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.

Dark

I like my coffee dark. Hip baristas have tried to school me over the years about the inverse ratio of caffeine level (lighter more, darker less), but I just smile and stick to the dark. In a seasonally affective sense, dark is distressing, though I am realizing this may be a line I have bought from my own mind about the way things are. Rape is less of a concern than it was, a perk of aging I suppose, though the younger woman inside still runs the show, so we never find ourselves between parked cars and bushes on a dark sidewalk. My mother -in-law once asked me why runners run in the street in the dark and I answered, its the rapists.

Dark O'Clock is the best time to rise out of bed, once having completed the screaming argument in your mind with the more sensible half of your being. Early morning hours are less busy on call, for some reason, than late night hours, and the dark makes being up, the only one up, not even the dog is up (!),  a clandestine act. Woods in the dark can be navigated by head lamp and dog with a flashing light on collar. If the dark is also foggy, headlamps are less helpful but the effect is like falling into a Sherlock Holmes novel, if he wrote about the dark, misty redwood forest instead of the Baskerville moors.

What scares me most in the dark is the automobiles, and when I ride my bike home from work with lights blooming out of every part of my bodily person, even then the cars act like I am the devil itself. How dare I ride my bike in the bike lane fully lighted in reflective clothing while signaling every turn after a hard day at work when it is dark and they just want to get home while playing that game of "how many points do you get for scaring the shit out of a tired doctor on a bicycle." Or how many points for a runner who is in the middle of the cross walk and fully lit, in the luminary sense people, because in the dark a zooming right hook turn into a crosswalk is fully acceptable maybe because no one can see you, sort of like when a toddler closes their eyes and the world that baffles them so disappears conveniently and truly.

When it is dark it is hard to maintain a fast pace for fear of tripping on some small crack in the sidewalk, some stone in the trail, and it forces you to slow down which is at once frustrating and pleasant. Training headlamp at sidewalk or trail, darkness is somewhat defeated but it will always prevail against the non-nocturnal human eyeball. I wonder if being blind is like running in the dark or if being blind is not so much darkness as much as a whole new way to see the world.

Any dog in the dark looks like the cast of a Stephen King novel.  Seen in the distance, they are only eyes, two embers bouncing up and down, and dark calculations of the mind take place, to determine if the unknown factor ahead is a raccoon or a lion or a labrador retriever. The time I surprised a raccoon and it surprised me on Old Arcata Road we both jumped in tandem and that was the one and only time I danced in the dark with a member of genus Procyon.

In the power outages, at least five of my patients fell in the dark. Pacific Gas & Electric thought they were saving people but we forget our vulnerability as creatures of the light, quite at mercy to the unflouresced night trip to the commode or refrigerator, stray shoes or cords on the floor melting into the darkness so they can grab our feet and fling us onto our face, forcing us to kiss the very earth while we fumble for the lifeline which we probably left hanging on the kitchen chair instead of wearing because who wants to wear a lifeline to bed.

And as we approach the shortest day of the year, which always confused me as a child because are not all days 24 hours?, we hunger for the day after that when the bookends of darkness start to slowly inch apart thus leaving more room to add our daytime stories to the collection. My child in prison sits in a dark cell day and night because society has decided prisoners do not deserve windows or vitamin D. Vitamin D requires the sun to make its chemical appearance, like a magic trick of science,it is and the supplement makers of the world are so grateful for the dark so they can charge us all millions of dollars to buy our sunshine vitamin in a plastic bottle which will later clog the ocean and lead us all into the darkness of an inhabitable planet, though first it will choke a sea turtle or dolphin, and at least we have stronger bones and happier affects in the process.

I do not like it when I am running the bay trail in the dark, the one by the highway, and some guy on a bike with an unleashed dog comes slowly toward me and I have three options: keep my cool and put those keys between my 2nd and 3rd finger to jab him if needed, dive into the icy bay, or dive onto highway 101 into the traffic parade of cranky drivers. Thus far, the dark trail riders and their dogs have posed no real threat, so maybe the real problem is the dark recesses of my mind where all the lore about a woman alone at night sits to remind me of my lack of power. Why should the spin of the planet so spin our psyches, why should dark and light be the binary of boogey men and beauty, why should we not rejoice in the stars and the quiet that night brings? It is this or that, them and us, good and bad, dark and light, he and she thinking that makes us all feel we have a grip on reality.  Not all light in the electromagnetic spectrum is visible to the human eye, so maybe the darkness is light. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second and the bulk of the light in our universe is invisible to us, so we call it dark.

Like dark coffee, it holds secrets that we cannot fathom, pearls that were our father's eyes, rich and strange, and it is a place where we can plagiarize tales and poetry to the glow of our own souls, scared and thrilled and serene and often asleep where we dream of the next voyage and the voyages of the day before.