Learning To Stand

A stroke disconnects the pathway between thought an action. It cuts off the everyday, every moment things we never think of, cutting off the pathway to muscles that do their job without conscious thought. New pathways need to be learned. Consequently, I’m learning how to stand

When the full effect of the stroke took hold, my brain still told the muscles in my right knee how to hold me up, what pressures to exert in the complex mechanism of sinew and bone enabling it to bare my weight. My knee did not get the message. On the third morning of my hospitalization, I got up to go to the bathroom, took a step, transferring weight to a leg that no longer new how to stand.

With my job I have learned over the years how to fall, twisting through the air, riding falling ladders to the ground in ways that would make Michael Jordan, going up for a basket, proud. I managed to fall into the chair besides my bed with a minor scrape on my back. It earned me a color-coded bracelet meaning I was a fall risk. I did not get out of my bed with out help or supervision for the next three weeks. Wherever I went, it was in a wheelchair.

I learned to transfer my self from chair to bed, locking my chair, weak side close to the bed, sliding out on to the edge of the chair to get my center of gravity, pushing up with my arms, pivoting to the bed on my good leg, lowering my self down.
Even now, almost four months later, if I forget to pay attention and try and stand without thinking, I feel my instability, I hesitate, freeze in a moment in fear, abandon my attempt to stand, and I fall back in my chair.

It’s a nice metaphor for life, don’t you think?

All the things I fear making me hesitate or not even begin the attempt, feeling my instability, my lack of confidence, having learned over the years, through trial and error how to fail without too much damage.

There is something in learning to stand akin to the American Indian who went into the battle and staked himself to the ground, a powerful message to his adversaries this was where he was making his stand, was prepared to die for what he believed. Yet it also acknowledged hisfear, acceptance of his fallen nature, the human propensity to cave at the critical moment.

Life is a constant invitation to stake oneself to the ground, committing not be moved, to live in integrity, to be married faithfully, to love my wife and treat her with respect, to walk humbly with my God.

I still run from so many things, so many commitments I have not yet made, so many ways I am still learning how to stand.

The Immigration Debate

I’m getting tired of the immigration debate. First off, unless you’re pure bread American Indian you come from immigrant stock. And even they came over that lanbd bridge.

As for the Mexicans, a third of this country, from Texas all the way up to Oregon used to be a Mexican province or state or something called Aztlan. Some of the right wingers out there claim there is a plot of flooding those states with illegal Mexicans in order to annex it back to Mexico. Some of those right wingers want to annex Texas and Oklahoma so maybe they ought to put them selves on there list of people out to destroy the country.

So everybody fess up. We have to quit pointing fingers. We all got skeletons in the immigration closet. You people who have grandmothers who don’t know how to speak the language, know who I’m talking about.

And some body ought to do something about those people on 18th street; along with all the other Mexicans in the eastern two thirds of the country before they figure out they missed the boat to Aztlan, so to speak.

Oh, and I got a beef with Polish carpenters. Some of them are really good carpenters so some of them have been getting hired instead of me... I mean instead of Americans. I think we need to change this whole supply and demand thing, you know, you do a good job and you get paid a good wage. It’s clearly not working. I mean how many Americans are out of work because we treat these immigrants like people. Putting them in shitty neighborhoods and letting them kill each other off isn’t any more efficient than it’s been for any of the other foreigners we’ve let in. Eventually they become assimilated and then sometimes it’s almost imposable to tell them apart from the real Americans.

Take the clue from Arizona. It’s time to quit pussy footing around and fortify our borders, and start checking people a little too swarthy or shifty-eyed. We’ve got plenty of our own poor huddled masses we can’t to get rid of. We don’t need any more from someplace else. Let’s tear that foreign statue down and replace it with one of our own pointing back out to sea.

And don’t forget to clean out your own closet.

Memories

One time there was the screech of tires on pavement and then that unmistakable crunch. It was loud. I followed the sound. I was small, still in short pants, but with a little ribbed dago’t. I’d run a little, then walk, then run a little more. It took me forever to get there. The ambulances were gone. The cars were there. They were under a viaduct.

One was a big, boxy Buick, or Oldsmobile maybe? There was a dent in front, enough to crack the radiator and leak it to the gutter. I can’t remember the color the fluid was back then, but I remember it dripping from underneath the car. It didn’t seem all that much damage to me. It was back a car length from the other car, a little sports car it had hit head on.

I was fascinated by the way the front end was folded up and over the back of the little convertible. It seemed impossible to me the two car were in the same accident. The big one was barely damaged. The little sports car was completely destroyed. There was glass everywhere aroud it and inside on the seats. Only the taillights were still intact. Everything else was broken. I remember squinting through my glasses, crooked on my face, seeing my shattered image, like a Picasso painting in the side view mirror.

In the back seat were a decapitated armless doll without any clothes on and a crumpled magazine. On the passenger side floorboard was a scrap of a woman’s blouse in a pool of blood.

I told all my friends about it, described in detail the small V dent in front grill of the bigger car, how it almost looked like it was just parked. I told over and over how the little car looked like it had been in a different accident and there wasn’t a piece of glass on it that wasn’t broken except for the back tail lights. I told the way the car was folded over on itself like a U on its side.
I left out the scrap of blouse it the blood.

I can still see it. It was a white, silky material, a few folds up above the watery blood. I remember staring at it for a long time, how my eyes kept coming back to it, how it stayed with me afterwards like the firemen and the dead cats with the maggots crawling out of their eye sockets and nose. It’s the same way, if I want to, I can “look” and see a taught mooring line with the water drops squeezed out and dancing, and the line breaking, folding back through the air, striking like a monstrous snake, lifting a sailor off the deck of a tug and slamming him into the steel bulkhead behind him.

There’s a lot back on Peoria street to remember and sometimes it’s hard to look, to see Pete’s bloody head, to here Trixie’s toenails on a warn linoleum floor, to remember the sickly sweet smell of the plastic’s factory. You get the good with the bad I guess, like a tray of fresh baked long johns cooling in a window sill of the bakery, rosting potatoes in a campfire pretending to be hobos one night in the back corner of the truck lot with my cousin Wayne and his friend Angelo, or Old Pete coming down the street with puppies in his pockets.

I Guess

It has just occurred to me I may be living in a constant state of fret, at least while I’m writing. It’s a low level worrying. I don’t know if it’s good or bad. It’s probably more accurate to say I live in this fretfulness when the subject of writing is anywhere near.

I know I worry about the right word. The problem is I believe words, at their best, are inaccurate symbols. For object, words can get pretty close; there is a certain agreement about what objects are called. For instance, we can all agree what a square box is, but anything beyond the most basic description becomes problematic. A heavy square box or a big square box dark square box opens things of to the matter of subjectivity, if I know what that means, if you think it means the same thing as I do, the words heavy, big, and dark are subject to the experience of the person reading the word.

An Olympic power lifter, and my wife, Jackie would have different opinions and experience with the word heavy, and probably also with the word big. They could have similar thought around the word dark, though you never can tell. Context helps as neither one probably would not think the box had dark thought.

So worrying about the right word is one thing. Another is fretting about whether anyone will care. Some of this goes back to childhood and is just dysfunctional nonsense, hoping people like me and all that stuff I’ve made a great deal of progress living behind. Some of it is legitimate. I’m by far not the best speller in the world a spell check helps, but knowing how to spell is better. I do know there are dictionaries, but I am a creative guy and my ability to misspell a word is legend. Some times I give up because I can’t find them. For those of you with a similar affliction there is a little book put out by Random House called THE BAD SPELLER’S DICTIONARY.

Then there’s vocabulary. Mine’s not bad, but it’s not the best either. I know the general rule is to write as simply and clearly as you can and I try not to use ten-dollar words, but sometimes when you’re trying to talk about complex things or you need to make subtle differences, you pay what you have to pay.

And then, whenever I talk writing, it’s like I’m talking about it for the first time, waiting to hear what come out of my mouth to see if I still agree with after I’ve said it. Come to think of it, that’s true whenever I talk. Sounds like I’m still afraid of saying the wrong thing, I guess.

mm

Truck Lot Boys And Hula-Hoops

We were truck lot boys. We played often in the cinder covered lot across the street where they parked semi trailers, backed up a against railroad ties. The trailers were parked in the form of a U bordered by Pumpilio’s garage on Huron, the elebvated Soo Line, the furniture factory, where they made office desks, and the brick two flat where Yudock lived on the first floor and Angelo on the second.

Next to the two-flat was a four-foot deep ditch littler with rubble from another brick building and years of accumulated trash and broken glass from half pints. There was room to walk between the ditch and the trailers. The trailers stopped just beyond the house. The ditch opened to the lower, grass sparse back lots behind the two-flats on that side of the street.

Behind the first two flat just down the slope was a little shed with the fifty-gallon drum where Yudock’s Mother chopped scrap wood. The grassy area ran fifty yards to the back of a furniture factory. Back in the corner of the truck lot by the factory, a two bay viaduct led to the street on the other side of the Soo Line.

There was also room to walk between Pumpilio’s high brick wall and the back end of the semis, a secret canyon path we often took through the truck lot when we were up to no good, we didn’t want to be seen, or were looking for a trailer that’s been broken into. One time we found one full of hula-hoops, the regular size, and the smaller. They appeared on the street gradually at first, a kid from the block here, one there.

“Where did you get that?” parents asked.

“I found it in the truck lot.” Technically true. We were little Catholic kids, skilled at bending the truth, leaving out details that would only complicate. Besides, it was a poor industrial neighborhood. Certain items, end tables, couches, console stereos, sometime “fell off the truck” and ended up in our living rooms.

The hula hoops, green, purple, orange, multi colored, multiplied, one little girl spinning three around her waist, another topping her, adding small ones around the arms. Pretty soon it became a contest to see who could spin the most at once, ten fifteen kids out, spinning as many or more hula hoops, some with so many going you could barely see the kid doing the spinning.

We became inventive. We played hula-hoop toss. We chased each other and used them a lassos. We swung each other around with them. We cut them apart, tied them in knots, used them as ropes and whips. We grew bored with them.

Pieces of them started to appear everywhere, in the gutter and gang ways, on the sidewalks and the truck lot to be run over by the semis, ground into the cinders until everywhere you looked were tiny little pieces of plastic mixed in, returned to the truck from where they came.

Old Pete

Old Pete lived at the bottom of the cinder pile across form Pumpilio’s garage on Huron. He lived in a hot and stuffy six by six, tin roofed shack smelling of dog, body odor, and smoke. His cot, with a moth eaten green wool army blanket hanging to the floor, took up the wall opposite the door. Sitting on the cot, Pete, forever needing a shave, lifted a flap of blanket revealing Trixie in a bed of rags suckling a litter of still blind, snuffling and mewing pups. “You can’t hold one yet,” he said is his wreak of a voice. He dropped the blanket. “Still too young. Maybe next time, after their eyes open.”

The tin plate of stew my mother gave me sat in front of him on a small round wooden barrel next to his butcher knife. He ate the stew with a big spoon he gripped like a hammer. We each had a battered tin cup he got from a medicine cabinet with no door tacked to the wall.

He had poured me water from a ceramic moonshine jug he kept on the floor next to the barrel. He drank coffee he heated on top of a little potbellied stove in the corner. Tin stove pipe ran out and up the side of his shack capped with tin, belching an occasional puff of smoke like a shack in a cartoon. He held his hot tin cup with an old wool sock.

He shoveled his stew in his mouth like there was someone looking over his shoulder. He talked with his mouth full, shoving food back in his mouth with his fingers stained with grime.

“Your, ma’s a good cook. Good woman. You listen to what she tells you. You hear.” I nodded. My seat was a metal milk crate turned on its side with an old towel for a cushion. Between swallows, Pete huffed to get a breath in. “Sure ya do. You listen to your ma. You’re a good boy. She’s learning you right. You’re lucky. You tell’er I said so. Old Pete.” He sopped up the gravy with a chunk of crusty Italian bread, sucking his finger clean one by one. “Old Pete,” he said again, looking off somewhere. “Been a long time. Poor old woman. You’re old man?”

His tone of voice turned colder. It scared me when he got angry. “He don’t hit you none? You tell Old Pete. That weren’t right. Old Pete knows. He knows how t’take care a things, too.” He wiped his mouth with the soiled sleeve of his overcoat, swallowed the rest of his coffee in a gulp.

“You get out of here now. Pete don’t want no more company. You gonna cry now? Go on. Git.” He grabbed his bottle of gin. I got up and hurried out the door. It was almost dark. I ran a little way and stopped to look back. He stood in his doorway gripping his gin by the bottle's neck. In his other hand was the tin plate. “Think this is?” he yelled. He pointed at me with the gin. “Git.” He threw the tin plate after me. "Think I got time t'mess with the likes a you?"

This was before the Old Polack hit him in the head with the baseball bat and he turned mean.

Alchemy

Alchemy

So, what to blog today? I’ll start writing and see what comes out. It’s how I deal with writers block, as I believe there is no such thing or at least I believe what Ralph Keyes says in “The Courage To Write”. It’s plain fear. It may be a different fear for some, but it’s fear.

For me, when I don’t want to start hitting the keys at all, it’s the fear that I’m about to write something stupid that I have no business sharing with the rest of the world. If you got it into your head to write me back to say this proves that my fears were accurate, then I’d like to thank you for proving me wrong as it at least exposes you as an ignorant person with no literary sensibilities or knowledge as to what actually goes into writing.

I suppose the next fear is that I’ll say something offensive, like calling some one and ignorant SOB, causing me to self censor myself like I did, because, getting down to the real fear, the cliché of all fears, I fear that I’ll expose myself, like some literary flasher, reveling the writer has no real words, that I’m just a fraud and a pretender and I have not faced up to the fact that all those people of yesteryear were right and I am just a dumb, scared little shit who needs to get out of the way, shut up, and stop bothering people.

This kind of thing just pisses me off these days, makes me fighting mad and the way I fight is by punching one key after another, building word upon word into coherence, thoughts others can identify with and then we can become allies in the great war, fire great salvos against those who tell little kids they’re stupid or don’t matter or nobody cares what the hell they have to say.

We can stand up together and shout, flood the world with our words, proclaim these kids matter, they’re important, they can survive and flourish. We are proof and witnesses that their pain can be summoned and crafted and turned into turned to something else.

So all you naysayers out there keep it up. You may destroy some of us with your belittling comments about our worth, but some of us survive. Some of us are alchemist. We take the lead weight of your words of destruction and write them into gold.