but that seems a little high to me.

Such is my life that when Sarah Kendzior liked the photo of her quote that I posted on Bluesky, it was a little thrill.

The Embrace might be growing on me.

We’ve been rewatching the HBO series JOHN ADAMS. It opens with the Boston Massacre, so I wanted to go honor the five fallen men from that day, but the Granary Burial Ground was closed. It looked like pure ice in there.

The HBO show is really well-acted with lots of local scenery, but it’s a strange time to be watching. It’s not a balm or a distraction, that’s for sure. “A Republic, if you can keep it,” Ben Franklin famously utters.

The birth of independence. The sacrifices. The wrangling over how to express our ideals. Not perfectly done, but still.

All to get out from under the tyranny of a king.

Tonight I went to a birthday party. A small, warm gathering with interesting folks and good food. Snow falling outside.

In a living room full of eight people that I was meeting for the first (maybe second) time, SIX of us had attended the protest the day prior. Six! I’m not sure why, but that really made me feel good.

PS I understand needing to step away, take breaks. I hope our community holds though. It means the world to me.

Here is Marti’s sweater and pin for tomorrow.

A Fish Rots on the Beach : A Lament

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I wrote this in KO’s workshop today, pretty much ignoring the prompt. Instead I wrote statements in response to 11 Tarot cards I’d drawn right before class. Cycling ’round and ’round until time ran out, not always staying with the exercise.

A cheerleader at heart, she makes sure all her guests have a drink.

His hand. Her hand. A panorama in between.

They steal and think we cannot see them.

The sun will set later today than yesterday.

What sanctuary can I offer and to whom?

He plants his feet. He plants his rod. All to avoid thinking about the future.

Tomorrow, ten years from now — equally calamitous.

Concerns, queries, brow furrowing brought to you by a milquetoast in Maine.

One of the Wise Ones says we can’t save everything but everything we do save is worth saving.

It reminds me, this chaos, of a savage game of pick up sticks.

Is it all about the dollar? Or is it the small dick power plays? Or maybe, the vengeance of bias, biases rutted so deep as to ruin their souls.

I hardly care anymore. Just make it stop.

A fish rots on the beach. The Good Angler who walked on water has left the scene. Fuck the multitudes.

Looking over the harbor and surveying his kingdom, the Shitty Landord is alone, the smell of his rotted flesh and soiled undercarriage making sure of that.

When the fires start, where will he run to?

“Be of good cheer,” the hostess chirps. And I kid you not, the bib of her white apron is adorned with ruffles.

Whom do you love? With what clutching fear? With what failed mercy or release? Hiding can be a shared pursuit.

“Appears to possibly exceed the bounds of the law.” Waste much ink? How about two words: IT’S ILLEGAL.

It’s illegal chant the crowds. Some wear scarves against the cold. The sun will set later today than yesterday. Does spring carry gladness anymore?

In the churches, dirt bags in red ties offer false humility, false witness, false surrender. Craven soldiers of the Crazy King, their claims to superiority of any kind, but especially of the spiritual kind, are laughable. But sssssssshhh! We don’t laugh in church.

“Can I plant a flag on Mars?” asked the flat-faced, google-eyed one. What flag you might wonder but never mind –YES. YES! Please go to the red planet as soon as you can!

The Fire Hose Method appears not to be working. Except that everyone I know suffers. We might fight through our exhaustion, our demoralization, with cranky knees and hips, with newfound intolerance to the cold, or not. I lack the will to place even a single phone call.

Ssssssssshhh. Don’t ask what else can they steal. Our dignity, our history, our fundamental societal structures, our futures. Isn’t that enough? No wonder Jesus turns his back in disgust.

Blasphemy, you charge? Here comes the trad wife with a tray of pigs-in-the-blanket, Pillsbury Crescent rolls for the wrap of course. I want to bump her arm and then snuffle up the appetizers from the floor, her delicate ankles in my peripheral vision. At some point, I’d look up, crumbs on my chin and shirt and ask, “Well, if you can make up shit about Our Savior, why can’t I?”

Here’s an idea for leaders of the Blue: STOP ASKING. I am not whispering here. Don’t you understand that we’re prepping our taxes and scrolling, scrolling past the endless donations to Senate and House races and PACs (all non-deductible of course)? The tally will not be made since seeing the total might make an artery to the brain collapse, leaving me drooling and in need of care 24/7. The purse will reopen — but not today.

She licks the buttery crumbs off her cheeks to her hostess’s dismay.

If you eat more fish and less beef, the planet might last longer. That’s all I’ll say about that except to add that being hit by an asteroid begins to look like a reasonable alternative to what’s coming.

I would like to see the Worst-Man-in History-Ever-to-Be-President stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial and begin his blathering self-congratulatory comparisons of himself to that great lawyer from Illinois and then watch the giant marble arms lift from the chair, reach out, and strangle the charlatan, the pathetic, incontinent, lying Orban-Wanna-Be. Leave the imposter limp and unconscious.

If only he was like Lincoln in that one way. Theater tickets, anyone? I’ve begun to think that Luigi missed his shot. The glassy-eyed South African or the Gaza-grabbing idiot would’ve made better targets.

People would celebrate in the streets then. Crowds like you’ve never seen!

Soften your edge, says the Buddhist. Accept your anger, then move through it. Not today, I’m afraid. Too many pigs-in-the-blanket still in the offing.

I just saw a psychologist opine that swearing has a way of making people feel better. No shit, Sherlock.