Testaments

For a year now, I have been trying to learn and memorize the 48 preludes and fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach. These are the old testament of piano. Stepwise, Bach takes us through the keys, the well-tempered tuning presented in fortspinnung. Fanny Mendelssohn, the lesser known but equally precocious sister of Felix, memorized 24 preludes in a week at age 13. I am not jealous. I am not jealous. I am not jealous.

If I was Fanny Mendelssohn and 13 years old, I would have gotten the Well Tempered Clavier memorized by now. But I am 3.9 x 13 and fatally distracted by the world around me. 

Memorizing music came naturally to me once. Actually scratch that, it was always hard work, but maybe I used to have better focus. Back in the days when I was not on call 24/7 and did not have this pocket-sized computer sitting next to me, making little chirps and rings and silently beckoning me away from any other task at hand. In music school, the practice rooms were in the basement of a building built to withstand a bomb (literally), and once in the little room with the door closed, you could be alone for hours. No phones in those days, except the ones connected to the wall. You could emerge from hours of practice into a dark world and realize your fingers were still tapping out phrases on your thighs which ached from sitting on a wooden bench. Once at midnight I came out of the music school to a large pack of raccoons. They all stopped their garbage can raid and swiveled their heads to me, two dozen glowing eye-dots between me and the parking lot.

I have been trying to memorize opus 109 of Ludwig Van Beethoven. The 32 piano sonatas he composed are the new testament of piano. Herein lies the gospel of theme, exposition, recapitulation and rondo. The deafer he got, the more laser-focused these pieces of music. No chaff, only wheat. Blessed are the piece makers, for they will be called the children of God.

When I sit and play piano, I think about coronavirus. I look out the window where the redwoods just sit there, unconcerned. So nice to have a day at home, but I worry about my friends on the hospital wards. I stop and scroll through my phone in case something has happened I need to know about instantly. I think about the fact that it might be better not to know.

Montel wrote an email to us today to let us know our child in prison is in good hands. New cellie, always some fear there. I worry about that too. But thanks for the reassurance, Montel.

Seems like the only time I do not worry is when I run. If I could run all day every day, I would never worry. The mask fogs my glasses and I take them off and run somewhat blind but at least not fog-blind. My brain turns off on a tangent with each new trail. On single track, if a runner comes from the opposite direction, we both pull back into the woods, diving away from shared air particles. I cannot hug friends. Our dogs still intermingle though.

That is not actually true, as my dog is on high alert regarding any other dog stepping paws on the same planet. How dare you enter my woods, my beach, my neighborhood! I fear my dog would be a Trump supporter if human, but then I see how he has a pure joy and realize there is no joy in Trumpland. Only hate and greed and mistrust of science. My dog digs science. He plays fetch with the discipline of a randomized controlled trial. He loves me best but Dr Fauci would be a close second, I am pretty sure.

I have not been able to creatively write for a long while. Mainly due to the aforementioned fatal distraction and a heavy dose of consternation. My piano may be well-tempered, but I am not. I tilt at betrayers of democracy. I foam at the mouth on the inside while smiling sweetly on the outside. I get on my knees and pray for clarity. I usually am tying my running shoes during this maneuver, and the prayer works almost every time. I write now as a testament to the dis-ease I fight daily. My face shield gives me superpowers. My hands are washed of any malarkey.

I wish everyone had the courtesy of Montel. Just to tell us we got each other's back, not to worry, not to despair. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. 

Blessed are those sharing their music with us during this lockdown, including the current Queen of Bach. I am not jealous. I am not jealous. I am not jealous.

Apocalyptic Meditations

The albuterol inhaler my doctor ordered was not the one my insurance covers so I did not pick it up.

The orange sky is not, I hope, some kind of electoral omen.

When short of breath I cannot work because it could be COVID-19.

Nobody really likes masks.

If I could do one thing over from my parenting years it would be taking a full year off from work for each new child.

Daniela reminded me the Bach Preludes and Fugues are the Old Testament, the Beethoven Sonatas the New Testament. Of piano.

Reading the Bible cover to cover makes all the world seem unnerving, especially if you are a woman, not white, not straight, and not big on smite. But did any right-leaning Christian ever read even one word ascribed to the Christ? 

If it was to become COVID, will it involve cardiomyopathy? The tightness in my chest might just be anxiety about 

What can be controlled and what cannot?

My child Zoomed a math exam today even though the world is on fire and that gave me hope. 

It can be 120 degrees where my other child is imprisoned. Sometimes they pour water from the toilet on the floor and lay in it for relief.

Even though I believe in God I find 

No judgement

Anyway my tax dollars will be used to help the department of justice defend the reputation of our rapist in chief.

I earned that money carrying for all kinds of people, many not well-off, in a rural place that some might describe as a shithole county

If just based on statistics of wealth, life expectancy, drug use and other public health measures of interest.

Others might be shocked by the beauty and in fact flock here to escape to the cooling breezes and redwood mist.

Whales stop by often. As do seals, mountain lions, elk and foxes. We also have a rat in our yard. 

Templeton, I think, or a descendant thereof. He likes the snacks our chickens receive and the detritus from the bird feeder which is still my all time favorite housewarming gift from 18 years past.

Coffee every morning, while junkos and hummingbirds feast, probably annoyed I watch them so intently.

Or once a deer wound it’s astounding tongue up into the conical bird feeder and drained it in 3 minutes flat. 

In an ideal society a mother would not have to choose career versus children. My own Mom puked her chemotherapy guts out before she went to work after making my lunch for my day at fifth grade.

America cares about children except for the child care aspect, the paid maternity/adoption leave, the healthcare coverage, the feeding of hungry mouths.

People should not be hungry.

I wanted to get some albuterol today because I am having trouble breathing. 

In my country, you can only breathe if you have enough clout. The right hue. The right insurance blue, shielding 

You from worry

A Bird Whispered in My Ear and Other Pandemic Ponderings

When I walked on a sidewalk in another country
Somebody's hope
Floated by on the river's edge
Smelling like sewage and fish markets.

The river, not their hope.

It left me breathless (their hope, not the river).

It felt like that when I saw Neowise, that comet. My stomach twisted around itself, settled only by the hot cocoa and small paper bags of popcorn we brought with us to Berry Summit. Sixty-eight hundred years from now it will come by again.

My children swear like sailors, though if I am honest I have never actually met a sailor who swears. I sit down in front of my piano and try to learn music. I stand six feet apart from my neighbors at the farmer's Market on Saturdays. I shave my hair short. I do a three thousand piece puzzle my brother sent, like he is continuing the tradition of torturing his little sister. My dog ate some pieces of the puzzle. I post on Facebook about fake vacations. I can't remember how my mother sounded or her smell. I get a weekly swab for SARS-COV2. The skin on my hands is rough from so much hand-washing.

When I walked in another country, I flashed on the collective burden of humanity on this Earth, which  made me shift my bag of souvenirs, suddenly awkward in my grasp. We stopped at a villager's home, where an elder weaved on her dirt floor. The sewage draining by path reminded me that civil engineers outclass doctors every time, when it comes to the health of communities. When I walked my daughters through the red light district in the still light, almost-midnight sky, it was not on purpose, we just ended up there. Women in windows, like so much merchandise.

A professor of history, a mother, a specialist in the rise of fascism, was gassed and shot by the feds in Portland. Rubber bullets bounce off skulls there as an experiment in what we will tolerate. I am indignant, then spend my day gardening and listening to my book on Audible.com.

When I walked in another country, I marveled at how the women gathered around my child who lost their kite in the Yangtze River. I had lost my child, in a city of some millions, and it just turned out to be they were in the middle of a circle of cooing mother-types. Later the Maoist driver untangled the kite string, silently. He was always silent except that time he guffawed at my child saying in perfect Mandarin, "who farted?"

If everyone wore a mask, we could venture out more safely. If we could venture out more safely, less people would die. If less people die, it would be less sad and frightening.

When I sit next to my husband of almost twenty-eight years, I understand why people insist on going to the intensive care unit even when it makes no physiological sense.

There is something reassuring about leaning against someone you have known for so long, who sees the beauty and funny in the same instant you do, and who can sit through the same piece of piano music countless times without batting an eyelash.

Though often this ends in snoring on the couch. I mean I look over like "did you hear that sublime thing I just did with that passage of Bach?" and he is open-mouthed sleeping. If you play Bach to the open mouth of a sleeping person, do the notes float down their windpipes and come out later as a musical eructation? Can you burp a fugue?

As I walk down the sidewalk in another country, I eat up the antiquities with my reluctantly American eyeballs. They taste like fresh fruit that might have ancestors in the Garden of Eden.
They smell like some ancient army pounding drums on a dusty road. They look like bones, all catacombed yet humming with stories of all the shitty empires of yore. They feel like music written in modes I never dreamed existed.

The antiquities, not my eyeballs.

Fresh bread and a Miyazaki flick. The dog leaning against you, all trust and fluffiness. The sudden realization you have to do more before it is too late. And by doing more I mean to say loving more.
A small bird whispered in my ear that of all the places it ever flew, straight into the heart of compassion was the absolute fucking bomb.

The Smell of Home Baked Bread

komorebi 5/24/20

Apparently a murderer was walking in my woods the other day. Right now I am honestly more worried about the people having parties without social distance then showing up in my woods and spitting hello at me with their maskless faces. I am pretty sure I can outrun a meth head, but I've heard that SARS-COV-2 does track repeats.

When I run the birds have things to say. Not that I think this has anything to do with me and this is why it makes me so happy. The birds are perfectly content to sing. The suns rays are split by redwoods and banana slugs linger on the path like some kind of cartoon drawn by a five year old. When I run, the mud splatters from late spring rains and fading purple irises sit path side. 

Every time my husband sneezes, I shout "CORONAVIRUS". I am fairly certain he is tired of this. Nonetheless he keeps baking bread, making pies, shaping Choux. I shelter in a bistro in Paris or what I imagine a bistro in Paris to be since I have never been to Paris and at this point such travels are seeming unlikely, unwise, unnecessary.

As a world class worrier, I lose sleep over, and over.

Yo-Yo Ma played all of the Bach cello suites in a live performance this weekend. Live in the sense that he sat down with his cello and his magnificent brain and played them, all six of them, for anyone who was able to tune in. There must've been a sound guy there too, at least to set it up. It was incredibly intimate, this man playing Bach alone in a studio, to thousands or maybe millions of viewers. Maybe trillions. Should've been trillions. Solace, comfort, skill, and words and music to remind us we are bound together. Music 300 years old and yet sounding shockingly modern at moments. 

Today (ironically, Memorial Day) a lot of people seemed to decide the virus isn't really a thing anymore. Gosh, gee I hope they are right. 

I mean it isn't really a thing as long as you are not famous

Unless you are John Prine or Adam Schlesinger or Ellis Marsalis.

I mean it isn't really a thing as long as you are not old.
Unless you have a child who gets sick and maybe dies.

I mean it isn't really a thing as long as you believe in freedom and God.
Unless someone at church is sick and might not even know it yet.

I do feel for people who are truly stuck at home. I "get" to go to work every day. Where I tend to sick people and lose sleep over, and over again.

When I run I notice the Ravens click-clacking, croaking, gurgling. The thrush whistles once or spins up a wild scale. Woodpeckers tap-tap-tap on trees, they have a secret knock and someone lets them in maybe for a worm and beetle party or something. Top secret. Forget-Me-Nots never sing but they whisper and make you look at them when they could otherwise so easily be missed. "Psst, running lady, down here. Watch out for that murder guy."

Komorebi makes my heart ache for something it misses but cannot quite remember in so much detail. A feeling also evoked by the smell of home baked bread. A feeling also evoked by my practically grown child's laughter while watching her favorite Korean drama. A feeling also evoked when sitting on a kitchen stool watching Yo-Yo Ma play Bach on youtube. A feeling also evoked by the way I want to hug my friends but just at the moment I cannot.

Because, science.
The truth, it is murder.

This too shall pass

OLD NEWS

Calamity is fairly normal.

Just read ancient Greek myth

Or any recorded human history

And feel reassured.

It is as old as word and song,

As small pox blankets,

As warfare.

Doctors, nurses and the people who clean the hospital rooms

Know blood can spatter everywhere,

Like that guy who put the block behind the 747 wheel

With his bare hand,

Drawing blue gowns into the ER room,

Sails in the wine-dark sea.

Stupidity receives no judgement here.

Refuse to listen to Dr Fauci,

Your right as an American.

Don’t fucking touch my apple pie.

Defund research, 

Disable pandemic response teams,

Have just enough staff and PPE to get by.

Economy, from the Greek for

Household Management,

In American translates as 

More important than lives,

My colleagues and friends 

Our grandparents

My own immunocompromised

Self

Bows to wealth.

Happily, it is all old news.

The plague will pass

And Hamilton will again be 

In theaters.

Late night TV hosts will wear their best suits.

We will hug,

And high-five every spectating child along the route of the New York City Marathon.

Which even before COVID-19 seemed a little dicey.

Yet absolutely irresistible.

Bionic Nursing Shoes

My Mom was a nurse. When she bought new white sneakers for me, I would don them, then go to the top of Hagen Road, sit on my baby blue bike with the STP sticker on the banana seat and ride the mile downhill scraping the tops and sides of my shoes along the street the whole way. Because.

My Grandmother was also a nurse. One day after work when she returned to their Peter Cooper Village apartment and was serving my Grandfather his before dinner wine and snack, she mentioned that Mickey Mantle had been in the office that day and people seemed pretty impressed and had he heard of him? Grandpa dropped the cheese right off his cracker.

When my husband came home from the Joggn Shoppe with my new Hoka Clifton's yesterday, I almost dropped the cheese off my cracker. But ever since Laura M named them "bionic nursing shoes" I love them more than any other shoe I have ever worn in my entire life.

I will need these dreamy cushion of clouds after my fifty miler this weekend. These creamy, angel food cake, eagle feather, thick foot gloves of love. These bionic nursing shoes.

Will I finish the fifty miler? Hope so. Will I contract coronavirus before, during or after? Hope not. Will my husband be crewing me starting with getting to the chilly Rodeo Beach at 5:45 AM? Yes he will. Will he have these shoes in a bag for me just in case I need them? Damn straight.

I have become a bit thick myself in the last month, not really part of my training plan, but a side effect of my beloved husband-crew's cooking and baking skills. When my eldest saw these new shoes, she said "thiccccccc". So clearly we were meant to be together, these shoes and I.

Speaking of shoes, did you know we put people in them? They call them Solitary Holding Units, or SHUs. When one of your children is placed there what can you do besides run 20 miles in the forest or sit upon your couch eating pastry? You could curl up in the fetal position in bed, which I have tried, but when you are on call almost 24/7 it is hard to accomplish for very long.

Speaking of pastry, "choux pastry" is now a normal, conversational term in our house. So there.

When my friend crashed her bike last month the whole world shifted. And yet it did not. She is the best all-around athlete I have ever known. She continues to be so in her recovery, probably now doing the hardest workouts of her life. She does not need bionic shoes. She carries in her heart and sinew and brain all that matters in life. In her recovery I have watched her tending to healing everyone around her.

Healing everyone around her.

And now with 3 1/2 more days between me and longer than I have ever run in my life, I feel not the least interested in the outcome. A strange feeling before a race. I am wondering some things, like when will the nausea and gut cramps set in, will I fall, will I see a whale as I gaze out on the Pacific Ocean from the headlands of Marin, simply one of the most beautiful places in the world? Will my Speedgoats grip the rocks and mud? Will my husband talk me off the ledge when I think I need to quit? Will I listen to music or just the sound of my feet, the wind in the redwoods and the crash of surf? Will I get a work-related phone call at mile 27? And 38?

So many unknowns.

I expect my choux pastry stores (thighs, abdomen, chin and God knows where else) will fuel me well. I expect my incredible fortune to be able to do this race will humble me every step of the way.
I expect to leap over walls in my bionic nursing shoes.

Hopefully I won't get disqualified from this race for the unfair advantage of carrying in my heart the amazing, freakish combination of Jamie Sommers, thicccc booty and the strongest, least complaining people I know: nurses. And my imaginary Laura.

Irish Blessings

When you are outside enough, you will bring pieces of nature into your home. A leaf on a shelf, dried in autumn fragility. Five or five thousand redwood fronds in corners or stuck to a canine paw or ear like jewelry. Beach sand in bed linen.

Several months ago when playing piano, I became diaphoretic, nauseous, had palpitations and my face started tingling on one side. Certain it was not some transcendental reaction to my unpolished Bach, I was equally certain I was having a stroke. I laid down on the couch and touched my cheek, brushing away the craziest, neon yellow, black-spiky caterpillar. It had left a rash where it tread upon my face. I took it outside and wondered what it all means anyway.

When you enter the home or life of a sick, vulnerable human being, you will bring pieces of that vulnerability into your heart. Methamphetamines sit on a a counter near a plate of cookies. The cat crawls in through an open window. Someone cannot breath. Something is infected. However the epigenetic fallout of systematic racism makes the idea of going to the ER or hospital more terrifying than death.

You chart the winding paths of attempted healing. You know the right answer to every test question but they never taught you about slumlords or the pushers that deliver drugs to the hands of elders. Penicillin is magnificent. Unless the disease is grinding poverty, abysmal despair, multi-drug-resistant hopelessness. The tobacco is so thick that the carpet blows smoke rings with each step you take. You will have to change your clothes later.

You run so many miles on trails 6, 8, 13.5, thick with mud from the rain, the rain. Quick steps grip the curves made by mountain bikers, like the periphery of the Indy 500 track. Dancing, one foot on each rim, over that root, skipping that stone. Passing families with tired or curious children, and passing unwashed homeless men out on their various walks.

High tide pushes you away from the shore to the hilly dunes. Saw grass slices your ankles and calves. Your son cried about this once and you gave him a hard time about it and maybe that's why he is in prison. That thought like the sand collecting in your shoes and the ticks hitching a ride on the dog sticks to you and follows you into the next morning when you lay in the still dark, separating from sleep. In those dunes a burrowing owl runs by and you carry that with you too. It brings back your first date with your beloved, a long walk by a bay punctuated by little man-owls puffing their chests out, running you out of their neighborhood because you do not belong.

Cars crash, helicopters fall out of the sky, hearts break, people make it or they do not. You smell the destruction of Eucalyptus trees driving down the highway to work and wish it was scented this way always.

You sweep your floor today
Redwood needles wait at the door
To replace their binned brothers tomorrow.

All this falling apart, this disintegration of order, of what we need it to be, is not like JS Bach.
Bach JS like not is, be to it need we what of, order of disintegration this, apart falling this All.

My parents had a coffee mug that said "May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead." Even at age 6 I thought that was one fucked up Irish blessing.

Being part Irish myself, I propose this:
For those in pain, may you feel loved.
May our homes be open to the dubious gifts of nature.
May our hearts hold space for kindness in this mean and meaningful world.
And may the disorder turn upside down and all around like the most clever Bach fugue of all.