Exactly a year ago, April 3, 2023, my husband suddenly became violently ill with the pancreatitis that would kill him 10 days later. Right about this time in the middle of the evening, as I start to write this post. So very suddenly. He was fine and then he wasn’t, from one moment to the next.
I think of last April 3, the earlier part of it, as The Last Good Day. I’d had a pleasant, relaxed afternoon that included hanging out at a coffee shop and then the new library. Bob and I were at the beginning of a week of spring break, after working much more than usual in the past few months and hardly seeing each other, and were planning on a romantic getaway to take the waters in Truth or Consequences on the 5th. I had cooked a spring dinner of greens from the garden, with rice and parmesan, and he said it was good. It was the last thing he ever ate, and I haven’t made it since, can’t.
He took the trash out, as he did every week, and finished getting his tax records together for his business so that I could get the bulk of the tax work done and not have to worry about it the rest of the week. I gave him a little bit of a hard time for not putting everything in the right categories and making more work for me. Not the conversation I would have had with him, if I had had any idea what would happen just a few minutes later.
And then life as we knew it ended.
I figured that today would be difficult. It’s been tolerable, not as hard as it might have been, but of course I’m not OK. I can’t expect to be, shouldn’t be. It’s OK not to be OK. The next week and a half, I’ll be inevitably remembering, these days floating on the layers of trauma from the year before.
If that weren’t disorienting enough, in the past couple of days someone or something has seemed bent on playing April Fool’s jokes on me. A couple of exceptionally odd events occurred, and if you’ve read much of my blog, you know that’s saying a lot.
On April 1, I was taking out the trash, which is now my job along with everything else Bob used to do. I opened the garage door to roll the recycling bin out, and before I could close it again, a bird flew in! An unfamiliar species, substantial, about the size of a robin, pale yellow belly and grey and black head and wings, one who must have been passing through on migration and gotten confused.
I chased the critter around with a broom, trying to shoo it back out, but there were too many places to hole up in the rafters where I couldn’t reach, and it seemed to have no interest in freeing itself if that meant navigating in the dark. As it darted around in a tizzy it kept bashing itself into the panels of lights in the ceiling, which must have looked like sky. I was tired after my workday, and cold, and we weren’t accomplishing anything except to give the bird bruises. I put out a pan of water for it and went to bed. The bird would have a safe place to sleep overnight, and no harm done.
In the morning, yesterday, April 2, I woke up late out of a disturbing dream, strangely sore all over and a little bit loopy. It took me a little while to remember that I had a bird in my garage. I went to open the garage door, closing the door from the house to the garage behind me lest the bird should try to escape in the wrong direction. I heard a loud click behind me but thought little of it. The bird immediately found its way out into the sunlight.
Relieved, I turned to go back into the house and make some coffee. And found that the door was locked! Obviously it had been unlocked, or I couldn’t have gone through it in the first place. This made no sense. And I was in trouble, still in my nightgown in the morning chill, and of course without keys or phone.
My next-door neighbors have a key to my house, and I have theirs, so I wasn’t extremely worried. And my 90+-year-old neighbor fortunately knew where the key was and quickly retrieved it from a drawer nearby. Whew! I marched up to my front door— and was no better off than before, because my glass storm door was still locked from the inside and there was no way of accessing it. I was about to resign myself to calling a locksmith, but then, just in case, tried my front deadbolt key in the house-to-garage door lock. And it worked. I didn’t even know the two doors had been keyed alike.
So what caused that door to click itself locked? I’ve lived here almost 22 years and nothing like that has ever happened. I’ve been paranoid about locking myself out since Bob has been gone, and I always, always triple-check that I have my keys when I leave. This time it was like the house itself locked me out. Or like someone did. In the context of the weird bird encounter, this was seriously creepy.
I’ve had instances of disembodied beings having helpful effects on physical objects (like last summer when apparently Bob fixed the roller shade on the patio— did I tell you about that?), but none in which they manipulated objects to do harm. I had been broadcasting calls to Bob for days, unable to get any more than the faintest signal on the cosmic WiFi, and I’d hate to think that I caught some kind of untoward attention in the process. I do know better than to call out to just anyone… don’t I?
At a health care appointment yesterday, I told my provider about my strange morning. It seemed symbolically significant to her, and she asked me to think about what it might mean in terms of being shut out or something similar. It certainly had a feeling of significance, but if it has a lesson for me, other than that I should never shut that door behind me again, I haven’t yet gotten the message. Perhaps it will become clear. If the confused bird had a message for me, I don’t know what that was either. I could make up a story but that wouldn’t be the point.
Once the craziness was over, I decided to take a photo of the blossoms on my pear tree before they faded, with the intention of using it for wallpaper on my phone. This one:
When I opened the wallpaper settings, I was surprised to find that my phone suggested this picture:
As I was telling you, I’d been trying and trying to “phone” Bob, without success. This photo wasn’t recent or prominent in my photo stream; it was from way back in 2021. It had never come up before on the list of potential wallpaper images. And it’s an edited version– the original background was removed and the image is cropped closely around the face (which the photo program might have done on its own for some reason).
And just a little while before I had been whining at my appointment about how frustrated I’d been at being unable to reach Bob for days despite trying every way I knew how.
I think the last really clear visit I’d had from him was back on March 17, first thing in the morning while I was still lounging in bed. When I got up I picked up my phone to text someone, and in the space where I was about to start typing, there was already a word: Bob.
In early January, a patient called to say she wasn’t going to be able to get here due to the day’s worsening snow, something that doesn’t happen all that commonly in Albuquerque. And then she added that her husband had died on December 20.
Of course I was shocked, and worried for her. Her husband was 84 years old but in good health and diligent about taking care of himself. He had died suddenly of an apparent heart attack. She had left the room briefly while he was on the phone, and when she came back, he was already gone.
The snow dissipated, and C made it to her appointment after all. It was a good thing, since there was so much for her body and mind to process, a very appropriate time for a supportive treatment.
She and her husband, J, had run a business together for many years, each of them handling different facets of it. She hadn’t gotten involved with the parts that J took care of, and didn’t understand his idiosyncratic ways of keeping records. However, she told me, she was in such close communication with him that he could give her specific advice to guide her through all that. With his help she was figuring everything out and keeping the business going by herself. Not that it was easy by any means, but it was doable. My heart went out to her, knowing all too well what a challenge it is to do all one’s own work plus everything one’s deceased spouse had been doing.
C asked if I had any sense of J being around, since a number of people she associates with had been able to perceive him. I had all my antennae up, but I wasn’t noticing anyone else in the room with us.
I marveled at the rich flow of information C was able to get from J, but she dismissed the idea that it was so amazing or unusual. She was about to say, “I’m nobody special, so if I can communicate like this, anyone can.”
She got as far as “I’m nobody special,” at which point I could feel J positively jumping up and down and waving his arms at my right side. He was taking vehement exception to C’s opinion that she wasn’t special! I told her what was going on— she was aware of his presence too— and she replied that he had always given her a hard time if she put herself down that way. We had a good laugh, and I made it clear that I thought C was very special too!
Seriously, what C can do appears to be beyond what most of us are capable of. After decades of practice, I can almost never get this kind of clarity. Apparently she’s been able to do it since childhood. She also has a spiritual discipline that she has pursued for many years, and I expect that it must help enhance her awareness.
I had only had one encounter with J during his life. It was in November 2023 when my laptop died in such a way that the data couldn’t be gotten out of it, and I was in a bind. (Yes, I had online backup, but it was painfully slow to access.) He generously called me to give me the name of someone who might be able to help. I had appreciated that tremendously, even though I ended up not needing that person, and when he showed up in my office I was able to thank him again.
Last week I was getting a session of energy work, and my dear departed husband showed up and assisted, the first time he has tried that. My friend who was treating me received some messages from him. One of them had to do with my being special, and valuable to this planet. Apparently he was trying to encourage me to stay here, or to help make it less onerous to do so.
Both C and J gave me their permission to write about them. Image by Gerd Altmann at Pixabay.
I’m still sifting through the hard drive on the replacement MacBook Pro I was forced to get when the last one failed prematurely a few weeks ago, and still finding wonderful stuff I had forgotten as well as junk to clear out. The following is an example of the former. My husband Bob and I went to France for our 25th anniversary in the summer of 2006, and he patiently and gamely followed me around to Chopin-related sites in Paris, despite the bizarrely hot and humid early June weather. (When he, a saxophonist, found Adolph Sax’s tomb, he understood my historical obsessions much better!) Bob died this past April, and I dearly treasure every detail of these memories.
[We stayed at Hotel Chopin, just down the street from the 5th-floor walkup where its namesake first lived in the city. The story begins in that neighborhood.]
This time as I walked past 27 Boulevard Poissonière, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. There was a sign that read, “FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN HABITA CETTE MAISON 1831-1832”—“Frédéric Chopin lived in this house 1831-1832.” I was a little miffed. I thought it was my little secret that he had lived there, shared by only the nerdiest of Chopin scholars. But no, everybody knows, so it’s much less fun.
Explanatory plaques were also attached to the walls of his home at Square d’Orléans, and similarly at the homes of other well-known dead folks. History is thick and deep in Paris.
Square d’Orléans was well worth searching out. In 2002 I hadn’t been able to find it, and I was determined to see it this time. My excuse, mostly true, was that I was interested in it as an early co-housing experiment, that it was an intriguing idea and I wanted to see just how it was put together. I think that (fortunately) Bob was nearly as interested in the place as I was, though only as architecture. It was attractive, quiet, peaceful, a spot we would have been pleased to live in ourselves.
I was surprised to find that No. 5, Sand’s building, was quite far from No. 9, where Chopin had resided. I had pictured the two homes as right next to each other or perhaps facing each other across a courtyard or something. In actuality, you couldn’t even see one from the other; they were at opposite corners of the square. I said to Bob, “It may seem strange to you that they lived in such completely separate spaces.” He looked at me blankly and replied, “We live in separate spaces.” Not that separate, for heaven’s sake.
(This concept allowed Lenore a chance to get in a dig at me when I described it to her. I said that being so far away would be helpful in terms of not hearing piano students all day. Her assent was way too enthusiastic.)
I greatly admired the fancy triple-arched window in the front of No. 2, where Pauline Viardot-Garcia lived with her husband, but I don’t know if it was there in her time. It seemed new.
I didn’t find out exactly where the Marlianis had lived, which was the place everybody gathered for dinner, if I have the story straight.
The Biblioteka Polska required far more searching, but I was determined to find Chopin’s death mask and see his face at last. I knew from Rosemary Brown’s book that it resided in a small museum within this Polish Library, or at least had been there at some time. I had the address on Quai d’Orléans, and we had no trouble finding that on the map, but good grief, it wasn’t easy to locate it in the real world. Quai d’Orléans is a fairly small section of street on Ile St. Louis, more or less catty-corner of the back of Notre Dame. And nowhere near a Métro stop. We started off from the stop at St. Michel, passed the cathedral, and found ourselves wandering around next to the Seine in the unseasonably baking heat. Eventually we found the right section of quai. The address we were looking for, unsurprisingly, was near the very end of the street. After about 20 minutes of walking, we ended up in front of a heavy, medieval-looking door. Which was locked.
Signs on the door in Polish and French gave the library and museum hours. As far as I could tell, the library should have been open at that moment, but the museum was open only for extremely limited periods, and we were a couple of hours too early for the next one. Fortunately, we had come on a Thursday, one of the two days per week that the museum was available.
The door was imposing and intimidating, and I hesitated to use the big wrought-iron knocker. As we stood there trying to figure out what to do, suddenly the door opened and a middle-aged man emerged. I could see that he wore a nametag with a Polish name written on it, but he was moving fast and I couldn’t quite catch what the name was. (I did notice that he looked rather like Zbigniew Brzezinski.)
The door remained just as locked. Naturally, I thought that this man might have some idea how we could get in, so I followed him, calling, “Monsieur! Monsieur!” He turned briefly and gave me a look that suggested I was entirely out of my mind, before taking off down the street at almost a sprint. I think that look meant, “I don’t speak French and I’m not talking to you!”
Rather at a loss, we decided that we had plenty of time to visit Notre Dame, which we were going to do anyway. I told Bob that he didn’t have to trek back to the Biblioteka with me if he didn’t want to, but he said that we were “in this together.”
After a peaceful visit to the cathedral, a yummy Greek lunch in the Quartier Latin, and another hot and sticky hike, we arrived at the wooden door again. We got there just moments before the museum was supposed to open. And the door was still locked. We had seen a woman leaning out a few minutes before, while we were still a good distance away, so we knew someone was in there. I was about to try knocking when another man came out and started off down the street. This time I was not to be dissuaded! I ran after him and asked, in French, if the museum was closed.
This guy had no problem talking to me. He looked puzzled and said that the museum certainly should be open. He tried the door himself, and finding that he couldn’t get in either, knocked. The woman we had spotted earlier answered, and we were ushered in and warmly welcomed.
Behind the mysterious door was a courtyard with quite a few people, all wearing nametags, milling around tables laden with food. There seemed to be some major event in progress. For all I knew, it was a normal day for them. We were told that the person who worked at the museum would be along any minute.
A young, dark-haired Polish woman arrived shortly thereafter and introduced herself as the museum guide. I told her in French that I was looking, most of all, for Chopin’s death mask, and wondered if it was still there, and she replied in English, “Yes, we have a room of Chopin’s stuff.”
No one had said anything about the people with nametags. I asked if they were having a convention or a meeting or something. The young woman explained that what I was seeing was the Chamber of Commerce of Poland. I still don’t know exactly what they were doing there, because I didn’t come up with any good questions.
An older man, a non-English speaker, managed to convey to us that we were supposed to pay to see the museum; I think it was five Euros apiece. We found ourselves accompanied by a sixtyish woman with an odd accent and a very tall young apparent Frenchman who didn’t say anything at all.
And then we were in the “room of Chopin’s stuff.” The mask was in a corner, arranged in a Plexiglas case in a lying-down position. It was white plaster, of course, and it looked like someone just sleeping. That thing that everyone says at wakes, “looks like he’s just sleeping.”
I kept thinking, These are the lips that I’ve kissed. It seemed a strange thing to think about a corpse, or a copy of a corpse. If not for the Plexiglas, I would have been tempted to bring my lips to those rigid white ones.
He seemed so small. Bob thought so too. I kept glancing back and forth from Bob’s skull to the mask, trying to compare general size. Chopin really did seem diminutive. Bob commented that he had probably become shrunken and shriveled by the time he died, but I said that the skull itself wouldn’t be able to shrink to any appreciable degree. I contorted and stretched to view from every possible angle; it was hard to look at the face straight on because the case was a little too high. I got a good look at his profile, and it seemed to me that he truly did look like the portrait hanging above my piano, the one I’ve always thought was the most accurate.
The usual cast of his left hand lay in another case. I was told that it was the original, but I didn’t believe that. The one at the Musée de la Vie Romantique was so much more detailed; this one lacked definition and could not have produced the other castings I’ve seen. I asked the guide if she knew where one could get a copy, since they seem to be all over but I’ve never seen them for sale. She thought they could be obtained on Majorca—not much help. His right hand was elsewhere in Paris, at the Musée Carnavalet. What a strange fate, I thought, to have one’s body broken up and spread across the world.
The famous photograph sat nearby. Not exactly the original, the guide said, but essentially so, because it was one of a number of prints that had been made at the same time by the photographer.
The sight that hit me the hardest, though, was his hair. In that same case was a substantial lock of it, maybe four inches long, and I noted with awe and satisfaction that it was exactly the color of my daughter’s, exactly as I had expected. There were a few lighter hairs, I thought grey but possibly just blond, I couldn’t quite tell in that light. Bob said, “Oh!” and touched his own hair in surprise. It was indeed almost like his, but with Lenore’s hint of red.
It struck me forcefully that since this piece of Chopin’s physical form was sitting there in front of me, in a nice little metal frame, he had actually existed! Part of his actual body was right there, looking like it might have been snipped off that very day. Suddenly he was real to me in a way he had never been before. Suddenly, just by seeing the color and texture of his hair, I could see him as a whole person so much more clearly.
I was already in a stunned state, but there was more—an 1845 Pleyel grand that he had owned. I was kind of brushing up against it whenever I could, and I finally asked if I might be allowed to touch it. The guide said that they had just acquired it recently, and that it hadn’t been restored yet (and might never be), and so it would probably be okay. She lifted the lid to reveal a mass of broken and twisted strings that looked like the aftermath of a bombing. She and I both plunked a couple of keys; there was nothing resembling a piano sound, but I could get a vague sense of the action. And I had the thought that there might be traces of oil from his skin, fragments of DNA, even some desiccated cells… surely I was leaving bits of myself as well, to mingle with molecules left by him and by everyone who had ever played that instrument. Which surely Delfina must have done. I felt a little faint. It was as if my arm had reached through a wormhole and directly touched him, and my long-dead avatar. My new hands touching the old ones.
I couldn’t tell for sure without trying to play it, but it seemed to me that this piano had modern-width keys, not the narrow keys Chopin typically used. Surely I must have been mistaken, since he would have been unlikely to change his preference so late in his life. I am still curious about that. I don’t know when the width of piano keys did change for good.
Next to the piano was an upholstered wooden chair, the one Mrs. Brown had sat in on her visit, where she reported feeling a sense of gloom and despair. I stood next to the chair and thought I might be picking this feeling up myself, but since Mrs. Brown had already put the idea in my head, I could have been imagining it.
There were plenty of other items of interest. I darted over to the original of the watercolor portrait by Maria Wodzinska, exclaiming to Bob, “Oh, there’s the portrait his fiancée did! She was such a talent.” They had the bronze medallion portraits of Witwicki, Fontana, and Zaleski—“There’s the guy who wrote that poem I like so much!” The space was lined with manuscripts, letters, another small portrait or two. I couldn’t take it all in very well in the limited time and with my boggled state of mind, but I lectured to Bob about everything I was familiar with, which was nearly everything. I had seen pictures of so many of these items in books over the years.
The sixtyish woman in our group was eyeing me with curiosity. “You know a lot,” she said. “What’s your background?” I wasn’t exactly sure what she was asking for. “Why are you so interested in Chopin?” she continued.
I sighed a little. How much should I say? “Do you really want to know?”
She really did want to know, and it felt safe to talk to her. I gave her a brief explanation, saying that when I was a teenager I had seen a really stupid movie about Chopin, and that I had realized I knew a great deal about him that I had no way of knowing. I didn’t mention anything about my current connection with him or any speculation about past lives. This seemed to be good enough for her.
This woman, whose name was Antonina Popowska, was mainly interested in Adam Mickiewicz, who was the subject of a larger section of the museum. We all had to stay together, so I was dragged somewhat unwillingly into the next room. It turned out that the library and museum had been founded by Mickiewicz’s son, hence the concentration on him.
The Mickiewicz museum was much more extensive and well-developed, with panels of pictures and written descriptions arranged along a timeline of the poet’s life and the major events of the era. Nina came to life, bubbling with questions and erudite comments. The guide was doing her best to keep her talk going in English, but at times she ran out of vocabulary. Nina spoke Polish but not French, and I had some French but almost no Polish; between us we managed to fill in the blanks and get everything straight.
One display had a flattering quote from George Sand, and I was asked to get it from French to English. I could understand the general sense of it, but I was embarrassed to find that I couldn’t really translate it. As usual, my language skills were not quite up to the task at hand.
All this time the tall young man who was with us had not said a single word. I kept glancing at him, trying to bring him into the conversation. The guide was completely ignoring him, and he didn’t make any effort to communicate, even nonverbally. I eventually gave up attempting to be friendly. With displays in French and commentary in English, something was probably getting through to him, I thought, and I hoped he was getting along okay.
Frankly, my interest in Mickiewicz is severely limited. (It doesn’t help that he referred to Delfina Potocka as “The Great Sinner,” or that he wrote that Chopin was Sand’s “moral vampire” and her “cross.”) I knew just enough about him to stay in the conversation. Some of what I thought I knew appeared to be wrong; for instance, I was sure that his mother-in-law, the pianist Maria Szymanowska, had been blind. I said that it was odd to have the bronze medallion of Marie d’Agoult in that room rather than the other, since she had nothing to do with Mickiewicz, and there was a slightly heated disagreement. As you can see, this was a pretty rarefied atmosphere. Nina showed herself to be as rabid and obsessive a history nerd as one can be, and I liked her better and better.
Although Bob and I both got overfilled with Mickiewicz knowledge very quickly, some of the exhibits did genuinely interest me. Mickiewicz’s death mask was dramatic and beautiful; he had managed to die with his leonine face in an expression that produced a wonderful sculpture, as if someone had intended it that way.
I was interested in the large bust of Prince Adam Czartoryski near the door. As we were leaving, it occurred to me that very few people would probably be interested in what Czartoryski had looked like, only us history nerds.
A neighboring room was devoted to large photos of scenes from a film version of Mickiewicz’s masterpiece Pan Tadeusz. Nina was in ecstasies. I was completely lost. I think that was when Bob went outside and sat on the stairs, waiting to be sprung from this joint.
I was as curious about Nina as she had been about me. It turned out that she had a fascinating and convoluted history. She had been born during World War II, in England, to a Polish couple, an air force officer and his wife. She was brought up there in an institutional setting, along with many other Polish children who were either orphaned or unable to stay with their parents. Her parents split up early on, which apparently was not unusual under the stresses of the war. She naturally spoke English, but in the orphanage they kept up fluency in Polish as well. As an adult, she had moved to Canada, her present home. She was visiting Europe with her husband, who, she told me in a conspiratorial tone, “isn’t very interested in this sort of thing.”
It turns out that if you put an obsessed Mickiewicz fan and an obsessed Chopin fan in the same room, they have a lot to say to each other. Nina wanted my opinion on some matters concerning Chopin, issues that she said she had heard “rumors” about. One was whether anything improper really happened with George Sand’s daughter, Solange. I swallowed my horror at being asked about this and replied that I didn’t think so, but that no one could be absolutely sure. The other question was one I had never run into before. Some people believed, Nina reported, that Chopin had some Jewish ancestry. Did I know anything about that? I didn’t, but I loved the idea because of the effect it would have on the stuffy old bigots in Poland. “I doubt it, and I don’t know how we could find out, but if it’s not true, I wish it could be,” I said. Perhaps I should have mentioned that he had the same nose as Horowitz.
I gave Nina my card. I should have asked for her contact information too, but I didn’t feel like I should impose on her that way.
When we write fiction, where do the characters come from? I haven’t had much luck coming up with stories, but now and then characters have jumped into my head fully formed and ready to walk around quite autonomously in some imagined environment. If I try to change them they resist and can be most intransigent. I wish I were better at giving them a place to live and things to do, as these vibrant creatures deserve a chance to develop.
A couple of weeks ago my last laptop died in a catastrophic fashion, and restoring my data from online backup to a new one has eaten a lot of my life since then. It’s been nerve-racking and time- and energy-wasting, but there have been great gifts in the process. I’ve found a lot of useful stuff that had been hidden in the layers of files that accreted from one machine to the next over the past decade and a half of MacBooks.
The following account of an odd dream was among them. It was such an unusual experience that I thought you might find it interesting. Maybe it tells us something about where those characters do come from? I don’t understand how what appeared to be a fully-formed, three-dimensional real person could pop into my consciousness out of nowhere as morning was approaching, but that’s what she did.
The Dream of the Colonel, 8/24/17
I’m at some sort of office doing an interview for an article or something. The person I am interviewing is maybe a couple of years older than I am, or maybe not. I notice first the screamingly wrong dress she is wearing. No one could fail to notice it. It’s not so much the dress in itself, though it’s a wrongheaded design, a lime green too-short shift with a blue panel for the front of the bodice. It’s that she should probably never wear a dress at all, at least not one as childish as this. She should be wearing something more authoritative, or more practical. I don’t have to ask to know that she’s ex-military. In her mind she’s still wearing a uniform.
She has sandy hair, very short and parted on the left side, and dark blue eyes. She’s quite pretty in a decidedly butch way. Her toned shoulders show in the sleeveless dress. She’s thin and lanky, with wiry muscles. She seems bright and like she knows what’s going on.
The interview goes well and I apparently get the information I need, but when I wake up I don’t remember a thing about it. I just remember this woman, in so much detail that I feel I’ve met a real person. It seems like I know a lot about her. The dream ended like this:
She’s used to making quick but well-crafted decisions. She makes one now. She asks if, when all this craziness is over, she can meet me somewhere sometime. I’m taken aback. Her gaydar is so sensitive that even I have shown up on it. That’s so sweet of you! I say sincerely, but you should know I’m married. Oh, that’s happened to all of us, she replies with a chuckle. No, I’m really married, I tell her, but I’d like to get to know you. She smiles. Seems like she’s heard this stuff before.
I wake up.
I lie there processing all this, and let her tell me about herself.
She recently retired from her military career after oh my god was it really that long? She has a couple of kids, both in their 30s. They’re doing OK. Husband was also in the Air Force. He was quite a while back. He’s doing OK too, or at least he was the last time they talked— when was that? Her daughter gave her that awful dress, trying to help her transition to this weird new life.
It seemed like it would be great not to give orders, not to be in command, not to be responsible for the whole whatever. Thought she could help. This was not her best decision. The office is all right in itself and the nonprofit is useful and the people are fine but she needs to get outside. She’ll get all squishy in here. Wrong way to save the world. Maybe she should volunteer for Doctors Without Borders or something. Except she knows nothing about medicine. She’s more of a machines kind of girl. Anyway, retiring as a colonel gives her options.
Fortunately, she can type fast. The reports get done. She can go for a run at lunch.
The morning of Halloween, I tried to talk with Bob, but I couldn’t get a clear signal. “Hey,” I said, “It’s Halloween, the veil is supposed to be thin. We should be able to connect.” I had the impression that he was going Ooooooooo and waggling scary fingers at me!
Día de los Muertos is my favorite holiday, and I always try to make some observation of it. I would never have imagined, a year ago, how much it would mean this time. Here is the ofrenda I made for Bob, using the photo board my daughter, her husband and I put together for his memorial.
I had intended to give him this Snoopy (he was a fan) for his birthday on March 19, but wasn’t able to get it in time from my friend who was selling it on eBay. Then I planned to give it to him for Easter. So he never got it.
See the alabaster bird on a perch in the back? And the broken one lying next to it? We bought the bird sculpture on our honeymoon, and the two birds became the symbol of our marriage. (The pair of red birds in the front left is from our anniversary last year.) When one bird got broken, Bob joked, “Do we have to get a divorce now?”
I never figured out what glue to use to fix the poor thing, and it’s been sitting in the china cabinet waiting in pieces for years. Now, the condition of the sculpture is all too poignantly appropriate.
Rituals like ofrendas are supposed to help us process our pain. I think maybe mine is being reactivated more than assuaged right now, but the observance is still worthwhile and I’m still glad to do it. The light, fun touch of this holiday, the recognition that the dead can still dance, is a wonderful reminder of the deeper reality of our existence.
But this year is far from light or fun.
I don’t know how to begin to make an altar for the thousands and thousands of needless, tragic, murderous, cruel deaths in Israel and Gaza. As I write, bombs continue to fall on children and adults alike, the elderly, the hospitalized, the disabled, it doesn’t matter. All are targets. What started with unspeakable brutality was met with hugely more of the same, because our species is like that. Victims lose their lives or limbs, while combatants lose their souls, and we are all diminished. No matter what comes next, the trauma and desire for revenge will ripple and radiate throughout humanity. And our ability to respond to the crises that threaten our entire planet will continue to be hamstrung by our obsession with conflict.
Probably by the time you read this, close to 10,000 will have died in that one small corner of the world. Then there are all those being killed, maimed and emotionally devastated just as needlessly in Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere. We are all human and therefore both all responsible and all affected, because we are truly, fundamentally all one.
And within that oneness, each of us is uniquely precious and irreplaceable. It keeps striking me that each of those thousands of losses is just as painful to someone as the loss of my husband is to me. Far more so, I should say, because Bob’s death was a natural occurrence that was no one’s fault, not a murder perpetrated by some blind evil.
Our minds balk at understanding mass tragedies; we go numb to those, and react far more to stories of individual suffering. But each of those thousands is an individual. Multiply personal agony by those thousands. Feel that crushing your heart. Contemplate what humans do to each other in the name of some imagined lofty principles and shrug off as merely “the cost of war.”
In these pages I’ve pointed out that dead doesn’t mean serious and that the next world isn’t a place of sadness. Today I would like you to think of the opposite aspect, the shock and damage that must be repaired when people are killed so suddenly and unjustly and at such young ages, both for themselves and those they leave behind. The damage that is done to our collective heart. Think of what we can do to calm the rage and terror within ourselves and begin to radiate something better.
Bob would endorse that. He lived it.
Once I asked Fryderyk what he thought was needed for us to save ourselves from the future that is bearing down on us. I was asking about climate specifically, but his message is relevant here as well: “Your love of life must become greater than your love of death.”
Today I sent this to the editorial board of the Albuquerque Journal. I was responding to an editorial which painted a sunny picture of Moms for Liberty and suggested that the teachers’ union and the rest of us who are trying to stop them are the real problem. The head of the editorial page sent me a pleasant email back, thanking me for reading. For whatever that’s worth.
I was pleased this morning to see your coverage of the 9/25/23 school board forum, and that the venue was packed and things stayed civil. There’s typically not enough turnout in school board elections. I hope this one is going to inspire people to get out there and vote.
This will indeed be an important election, and crucial for the rights of parents as well as students and teachers— but not in the way your 9/24/23 editorial suggests.
You objected to calling Moms for Liberty an extremist group. But banning books, often classic literature, is an extreme act. Yelling “pedophile” at anyone who supports rights for LGBTQ Americans is an extreme act. Across the country, teachers and librarians have been fired for simply having a rainbow poster in their room. A teacher was fired for reading from the “wrong” edition of the Diary of Anne Frank. These are extreme situations, and Moms for Liberty and similar groups are pushing them to happen.
I fail to see how any of this increases liberty. Or how taking away books, preventing history from being taught accurately, and limiting what teachers and students can discuss can bring the improvement in educational outcomes that we need.
These are not widely popular initiatives; they come from a very vocal minority, not a groundswell of disgruntled parents. Even in relatively conservative Rio Rancho, efforts to ban books have been soundly defeated. Most Americans simply do not want a Fahrenheit 451 future for our country. (Ironically, Fahrenheit 451 itself has often been targeted for censorship.)
While some individual members of M4L may genuinely believe they are supporting the rights of parents, in reality they are working to take away rights for those with whom they disagree. The point of the organization is not to help parents have agency over their kids’ education. It is to gut public education. It’s the same thing that the American right has been working toward for decades. Privatizing education gives more money and power to corporations and takes it away from ordinary people and the governments they elect. Again, how is this “liberty”?
It’s always easy to manipulate people by convincing them that their kids are being threatened, usually by some sort of outside or marginalized group. This kind of thing has happened many times before. The hysteria over “groomers” and gay and trans folk is not so different from the satanic panic of the ‘90s, for example. And it’s very easy for well-funded political groups to exploit such fears. Moms for Liberty is a very well-funded political group. The Journal editors seem to believe that they really are what they purport to be, a bunch of regular grassroots women keeping their work going by selling T-shirts. In reality, they are astroturf, and as a news organization, surely the Journal could figure that out. I wonder why you did not, or why you prefer not to make the reality clear.
Here’s what’s actually going on. As reported in Forbes, hardly a lefty outlet: ‘M4L reported gross receipts over half a million dollars in its first year; Cunningham computes that only about $28,000 of that came from selling t-shirts. The rest came from anonymous donors writing checks as large as $100,000.
‘M4L went operational on January 1, 2021. By the end of the month, they had appeared on the Rush Limbaugh Show; soon they moved on to score appearances or shout outs from Breitbart, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Fox News, and Steve Bannon’s War Room. In just six months they had achieved the kind of media presence that most plucky t-shirt moms wouldn’t dream of.
‘M4L has hired a pricey press company and launched at least three federal political action committees.’ https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2023/01/27/dark-money-and-education-parent-grass-roots-groups/
‘They show up shouting at school board meetings with endless complaints. The press interviews them as though they are “regular moms” looking out for their children, but they are not. They are a well-funded facade for the Koch, Walton, and DeVos families to disrupt and destroy public education.’ https://networkforpubliceducation.org/merchants-of-deception/
The teachers’ union is right to alert our community to the danger this group poses, and they’re far from the only ones who are concerned. It’s not just public education that’s under threat. It’s freedom of thought and speech, and freedom to be who we are. Freedoms that New Mexicans surely value.
Please, please, editors and people of Albuquerque, don’t take Moms for Liberty at face value, and don’t take my word for all this. The truth is easy to find. FOLLOW THE MONEY. Same as always.
I think of them as “Moms for Fascism.” Although they will probably fizzle out eventually, I’m very nervous about the harm they have caused and will no doubt continue to cause.
The above is a clip from a recording made in connection with the Big Circle afterlife communication group. I’ve been meaning to share it with you for a while. Things happened in between that made it both impossible to do that, and more important than ever.
On April 3, my husband very suddenly became violently ill. At the ER they diagnosed pancreatitis. I felt relieved at first; a couple of my patients have had repeated bouts of pancreatitis for unknown reasons, and although it’s been painful and difficult, they’ve recovered in a few days. That’s what the hospital staff expected for Bob.
It was not to be. His kidneys were damaged, and over the course of days of desperation alternating with improvement and hope, multiple systems failed. He passed on April 13 at about 10:50 pm.
This is still an unreal statement to me, even though I have said and written it so many times since then, even though I had my hands on his body and my ear to his chest as his heart slowed and stopped, even though I myself closed his eyes.
So here I am, still a small medium, left to make sense of all this and to regroup and go on. You will not be surprised to hear that I was very much energetically in touch with Bob as he was fighting to survive, and as he found it impossible to stay connected to the body that could no longer serve him. There will be more to write about that as I can.
The story of my relationship with him across the veil is only beginning to be written. So far it’s in line with what I’ve experienced in the past— emotional tones, physical sensations, little or nothing in the way of verbal communication or any other exact messages. Except, of course, in the sense that constant love and affection is a message in itself, the most crucial message of all to receive.
It will be strange to fill out forms and check the “widowed” box, because I don’t feel widowed at all. I feel very much still married– it’s just that my husband lives somewhere else now, as if on a remote island with bad phone and internet connections.
You might remember my previous experiences with trying to hear messages through Electronic Voice Phenomena, the technique used in the clip at the top of the page. Some were straightforward and easy to catch. Others were incomprehensible even after listening many, many times. All made it clear that the reality we live in is far more extensive and complex than we’ve been taught, and that we are far less limited than we ever imagined. Recently the Big Circle’s work came back to my attention, before I had the present need to be reminded of it, and I am grateful.
I’ve listened to a good number of clips from their weekly recording sessions, and many are striking, but it was this simple, totally unmistakable greeting from Jim, whoever he may be, that left me completely gobsmacked. “Hi.” That’s all. They are there. They are here. We are here. We are together. No one is lost.
The Democratic Party LegislativeAction Expo was held 1/7/23, in preparation for the legislative session that will start January 17.There were multiple breakout tracks, and I wish it had been possible to get to more of them. The one that seemed most important to me was “Modernizing the Legislature,” with Rep. Natalie Figueroa, Rep. Meredith Dixon, and Rep. Joy Garratt.
I’ve been painfully aware for years that the kinds of changes these representatives are proposing are needed desperately. The trouble is that for the most part, there is no incremental way to get from here to where we have to go. We need an abrupt transformation, and it’s hard to see how that can be made to happen. I was heartened to hear that there are some concrete plans and a plausible path.
In an effort to help inform everyone I can reach about this, my notes from the presentation follow, with some clarifications added:
***
Many people in our state, even very aware and educated people, don’t realize that New Mexico has the only unpaid legislature in the country. Salaries vary among the states, but only New Mexico expects senators and representatives to get by on nothing more than a small per diem that may not get even close to covering the expenses they incur in order to serve.
This is just one of the structural issues that is holding back our ability to create good and sufficient law and move our state forward. New Mexicans are realizing more and more that we can’t keep going the way we are. Our legislative branch was built for a much simpler time. When I think about how inadequate it is for the needs of the 21st century, I’m amazed that we’ve held together as well as we have.
Some of our legislators have been meeting for the past 14 months to discuss all this and craft a bill to fix it.
Legislators need time to research, read, meet with constituents, and they don’t have it.
Voters will have to make the change to paid legislators. Compensating legislators has been voted down 7 times in the past, with the last time being in 1992. There is more support for the idea this time.
The proposed bill covers three aspects of our predicament.
— Longer annual legislative sessions:
Our 60-day sessions alternating with budget-only 30-day sessions have become terminally overpacked. Annual 60-day sessions are being proposed. Bills would carry over to a second year (matching the 2-year terms of House members) so the process doesn’t have to be started over every time. No limit on the governor’s call (what bills she can have included).
Increasing the length of the sessions requires a constitutional amendment.
— Staffing:
Rep. Dixon was a congressional staffer so understands what the legislators need. She says we don’t have ways to make it easy for people to communicate with their legislators. There is only one staffer to two legislators during the session, and outside the session time there is no help at all.
Proposed $2.5 million in the feed bill (the bill that funds the legislature) this year to work on how to organize and pay staff. Where would they work? Who would manage them? What equipment would be needed or is already available?
HB 2 will include a stipulation for one staffer per legislator starting 7/1/24. This would cost $15-25 million.
Increasing staffing does not require a constitutional amendment and is probably the easiest of these to accomplish.
— Compensation:
A citizens’ group would decide, and could adjust legislators’ pay rate for changes in the economy. We were told that even a prominent Republican suggested $70,000-80,000 per year, though I am not clear which one. The figure of $50,000 has been suggested as a minimum. The idea is to have a professional legislature at rates that would attract competent people and keep them from needing to maintain another job.
Paying legislators, other than their present per diem, would also require a constitutional amendment.
***
What happens, and does not happen, between legislative sessions:
During the interim, the Legislative Council Service does event planning for 25 meetings, which reduces their time to help craft bills. They do research, but it takes a long time because “the caseload is incredible.”
Constituent Services in the House has only 5 staffers in the interim. The governor also has caseworkers. Even figuring out who should do a given task, in which branch or agency, takes a long time.
There are no year-round bill analysts as things stand now, even though billions of dollars are involved with their decisions.
The Legislative Finance Committee is year-round and does Fiscal Impact Reports. No one analyzes any impacts from bills, including their potential benefits, other than strictly fiscal impacts. FIRs can be wrong, so legislators and supporters of bills need to be vigilant. They get their information from state (executive branch) agencies. The dependence of legislators on FIRs is disproportionate due to all the problems listed above— they have no time to do the research themselves.
***
Talking points:
Saying “let the people decide” will help pass the bill. It needs wide support from us.
The state House is now majority women, whereas it was only 8 years ago that they even got a women’s restroom on the House side!
The percentage of the state budget that goes to the whole legislative branch is very small. The legislative branch is not coequal with the executive branch under present conditions.
An attendee pointed out the problem of bills being blocked by committee chairs, but that is not addressed in this bill.
Some of us asked why not even longer sessions, like 75 days. Longer than 60 days would be great, but if legislators are not paid, asking them to be present for longer sessions wouldn’t work out. One component of the bill may pass and not others, so their consequences must be considered separately.
People may not know that interim committees meet all year— being a representative or senator is really a year-round job. Many legislators feel that they are on too many committees, and more than one committee may meet at the same time in widely separated locations, so that the legislators can’t keep up. They do get a per diem for committee meetings.
There is a process for New Mexicans to repeal any law they don’t want.
The Legislative Council Service (staffed by lawyers) would still write bills as they do now. LCS is nonpartisan and can’t advise sponsors on the consequences of their bills.
Wealthy legislators could decide to go without their salaries.
Staffing issues are the “most universally embraced” aspect.
Point out that it costs to be in the legislature, including the time and energy of family members who have to help out with things like child care.
***
Comments from the audience:
An attendee who was a congressional staffer pointed out that even though staff pay is low, it’s a good jump-off point for a young person’s career— but child care is badly needed.
An attendee said that school boards or other authorities or businesses may frown on giving leave to serve in the legislature. There is no mechanism yet for this. (School board members don’t get paid and their per diems have been cut.)
A while back I ran into a wall of bothsidesism from someone I respect and admire. His contention was that we need to acknowledge the harm those of us on the left, where he also sits, have done through intolerance of those with different views. He was speaking, particularly, about right-leaning persons being shouted down on a college campus in his state. We need to look not only at the elephant in the room, he said, but the donkey too.
My friend is dedicated to bringing people together in the purple middle, and contends that most Americans are already living there and can agree on most everything that’s important. That research says most Republicans are afraid of Democrats, as much as the reverse. That we’re mostly wrong about each other and that the media are responsible for ginning up our conflicts, which we mostly wouldn’t have otherwise.
I thought and thought about how to respond to this. I could not see the shadow of the donkey being as big as that of the elephant.
I was still formulating a reply when the Club Q massacre took place. And instead I wrote this:
Lefts Don’t Make the Right
Spare me your false equivalences
They want to kill us,
they have done it and will again
so spare me your false equivalences,
your tsks and tuts
at the failings of our folk.
A side-eye or call-out is not murder
A firing or shunning might violate,
but is not a plan for genocide,
so spare me.
To exclude is all too human,
and to be dense and oblivious,
that knows no limits,
but to exclude by design,
as a system for advantage,
to make it law—
that belongs to them,
so spare the false equivalences.
There are not very fine people
on both sides.
*****************************
I will be returning to this subject soon.
*
For those reading this in the future when the event has faded from memory, the Club Q shooting was an attack on LGBTQ folk at a place where, until then, they had felt safe. It happened in Colorado Springs, during a period when right-wing forces were intensifying their rhetoric against queer Americans and passing more and more laws to restrict our rights. And in that way, it was not a surprise. Here is one account: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/22/us/colorado-springs-nightclub-shooting-narrative-cec/index.html
As we wait for the dust to settle from the midterm elections and the final numbers to crunch, let’s clear out our poor brains and spend a little time thinking about something other than that, or war or inflation or viral variants. Here’s a different, equally uncertain and slippery subject.
A few weeks ago I picked up a nice used mountain dulcimer at the Albuquerque Folk Festival for $50. I had always considered acquiring one. For some reason, the song that popped into my mind to play on it was “Wildwood Flower.”
I couldn’t remember the third line of the first verse, so I looked up the lyrics— and found that nobody knows what they are! I fell into a kind of quantum uncertainty zone of folk poetry.
What I remembered, with that third line clarified, was:
I will twine and will mingle my waving black hair With the roses so red and the lilies so fair The myrtle so bright with its emerald hue The pale emanita and the islip so blue.
I really thought those were the right words. I had chuckled at “Mother” Maybelle Carter’s version, which ends “The pale and the leader and the eyes look like blue.” Obviously she, or someone along the line, misheard badly. Apparently she said herself that some of the words had gotten mixed up.
But here’s the trouble: There’s no such thing as an emanita (though that can be used as a girl’s name). Islip is a town in New York and has nothing to do with plant parts; it originally denoted a place on the edge of a body of water.
It’s thought that this song, popularized by the Carters in 1928, was derived from one published in 1860, “I’ll Twine ‘Mid the Ringlets”:
I’ll twine ‘mid the ringlets of my raven black hair The lilies so pale and the roses so fair The myrtle so bright with an emerald hue And the pale aronatus with eyes of bright blue.
But there’s no such thing as an aronatus flower, either. At least, that name is not used now, nor is it known to have ever been used. It’s conceivable that any of these oddball words for flowers might have existed at some time in some isolated area of the country, but that seems like a long shot. In addition, this verse is flawed by the repeated use of the word “pale.”
“Emanita” must have been in use in these lyrics by the 1920s, or even in the 1910s when Maybelle was a girl, in order for her to hear something like “and the leader.” You might want to say that amanita was meant instead of emanita, but who would twine poisonous mushrooms in her hair? (A harfoot girl, perhaps?)
And what is blue and sounds like “islip”? Nothing I can think of. I considered cowslips, but they are bright yellow and grow in the UK, not the US. Emmylou Harris and Iris Dement used “hyssop so blue.” That works well enough. It just doesn’t give us the “eyes” sound that was prominent in the original lyrics and that little Maybelle heard in her grandmother’s singing. I might choose “iris so blue.”
Johnny Cash, who of course married into the Carter family, sang “the pale amaryllis and violets so blue.” Amaryllis flowers can be pale, but they are native to South Africa, and the song is American, so amaryllis is not a great choice. Besides which, amaryllis blooms are large, and there’s already a lot of botany on this lady’s head. As for the violets, “blue” violets are hackneyed, and in any case violets are violet, not blue! Cash made a valiant attempt to fix the song, but I’d say he fell a bit short.
Amaranthus has also been suggested as the mystery flower, but it’s anything but pale.
An interesting alternative is given here: http://ergo-sum.net/music/MaudIrving.html
There is a white flower with distinct blue centers, the blue-eyed tulip. Like roses and lilies, tulips bloom in the spring, and could plausibly be combined with these flowers, or with violets or irises.
Harking back to the original song, I propose “The white wild tulip with eyes of bright blue” as a possible 4th line, though somehow “tulip” seems less poetic to me than some other flower names.
This site brings up another fuzzy aspect of this seemingly simple song: the lyricist, “Maud Irving,” may not have existed. The poem may–or may not– have been penned by one J. William Van Namee. His other known works are rather frightful, stickily sentimental verses. In any case, “Wildwood Flower” can’t be counted as a true folk song, since it has a published antecedent. Yet, since it’s been filtered through multiple minds and greatly changed over the years, it certainly has a folk song aspect.
We are folk, too, so we might as well put our 2 cents in with our own tweaks and substitutions. I’ve brainstormed some flower terms that could fit the space of “pale emanita.” They don’t all fit the same season or region, but poetically speaking, there are plenty of candidates:
pale artemisia
pale gladiolus
pale morning glory
pale elder flower
palest alyssum
palest azalea
palest camellia
lovely petunias
lovely gardenias
lovely hydrangea
sweet honeysuckle
Am I overthinking this little song? As a poet myself, I’m fascinated by the search for the exact right word and by the way language adapts and morphs as it travels among the folks. And song lyrics should be both pleasing in the moment and durable through years of repetition. Lots of attempts have been made to put this pretty tune’s words to rights, perhaps none totally satisfactory so far. This is my contribution to the confusion.
Elene Explores 