actually....

There have been times in the life of this humble blog-ini that I've felt I should take something back. But it's out there, and to make a fuss over something makes it bigger; makes it oni instead of ini.

For example, my first posted version of the last entry ended with "like tossing a salad. A corn salad." Well, I had to get up and out of bed to go change that one. Hair is not like corn salad, however tempting it was to revisit the cornfield at that point. Hair that is like corn salad has worse problems than crop circles.

See, now I've made a fuss.

I try to be impeccable with my word, though, except for the froth of metaphors that my brain generates. (I am picturing a thought brewery, with large metal containers of thought; metaphors form as a frothy by-product of the thoughts and need to be skimmed off every now and then.) (I cannot help it. These pictures form.)

Anyway, when I've apparently been unclear, or if I leave a misconception out there, I feel a need to clear it up. I got several replies and emails, for example, from people who assured me that they haven't seen crop circles on my head. I know that. And now I feel like I was speaking metaphorically, but everyone thought the metaphor was the liquid, when it was actually just froth. I don't actually have crop circles on my head. There are no bald spots; just really thin hair. I am susceptible to hat head, let's say, whether or not I wear a hat. That's all.

So that's cleared up.

Then, too, there is the garden issue. This is less a matter of being unclear as a matter of being flat-out wrong and leading you to believe our mistake.

We were so excited to see the bounty that had sprung forth after the poisoning incident, and it looked like there would be a great variety. Though we were heavy on the large-leafed vines, we were expecting at least cucumber, at least cantaloupe, of course zucchini. I blogged about the wonder of it all.

As it turns out, they are all butternut squash plants. Sure, there are some tomatoes in there, which we are happy for, but the marvel of a volunteer tomato plant doesn't count. Tomatoes are unflagging volunteers; they're like the kid who raises her hand whenever the teacher asks anything.

But a dozen butternut squash plants? Having a dozen butternut squash plants is like owning a dozen ironing boards. It's just...silly.

Come and get one, or two, or three (butternut squash - we only have one ironing board) in a few weeks. Or maybe months. There a lots and lots of them, but they turn out to be the slowest things in the world to mature. They're like humans, for god's sake.

grooming lessons

Most of my life I had crazy thick hair. These two shots, taken over 30 years apart, I submit as evidence.

I would brush out enough to stuff a pillow every other day, and the loss was never visible. But during chemo, all my follicles closed up shop, as you may recall, and I got an answer to that question that comes up when you are brushing your teeth and checking yourself out in the mirror, about what your scalp looks like under that lush mane. Might you have a birthmark up there, maybe in the shape of a heart? Or Block Island. Or, god forbid, Florida.

Turns out there's nothing at all up there, except that little scar from the tin can Kevie threw at me by accident. The suspense about the scalp unveiling was over very quickly, and I was eager for a 6-month shadow to appear.

Some hair came back, staggering across the smoky battleground waving a tattered flag; white of course. But lots of follicles just couldn't handle all that poison, and they up and died on that battleground. My hair is so thin now.

Yesterday Laura and I got caught in the rain while walking our loop. I felt the cool rain on my head, felt it slide down my forehead, then into my eyes. I said, "Close your eyes, La, and just feel the sensation of the rain hitting your scalp." I expected her to be feeling the same kind of gratitude for the heaven-sent coolness on an insanely hot day. But she said, "Um, it hasn't gotten through to my scalp yet, hon." Suddenly the sensation wasn't as soothing.

Ever since chemo, Laura has been my groomer, just like these guys. If she doesn't do a little fluff here and there every few hours, little crop circles have formed and there are vast swaths of corn plowed under. You could for sure see that Florida birthmark if it were there. There just isn't enough hair to cover the whole scalp. It's like twin sheets on a queen-sized bed. What those sheets are doing out in the cornfield, I just can't explain. I guess that's part of the mystery of crop circles.

There is an old saying: "Give a man an ear of corn and he eats for a day. Teach him how to plow a field, and he can eat for life."* Actually, I think it's something about teaching someone how to fish, but I simply cannot and will not bring fish into the queen-sized bed out in the cornfield. Regardless, now that Laura is away so much of the time, she is worried that I am showing up in counseling sessions with crop circles on my head. She has decided I need to learn to cover my baldish spots on my own, and has been teaching me how my hands should move along the back of my scalp in order to hide the thinner spots. Fluff, fluff. I can't see it, but she points out where the crop circles tend to appear. Fluff, fluff. It's a lot like tossing a salad. On the back of my head.

*AND make crop circles

sweet spot of life

I think I've reached a certain sweet spot in life. I've got the hang of a lot of things by now. I hardly ever cut myself when slicing vegetables or fruit, and may be at my top speed. I've practiced things like that a lot -- over 50 years, I suppose. And I'm not yet wobbly in a dangerous way. That's not so far off, I know. There will come a time, should I be lucky enough to live that long, when I am as unsure with a knife as when I was four.

Right now, though, this is a great place to be.

It's small things. I rarely misbutton my shirts, something that used to happen pretty often in the early days, when you think about it. You get to the bottom of the shirt, and ah geez, you're off by one button. Not in your 50s, my friend. We are Competent. Also, you learn to gloss over the times when these things do happen. They just blend in with the many more times when you have buttoned successfully over the years, and at long last the ratio has become overwhelmingly in favor of a positive buttoning experience.

I'm savoring this era. You know stuff. Like how to pull the hose around a corner without hurting the hosta. How to install shades. How to flick gunk off a pan, right into the sink. How to repair a broken cup, or to recognize when it's truly a goner. Come to think of it, a lot of the competency of this life phase has to do with knowing when something is a goner and when it might be saved once more. The cup, the gizmo, the roof, the favorite shirt. I know exactly when to give up on a strand of floss and take another.

How often do you get to sit at a sweet spot? For me, hardly ever. I generally tip one way or another. Watching the Olympics last night I noticed I couldn't make my way to that particular sweet spot where you care enough about the competition to make it exciting to watch but don't care so much that you feel anxious. I just tipped straight into anxiety. For all of the athletes. And their parents! Oh my god. There were some shots of parents watching their kids do gymnastics, and it was agonizing to watch their agony. That one mom looked like she was going to birth an alien right there in the bleachers.

No thanks to that kind of excitement. But today we were watching some other competition, when suddenly the crowd, and Laura, cheered wildly. "What happened?" I asked Laura. "That guy just scored!" I had moved so far from the sweet spot that I had forgotten to care what was happening. It became as sports events generally are for me -- like watching a fish tank. It's kind of relaxing, but you forget to notice when someone scores, or wins. If you start to really pay attention, you worry about everyone and how badly they want to win, how hard they are trying. There is no sweet spot for me in the wide world of sports.

So I have to focus on my own fleeting experience of an existential sweet spot. I know how to do most of what I need to know how to do, and I either don't screw it up or the screw up gets absorbed into the much larger database of "I've got this" experiences. It's not forever, but it's here now. How sweet is that?

forgiveness lesson

It's high time I let Laura out of the public stocks o' shame I put her in when she poisoned the garden. You remember.

We decided to let the soil Rest In Peace, back in the immediate aftermath of the accident. We pulled out and tossed the poisoned plants and stirred lots of compost into the soil, since compost breaks down the poison, we were told. We bought some hay and covered the beds. We all but played "Taps" and kept a flag at half-mast. The garden looked pathetic all empty and covered, and somehow that felt right.

That lasted a few days, and the empty beds just looked so grim out there. We decided to keep the somber look for most of the beds, but planted colorful flowers in the beds closest to the house. We waited to see if these non-edible plants would tolerate the poisoned soil. They did.

And then, well, you know what's in our compost? Tomato seeds, cucumber seeds, zucchini seeds, cantaloupe seeds. For awhile we just pulled out the little volunteers that kept sprouting through the hay, in an attempt to put them and us out of our misery. We assumed we couldn't eat them even if they did manage to squeeze out a poisoned fruit or two.

But life wants life, you know. It loves itself and just can't help it. The plants just kept coming.

I called a master gardener and explained our situation. She, it turns out, once had sprayed much of her own garden with the same poison the week before it was featured on her town's garden tour. Sure, she hadn't poisoned edible plants, but she empathized, deeply. She said not to feel too badly about it; that these things happen to everyone. My scrawny heart shrank a bit not to have her snort with me over Laura's mistake. I felt very small, very scrawny about that.

She also said the volunteer plants are perfectly safe to eat. The poison was gone after we had pulled the original plants and had had a good rain.

We aren't even entirely sure about some of the plants that are coming, but they're coming. Will this one be a cantaloupe or a cuke? Here is a shot of a bit of the impending bounty, randomly spaced in the hay, and groping its way toward more and more life.

And here is the larger spiritual message I am taking away from all this:

my inner cutie

I write myself notes all the time in the bright light of an insight, a decision, a moment's clarity. I stick those notes some place clever: in the front of my calendar, under my ink blotter (whoa, I wonder if they've come up with a new name for that), between pages 135 and 136 of a book I may not finish, in the front pocket of the shorts I just washed. It's an imperfect system.

Today I came upon a piece of scrap paper with a wide range of notes to self. "Important," I wrote at some undetermined, unremembered point in the past. "Know that your internal experience is changeable." On the same scrap, near that great message - the essence of which I forget about a hundred times a day - is this: "When you have an unpleasant or fearful thought, think of a barking dog tied to a tree. Walk past it and say to the dog, 'thanks for sharing!'"

I have never once done this, but still think it's a great idea. I am going to begin by saying it to actual barking dogs, of which there are several along my daily walking loop.

The best thing about finding the scrap of paper, though, is this little scrawl, below. I imagine that when I wrote it, I meant to remind myself to "evaluate the value of my inner critic," meaning, I suppose, to question its assumed authority.

But today as I read my scrawl, I thought it said, "have you ever evaluated the value of your inner cutie?"

What? I thought. What does that mean?

Before I figured out what I really had written, I had time enough to think: why no! No, I haven't given enough time to evaluating the value of my inner cutie. But when I do, I can see that it's a much more useful part of me than my inner critic.

But hey, inner critic -- thanks for sharing!

viva la revolucion

       Laura has been the Principal at Fieldston Upper for almost two weeks now. She is glad to be there, but feels a bit like Hudson River flotsam. Her office isn't ready, so she's planted herself in the reception area, between the African violet and the copy machine. Our little co-op isn't ready either, so last week she rented the spare room of a nice retired couple in Yonkers. That had its own strains, you know? It wasn't cheap, for one thing. But also, the host was so warm and welcoming that Laura couldn't just flop down after work. The host wanted to hear about Laura's day, to see what she was wearing to dinner with her new colleagues, have her twirl around, all that. That's my job.
       This week (and next) the School has kindly sprung for a hotel. Laura is living on food from the Applebee's that is adjacent to the Hampton Inn. She's bringing home her pile of plastic takeout containers so we can give them to the guy who uses them at his booth at Sunday's Farmer's Market. It seems the least we can do in a generally unecological situation.
       I'm worrying more and more about our gigantic, collective ecological shoes. During the week I am bouncing around, quite literally, by myself in a house that was built for a family. We love this house, and keep thinking that it will someday be such a great place for our hypothetical grandchildren to visit. And on Thanksgiving when there are 17 or 18 warm bodies sprawled all over the house, Laura and I feel like we live in heaven. It's a little louder than heaven is usually depicted, and there's a lot of cooking and more dishes than you can shake a stick at (which really doesn't work at all), but still.
       But I am not sure Thanksgiving is good enough justification to have so much space. I feel like maybe this lovely old home should be one of those places that a gang of revolutionaries take over, use as a center for their revolutionary activities. They storm in, shouting that it's too big for one person -- and they're right. But they toss around our books and break those clay figures the kids made when they were little. They neglect the plants, leave dishes everywhere, and replace my dad's paintings with graffiti. I just hate that. I wonder if they will let me keep my home office, or if they maybe think counseling is a sign of pre-revolutionary alienation and brainwashing.

       I wish I would welcome the revolutionaries, but I'm so attached to my life as it is. Just terrible. I am trying to live in a way that makes me worthy of all my blessings, but I want my green smoothie and eat it, too. I am trying to use the car as little as possible. Last week I mapped out a 6-mile walk to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, where I needed to return a small rug for the bathroom I painted the moment Laura drove away. Finally I realized it would take me all day to walk to the store and back, and decided that perhaps the earth would forgive me if I drove there as long as I felt kind of bad about it. So I drove to return the mass-manufactured rug, and came home to search on Etsy to find a homemade, cotton rug. ¡Viva la revolucion! Viva la humble, ambivalent, imperfect revolution within me.

what happens when the mind is back in charge

Laura is getting her first acupuncture treatment, using a Groupon I bought her. She'll be home in about an hour, and I'm making summer leftover lunch for us. A dollop of homemade kidney bean hummus, some tomato and basil salad. The tomatoes look a little sad, but still edible.
I'm cutting up last night's grilled chicken.
Mm, that looks good. Maybe I'll take a little bite of one of the chunks I just made.
Nah. Resist the impulse.
That is all you have to do. Just resist the impulse.
Gee, every second, that's what we're doing, it seems like.
Maybe it's all about resisting impulse.
Resist the impulse.
Like we direct our own behavior, but doing that means working against so many impulses.
(I keep cutting up last night's chicken.)
"Resist the impulse to scream."
That's a phrase, right? Where did that come from?
Huh.
Resist the impulse to scream.
Interesting! The more you focus on that, the harder it is to do.
If you really focused on it, like really hard, eventually you'd almost have to scream.
I wonder if I could have a "resist the impulse to scream" bumper sticker made. Get everyone behind my car thinking about it.
Maybe someone would scream then, right there in their car.
Or maybe they'd think it's a political statement. Or sort of social commentary. Or just a goof.
Maybe people would talk about it. At a red light. There's a long silence while they wait for the light, and then the passenger says to the driver: "What do you think that bumpersticker means? 'Resist the Impulse to Scream.'" The driver says, "Huh. No idea. Maybe it's like...a thing."
I wonder if there is a "resist the impulse to scream" t-shirt.
Maybe I should make one for myself.
But then someone would steal the idea!
(Still cutting the chicken.)
Eh, but it's a great idea, so I should just put it out there. It's not good to be selfish with ideas.
But what about that for a book title? Resist the Impulse to Scream: short essays.
That sounds like all the essays will be desperate, shrill, dark. Or like a manifesto of some kind, where the author knows names and controversies and can sound culturally literate and informed. I can't muster a whole book of that.
What does Google say? "Resist the impulse to scream." Put it in quotes. Oh, that's interesting. You get lots and lots of these.
I wonder if i should TradeMark it. "Resist the Impulse to Scream"™.
Maybe I should save the domain name. Is it available?
ResistTheImpulseToScream.com Yes! Available. Only $12.99 a year.
Oh, that's funny. ResisttheImpulse2Scream.com is available, too.
Snort. Who would use that?