The third installment in my bimonthly series. Some songs are good to dance to, some songs you have to dance to. Buddy and the band are doing some serious gravity-busting here that gives me the same kind of dance-y cosmic jitters I've only ever gotten from a couple Michael Jackson songs. Weird, but for reals.
This ain’t no sock hop, bud. The punch is spiked, the pants are tight and your corsage is a black dahlia and bleeding hearts…
You dance—squirm, a thrust, gasp—until your palms are pomade-wet. Dreams thump and grind to a hiccuping guitar, caress curves of the stand-up bass. This is the realm of the half-man, half-boy, and I’m just along for the ride because sitting still for 2 minutes 18 seconds is impossible.
Remember the day of Mom’s funeral? It was glorious, mid-August, and if you wanted a word to describe the space between the sunrise and the sunset as a noun, I would say exultation. Butterflies and hawks, all things light and bright and airborne, accompanied us, the yang to the yin of your day…
How many times did you say it doesn’t snow like it used to? Well, you got a beautiful, magical nor’easter that shut down the town. I walked around the block in the morning before the funeral Mass, the first to make tracks along Main Street in the kind of snow that whispers and sparkles.
As we drove to the cemetery, we were the only ones on the road, save for your distinguished guides lining either side of the street—those elegant old East Hampton trees, heavy and proud with snow like kindly wizards.
Three members of the Honor Guard were waiting for us at the cemetery, standing at attention in their dress blues, snow on their eyelashes. I can see now the white gloves that folded your flag with such love and care…I bet you know, of course, it takes 2 officers and 12 different folds, ending in a triangle of white stars on a blue ground, a sliver of starlit sky to guide you on your way.
And their faces, so full of reverence for a member of their Navy family. I saw in their eyes what your service meant to you—and I’m sorry, and kind of embarrassed, I didn’t understand sooner. My feelings about the military were colored more by what I had seen about Vietnam, but everyone says, and you should know, how special the WWII veterans are. My friend Kathy told me that her father, who would have been 91, enlisted in the Navy when he was just 17. “You probably didn’t get it back then," she said, “because these veterans didn’t talk or boast about their service at all.” I am making you a promise that I will submit your name and a photo to the online World War II National Registry.
I can see you nod and smile… I think that means I have the go-ahead : )
After the flag was presented to George, a bugler played Taps. I also think you told me, though I mustn’t have been listening, how beautiful and perfect that song is. The notes shimmered through the snow like golden leaves becoming, swelling, not wanting to leave quite yet, the first notes ever played of the last song in the world.
Day is done, gone the sun From the lakes, from the hills, from the sky All is well, safely rest God is nigh.
And the snow, it kept coming, swirling and whirling like we were inside that most beautiful mystery with you. It fell on the white roses that we left for you, blossoming in the middle of winter in your enchanted forest. Each snowflake a koan, and each petal an answer..
Is being the same as to be? Or is becoming bigger than being? Was the first song heard by the listener or the musician? Did you hear the roses bloom in the snowfall?
One easy answer: What we decided to sing to you in closing after Father said the prayers. We sang loudly. We sang strongly. I sang it like I always sing this song, like you’re right there next to me and singing it with me…
Take me out to the ball game, Take me out with the crowd. Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don't care if we never get back. For it’s root, root, root for the home team, If they don't win, it's a shame. For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out, At the old ball game!
So you know, we were also joined at the cemetery by a couple who was wandering by the church and attended your Mass. Afterward they came up and hugged me and said that even though they didn’t know you before, they felt like they did now (Confession: During Mass, several of us kind of talked a whole lot about you and shared some of your best stories.)
Leave it to you to make new friends at your funeral. : )
All my love, Pune
I love this song, and especially this version. A honky-tonk cellblock “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” kinda.
Number 2 in a new series, this instrumental is like mainlining emotion, sad and sweet, tho some jerk on Amazon called it “kitschy.”
Is that a bird I heard? Yes, yes, a little brown one dressed in houndstooth decoupage, wandering forlornly through a crackly film strip on the wintry day his best friend moved away… On the path he finds a stray piece of yarn, rusty orange like a secret patch on a magical calico cat, leading him home.
True fact: This song is played by a quintet of chickadees who talked incessantly during the recording, their blip-chirps and tweet-beats perching like arpeggios on the sheet music they pretended to follow.
Two Thursdays ago I dumped the entire contents of the litter box down the toilet. I know you’re not supposed to do that, even if you use “flushable” litter like I do—but it was like I’d lost my mind, and some weird cosmic cesspool seemed to be calling the litter home. I can still hear the whoosh of the walnut-shell pellets leaping into the bowl like spawning salmon.
The toilet immediately started overflowing, and I ran to the kitchen to get a plastic container in order to bail out the water, which I threw into the sink. When I got close to the bottom, I took a wire hanger and pushed it as far as I could down the snakey maze of the bowl’s innards. Encountering no clumps or clogs, I stubbornly, blindly pulled a Pollyanna and…
I flushed again.
At this point things went from suck to blow, the pellet and poo stew reappearing from the depths of the bowl and sloshing at my toes. I slid into the nearest available shoes—my beloved copper Birkenstocks—and gloriously surrendered to my own idiocy, making things worse with each progressively bad decision I made. First smooth move, ex-lax: I bailed out water and backed-up pellets into the sink. Second smooth move, ex-lax: When the sink got too full, I moved to the bathtub, which already had been slow to drain over the past few weeks.
Finally, with the toilet clogged and both the sink and the bathtub refusing to drain, I surrendered.
“I’m an idiot,” I told the after-hours emergency plumbers in a shaky voice. “Please help.” At this point Sal was yelling at me that he had to go to the bathroom, while Ira was scratching at the empty litterbox—neither of them gave a sh*t (c’mon, I had to write that!). While I waited for the plumbers, I bailed as much of the standing water as I could. But there was no place left to put it, right?! Wrong—not when you’re as foolishly, muleishly resourceful as I am…so I flung it out the window, hoping to God since it was pouring out that no one else had their window open.
The plumbers—it took two, huge and beer-bellied—brought a giant snake with them, and some motorized thing that whirred and sucked when turned on. I went to ask them some questions and apologize, and they ignored me. One walked by and rolled his eyes, muttering “Ridiculous!” right as he passed me, while the other stood in the middle of the living room looking at his phone, dripping water on the floor. Who knew plumbers were so passive-aggressive?!
I don’t know if anything like this has happened to you, but there’s something so…infantalizing…about your toilet overflowing, a primal shame of getting caught with your pants down. So when I heard them say, “Look at this, we gotta get a picture of this,” galumphing around in the tub to take photos of the supposedly 5 pounds of sludge that had been stopping it up, I couldn’t even look at them. They slammed out the door, threatening to charge me twice.
The next day, though, I was oddly rejuvenated, flushing freely and fearlessly. It had been a wake-up call—if those rude oafs who spend their days cleaning up shit think I’M disgusting…. !!! Histrionic much? Sure, but if I was going to panic, I better go all out, and it better be for a good reason. I had a sense this could be about a lot more than kitty litter—what do you want to flush away so that no one can ever see?
It’s true—on a surface-y kind of level, I suspect I may be a slob. I’ve seen cat hair in the refrigerator, and I have a drawer that sometimes doesn’t open because of the wires and cables and ear buds I’ve shoved in to it. Some people may be fine with that, but I have a low trash threshhold--visual clutter is very anxiety-making for me.
Since then, I’ve been hanging up my coat instead of throwing it over the chair. Seeing what’s hiding in the corners. Recycling clothing items I don’t wear that someone else might. And I consider it healthy for my ego that the day after the Big Flush, I felt a blooming, belated rage at those plumbing oafs. I’m just really trying to get my sh*t together.
I was one of those dreamy kids, the kind that don't really exist anymore, mostly because of the Internet and because moms would totally get crap for letting their children do, well…nothing. Each hour spent looking for four-leaf clovers I swear made room for something new in my head, like the imagination is this giant hole only you can dig for yourself, its adult size determined by how much space you can shovel into place by the time you are, say, 12…
I walked to the library every week and carried home my loot--goopy Nancy Drew, bad dream-making Alfred Hitchcock. I talked to the flowers in the backyard, scared to touch the bleeding hearts, lightly fingering the churchy Queen Anne's lace… I danced to my sister's terrible records (for hours!), drew ladies in ruffly, bustle-y dresses, raided the bathroom cabinet and mixed up concoctions in the sink, explaining to the television audience (the one behind the mirror, of course) exactly how to combine the ingredients.
I remember clearly one Saturday afternoon in late winter, when I took my red, white and blue basketball (cue up the Harlem Globetrotters theme song) and walked up the road and through the field to the basketball court at Most Holy Trinity to practice by myself. We had just formed our first girls' basketball team, and I was the center. I was 11 and there was nothing I couldn't do--keep up with the boys during sprints in gym class, hit triples during our lunchtime baseball games, get 100s on my tests, write, sing and perform my entry in the school song contest (to the tune of "Camptown Races," the only other song besides "Jingle Bells" I could play on the guitar)… So on that March day, I was full with potential, like the forsythia buds that my mom had brought into the house to force-bloom. As I looked up at the net I had this vague feeling that things were going to get complicated in the distant future, but in that moment, at least as far as I could see ahead of me, the world was kind and mine.
I'm pretty sure that's a basic rule to live by if you're a kitten like Ira, and I would do anything to keep his life--and that of his big brothers, Lorenzo and Derrick--that way, always. Dogs and cats have that pureness and sureness I get really fierce about protecting, because it seems like even kids have to let it go sooner and sooner… and somebody has to have it or we're all screwed.
At 13 weeks old, he reminds me that with every day dawns a whole new world, and there he is waiting for the sun. The first time he met Derrick and Lorenzo, he launched himself at them like a rocket, a kitty Odysseus finding his long-lost friends. (They reciprocated…a month later.) When he's hanging out on his cat tree or perched on the foot of the bed and sees me walk by, he gets so excited that the force of his wee-kitteh happiness knocks him off balance, and I am forever making sure he doesn't fall. He can't quite yet contain his meows either--I'll say his name softly, Ira, Ira, Ira, and he does this redonkulous bobble-head thingie, his whiskers start wiggling and only then does the meow come, like it's something he's still figuring out the choreography for… Can you imagine if you got that happy to be recognized, when they called your name at, say, jury duty, or when you're next in line in the post office?
When Derrick showed his little bro how to play Bathtub (Cat A jumps in bathtub and uses magical kitty powers to make sure Cat B, who may be otherwise engaged in another room, knows the game is about to commence; when Cat B approaches, Cat A leaps out of the bathtub; Cat B chases Cat A), they played this every morning for a week. Then one day Ira tried to initiate the game while there was water in the tub.
Well…nothing much happened. He tumbled into water that went up to his little chocolate-brown cat spats and zoomed right out, galloping through the house in celebration. The next day he was back in the tub, watching the faucet drip. I was too scared to try out for basketball in high school, and now I think I sing so badly I'm embarrassed to do karaoke (tho I practice it in the bathtub--I could probably do "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head," if they even have that one.)
Ira knows, in his tiny cat head, that it's not about how it's done, it's simply that it's done. And if you carry on as though good things will happen (like your big brothers love you even though you steal food and treats out of their bowls and push them off the prime real estate), maybe good things will happen. That people love you more the worse you sing karaoke, that it's the best feeling ever when someone's happy to see you, and that the world is big and you are small but not.
Incidentally, the MHT girls basketball team played just one game. We won, but I wasn't in it because I'd broken my finger the day before.
I'm sorry I can't be there to give you black licorice, Superman socks and a pair of Groucho Marx glasses (you looked so good in them!), but I wanted to tell you these 8 things I love about you.
1.) You respect everyone...
No matter who it is, you always look at someone and nod at them in acknowledgment when you pass by. I think of this every day when I get on the elevator in my apartment building and feel someone avoiding my eyes. We walk through each other like there's no one else there, even when we're inches away. It's what we do.
But then I see that gentle, expectant look on your face when you greet someone you may or may not know. Doesn't matter--it's the same look. (I've caught you doing it to the neighbors' dogs, which makes me love you even more.). So I think of you and say "Good night" or "Have a good day" when I get off the elevator. I kinda mumble so they may think I'm talking to myself, but I promise to keep working on it.
2)…even commonly mispronounced words
Yup, you're one of the few people I know who actually says the second "e" in vegetable and the "a" in comfortable, showing me not to overlook the little things in life. And let's not get started on "berserk!"
3) You don't talk trash about people.
It occurred to me the last time I saw you that you don't say bad stuff about ANYONE. I think the worst I've heard you say is that someone's a "freeloader" or a "wise guy," but with all that practice, it's like you probably couldn't even insult someone if you tried.
I think this means I have to forgive you for writing that really nice letter to George Bush. : )
4) You have great skin.
93 and STILL NO WRINKLES! Seriously, folks. I think it's directly related to #3. And maybe #7. 5) You still do whatever it takes to make us feel at ease.
Oh, Dad. I know it upsets you when you can't remember things. First of all, it doesn't matter--everybody forgets stuff. And second of all, I'm on to you. I see how you make jokes to make us feel better about it, and how you keep finding new ways to anchor yourself in the present. You'll talk about the cardinal-red flowers that have just started to bloom, or the birds who have visited our backyard that day. That's what a good dad does, and you're only getting better with age.
6) You taught me how to tie a tie, shine my shoes and keep score at a baseball game.
All of these things take a little extra time and care. And darned if I don't know a 6-4-3 double play when I see one.
7) You have ice cream every day and always give IHOP a little treat during dinner (and lunch, and, well, probably breakfast, too).
Life is to be enjoyed. Why not with caramel sauce and maraschino cherries?
8) You have great taste in women.
Barbara told me that she recently found you looking at the beautiful photograph hanging near the fireplace of you and mom on your 50th wedding anniversary. "She was such a good person," Barbara heard you say out loud. Yeah, you're right about that : )
Enjoy your day. Can you feel the big hug I'm sending you?
Love,
Pune
Daughter #5, Kid #6
(Hair still pink)
P.S. Meet you back here next Father's Day for 8 more reasons!
Warning! Unicorn Alert: This post contains content that has not been scientifically proven. Aura photography! Spirit guides! Oh, and a Fresh Prince of Bel Air video…
This March I had a picture of my aura taken during a visit to Kripalu Institute. I'm pretty sure it employs Kirlian photography, named for the electrical engineer who discovered the technique, which he believed to depict a life force or energy field surrounding living things. The sweet photographer Heidi set up this tripped-out, willy-wonky, Wizard of Oz-y contraption, and I had to put my palms into hand-shaped panels with little electrode-y points for the finger tips. I normally don't like having my photo taken because my nose tends to come out looking like it has its own zip code, but this was one photo in which you just couldn't hide…
Although I had a stray thought that it'd come out rotting and covered in black mold, I was surprised-but-not-surprised at that pop and snap of beany green. [Note: This is a photo of my photo I took with an iPhone, and you can't really see everything I'm gonna write about. Hopefully you get the general gist.] According to the handout clipped to the photo, the colors on the subject's left (what you see on the right in the photo) represent the vibration coming into your being. The colors on the right are the energies being expressed, what others most likely see and feel. And the color over the subject's head is the color that best describes that person. According to the handout:
Primarily Green Photos: These individuals are strongly connected to the heart chakra and are most often balanced, giving people…The keywords here are love and service.... Green in a photo may also be an an indication of a growth opportunity or change, and is a good indication of a positive state of overall health. Green individuals will show a tendency to periodic burnout caused by their unceasing engagement in trying to help others and right the wrongs of the world. Being connected to the source of Perfect Love, they don't realize their own limitations and push this to the extreme point where they save little for their own needs. (Acck, just rereading this, I don't like that last sentence--there are few things worse than someone who is stingy with herself!).
Along with the green I got a little bit of Oy G. Biv going on, with those fruit stripes of orange ("childlike, playful, creative, living life from the gut") and yellow ("cerebral and intellectual, with strong abilities in logic and number-based thought processes"). Uh, not sure about that last one…tell that to all the people I ask to check my calculations 'cause I've forgotten how to subtract..I panic and overcompensate when it comes time to cross out a zero and carry the 1. And I'm so beyond grateful for that juicy grape of "inspiration from things divine" to my left.
And the 6 green dots? [Gaak, you can't see them in my photo.] Those are spirit guides. Heidi said that 6 was on the high side, and I think I know why. This was taken right when I was coming out of a period of deep mourning when my mom died, so I needed all the help I could get. One of those is my mom for sure, and Bing and Paloma, and my mom's mom, too. I didn't know her well, but my Grandma was a kindred spirit. She used to sneak out of the house to go dancing when she was young, and knew there was nothing that chocolate couldn't fix.
Science will tell you that what's captured on film is the corona discharge (I think that can be simplified to "electrical field") between the object photographed and the high-voltage plate used in the photography set-up. And even more Boring Bettys will tell you that the actual colors are impacted by stuff like oils, sweat, bacteria and ionizing contaminants. No way, just… no way. The secret of one's spiritual state cannot come down to what kind of deodorant you wear. (Though I have to state here those crystal rocks don't work too well.)
P.S. I asked Heidi if she'd taken any aura photographs of animals. Yes, she said, a German shepherd. He had to stand on his hind legs and put his paws on the hand sensors. The photo came out all purple--for an individual "very closely tied to a high level of spirituality, those who tend of carry a lot of natural healing ability and may feel they are on a special mission for the benefit of humanity at large." I got chills when Heidi told me he was a service dog.
