Day 98: Beach Rhapsody in Grey, with Black Dog

Even on an overcast morning there is
much to love about a beach walk with the black dog.

The clouds ride through the sky like waves.

But one cloud looks like a castle fortress with turrets and a moat.

The grey light and grey sand make everything soft and inviting.

And then there is always something unexpected around the corner.

Is a sandcastle a good thing to sit near, to try in vain to make fresh metaphors about, or just to sniff?

When there is so much around us, we don't have to go far to grasp infinity.

Day 97: Inviting the Muse Through Meditation and Acceptance of What Is

For a big chunk of Monday I was worried about Zoe.  She was so eager on Saturday that she ran like mad, and we now think she strained her back leg like one of those middle aged weekend warriors with desk jobs who get a little too excited about that hike into the Adirondacks.  On Sunday she didn't want to walk as far as usual, and Monday morning she was sitting down and saying Not, today, duckies. 

Of course she's perfectly content to sit for hours at the balcony, staring at the waves, doing her doggy meditation, but I worried about her being in pain.  And we are up three flights of stairs at this hotel.

Our other concern is that she always gets a little clingy when we travel, crying when one of us leaves the car for anything, and not wanting either of us to go anywhere without her, but she's even more like this now.  I wouldn't mind that so much but I know stress takes a toll on her gut, and here she is taking those drugs that give her gastrointestinal system a real workout.

So before I sat down to write on Monday I was wrestling with some concerns.  Even paradise had snakes in it.  (But of course, snakes are good for the ecosystem, sacred in many cultures, and Eve was framed.)

I've always written well here in this peaceful place, sitting here with the view of the ocean coming in, and the sound itself calms my breath and my mind.  The old me would have worked hard at not letting my worries interrupt the work.  But that resistance to the here and now would also limit what I invited into the work--those sweet surprises. So, instead of demanding a great performance, my goal was to just let my worries float along in my brain along with the steady sound of the waves.  In other words, to
not worry about worrying.

And so I went to a passage of the work when my character is a bit fraught, and just went with it.  By late afternoon, I felt my peace return.

And then, guess what?  On the afternoon walk, she was in fine form.  She had more energy than we did.  And I will have some pictures and a post soon about Zoe at play with the dogs of Dixie.

Today, the world already looks brighter.  And this is what it looks like through the window:

I like to read before I meditate.  I open to Roger Rosenblatt's Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats:

There's only one point to writing.  It allows you to do impossible things.  Sure, most of the time it's chimney sweeping and dung removal.  Or plastering.  A lot of the time, writing is plastering or caulking or pointing up the bricks.  But every so often there is a moment in the dead of morning where everything is still as starlight and something invades your room, like a bird that has flown through the window, and you are filled with as much joy as panic.  And then you think: I can do anything.

That's what it feels like to me when the muse says, Why, hello, Natalia.  May I visit you today?  And oh, that blessed presence: that bird that flies through the window into a room of stillness.

On the subject of mindfulness and writing and inspiration, I want to recommend a blog by Brenda Miller, "A Spa for the Mind," which I've just linked you to.  She's a wonderful essayist and editor, and I absolutely adore her resonant blog voice.  She and a colleague/friend of hers named Holly Hughes have a book coming out soon called The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, which I know I'm going to want to read and possibly teach. 

What she and Holly Hughes have come to realize is that the interruptions to our writing life, and the interruptions to our contemplative lives are not interruptions, but are actually part of the path itself.
Brenda Miller writes:

We came to fully understand that all those interruptions are really life itself, not something apart from that life. Contemplation and writing do not happen only in quiet places, in sanctified rooms. In fact, we need to be in contact with the world, to feel ourselves in dialogue with our ordinary lives, rather than resisting them. If we train ourselves, we’ll see that our writing material, and our contemplative state of mind, can be found anywhere: in the Volkswagen repair shop, at the doctor’s office, in a traffic jam, at PetSmart.

This is so true.  It isn't easy--it's work--but I have at times entered a contemplative state of mind even in a busy coffee shop while waiting for Zoe's chemotherapy to be done, and waiting to find out the results of her latest lung X-rays.  I wrote my favorite post, Day 57: The Purple Heart Meditation, in a scenario like the one I just described.  And when I think I'm too scared to write, I just write through it.

I also love/love/love the Denise Levertov poem they quote in the book, which Brenda includes in her lovely post from Sunday.  I met Denise Levertov twice in my life: once when I was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, and she came there to read, and then in Seattle in the 1990s, not long before she died, via a friend who had done some work for her.  Her poetry always inspired me.  O Taste and See, the collection, as well as the title poem, made me want to write.

Here's the quote, that I just copied from Brenda's post, but do go over there and check out the whole post anyway, and look at her back pages about her dog, her yoga practice, her writing practice, and her serious attacks on the clutter in her house.

Preface

"A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was, confronting me—a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day’s blow
rang out, metallic—or it was I, a bell awakened,
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I can."

    —Denise Levertov, “Variation on a Theme by Rilke”

That bell awakened reminds me of the end of Annie Dillard's essay "On Seeing" from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where she finally finds "the tree with lights in it" after wandering through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia trying to view the natural world with the same wonder and the same absence of preconceived ideas as the newly sighted.  She writes:

"I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked
breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."

I love the idea of being the bell, not just listening to it.  Of feeling oneself to be struck by an outside agent of beauty and breath, life and energy.  To reverberate with that ringing.

I'll end with "O Taste and See," Levertov's great 1964 poem that inspired another generation of writers:

"O Taste and See" by Denise Levertov

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.
 

Gentle readers, may the muse inspire you today, whatever you do, and if you are one of my readers for whom grief is the language you speak most right now, I also wish you mercy, plum, quince, and many bushels of tangerines.

Namaste!

Day 96: Country Ham, Carolina Yum

My husband couldn't wait to be reunited with country ham.  His late wife was from North Carolina and his visits with the in-laws always featured platters of eggs and country ham and grits.  As soon as we got down here, he bought some.

My first dose of country ham came from the hard-working, divorced mother of a student on the heels of one of our many conversations.  She was a Southerner, but her son had lost most of his accent, probably on purpose.  She would call me out of desperation, just wanting someone to listen to her talk about her son, and I couldn't not take her calls.  This ham was probably a bribe, and had he known about it, the student would have added this gift to his list of grievances against his mom, but what was I to do?  Mail the box back? He was failing my class, but I had already decided to give him another chance before the box came to the house.  That mother-son relationship with complicated.  As soon as he did well in a class, as soon as he aced an exam or a paper, as soon as he received praise from his professor, he would disappear.  It was difficult for him to hide his fierce intelligence, but he needed to flunk out so that he could show his mother that she hadn't won.  His every failure was a victory in a battle of wills, but I didn't get close enough to either of them to find out why.  I gave him an incomplete, but then he never did write the paper, and so he still failed the class.  In the time between I gave him the not-0 and the time I did, in my memory, there was country ham on every shelf of the fridge.  It was too salty for my taste, but I ate it anyway so as not to let my husband eat it all and get a stroke.  I thought of this sad mother with every bite.  She was trying to figure it out, trying to understand what had gone so terribly wrong, and there was nothing I could do to help.

At the bistro on Topsail Island I want to order chipotle shrimp with sausage and cheese grits, but after a week of eating only brown rice, bananas, apples, and toast, I'm not quite ready for the spice.  I choose, instead, grilled mahi mahi fresh from this Carolina coast with a shrimp tomato sauce with corn in it that drawls Southern yum with every bite.  Mashed potatoes with the skins on, and an organic green side salad.  The place is so packed we have to eat at the bar, but we don't mind.  My first full post-flu meal in almost a week is more scrumptious than I remember food ever tasting.  I eat every bite and if I could, I would lick the plate.  Our bartender/waitress is from South Hadley, Massachusetts, and it's apparent that she loves it down here on the Carolina coast.  She looks like someone from Western Mass, with her dark ponytail and dark eyes and thin lips, but she's going to fit in just fine.  I see a y'all dying to break out, and soon we'll be honey and how y'all doin'? and it will come out sweet as sweet tea.

That's what could happen to me, too, and then my visiting friends would laugh at me because I'm the most Northern Northerner we know.  I wouldn't be like Madonna getting that odd English accent; it's more like my crisp Yankee consonants would soften like cornbread after red-eye gravy and grits brush against it.

Zoe waits for new smells to emerge in our kitchenette.  We wanted barbeque but no place was open, so my husband brings back Food Lion's pulled pork and baked beans and cornbread.  She licks our plates but it makes her thirsty, so she drinks quite a lot of water.

And outside the ocean keeps announcing its presence, as steady as urban traffic.  Walking on sand works up an appetite just as ample as walking on snow, and I will savor every taste.  But as for the country ham, it's my husband's.  I don't need to eat it to write an ode to it in a post, and just smelling it is enough to remind me that we are vacationing where it is made, and it's quite a lovely, salty where.

Day 95: The Road Retaken

Although it’s been three years, we remember our parts.  Pack the car with the dog inside so she knows she’s going.  Be sure to keep her food for en route separate, so it’s easy to retrieve for the hotel in Binghamton, if we have bad weather, or Pennsylvania, or even Maryland if the force is with us.  Aim to arrive in North Carolina early enough on Saturday to walk the dog on the beach before sunset.

We pass only one squall, in the Bermuda Triangle between Watertown and Syracuse, a place known also as Freak Weather USA which is notorious for sending horizontal snowstorms and wayward snowdrifts into cars, even in summer.  We get off with just a mild dusting, but if you look closely it appears that Zoe is staring out into the abyss. 

 We make it to Gettysburg, and marvel at all we won’t get to see: Civil War battlegrounds, a place mysteriously named “The Ghost Walk,” canons and historic monuments.  It’s bed, sleep, rise, walk through a park and hit the road again by 8. 

We are waiting for color to sock us in the face but it’s muted in Dixieland as well: a few daffodils that I don’t photograph at a rest stop when other needs take precedence, and finally these white blossoms, which look similar to the ones I photographed outside of Syracuse, above.  The weather is the same for five hundred miles: 58.  That will do for now.

We’re checked into our usual room at the hotel on the third floor.  We have stayed here every time because the view is most panoramic.  But with our tripod dog, those are a lot of steps to climb up and down.  We consider a Plan B, but then Zoe bounds up nimbly and we sigh with contentment.  We’re back.

But does Zoe know we’re back?  That we have returned to a place where she was blissfully happy five years in a row, from ages two to six?  Her first vacation destination before France?  She sniffs around with mild curiosity, but not the excitement we see in her when she returns to, say, her aunt and uncle’s house in Massachusetts and knows she’s about to romp with her saucy cousin Sadie, and have a new array of tastes to lick off in the pre-dishwasher canine rinse cycle.

But then on the beach, she wakes up.  I saw her do this once before in her life, when she was a puppy.  To watch something that had imprinted on her long ago arise from her limbic brain to fill her with happiness and also longing and sadness—the recognition that she had had to do without, and now here is what was missing back again, alive and fragrant before her.   

That it was me, once upon a time.  We had left Zoe with Mira and Doug when she was a puppy and we’d only had her for three weeks.  We’d had this trip planned for a long time for the summer of 2003: to drive cross country to visit Science Son in Seattle.  I was going to get a dog after the trip, not before, but then I walked into the pound and laid my eyes on this cute little eight-pound sheepdog baby and I was a goner.  So when we  returned from our trip, three weeks later, Zoe seemed pleased to see me, but happy in the generic puppy way, as though she were encountering just another pleasant, peppy person.  And then one moment in the living room she just woke up to me.  To my smell, my voice.  And out came these little keening sounds.  These high-pitched little cries of reunion and greetings of joy.  They were mixed with aching sadness too, it seemed: the recognition of what she’d almost lost, even though she could not have been in better hands.  Mira said she was glad she had witnessed this so that she’d believe my story was not an exaggeration.  And it made it easier for Mira to give her back to me, because by now, of course, she loved Zoe as much as I did.  I lay myself down at her feet and Zoe ran all over my body, sniffing and wagging her tail and kissing me and keening, and I felt myself to be more wolf mama than human, back in our primordial den, and I knew exactly who I was more than ever before in my life.

Now Zoe does that with the beach: she wakes up to it, but instead of keening sounds, she just lets our a woof and does her crazy gleeful run where her head bobs up and down and her big strong shoulders barrel into the sand.  And then she appears to be flying.  She knows exactly where she is and what she’s supposed to do.  She wants us to play our beach game with her: to find a stone or a shell for her to chase and dive for, never tiring as we do it again and again and again and again.

Then it’s time to meet a new dog, or four.  Time for the ceremonial butt sniffing.   

Afterwards, we return to the balcony where she can sniff the sniffing snout of the neighbor dog.  

In the morning she rises at 5:30 but it’s 6:30 now, so it’s not really so early.  She assumes her post on the balcony and watches the pink sky turn blue, and waits for the dogs of Dixie to know she’s back.

Day 94: Packing in Secret

All of you dog people out there know that it's not a good idea to get the suitcase out too soon.  For spring break, I've been packing in secret.  When I do laundry, I leave some things folded on the table in the laundry room and yesterday, I hauled the red suitcase out of its hidey-hole and set it up there as well.  Zoe would never think to look here.  She avoids the laundry room.  It smells like soap, and bleach.  And when the machines rumble, they remind her of storms.

The next step is to gather the books and audio-books and electronic devices in a relaxed way, as though we're just cleaning up, and to set them on the dining room table without bagging them up.  Any container arouses suspicion.

While I was walking Zoe, my husband bagged up some road snacks and wine for our trip.  It was a good stealthy move.  He's a master at this.

While he does the morning walk in his car, I'll put our luggage in mine. 

Pillows and dog blankets, her bowls and food, they won't hit the car until she's in it and knows for sure she won't be left behind.

And once that happens, she has on her eager road trip face.  We will listen to mysteries, snack, watch winter morph into full-on intoxicating spring in a measly few hours, smell spring flowers, and we'll arrive at the beach, Zoe's favorite human-friendly dog hotel in the whole world.  

All the secrecy, the borderline lying will be worth it.

Day 93: Intelligent Optimists

Cindy just introduced me to a magazine called Ode: News for Intelligent Optimists.  The title cracked me up.  As a cautious optimist, I'd like to see what the smart hopeful set has to say.  She wanted me to read an article about Jim Cannon, the military strategist and visionary who wants the military to retool to save the planet and who inspired the comic film, The Men Who Stare at Goats.  Her son would like to join the navy when it becomes a branch of this man's First Earth Battalion and devotes itself not to war but to measuring rising ocean temperatures and melting polar ice along with policing dumping and illegal fishing in the seas. 

Cindy cultivates optimism.  She will wake up one morning and say, I haven't baked yet in 2012, and suddenly, there are scones.  As I write this post, my feet are resting near the quilt she made for Zoe from all our tossed-away bandanas from the groomers.  She is anti-gloom.  She is anti-clutter.  And she is definitely pro-beauty. (For more about Cindy, go here and there.)

For all these reasons, she didn't like the fact that we had Zoe's many medicines and herbs in a priority airmail box on the counter.  I'd written in my messy scrawl, "Do not move this" because I knew it was an ugly box to have lying next to the fruit bowl when the counter is clean and the light comes through the stained glass windows and the river glints just beyond, but I needed it to stay there so that everything would be easy to find.  She had written Zoe on it neatly in red and turned the box around, but that didn't satisfy her.  Who wants to look at an ugly airmail box day after day? 

"I have a beautiful box my sister gave me to put spa things in, in our bathroom," she said.  "You should use that."

the nice box on the left, the provisional on the right

"But don't you need it?"  I pictured a fragrant collection of herbal soaps and bath salts and oils, the smells of lavender and lemon balm, and then I glanced back at the cardboard box filled with vials of metronomic chemotherapy drugs, the Imodium and anti-nausea pills.  If I could imagine we were plying Zoe with spa treatments, it would make it all go down easier--at least for me.

Of course now I will have to scheme up something nice to give Cindy in return, something she doesn't know she needs, just like this box is for us.

"I really don't need it," she said.  "It doesn't fit in our bathroom.  And you can give it back to me, when you don't need it."

When you don't need it.  

We don't always sugar-coat things around here.  We're often quite frank.  But the family member whose medicine was going in that lovely box was currently getting her rump patted by the box donor, and we three know said family member to be one of the most intelligent of the optimists in our extended multi-species pack. 

My husband and I had just returned from Agway where we bought more dog food.  "What size, do you think?" I had asked my husband.  An innocent question, under other circumstances.

Without discussion we picked the biggest bag there was.  He had to haul it over his shoulder and he looked a little like Santa Claus.

The man behind the counter had gotten us onto this brand when the one we were using, from Canada, started playing hard to get.  So he knows what's going on with us and why we want the healthiest kind we can find.

My husband eased this heavy load near the cash register for scanning and said, "We're optimistic."

Zoe, of course, did not decipher the meaning behind the giant bag of food and the pretty new box, nor did she ponder the faith and aesthetics behind choices that would allow bulk and beauty, respectively, to replace the provisional.  She lives in the forever now.  And that's how we found her just now, on her favorite rug, waiting for another tiresome photo shoot to be over so she could get down to what matters: asking to go on a walk.

P.S.  As an intelligent optimist, I knew that my sister, Mira Bartok, was going to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Memory Palace last night, and she did!  She called me when we were having dinner to tell me.  Yea to Mira Bee!  Yea to sisters!  And Yea to the transformative power of literature to take a sad life story and make it resonant and beautiful and true and wise: a story that has touched countless lives.

Day 92: Spring Melt

While I was a cave-dweller in a sick daze our world heated up.  The temperature rose 40 degrees in so many hours.
  

photo by Tara Freeman

Zoe likes a change if she's in the story, preferably as the protagonist if needles and drugs are not involved.  So my return to the studio to write becomes her return to the balcony to survey the back yard and make sure it's safe from encroaching groundhogs.

I write with a pen today in a notebook in one of my timed speed-writes to break through something that's been cold a while and needs to thaw.  When I play this game I go through the dictionary first with my eyes closed and point to a few random words I have to use without over-thinking them.  One of those words made me laugh when I found it.  Samizdat?  Really?  Okay.

I actually find a really handy use of this Russian word I didn't know before.  Sam means self, and izdatelstvo means publishing; the word refers to clandestine self-published pamphlets and other forms of literature produced following the death of Stalin as a revolt against restrictions on freedom of expression of dissident Soviet authors.  It actually has a purpose in the chapter I'm writing.  Who knew?  My character is Russian and the semi-WASP family she's visiting, in 1988, are fascinated with her ethnicity.  And the characters are all playing a game of Risk.

Maybe blogs are the samizdat of a different kind of self-publishing craze, but hardly clandestine.  I read a Joyce Carol Oates story once in which some artists are on a trip to Eastern Europe in the Cold War, and her narrator makes a case that trying to write what will sell, what will be commercially viable, creates another kind of censorship.  The characters under Soviet rule are not convinced.

photo by Tara Freeman

When the meditation timer goes off I'm still blazing away and I go for another half hour without lifting the pen off the paper except to turn the page.  It's a good day.  Then I hear Zoe hunker down closer to the sliding door of the balcony.  She's peering inside but doesn't want to disturb me.  And when I bring her in, she rolls around on the Indian rug and says she's glad that things are on an upswing.

Outside, on our walk, the earth makes a squishing sound.  We track through slush, mud, and rivulet, and everything that could be green is revealing itself to us, although much is still brown and greyish-white.  We walk for an hour but Zoe would like more of this, please.  Tomorrow, I promise, I'll be up for something longer.  As a compromise, I put her on the tie-up outside so she can tell off all the dogs parading past our house without a permit.

But still, before we give in to the changes we humans think we are due--and I think now of a pink-skinned girl I saw running down Main Street in shorts--I see that my conservative dog is in no hurry for a new season.  She finds every patch of snow left and walks with her head bent low, jaw scraping the ground to taste every last bite of winter with each step.