http://ruebarbs.blogspot.com/2009/05/adagio-by-albinoni.html
http://ruebarbs.blogspot.com/2009/05/sunshine-at-twilight.html
http://ruebarbs.blogspot.com/2009/04/orphan.html
From the Edge is Anthony Porter's insightful, thought-provoking, sometimes acerbic, always-entertaining observations and analyses of life, events, people, and places.
From the Edge
Receiving
I’ve been crying rather a lot lately, partly out of gratitude. I’m grateful for the many people, maybe you, who have given money for my wife’s cancer treatment. I’m also astounded, humbled, and maybe flummoxed. I know that people are essentially good and can manage our own affairs reasonably well without threat of violence, and still if I think about your compassion and generosity I end up slack-jawed at the awesomeness of you. Then I cry.
Even people I’d never heard of have given us money, sometimes hundreds of dollars. The biggest donors are people we don’t know. A guy I barely know handed me a C-note in the co-op, just put it in my hand, to help pay for Janice’s treatment. That time I got to the parking lot before I cried.
Some years ago, trying to raise money for an alternative newspaper, I happened to take part in a meeting with a billionaire. His office was obvious, and he opened with a story about how when his father had been sick recently he’d simply hired a plane and had the old man flown out to the best place on the continent for treating the old man’s ailment. Those of us with experience with the obscenely rich were duly impressed with this guy’s selfless generosity toward his also-rich father’s health care. The three of us were there begging for chump change, and he was bragging about his wealth like we might have missed it.
And I want to do the same for Janice, spare no expense, just keep doing what’s working and I’ll take care of it, and I know that I can’t take care of squat. Sometimes that makes me cry, too, that after a lifetime of trying to accumulate more and better stuff, I don’t have much. Part of me feels responsible and a failure, for a little while anyway, for not having been better at wage slavery or even capitalism—more cause for weeping.
So far the hardest part is learning to receive the gifts of the universe, this time obviously routed through you, and also more commonly and subtly routed where I least expect it. I’m grateful for getting to know Janice better. Her persistence is something to behold. She makes me feel flighty, another reason to cry.
My emotional life is such that I’m perfectly capable of bursting into laughter or tears at any moment. There’s so damn much profundity and joy and awe in my life, I don’t know what to expect from one minute to the next, which is probably just as well.
Comments OffEthics
I just read an article about working conditions at Apple factories in China. Apparently workers at Apple’s major supplier in China “‘have needlessly suffered lifelong injuries, and even died from avoidable tragedies, including suicides, explosions and exhaustion from 30- to 60-hour shifts.’ . . . Others have suffered from exposure to chemical toxins. The manufacturing plants . . . are sweatshops of the worst sort, relying heavily on child labor and rampant violation of basic labor rights. The working conditions are truly horrendous and brutal.”
The AFL-CIO is up in arms. I could be up in arms, too. While I encourage child labor, one should treat them well. Still, what ought I do because of “reports of some workers suffering repetitive motion injuries that caused them to permanently lose use of their hands” and split needlessly an infinitive?
I’m real sorry about their hands, but as I keyboard this on my Mac and periodically rejoice in never having to experience the agony of Windows™, repetitive motion injuries seem an inevitable consequence of using people as machines. It’s part of the deal we’ve made with capitalism. I’ve had carpal tunnel syndrome for years, and the whole time it took me to develop it I knew there was something wrong with sitting there like that all the fucking time holding my hands just so. I wanted the money, though, so I did it and still do now and I wear my wrist braces when I must. I’m glad it’s not black lung.
When I worked for the B&O railroad I walked alongside many a tank car and hopper that leaked something I didn’t recognize. I realized once when some liquid splashed onto my cheek that I was responsible for that happening, that no matter what it turned out to be, if it ate my face off or not, it was on me because I chose to be there for money.
And the poor Chinese people, many of them women and children, I suppose, who get eight bucks for an iPad do it for the eight bucks. That’s what eight bucks will buy over there. I don’t see how to change that from my worktable. I could find a way to protest—I think I signed an online petition—but there’s no way I’m gonna settle for anybody’s Windows™ machine because of who got shafted getting Lion to my desktop. I would be annoyed most of the time, and that’s no way to increase the love and peace in the world, which is what interests me most.
Comments OffWayne Dyer
How’s Janice?
Friends ask me, “How is Janice? How is she doing? Is she feeling better?” I came to say “She has good days,” which was vague enough and still true.
When I was at the clinic with her if she’d slept well she often started with yoga at 8am, very gentle and easy with lots of blankets and pillows in front of a fireplace. Then sometimes she’d sit in on a raw-food class or get a shot of fresh wheat grass juice. Raw foods and juices are key to this approach to treatment for cancer. At ten-thirty or eleven she might have an intravenous infusion, maybe insulin-potentiated therapy—the latest chemotherapy technique—or a supermega dose of vitamin C or selenite or whatever the medical team suggests and she decides is worth the always hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars such concoctions cost. Her first week cost $6,000, the second was only $5,100.
I think I know what people mean when they ask how she is, but her illness doesn’t seem to lend itself to easy judgments. She has easy days, when she only spits up seven or eight times. She has hard days, when she’s too weak to sit up.
I know how she was three weeks ago. She looked pretty good my last morning there, but she was gonna have a physically more demanding day than she’d had lately, because I was leaving for the airport and her old friend Kathy wouldn’t get there until early evening. So when the shuttle came to get me Janice looked pretty good—well-rested and confident.
We talk and text, so I have reason to believe that nothing major has happened to or for her as of this writing. She’s in pain and has little energy. She has growths in many areas of her body that seem to be asserting their presence less than before—her bad numbers are down. She has a pic—a long-term IV apparatus—in her arm and an open wound in her chest, and I think she needs good cheer more than anything else. You can imagine what it’s like trying to keep a positive attitude under such a circumstance, and still that’s what she’s got to do. Do you know any good jokes?
We’re all of us learning as we go, and the past few years have let me appreciate life and Janice in new ways after all this time, and one thing I know is I don’t know how she is unless I’m with her, which I will be by the time you read this.
Comments OffBilly Collins, “What She Said”
Thich Nhat Hanh on ego
Arizona
I was recently in Arizona, a mixed blessing, like pretty much everything else. I didn’t have many expectations about Arizona other than lots of desert and heat. It being February, there wasn’t much heat. There was a lot of sunshine, though, which I always love and appreciate.
I remembered having read only one thing about Arizona. The unknown writer had been unfavorably impressed by the plethora, not to mention surfeit, of strip malls. I don’t mind strip malls, at least not as long as they’re not in my neighborhood. In your neighborhood—fine. I recognize strip malls’ right to exist somewhere else, and I was prepared to tolerate your defense of that right. That was before I went to Mesa, one ’burb away from Phoenix in Maricopa County.
Now that I’ve been to Mesa, Tempe, Gilbert, Chandler, Apache Junction, and other areas of what to an outsider—which I gratefully am—still looks like Phoenix, I can understand why that writer was anti-strip mall. Maricopa County has a lot of strip malls. I’d go so far as to say that Phoenix and environs have too many strip malls. I say “too many strip malls” not because I think there’s an optimal number of strip malls per unit area or per capita or per anything. I say Maricopa County has too many strip malls because many of them have died for lack of a reason to be there. Several showed no signs of ever having been active at all, just a block or two of empty brown store fronts.
Maricopa County seems to be mostly shades of brown, from écru to chocolate. There are great swaths of sand-colored buildings along the ginormous streets—Second Street in the heart of downtown Chico would be an alley in Mesa—mile after mile of beige carefully accented by burnt umber and coffee, with the occasional flamboyant splash of auburn.
I like brown, and not just because I’m personally brown. I like many kinds of brown surfaces, from skin to wood and actual sand and autumn leaves, and still Maricopa County, in addition to too many strip malls, might be said to have too much brown. In the desert, brown makes sense, and although I found the brown buildings usually inoffensive and occasionally elegant, I began to think that local government put the kibosh on bright colors, the way slaves in parts of the Old South were forbidden to wear bright colors.
I also went to Sedona, which oozes charm and smells like money, and the Grand Canyon, which is awesome.
Comments OffSinging
Dancing
The bus
I recently rode a Greyhound bus from Chico to Phoenix. It was a trip. I took a bus from Saint Paul to Chicago in the late ’80s and encountered the same kind of motley assortment of poor people. Of course I have no way of knowing they were poor people other than my keen analytic and deductive skills, and they fit the stereotypes in my head.
The drivers were all polite and professional, including the one out of Sacramento who warned a bunch that sat together in the back that there weren’t gonna be any shenanigans this trip. No loud talking, no radios, no cell-phone conversations, pretty much nothing audible.
As far as I could tell the driver picked them out solely on the basis of how they dressed and carried themselves. He was profiling. In his position, I would have expected some hubbub before we got to L.A., also based solely on how they were dressed and carried themselves. They clearly used the same fashion consultant, and I bet they were used to getting special attention. Folks who fly in Muslim garb probably experience the same thing.
Even given the state of corporate paranoia I was still surprised when some guy with a “security” patch on his shirt rifled through our carry-ons before we could board to leave Los Angeles. He put the bags on a little table by the bus door and—maybe because the light was so dim—stuck his hand in each one and felt around inside for God-knows-what.
There were a lot of fat people, mostly women. I just managed to get my arm rest in place before one plopped down next to me. She flowed over anyway, but the steel barrier saved me.
The most popular luggage, as it were, was plastic bags, mostly black yard-waste and white garbage bags and some from low-end retail stores. One dapper young man dressed in white used a clear plastic bag for his stuff. Clear. There were a few roll-along suitcases and a couple of paper bags, too.
I tend to look askance at parents who are dress themselves more warmly than they do their child. Several times I found myself wanting to say, “Cover that baby’s head, you ninny!” Not being armed, I didn’t.
Sincerely wishing to avoid the onboard toilet, I opted for dehydration, and for the the 19-hour trip I limited myself to two Tin Roof raisin-oatmeal cookies, 12 ounces of water, and a truck-stop sandwich sealed in plastic, which I decided would go down best in the dark. I was right.
One comment so far, add another ▶The Post Office
I love the Post Office. The Post Office is a useful government service and worth paying for, like Amtrak, Social Security, and universal single-payer healthcare. We shouldn’t expect it to make a profit or even break even—we should just pay for it.
One of my uncles worked for the Post Office for forty-two years. He had a good job and was one of my mother’s heroes. I worked for the Post Office for a couple of years in the sixties and, while working there now is bound to differ from my experience, the Post Office is still doing the same thing it was doing when I had the best part-time job in town.
Management was a bit dim—as management tends to be—and it didn’t matter because everybody knew that the goal was delivering stuff. We never had strategy meetings or new thoughts about what to do. We delivered stuff. Because we all knew why we were there management had limited influence.
I don’t know what this month’s first-class postage is. I don’t care. It’s worth it. I can give the Post Office a letter and somebody will put it in the designated slot anywhere I say in the continental United States for under fifty cents. What’s cheaper than that? Nothing. Businesses that depend on cheap junk mail can die and go away.
Whenever I piece together postage with several stamps I put extra stamps on as a tip. Since the Post Office people should expect to do the necessary for every stamp sold, when I buy stamps and don’t ask anything in return, I feel like I’m giving them a little respite, a slackening in their steady pace, a minuscule, anonymous break.
The Internet has caused the Post Office to lose a lot of business. That’s traumatic for the people who make their livings that way, and I hope the government will do right by them as they try to find another way to make a living. I hope they can be as useful as they are now.
I give a little extra to the city of Chico, too. I used to keep nickels, dimes, and quarters for parking meters, and now I use quarters only, even if I’m only gonna be five minutes. You’re welcome, Chico.
If you handed me a #10 envelope and told me where to put it in Chicago or Key West for fifty cents, I might tell you where to put it. If the Post Office charged a dollar instead of the current rate, I wouldn’t squawk. Deliver your own mail and see how you like it.
One comment so far, add another ▶For Janice
I’d persuaded a friend to steer me to a Juneteenth celebration in north Minneapolis. My first children’s book had been published a couple of weeks before, the weather was actually warm, and I was on a roll.
Roy and I had just arrived when I saw a lovely woman and a little boy coming toward us. She walked up and hugged Roy, and they began to chat. I was only five years out of Chicago, where people didn’t hug without a good reason. If there had been something between Roy and her I thought I would’ve known about it. I hoped that this was just Minnesota nice and didn’t mean anything serious.
I thought all that because I’d fallen in love. I fell in love readily back then, with all sorts of women for all sorts of reasons, nearly all of them superficial. This one was different. I’m calling it falling in love, but it was more than that. I recognized her. Roy introduced us and her voice was lovely, too. Bam.
I was a children’s book editor, and she was an artist who wanted to illustrate children’s books. Pow. We exchanged numbers so she could bring her portfolio to my office the next week to be considered for an assignment. She left soon after for a previous commitment and promised to call me for an appointment.
Roy then told me that she had made the painting over the sofa in his living room, the picture I had asked about. Boing.
She showed me her book the next week, and I promised to get her work. We exchanged business cards, and on hers she wrote “Call me anytime.” For two months I looked at that every day on my cork board at work, knowing that calling her wasn’t gonna be like calling anybody else, and I didn’t until mid-August, when I threw a party so I could invite her. She smelled like coconut that evening. She still does, thanks to Skin Trip. I let her use my favorite mug, and she sat on my bed. A month later I asked her to marry me (music swells). That was the summer of 1990.
After twenty-one years of marriage, two more sons, and twenty-seven children’s books, the love of my life is living with stage-four breast cancer and doing her best not to make me a widower, and that’s where you come in. She’s currently at a cancer clinic in Arizona and can’t afford to stay long enough to get the most benefit. Please, help at www.giveforward.com/forjanice. Now, please.
11 comments so far, add yours ▶In the shade
I used to think one of the oddest things about Chico was the way people would park their cars way across a parking lot to get it under a sorry little parking-lot tree for a scrap of shade. That was before I’d experienced a car that’d been sitting for more than ninety seconds in a July sun in Chico, and of course now I do the same thing, estimating the change in the sun’s position so as not to end up in full sun before I leave.
I was shocked that someone would go to that much trouble for a little shade. In Minnesota looking for a spot in the shade would be unseemly, self-indulgent, and a little selfish, too, because you’d be hogging a spot that somebody more deserving could have.
Last summer I found a good spot in a parking lot, in deep shade and certain to stay that way for the duration of my errand. I was happy as I walked to the store until I saw another spot nearer to the store and just as shady. It was also close to a cart corral, in case I thought of enough stuff to buy to warrant that extra convenience for my shopping pleasure. I hadn’t parked near a cart corral, except no cart corral could possibly be more than thirty yards away anyway.
I had a perfectly good parking spot a few steps away, and I wasn’t planning to spend enough money to need a cart. Still, when I saw that other spot cool and inviting one slot away from the cart corral, I thought, “Shit! I could have parked there! If I hadn’t grabbed the first one I saw, I could be right there in the shade almost next to the cart corral! I blew it again!” That’s not a direct quote—except “Shit!”—but that’s the gist of it. I actually thought about going back to my car and driving to the new spot.
I was upset, disappointed in myself, and despairing of ever doing anything right for about 7.3 seconds, down from six months twenty years ago. Right after that I burst out laughing. Not all my loony thoughts make me laugh like that, and I especially appreciate the ones that do. I appreciate all my thoughts eventually, and some take longer than others.
The thoughts that take the longest to appreciate are the ones I’ve had so much that I don’t recognize them as thoughts and, instead, I believe them. Beliefs are very sneaky.
Comments OffReggie Watts
Surveillance
I keep tabs on my family. I like knowing where they are, how they’re doing. Knowing their whereabouts was easy when the boys were little, and still feasible until impromptu sleepovers and overnight trips with the fellas eased my wants to the side. Now I hardly know where anybody is.
When my oldest used to visit his best friend as a tyke, he would walk the block between our houses with his buddy’s big sister watching from her corner and me watching his back from ours. He went to Central America last spring, and I thought I could hear his ties to me humming from the strain the whole time he was gone. Then my wife and I left for the Pacific Northwest before he got back, and our youngest went to Minnesota while we were gone, and I went to a meditation course before he got back, and by Labor Day I lived with two young men, not adults mind you, but two guys who clearly didn’t need a daddy. Nobody said that, but I’d hardly seen them for months, and they had survived on their own, thus demonstrating my uselessness. That’s the story I made up.
I’d forgotten about the great discovery I made long ago that the one true path to happiness with little boys on a playground was not to look while they courted disaster with steel and concrete. It felt at first like neglect to ignore a toddler. What kind of father lets his son risk injury or death? A realistic father.
The alternative to informed neglect isn’t constant vigilance, which I’d gotten used to—it’s constant motion, because I had to go with him, matching him whim for whim or I couldn’t help anyway. I’ve spent many a party going up and down stairs with a little boy. I could be vigilant with a highball in the dining room, but if he takes a header off the top step, I’m within grabbing distance or I’m null and void. If I can’t get there in time to make a difference, I don’t want to know what’s going on.
Now I’m always too far away to help, whether I know his approximate location or not. In an emergency, I can’t get there in time to be useful, so they’re actually on their own and have been for a long time.
I rest in the knowledge that I’ve warped them as much as I could, and those various biases and reactions I’ve managed to plant, mostly inadvertently I suppose, will be useful in adversity or not, and I trust them to know the difference.
Comments OffQuotations
When you can look at yourself the same way you do a sunset, or a puppy, you are seeing clearly. Seth
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals. Gregory Boyle (1954- )
Rather than continuing to seek the truth, simply let go of your views. Siddhartha Gotama (c. 566-480 BCE)
Not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. The Fourteenth Dalai Lama (1935– )
Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are. Chinese proverb
Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for. Earl Warren (1891–1974)
Observing without evaluating is the highest form of human intelligence. Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986)
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. Plato (427–347 BCE)
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)
If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Yiddish proverb
Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths. Etty Hillesum (1914–1943)
We can’t plan life. All we can do is be available for it. Lauryn Hill (1975– )
The spiritual path is simply the journey of living our lives. Everyone is on a spiritual path; most people just don’t know it. Marianne Williamson (1952– )
The truth will set you free, but not until it is finished with you. David Foster Wallace (1962–2008)
A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner. English proverb
This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness. Mary Oliver (1935– )
From the ego’s point of view, spiritual progress is “one insult after another.” Lama Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (1939–1987)
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. Niels Bohr (1885–1962)
Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions. Seng-Ts’an (?–606)
Stillness is the language God speaks. Everything else is a bad translation. Anonymous
Only the hand that erases can write the true thing. Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1327)
One comment so far, add another ▶Dissolution
Everything is cool, there’s nothing to worry about, and it ain’t ever gonna be over. Everything passes away. Eventually your molecules and things will do something else, become something else.
There’s apparently a Buddhist practice that involves a prospective monk spending some weeks or months with a decaying corpse, as a reminder of the transience of all forms, presumably including his. I can see how hanging out with a decaying corpse could teach me things I maybe couldn’t learn any other way, and as it happens I am hanging out with a decaying pre-corpse—my body. I’m not dying any faster than necessary. It’s just that my contemplation of anicca in Pali, anissa in Sanskrit, focuses on the body as the most immediate evidence of the impermanence of all things, all forms, so I’m probably paying more attention to my body than I have since I learned to masturbate.
An upside of death is that I won’t have to buy and wear clothes any more—I’m very tired of buying and wearing clothes—and still I can’t bear to part with a 20-year-old T-shirt from a nonprofit magazine I once edited. Stuff ought to be easier to get rid of, it being transient whether I keep it or not, but when I see that old shirt I remember wild-eyed discussions with our art director about the logo, and my son sleeping in a car seat in my office while I read manuscripts on Saturday mornings while my wife slept in, and how the publisher became my favorite geezer. I’m not detached enough to get rid of that shirt, and whoever manages to survive me is just gonna have to lump it. That’s one T-shirt’s story, and I have many, many more. I’d hate to have to go through my stuff after I’m gone. I hope that’s not required. I don’t like leaving a mess for my family to deal with, but that’s the only thing likely to happen.
My mother wanted a conventional funeral and burial, and when she died I had her cremated. Her ashes are still in my closet. I’m gonna make some specific bequests of my books to people I think will appreciate them, but I don’t expect to have any effect on anything once I’m dead. Not many people will care about my typography titles. Mysteries, a few; style guides, fewer.
As it happens, my fretting about what a mess I’ll leave when I buy the farm is also impermanent, and when I take three or six or 20 deep slow breaths all is well right now.
Comments Off