failing

 I just got a wonderful e-mail from Patt Blue who inadvertently reminded me that I do write a blog, or did write a blog, so I'm writing this for her since my e-mail server takes my words and flings them into nowhere if I try to write more than a few sentences.

I'd actually written a story to a friend this morning, someone I write the shortest notes to, leaving all sense of my strange life bare, but, of course, the system took the words...so here is the gist of them.

My new pleasure is driving the overflow of folks heading to the dentist from the backside of the racetrack on Thursday afternoons. Shirley zips along on the highway and get them there in ten minutes and I, who am phobic, take them the long, long way, up route 16, on Memorial Drive, down Mass. Avenue, to Barbara McInnis House, or the former mortuary, where there is free dental care.

My car holds 4 and most of the batches have been Spanish speakers, some of whom I know, most of whom I don't. So I got to listen to a joke that included the word gorda many times that was prompted by a fat woman someone saw out of the window. I didn't understand all the details, but I think it was about a husband and a wife...it was told by Germany, who used to ride the racehorse I co-owned briefly, another long, difficult story...anyway, he's a slight, handsome fellow with a tight face and good smile and everyone laughed at his joke.

There are different folks going forward and back, and on last Thursday there were mostly English speakers, including Potts who Shirlery thought I knew, but I didn't. He was actually pleased at the scenic route and seemed to enjoy my commentary, "Oh, that's the Charles River? Thats MIT?" I put the radio on some station that i think they'll like and, by accident we were listening to one of the college stations, old records, Nina Simone and Woody Guthrie. I got some applause when I identified his voice before the announcer told us it was recorded in 1947. And then this monologue came on about a guy shoved along in the crowd though some gates, and up into bleachers to watch a bunch of men fight over a little pumpkin they was a kickin' back and forth on the cow pasture down below. I'd heard that Andy Griffin got his start by making this record about watching a football game, but never imagined I'd get to hear it with a group of guys who liked it as much as I did....

the skinny fellow, who I could see in the backview mirror and know slightly, worked for Reba MacIntyre, a real nice lady, when she had Thoroughbreds. Now she has cutters...he said they cut out cattle...I'm curious about just what they look like and what qualities they are bred for..and will ask him when I see him next. He evidentially likes to drive, especially around rotaries which provide a certain spice of danger here in Massachusetts. Most of those drivers are mean suckers and he likes that.

So, last weekend Shirley drove us down to Rehoboth so I could video tape and photograph foals and mares. Paul Foley, a man who is an excellent photographer and brilliant on many levels and in many areas, one  of them being technical information about cameras, spent a couple of hours with me in Paneras, decoding exactly what I might want in terms of a new video camera. He was tactful, something that would be hard for anyone facing the depth of my technical ignorance. And after consulting the web for further information and thinking, which must have taken many hours that evening and the next day, he correctly decided that the camera I thought I wanted was not going to be the right one. So he suggested one similar to my old friend, the Canon that uses mini-dvs...and i ordered it with gratitude for his time and effort and the understanding of my limitations.

But, and here's the story, in the meantime I'd use my Nikon camera which does take HD video. The new camcorder with high definition would arrive at the end of the week. I did NOT do what he told me to do --------- practice using the Nikon so I was secure. But, to my slight credit, I did take along my old friend, the Canon. My purpose was to photograph foals and mares, along with the vet, feedman, horseshoer and the jockey who broke babies. Naturally there were other things going on which I was to capture for an eleven minute video about the lives of Thoroughbreds before their five or eight years on the track and afterwards.

 We were starting on George and Arlene Brown's breeding farm...

One of the mares has a habit of trying to kill her foals, so it had to be hand--raised and kept with a mini, a version of horse which was quite unimaginable to me. He is the foal's companion and went along with it back to the owner's farm not long after I got to photograph them. I am terrified of horses, so it was extremely odd to find myself actually in a paddock with both the mini and the orphan. They'd been led in while I wasn't watching and the gate closed. Fortunately, they were both extremely friendly and non-threatening.

George tells folks not to worry about horses, they'll knock you down, trample you, bite you, leaving you with black and blue marks in the morning. Thoroughbreds are unpredictable and stallions are even more so...I stayed quite a distance away when they bathed one of the two stallions that stand on that farm.            

The vet was examining whether an embryo had attached to the wall of the uterous, using a scope so that she could check on the screen. It had implanted. In the old days, this discovery was made by feel. If there are twins, it's important to pinch one off. The whole birth arrangement of horses seems a bit dicy to me since about 50% die in the wild. Arlene and George spend their nights watching the foaling pen because they have to turn the babies if they are coming out feet upwards.

The foals are born after 11 months and go back to their owners, along with the current baby, already pregnant again. Breed mares. This is undoubtedly the same timing that would occur in nature.

It was quite remarkable to stand in the field watching mares and their foals run down the hill, into the pasture. The foals danced around, leaping and running, often coming too near to where four of us stood under the tree. I can't say that I like horses any more than I did, but it was such an interesting experience.

Fortunately, I got 7 minutes of useful footage on my old camera. And on Monday I called to cancel my order for the new one. I'm sorry, Paul, but even with the smart modifications you suggested, I realized I'm not up to learning more right now....I'm going to have to get a new computer and that's about as much as I can handle.

This blog is supposed to concern aging. And aging is a serious issue. As Morris said when we had coffee on Friday, "Seventy is an entirely new country."   He has a very good life and is a contented person.       I, on the other hand, have a lot of regrets over the mess I made, the poor choices I made. But at seventy, there's not a whole hell of a lot to do to correct them, except put one foot in front of the other and do what's in front of me. And luckily, that's often very interesting.

P.S. SOMEONE IS GOING TO HAVE TO EXPLAIN WHERE THE LISTS OF BLOGS I FOLLOW HAS GONE TO...THEY AREN'T POSTED ON MY BLOG AND NOW THEY AREN'T IN THE BACK MATERIAL, EITHER...AND I'M HELPLESS...

Whew...

 I was inspired by a conversation Mim was having with H. at the Bagel Bards. And then inspired by running into B. at Starbucks. He's quit a disagreeable job and started cleaning out his house, a task that used to be easy, but is much harder due to his health. I had hopes that Ann-Marie would be here and would help me for two days, get me going, but....she isn't. And I got going myself, yesterday afternoon, deciding that two hours would be my limit.

I'd told Mim and H. the story of Barbara McInnis, a folk hero here in the homeless community of Boson, the TB nurse at Pine Street, who had a wonderful song written about her and a respite unit named after her when she was alive. That's unusual. She amassed an amazing amount of clutter, filled all the rooms in her J.P. apartment. Thinking that going to therapy would take too many years to make any inroads into why she was a hoarder, she hired someone for two or three hours on Tuesday evenings, put out three boxes -- to keep, for the good will, to toss out. He would bring her things (she wasn't moving around all that well by then) and she would put them in the appropriate box.

When she began looking at the good will box, thinking that she might save something out of it, she stopped and he took the boxes away.

She was right. At a certain point I did begin thinking, 'Should I keep this?' and stopped, but I'd gotten rid of two of the baskets under the futon.

 Sherlock broke the bag that I put all that stuff in, stuff I'd looked at four or five times, over the years, not able to throw it out.

 Before I moved out to live with X, everything in my workroom was in order. I could find what I needed. When I moved back here, five years later, everything got dropped where ever. This is a corner that was, more-or-less tools for making books. It's now quite neat.

 For years I kept every bottle that the Hormone Replacement Treatment pills came in and all the boxes of the Vagifem. They were, I thought, a tribute to menopause and I was going to put the pill bottles in poured clear stuff (I forget the name of that toxic agent) so that they would become an entity. I don't know what I was going to do with the boxes. It was a good idea, I thought... but I'm not a sculptor or an installation artist, though I think in that direction... so I threw them out, except for this bag that was stuck in a corner. Gone now.

 One insanity, but also a great pleasure, was working with clay. I think this came about because someone was going to put my work in a large show so I felt able to branch out and add sculptural or installation work to it. She never did follow up on that idea, but by the time I figured that out I'd done three or four large clay projects which are now upstairs in boxes. When S. visited, she looked horrified -- not only are there cases of exhibition prints and boxes and notebooks with negatives, but now there are all these boxes with stuff inside them. Can't I get a storage unit, she said.

 One of the problems I made invovled these blobs...they were great fun to shore up with newspaper and bottles so that the clay would drape and dry....and the pieces, like the one above, fit in strange ways into a disintegrated landscape. I really liked doing them. They were quite ugly and I like that, also....  The boxes in which I'd packed them all were hard to identify because many boxes were labeled blobs...and some of those boxes contain some more interesting blobs that I'm not ready to dispose of yet..... they also make a landscape-like-something-but are slightly more charming and smaller.

But the slithering, corroded and impossible blobs are gone...in the orange bags that we are now required to use in Chelsea if we have to much to contain in the garbage cans.

And I lost my new glasses. That was Friday. Gone. My only hope is that Sherlock batted them off the couch and knocked them somewhere, but I haven't been able to find them. Alas.

So I started

our the semester with a blog for students that (or which, as the case may be) I was absolutely positive would be a good way of communicating since everyone is constantly on the computer or texting messages. But it took a long time for almost all of them to sign up and it was clear they didn't read it and so, for two weeks, I gave up. 

I'd also found out that Margaret, the woman who took over my position after I retired, e-mailed them twice a week. I did take their e-mails, (but this was only a couple of weeks ago since it has taken so long for us to get together to walk the dogs and have lunch) in the semester and some part of me said, the hell with it...this is a good way of communicating...and besides, I don't really know how to make a long list of e-mails. But the main point wasn't my ineptitude in that area, but that I was really pleased with using the blog. I'd learned about blogging from a former student who was in a class she liked, taught by a part-time person who blogged. At first this student didn't like reading the blog, but she found some useful things in it. And I thought, what a good idea.

And besides, I'd gotten all excited about Zoe Strauss..and wanted to do a renegade show, etc, etc, which shows what happens when you get really charged up but have no power except to get them to do their expected work. Nothing exciting.

However, one student is remarkable, and another went well beyond what that student had done the semester before and that was a great pleasure to watch...and others did interesting work, and so on....and there are only two more classes, one of which is tomorrow.

 I finished 100 4x6 drawings with text from "Bread & Roses: Mill, Migrants and the Struggle for the American Dream" by Bruce Watson...a meditation on the strike of 1912...that will be shown in the Essex Art Center in June...  I rather like it which is unusual since I don't much care whether I like my work or not, assuming I've done it honorably...but this has meaningful content and it might look pretty good on the wall.

Last night I dreampt that I had taken the work to Cathy MaLaurin (I don't think that is spelled correctly even though I e-mail her every ten minutes with some dumb question and have taken two interesting short workshops with her and she is finishing up her masters at the Museum School, etc...  and I'd brought along a doll house that my father had made, with all sorts of tiny furniture, also handmade, and lots of Christmas ornaments and decorations, all miniscule and made of paper and tinsel... what a heap of stuff that wasn't at all relevant to the other work I'd taken to her...But I rationalized that it represented houses from that 1912 time period. I wasn't sure why I brought any of the work since it wasn't due, but I had a bit pile of stuff lined up on a wide, low shelf...
  
Anyway, Cathy was wearing a wonderful one-piece something or other, sort of like what I would  have worn in the 60s, but much more interesting.. loose and flowing, pants, African maybe..that she'd made..I wanted to make one also...I should add the the Cathy-in-the-dream was long and willowy...(which is not far off from the real Cathy) and I'm not..and she's young and I'm not and I hate to sew...

even though I dutifully go to Empty Spools Quilters every Friday morning and try to make a quilt because Mary, who has been married 64 years, and is fabulous and always busy doing the final quilting stitching doesn't like to sit around and talk, so something has to be ready for her to do every Friday morning. And only Eileen and I are cranking out quilts and I always get there late so it's hard to finish one within that time limit...especially with coffee break during which I always take seconds and thirds of sweets, after trying, most of the time, not to eat them...
    I hate sewing and I hate making quilts, but I got committed...     maybe that means I got crazy which is also true.

Tulip

 There is a very nice fellow who also walks in the park behind Starbucks. He is tall and looks capable and might be from Bosnia, or maybe Russia. And he walks a small nicely ratty-looking dog who is a bit timid. He is always on the phone but stoops to befriend Tulip who really doesn't want anything to do with  him. She is generally afraid, especially of other dogs, and this fear masks itself in ferocious barking at them, pulling on the leash and jumping around. She occasionally barks at men walking by, but never at this gentle guy. She just dodges his hand.

Right now Tulip is guarding some food on the couch. This means that if I get close to her, she enlarges by two or three feet, snarling and snapping. She was deprived and mis-treated and it truly was a mistake to get a dog on line, from the south, sent up to me, sight-unseen. They did not tell me that she was so tangled and neglected that she couldn't walk when she was given to the shelter.

The kindly fellow says, "It takes time. She'll be alright.

I find it fascinating that dogs harbor/remember/are inhibited and inhabited by so many early impressions that they act out in various ways. Bogie had a very good puppyhood, but he learned to shake himself when I put the leash on him, in addition to sitting as he was told. Once he tried that, he never unlearned that pattern, sit, shake, leash put on, go out.

When he was less than two, his back legs began shaking. Nothing serious, just some neurological glitch. Now his whole body shakes when he's distressed by some assault -- something not going his way --  Sherlock trying to prevent him from walking through a doorway or a car backfire. Fireworks terrify him.

I imagine there are many gradations of responses to our hold-ons from childhood, but there certainly are polar opposites in opinions about whether early experience effects us.  I remember being very perplexed when someone said, "It's over and done with. And certainly can't still be effecting you." That is what I consider an insane view of the residue of our childhoods in us....   On the other hand is the irony of having to take ourselves in hand to teach ourselves whatever we might not have been taught early on....self-care, assertiveness, goal setting... whatever.

Taxes and Talking

 I missed hearing myself on the radio...not having taken the time to look at e-mail before heading out to Lawrence to begin interviewing again for a project that's due at the end of May.

 Esther, a woman I met at the Cafe Verde, who is one of those marvelous creatures, a connector, has connected me to a number of fascinating and diverse people who will talk to my video camera. On Wednesday, she took me to Lawrence Works, where she's a board member. A remarkable organization that has a wide range of workshops, classes, activities and projects including building housing. The staff is bi-lingual and seem to have created a pleasant atmosphere for those who need their resources and within their work environment. (I have a great envy for people who work in supportive, welcoming, socially based organizations.)

The first person I interviewed referred to himself as a 'white guy,' who immigrated from Andover (a wealthy community) to Lawrence (poor city), a now bi-lingual man who lives, with his wife and baby, in the neighborhood. He was particularly interesting because I'm always curious about how 'white' people like me, who grew up in suburban neighborhoods, make commitments, connections and become integrated into less affluent, urban communities especially when it involves learning another language, (which I've never done.)

And then Esther introduced me to another Esther who came here from Peru ten years ago, with her two children.
At first she worked in a factory as a temporary worker, meaning she had to stand, waiting, every morning at 4am, hoping she'd be chosen for day labor...
when that factory wasn't hiring any more, she was out of work for 2 months
before finding work in a 24-hour gas station. Fortunately, the owner spoke Spanish because when he asked her to read the employee regulations, written in English, she was able to understand enough, comparing words similar to Spanish, that she convinced him she could read English. Actually she knew only about 30 words. And she was very good with numbers, so she could make change and was hired to work from 11pm to 7am,
then had to take an English class, 8-10am, (a requirement for the night job)
and then wasn't making enough money to support her family, so she had to get another job, from 10:30 until sometime in the afternoon,
after which she went home, cooked for her children,
slept 4 hours
and went to work again,
 7 days a week,
90 hours a week,
to send her two children to college.
The American Dream.
I'm not being sarcastic about the American Dream, even though I get very angry about the illegal immigrant policy and the anger this country of immigrants has toward illegal Mexicans.
Imagine not letting people who were brought here as young children and have graduated from high school not attend college and get on with their lives, working and building families.
Pass the Dream Act, please,
and then move further, allowing parents who own houses, who have paid taxes, blah and blah, to have amnesty. And on and on...........
Esther had graduated from college and was a teacher in Peru, but she knew that she could not have made enough to send her children to college
and to buy a house, one that was built by Lawrence Works, in a cluster of ten new buildings so that there is a community.

So, I interviewed 4, count them, people....and then went to the library to try to hunt for the text of Carmella Teoli (spelling) speaking in Washington about child labor in 1912. Her hair got caught in a loom and part of her scalp was ripped off. She spent quite a lot of time in the hospital and was one of the children sent from Lawrence to testify.

 Of course I assumed that I could easily locate the book (having photographed some of her testimony -- large type, big, white pages...) without knowing what book it is. The librarian said, "You don't how many people come up to me asking for the red book," after quietly remarking that it's useful to make citations. After my no-success, I got in the car, stopped for a pure poison, extra chocolate sauce, please, sundae at McDonalds and got home before the elephants finished walking over my body.

At any rate, I missed hearing the interview with Adam Ragussea.

He wanted to meet out at Suffolk Downs, so we went to the 8th Pole, and talked with Jim Greene and Shirley Edwards, who started this organization that supplies some clothing, some food and health care for the backside workers.

I was extremely glad that they were included because their work is so important and their knowledge of what backside workers need, as well as their appreciation of the endless hard work that goes on back there, is so wide ranging.  At any rate, doing the interview with them along for the ride was what I'd actually call perfect....and much more significant than talking about the book...I was actually pleased...something that my dour self doesn't experience often...

 and had no idea that I'd feel as if elephants had walked over me afterwards.

Adam has an easy way of keeping the conversation moving and editing all of it into something I approve of -- given my political, social biases.     I heard it the next day.  (And if you want to hear it, just go to that WBUR site...and look for Radio Boston...and then for "My  Suffolk Downs.")

And then Mim called...which was extremely nice. And she said i sounded intelligent. I thought I sounded hesitant and that my voice is sort of nabi-ish.

Someone had built a stick house, a frame with sticks bent in half for the root, in the park near Target. But I didn't have my camera with me any time I walked the dogs by it...until it had been destroyed by a wind storm.

I finally finished my income taxes today.


Unfortunately, I don't know how to make my blog following list show on the front of this so no one can see what I would be following if I had time and energy...

but there a fantastic blog, not that I imagine that he cares if he gets more readers. James at For You and Me..

you can find his comment in my blog just below this one..and trace him that way. I hope he won't be annoyed that I'm advertising for his words, but they give so much to me.

Rescue

Maybe I've told this story before, but I'm sitting in Paneras, having wrestled with writing and not quite willing to get up and leave and thinking about how I so rarely have time to blog, so I thought of the cats.

We had an exciting time this summer and late fall when K. rescued cats. She'd already found a home for a scrappy white cat that probably belonged to an old lady in a house several streets over. Either she died or the house was condemned because that creature took up in the back yard...which was fine. He'd come out to eat and I picked him up once. But he got more and more fierce as he took possession of the porch. But, K's belief in the power of Craig's list was accurate and she found a woman who picked him up, nice as could be, put him in a carrier and took him home with her to live in a big house with two other cats.

Then came the kittens that were deposited by their mother on the porch next door. They spent a good deal of time on my upstairs porch before Gina took two and I kept Sherlock, an extremely handsome fellow who looks just like his father who we see walking the street at odd times. Gina's cat Ariel looks very much like the mother who was, perhaps, living up the street, or at least perching in a driveway.

Then, when they were placed, another cat came along who turned out to be pregnant. That's a whole different kettle of worms. She had two orange kittens in her litter box in the basement. Because I wanted to photograph them, my obsessive need to record the development of....she got spooked and...

we thought she ate them, the idea of which caused a considerable amount of worrying and noise.

But she hadn't.

She'd hidden them under and around boxes in the dirtiest part of a very dirty basement, cinders and ash and dust, where I found them after sitting down there, listening for an hour, until I heard the tiniest peep. K. was enormously relieved and I was forbidden from photographing for a week.

She hid them one more time, for good measure, but this time K found them, again in a lot of dust and dirt.

It was an exciting time and I miss all the fussing, though I like waking up to Sherlock's purring as he peers into my face, waiting for a spoonful of wet food. He's definitely smart enough to be brain surgeon and has only broken three or four things. He's started to terrorize Bogie as the dog goes through his anxious hesitation about jumping up on the bed. Bogie is the sort of fellow who is an easy victim, a cross-look can send him into shudders. I often identify with his personality, though I try to bluff my way into appearing sturdier.

The man I was in love with when I was teaching at MIT used to sit on the couch with me and unexpectedly yell, "Boo." I screamed and nearly cried every time.

Clemente comes up behind me at the racetrack and grabs my neck and I scream every time. No matter how quietly I creep behind him, and how fast I grab him, he never flinches. Nerves of steel. I guess that's what it takes to have been a jockey.

dreams

Yesterday I tried to post this image of the book that Press Wafer and Kat Ran Presses have recently published. But nothing worked...many nothings didn't work and it wouldn't post which is just as well because today I have an actual dream, last night's dream, instead of the type of dreams I was trying to describe that I have been beset by since the book actually materialized.

I was driving a van (modeled on the VW van my father had and used to drive, with Mari, his third wife, down from Nova Scotia to Alabama, stopping at ice cream pits along with way, to stay with Cousin Hilda, his mother's sister, for a couple of months every winter. He hated (not a word he'd use, let's say he seriously disliked) being with her since she had annually supervised Tom Thumb weddings in kindergarden classes, a event he considered a disgusting spectacle of small children pretending to get married, all those costumes, all those adults oggling at the darlings, performing a ceremony they couldn't possibly understand and that even Cousin Hilda, who married a much, much, much older man so she wouldn't have to have sex ((or children)) didn't really understand) out of a lot just as a blue sedan was pulling out. I drove ahead of it, though I wasn't in control ... and couldn't figure out what was the matter...why couldn't I see the street? why was I just guessing? why was I just lucky, and why didn't I hit that car or the cars parked along the road?

I managed to pull into a place where huge men were working on huge trucks and guarded by huge dogs. And got out of the van, finally figuring out that I was driving from the back of the bus...(oh, what a good phrase that you dreamed up, you whirling-eyed-monster-dog who is nightly punishing me because that book was published). Now the problem was easy to fix, just get in the front of the van, except I have to question whether I'm capable of anything because how could I have made such a terrible mistake, what is wrong with me? has my mind gone? and also have to protect the dogs, my beloved Bogie and my daughter's beloved dog, Happy, from a smaller dog (maybe a young Doberman) who was trying to jump into the front seat ...at the two dogs...  

But, I closed the door before the next segment, the old-stairway-torture-segment, in the building-I-don't-  know, trying to get somewhere, up a narrow, curving puzzle of iron stairs, some of which went down, some up, impossible to tell which way to climb. And two people were coming down, a young woman and a young man, and I needed to buy my daughter school clothes and where was the store? And had I ever bought her clothes? Ever? Had I been so inadequate that I hadn't bought her school clothes?

You get the idea that going to sleep has not been a lot of fun...and that during the days I work very hard on many different projects....I was going to give up a small grant for grassroots videos here in Chelsea, but got talked out of that by someone from the committee and probably it's for the better because I have only been able to accomplish ANY work by working on many projects at once and doing too many other things (which is why retiring wasn't a good idea.)

I cannot concentrate on MY work, never have been able to...whatever MY work is...because something in me doesn't not want me to have a voice...          and it got tricked by this book being published. It thought that, because it took three years, it wouldn't happen and then it got doubly tricked because Michael Russem was the designer for Bill Corbett's project and he adopted it, added many photographs so it's more than a small chapbook with three images. Oh, dear...thank you Bill and Michael and thank you, Mim, for having written about it on your blog, since I'd been avoiding it...