Viaduct Kiss

 Recurring dream: a viaduct from my childhood town appears, I drive over it and something magical happens. One side of the viaduct is safe (the side that goes to my home). The other is some kind of slightly off Terabithia, magical but not always in a good way.

In real life, the viaduct bridges over railroad tracks. Under this viaduct I once kissed a self-identified dirtball. "Why are you hanging out with a dirtball?" said he. I was a practically invisible nerd with braces and hair I did not yet understand how to manage. It was actually a nice kiss, all clandestine. Have you ever been under a viaduct where the slope meets the underside of the bridge and you can tuck yourself in behind a pillar and hide? 

At the beach today there were truck tire marks all over, by the water, on the dunes. THE truck in question was stuck in some impossible position in the sand, truly I do not think it will be able to be extricated unless a crane is involved. The hair on the back of my neck stood up when Dog and I passed by them, as they were doing some maneuver with a rope to try to, well, try to do something that indicates they slept through physics class. We went along our way and spent an hour by the ocean on this luscious day. September on a Northern California beach is a balmy, gentle time. Today was a good day for a beginner surfer, with small, organized sets of waves pealing in regularly. Dog is almost 12 years old and he cannot really run like he used to, but he enjoys this beach as much as anyone can ever enjoy anything. Like joy with a fluffy top knot and 4 stick legs. 

We were passing by THE truck, still stuck ass backwards in the dune, and in that way that any woman on earth can understand, I took a wide berth around it with Dog on short leash. Still, I was surprised when the dog of THE truck rushed us and attacked my old boy. THE people of THE truck screamed at the attacking pup and finally pulled it off, and I just got the heck out of there as fast as I could, in self-preservation mode. I did not even realize till we were part way home that Dog was injured, and bleeding.

A vet visit, $300 and some antibiotics-Dog will be OK. 

This past week a governor enticed some traumatized immigrants onto a plane and dumped them at Martha's Vineyard, then laughed and crowed about it to a rally of supporters who cheered out loud, in public. This is America. Grown ups take joy rides on a serene beach and have animals in their care they cannot handle. People taunt women and children and men who have literally walked hundreds of miles at risk of death to reach our country. Little girls are raped and forced to carry the subsequent baby to term. This is America.

I am nearly 53 years old. I was thinking by this point in life I would have a grasp on what's happening around me. That somehow it would all make sense. But I still do not understand why people are mean. What is the point? And why is it so often worn as a badge of honor? 

When I was 8 or 9 years old, a man called our home and I answered. He said "I'm going to come and kill your Daddy!". Apparently this was related to Dad allowing a group of gay men to meet in the church where he served as pastor. In my dreams, the home where I grew up represents the safe side of the viaduct. But in reality, it was where 8 year old me was introduced to the way someone can assault your space with hate. My parents died long ago (of cancer, not wing nuts, though perhaps their cells mutated in response to the stress of trying to be kind in a fucked up world). The childhood home has had many other owners since. It is reported someone has even cooked meth in my mother's old kitchen. Where we used to eat our breakfast cereal, and bake cookies, and where you could stand at the window over the sink and watch the deer eating my father's garden. 

In my dreams, the viaduct has led to Zion National Park, where I was trying to take a run and kept getting lost. Once it led to a VA clinic that I had to work at and for some reason deliver babies. In reality it still leads to the IGA and from the top you can see my old high school, just sitting there and still demoralizing new generations of teenagers. I never graduated from high school, so maybe the viaduct dreams are the deep anxiety that someone will pull me over on this road of life and require me to complete my PE classes. In my old uniform.

The Terabithia I seek probably doesn't require driving over the viaduct where a dirtball kissed an invisible nerd. Might be that all the magic I need is accessed by paying kind attention to the people around me. That's pretty much what my parents taught me. How we respond to the constant assault on serenity, otherwise known as being a human on earth, is a choice we make. You can cook meth in my Mom's kitchen, but you cannot diminish the lovingkindness she brought into this world. You can want to shoot a man of Christ for being kind to others, but it won't heal your own despicable despair. You can drive over the beach crabs and make a perfectly nice dog whimper in pain, but you cannot take away his pure joy that only seems to increase even though the beach trip has happened a million times before.

You can be mean. I wish you wouldn't be though.

Invisibilidad

 Había una vez, ella era invisible.

I was thinking about the pandemic. Women did the bulk of the child care when children suddenly found themselves at home for a year or more. Same women might also be trying to work. They might have had to stop working in order to support their children in zoom school. It was expected the women would be the ones to do this. Women also did and do the bulk of the nursing, tending to people dying horribly on ventilators in the ICU. Nursing those in the overfull emergency rooms that still cannot accommodate everyone on any given day. Nurses getting assaulted by patients as they do their essential function. A somewhat worn and tattered "Heroes Work Here" sign greeting them as they walk in for each shift. Women are doctors too and they are less invisible but the $2 million in wages missing over their 40 year career compared with the men doctors is yet to be found. 

As my husband and I soon celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary, I am thinking too about marriage. Why was I so fortunate to have a partner that makes me feel seen every day? If anything I worry he does not feel seen as he has inhabited the traditional role of stay at home parent during our life together. Marriage is interesting in its original purpose of subjugating women into a role where they need protecting by a man. Particularly white women who are currently being forcibly put back into their role of propagators of the race. It is no coincidence that Roe falls in this era of renewed energy around white supremacy as the creed of our nation.

I might be angry, and I realize that is not very ladylike of me. But I am thinking about feminine power and how it is the missing piece of the healing arts in our country. The data are clear that while we have mad technology in our system of medical care, the outcomes are poor compared to other countries of similar wealth. We spend a lot more on it too. When I was pregnant in medical school the men were befuddled by my very presence. I pumped breast milk in the women's bathroom stall. I pretended not to be a mother so that I could be a resident that people respected. I worked and worked and worked. Privileged as I am, I can see this was not ideal, now, 27 years later. But perhaps more importantly on a societal basis is the parts of me I tried not to bring into my healing art, pushing down my tenderness and compassion for fear of not being seen. As recent as last week a male colleague was chiding me for the work I do, which is high intensity, low productivity medicine that focuses on the goals and concerns of each human being for whom I serve as physician. I think his words were "what exactly is it you do all day?"

If I am invisible those I serve are invisible minus a million. Like some bullies on the playground the world screams this at them every minute. Like one hand clapping I know the self is a mirage. Like hands clasped I know we are more like the trees in a forest, where it appears they are all individuals but if you dig a bit underground you will see they are all connected to each other. My hands play Rachmaninoff and they can palpate a liver. For this I can thanks the many teachers in my life, my root system of people who shared their skills and believed in me. That saw me. 

My anger too is not in isolation. There are whole communities of people and particularly people who identify as women and girls that are strengthening our connections. We sit with each other in silence as a warrior sangha, but since we have powerful presence we do not need words. I invite the 50% of white women who voted and continue to vote for fascism and self annihilation to consider that they could be a part of this sangha. Or congregation. Or root system. Or a girls night out that lasts well beyond the dancing and frivolity.

In medicine, in healthcare, in relationships of healing, the feminine is what we all need in order to see the outcomes improve. A heart transplant is cool. My dad had one, actually. But we also need to notice the women who are dying in pregnancy and childbirth, and now forced childbirth. Are women worthy of living? 

Once upon a time she was invisible. 

Define Blue Eyes

Define fine. Is it pleasing, first-class, thin and wispy or what a teenager says when they are feeling snippy? "I'm fine." Maybe it is not being bombed or maybe it is being bombed and the world actually caring, versus living somewhere, say Syria, that does not lead to people posting supportive memes on social media. Fine is how I would describe a nice human being. Or the Steinway I recently decided to buy. Fine means okay, rare, mundane, or it is furious or it is grains of sand settling in the tight curls of my big, goofy poodle after a run at the beach. A fine speaker gives a solid speech. 

Someone angry with blond hair and two X chromosomes demanded that Ketanji Brown Jackson define "woman." KBJ continued to smile, though I doubt she felt fine, and gently reminded angry XX that she is not vying for a seat on the Supreme Court of biology. But of course, biology is law and politics moreso than science these days, and nine justices get to decide what I do with my body and you do with yours and whether my transgender child should be allowed to live. What defines woman? When I was a tween and giving piano recitals, I wanted to wear tails but was told I could not because I am a girl. When I go to work now, my hair is too short or too long or my body too fat or too thin. It is hard to be comfortable in your skin. There, I defined "woman." I would rather be Circe than the sailors of Odysseus or Odysseus himself. Though it may also be fine to be a swine.

The best part of definitions is they are often wrong. Like the close-but-no-cigar way we all go through life, narrating the events as if we know and understand them. All of us walking about with thought-bubbles like cartoons. If our mind bubbles were readable, imagine the cacophony! Imagine how hard it would be to follow the billions of story lines. I would say to you "did you read what that guy just thought???" 

Imagine having to read Ted Cruz' thought-bubbles.

A little bit ago I gathered with friends to watch the ashes of Dan be scattered by his wife and child. It is the third ash-scattering I have attended, the first two being my parents. Have you ever tasted human ash? Or felt it? It is so weird how they put it in a plastic bag, like someone's sandwich. I wonder if it is the whole person or just a sampling? Is it really that actual person or do they just mix everyone up and dole out a bit to each family? I have never tasted ash on purpose but it does blow in the wind and it is very sticky, and it clings like it is trying to stay around rather than be discarded and separated from other humans. My parents' ashes are buried in our old back yard and sometimes I fantasize about digging them up and reburying them somewhere closer so I can visit them but I suppose by now they have seeped into the soil and fed some blades of grass which a deer then ate, perhaps incorporating it into their milk with which they fed to their fawn who shat and helped a wildflower bloom into neon color. 

My mother kept a very clean house. You couldn't put down a glass and walk into the other room for something without coming back and finding it washed and dried and back in the cupboard. My parent's house was the oldest house in our neighborhood in Wisconsin, very modest, with the best sledding hill in back. Rattlesnakes and rabbits and deer abounded, as did the bees you would accidentally step on while running barefoot in the summer, leading to a justified sting. The piano my parents got for me at age 16 to replace our little spinet was 40 years old when they bought it, and came from the local music store owner's home. It dominated the living room in our house. Now that house has other inhabitants. Turns out one of them over the years cooked methamphetamines in my mother's kitchen. Impermanence defined, and I doubt the ashes of Mom would mind.

The piano is much older than 40 now and me no longer 16. I hauled it everywhere over the years of my life, up 4 flights of a walk up flat in Minneapolis, across the country to California and back again and back again. It is, like all of us, not meant to last forever. Nor will the 1967 Steinway M I hope to bring home soon, but hopefully it will outlast me. I wonder, when human extinction takes place, about music. I think of all the grief around the real possibility of our species burning itself into oblivion, that for me this is the greatest grief of all, that the universe in general will lack Beethoven and Bach and John Coltrane. I am learning that attachment is a sure way to prolong suffering, but the late Beethoven Quartets are hard to release. I would rather not taste the ashes of art and music in my mouth, or have them cling to my skin to remind me about what can be lost.

Define fine. I won't be running the Boston Marathon as planned, due to injury. But I took a nice walk in the woods today and the trillium are absolutely everywhere, so I guess I am fine. I might never run the way I used to, because I am aging and fatigued, yet I guess I am fine. I guess, in my estimation, it is fine to be alive and to feel the cold nose of my dog push against my hand while I scroll on my phone, him trying to bring me into his world and out of the bizarre virtual universe. He also pushes against my hands with his fuzzy face when I practice piano for too long, and I cannot discern whether this is out of the same frustration and disgust my siblings felt listening to me play endlessly in our very small childhood home or if he just really wants to go for a walk. Or wishes a scratch on the head, after which he will trot off contentedly. 

Lately I have been asking people how they define compassion. 

Compassion is a bag of worms feeding the soil that produces astounding flowers and trees that bear fruit that we eat and the sweetness explodes in our mouth and reminds us of Christmas morning. Compassion is open heart surgery with a grafted vessel infused with hope and bitter wine. Compassion is grasping a thorny mess and holding it tight like you might hold a child shaking in fear after a clap of thunder that shakes the foundations of your home. Compassion is letting your mind bubble pop without regrets. Compassion is being disarmed. Being alarmed but not paralyzed by fear, then rolling up your sleeves and rebuilding what is broken. Compassion is taking a walk when you wish you could run or taking your mother's ashes and thanking them the way you wished you had thanked her.

Fine is what you pay when you don't follow the rules. Love is what you use to counter fools. Piano is hard to play when your dog nudges your hand. Steinways are fabulous and grand. I will run again when I can. I remember well the last time I ran with Dan. Both of us carefree in the golden hills of Palo Alto, his early dementia not slowing him down, his blue eyes sparkling. 

His fine blue eyes sparkling.