History Lesson

After our turkey dinner on TG, complete with a lime-green and pineapple jello mold, I went to the movies with my Lynn, Liz, Erin, and Allie. Watching BOBBY was nostalgic and thought-provoking. Two days later, I continue to ponder my own slice of personal history related to that era.

Bobby Kennedy entered the presidential race at the end of March 1968. I had just turned sixteen. Not yet old enough to vote, my thoughts were on driving, clothing, friends, music. President John Kennedy had been assassinated just five years earlier.

Martin Luther King was murdered a few weeks after Bobby's announcement to enter the presidential race. The war in Vietnam and civil rights riots sometimes felt far from the suburbs of Buffalo, but thanks to up-close-and-personal broadcasting, these events arrived on our television set each evening. The world out there seemed to be a troubled and violent place.

We grew up with the hopefulness aroused by the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. The rules were changing. An emerging youth culture was bursting with flower power, hippies, humanity, rock and roll. Daily casualities of the war had reached about two thousand. Most kids were against the draft and the war. Everyone knew somebody there.

Bobby was shot in early June. Ever since his brother's death, tragedy seemed to be woven into the fabric of our lives. Yet, day-to-day existence for a sixteen-year-old girl remained intact. I lounged on the beach at a Lake Erie cottage with girlfriends during the week of the violent August protests at the Chicago democratic convention. Kids just a couple years older were getting their heads bashed in. A revolution was underway. Nixon was elected. The killing in Vietnam would continue for seven more years.

A year later, this photo of Hillary Rodham (Clinton) was taken....a girl like me. I am not convinced she is the best candidate for our next president, but I do like to see her in context in this history lesson.

Not Helpless

A helpless jelly poured into a mold. Henry James said that about human consciousness. Formless, expansive, receptive...we can wonder about ourself and the world, knowing the life that allows this wakefulness may end anytime.

I am quite certain that tomorrow on Thanksgiving Day in America I will encounter a colorful quivering mold of gelatin and I will be sure to be grateful for my own formlessness taking shape daily.

Karma

Finally, a little breath of fresh air. His Holiness The Dalai Lama on a windy September afternoon delivered inspiration at UB's north campus. A few days later, I was off with the pink suitcase to New York City for his teaching weekend on The Blade Wheel of Mind Transformation at The Beacon Theater.

Then...broken branches and broken glass...an October lake effect storm and a random home invasion.

The thief made off with a couple precious rings and a spare car key. I resorted to using The Club for security. I taped a note to it...THE LAW OF KARMA IS YOUR SHADOW. The law of karma is my shadow.

I began this blogging a few months ago with an intention to reflect on and explore living with multiple myeloma. The writing veered into various directions and I rarely mention the word cancer. I tend to re-frame whenever possible....for good reason. My American Heritage dictionary defines it as any various malignant neoplasms that manifest invasiveness and a tendency to mestastisize to new sites...a pernicious spreading evil...creeping ulcer.

No Thank you.

Thus far, I remain in the best kind of remission. I am well. I am better. Memory of treatment drifts further into the background of my mind like a passing cloud. Buddhist teachings maintain that the physical body is a vehicle that carries us and our karmic inheritance through the world. I especially appreciate Dr. Andrew Weil's belief that intense feeling gives power to the body...passion heals. Many buddhist teachers have received cancer as their final life challenge. The cancer wants to live too, proclaimed Shunryo Suzuki Roshi before he died of the disease. He also instructed You are perfect as you are AND you could use a little work!

I am working.

Autumn Awe

Magnificient flaming leaves of autumn hung over the brick side of my house like a coat...until just the other day when I noticed most had fallen into a pile on the driveway. The clocks were dialed back an hour. A full harvest moon ripens in the darkness.

The seasons turn, turn, turn.......blogging has been neglected. Two months have passed since my last entry. Where have I been? Summer visits, the Jefferson Pilot incident, the River Grille incident, the two hundred five over one hundred fifteen incident.

Bell Awakening

I have a small brass bell in the form of a victorian woman carrying a mask. Toby recently pointed out to me that her hair is styled in pigtails. I imagine this bell lady off to a festive masked ball. Her long, lean, high-laced boots dangle and clank inside a long flowing skirt.

This curious object came to me from the home of my grandmother, Evelyn. She called us to meals with another bell, a small silver dome with a pushbutton on top...the kind of bell found on the counter of a shop. Her german immigrant father, Carl, was proprietor of Oelkers Dry Goods, located on the edge of the Erie Canal in North Tonawanda.

My grandmother's home was rich with sound. A clock on the bookcase in the living room bonged hourly to match the passing of time. Church bells in a nearby steeple sent soothing sounds through the neighborhood several times each day. Whenever I hear that particular bell tone, I find myself transported to a painted wicker rocker on that North Tonawanda front porch, tall oak trees rustling in the breeze.

Bell sounds in my present neighborhood offer a strange comfort. Just today I noticed the bells chiming to the tune of AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL coming from the church belltower next to the Amherst Street Wegmans.

Alarm clock, door bell, oven timer, seatbelt chime...bells warn, invite, announce, celebrate...wake us up to the freshness of the moment.

Mobile Environment

I have lived in North Buffalo for a week now. I take in the sounds and smells of my new neighborhood. I'm comfortable here. I wonder about the history of this home that was built in the early half of the twentieth century. This lower flat is spacious with wild vegetation growing around it. Unmanicured, imperfect, warped...my very own brokedown palace.

This is my 21st home since birth. Call me a crazed wandering nomad. Yet, living with my familiar furnishings in this a new location becomes an amusing artform...a reassemblage of parts.

In the living room, I see the comfy sofa I purchased six years ago while living in the Westminster apartment. The navy blue velour fabric is now camouflaged with a creamy cotton slipcover. Two pillows are covered in patchwork vintage barkcloth, a sewing project I embraced while recovering two years ago. One square of fabric is leftover from a curtain I had hanging in my New York apartment in the 1980s. I later used the fabric to make a large totebag that I gave to Janet.

I see the low wooden armchair, painted light grey. It is oddly small, almost childsize. I picked it up at the Salvation Army and happily painted it out on the patio at the Westminster apartment. Lately, it is my favorite place to sit.

The large Crate&Barrel coffee table was inherited from CJ when he left his Denver loft for Boston in 2003. It has a 1950s retro feel with light wood and black wrought-iron legs...big enough to double as a desk and dining table!

The embroidered floral wingback was a gift from Lynn. She noted a lack of seating at my Glendale place while staying with me during chemo in 2004. We began shopping for a chair that week, but I did not find the right one until later when Toby and Darcy were visiting. We discovered this cozy vintage seat in a shop on South Broadway and they managed to squeeze it into the back of the Daewoo. I now cover it with an antique embroidered muslin throw found in my mother's hope chest. Originally a tablecloth or bedspread, it was likely an never-used wedding gift.

The rose ottoman had a matching armchair when I settled into the basement apartment on Dexter Street in Denver. I moved out a couple years later in 1996 to live with Dan in the brand new home in Broomfield. My landlord, Ben, agreed to let me take the set with me. A few years later, I found myself on my own once again with little furniture. The chair and ottoman became central to my decor. I eventually disposed of the wornout chair when I was able to buy the navy sofa.

Dan and I picked up the small squarish wood table at a thrift store. Once used as a nightstand, I later painted over the dark wood the same light grey as the small chair I like. It is now the perfect size for my dated stereo. Unlike the tiny sleek contemporary models most people now have, this unit is a big boxy all-in-one piece, complete with cassette, cd, radio, turntable. I upgraded the cheap Emerson system with Bose speakers that I also acquired when CJ was giving away so much the night before his move. It's perfect. Occasionally, I listen to an antique vinyl record from my small ten-inch stack. It has a five-disc cd changer player, but plays only commercially reproduced CDs. The discs I burn on the computer must be played on the oversized boombox that Larry brought to me during the three-week hospital stint in 2003.

The small glass lamp on the mantle sat on my mother's dresser for many years until she replaced it with a newer one and retured the lamp to a shelf in the closet. I refurbished it last year with a new cord and shade.

Items come and go. I could go through each room and trace more histories. Maybe I will do that later. For now, I am simply pleased to be here.

Basic Instincts

This morning I enjoyed reading a newspaper article about Italian immigrant life on the east side of Buffalo during the 1940s. The writer reminisced about a time when people in the neighborhood did not have telephones, but they used other creative means of communication.

Upstairs and downstairs neighbors banged a spoon on the water pipes as a form of code. One bang meant good morning, two bangs conveyed come up (or down) so we can talk, three bangs screamed emergency--come quick! A simple open window allowed neighbors to shout back-and-forth with ease.

During the late 1970s I lived in a vintage apartment in the mission district of SanFrancisco...dark wood, stained glass, history. Toby and Lauren resided two floors above. Up and down the fire escape stairway out back allowed for frequent visits.

During the 1980s I lived on on the lower east side of New York in a turn of the century tenement building, characterized by the bathtub in the kitchen that I painted pink and five flights of steps up to my top floor unit. There was no intercom. Visitors were required to stand out on Sixth Street and shout my name so I could toss them the key placed inside a sock.

During 2002, I possessed two cell phones and two pagers, a set for each of my two crisis counselor jobs. One position involved on-call shifts during the hours when most people sleep. That job is long gone. Yet, an occasional phantom pager vibration or sound wakes me up. As an amputee sometimes feels pain in the missing limb, I too experience a moment of distress when I hear a particular pager tone ringing in somebody else's life.

In an effort to simplify, I gave up my personal cell phone about a year ago. The other day I stopped by my new landlord's place to pick up keys. He had instructed me to find him working on his back porch. When I did not find him there, I felt a momentary wish to be able to call him on a cell. Returning to basic instincts, I shouted out his name and he immediately appeared from the other side of the house. Simple.

Universal Unconscious, Trends, Collars Up

Evidence of strange collar-up phenomenon (NYC, circa 1982).

Healing Is Low Tech

This sounds like a familiar quote, but the words actually flowed from my fingers the other day. Jane commented that the phrase has bumper sticker potential. The artist, Jenny Holzer, might place such a truism on a billboard, Las Vegas neon sign, stone bench. I was a big fan when she began using words as visual art.

Certain ideas and creative trends seem to bubble up in a multiples...universal unconscious as Carl Jung would say. Healing is low-tech could show up as the slogan for some campaign or commercial without any involvement from me. I have seen evidence of this over-and-over in the world of art and media.

Charlie and I once recorded a really bad little song about this idea. Everybody in the world's got their collar up...Everybody in the world's got their collar up...Must have seen it in a magazine...I don't know...I don't know. Somewhere about 1982 this quirky turned-up-collar phenomenon happened for a few months. Now there are too many trends and media to track them that they all blend together.

I recently noticed a curious comment attached to a blogger's rant...No quoters, please. I agree that quotes have been Hallmarkized to death, but bytes of wisdom are shortcuts to a larger world view. Perhaps our possibility for true wisdom has been reduced to the one-line quote.

I admit to this strange habit. I collect these seeds of truth. Just the other day I found myself telling my sister...You can't stop progress. We hear that all the time, but who said it for the first time? It reminds me of another by Albert Einstein...Nothing happens until something moves.

I understand the anti-quoter's sentiment. Be original. Be creative. Be smart. Is that even possible with so many reference points to borrow from. I believe it is in the collage of found parts that true art emerges. The universal unconscious belongs to us all. Picasso said it best back in the early twentieth century...Good artists borrow--great artists steal.

Healing IS low-tech...Breathe.

Stopping For Rainbows

A few years ago, I took a roadtrip from Denver to SanFrancisco. After a visit in the bay area with friends, I was on my way back to Colorado. Driving through Utah I encountered torrential rain, thunder, and lightening that sparked the most breathtaking double rainbow I had ever seen.

I pulled off the highway onto the shoulder to take a few photos and sit awhile to fully experience the magical moment. The Toyota vibrated with the movement of traffic whizzing by and I found myself unable to re-enter the stream of traffic. I did not trust my ability to judge the distance and speed of the oncoming cars. Plus, my vehicle lacked pep...so I waited. I waited until the coast was entirely clear so that I could ease back into the flow and continue on my journey without getting killed.

I had lost more than an hour of driving time and found myself reaching the higher altitudes as sun set. Pretty soon the rains began again. The white-knuckle drive on a totally dark winding two-lane highway appeared to have no end in sight until I noticed a few trucks parked off the road. I joined the pack and tried to sleep in the backseat with a small blanket that did not quite keep me warm that cold night. It was scary and uncomfortable.

The next morning was fresh and still as dawn broke and I was back on the road without rain and darkness for an effortless journey across sunny Wyoming and down to Denver.

The wheel of life symbolizes the samsaric nature of existence...the circular cyclic movement of life through birth, suffering, sickness, old age, death. It's really not THAT bad, but I have noticed that the momentum of the turning wheel of our daily life feels so familiar that stepping off for awhile can be quite disorienting and groundless...also liberating.

Leaving the flow of traffic that afternoon in Utah was like stepping off the wheel. Leaving the familiar world of life and work in Denver to move to Buffalo also has been a step off the wheel.

The rainbow photos from that afternoon in Utah were unimpressive. Had I resisted the urge to stop that day in the rain, I would have passed through the rainbow and the mountains without event. The drama of the moment would not have welded itself into a shape.....no story, no metaphor, no inspiration. I need shapes.

Six Degrees Of Separation

Ever since President Lyndon Johnson waved to me and my friend, Peggy, while visiting the White House in 1965, I have found myself intersecting in remote ways with well-known others. Yet I remain in sync with Emily Dickinson's poem...."I am nobody. Who are you. Are you a nobody too?"

Received a telephone call from Kathleen last night. She was up late painting in her studio on the Amalfi coast of Italy. During the two-hour conversation, topics were abundant. She told me about her new favorite activity...beach badminton and volleyball. She also described the 10 x 10 foot painting she had just completed...a single red rose commissioned by Valentino (yeah, the designer guy). He was happy with the commission and brought her one of his high-end red leather handbags. Although, she cares little about such things. Her work in Africa as a United Nations field director is fascinating, as are her political views.

Our talk went from genocide and Chinese oil interests to cancer, dead boyfriends, the simple life. The $7.00 a gallon cost of gas in Italy does not cause huge concern since the people there drive scooters, smart cars, and ride the train to Rome.

Kathleen is an inspiration. Three years ago she was a recent cancer survivor, living a semi-retirement lifestyle in Arizona with her boyfriend, John, who once played drums with The Dave Mason Band...then lived out another career as a mailman who tinkered in his woodshop and golfed. Instead of retiring, they have reinvented themselves by moving to a quaint Italian village and getting married. John moved on into another career as an industrial designer. Kathleen sells her paintings and returned to the work she loved twenty years ago......serving the UN with sustainable development projects.

Six degrees of separation finds the collage of my life taking shape on the less-than-glamorous Lake Erie Coast of Buffalo. The ongoing process of engaging with the world and creating a life is much the same no matter where I am.

Health, Wellbeing, Mystery

A lot has been written about the politics of hope, but I find myself thinking about the social psychology of health and wellbeing. Maybe my interest is really more about a philosophy of health and wellbeing. I hunt for more specific words to describe a specific condition. Forget about generalizations such as cancer, sickness, ill health.

Every person has some condition of health. A person with cancer can be very healthy. A person without cancer can be very unhealthy.

What are the fundamental components of health? Three categories interest me:

Physical...nutrition, housing, medical
What is the strength, energy and vitality of the body?
Are there limitations, deformities, pain?
Is nutrition, housing and medical intervention available?

Social...friends, family, income
What connections nourish the soul?
What economic conditions support or limit?

Emotional...spirituality, meaning, education
What is the state of mind?
What are the beliefs that shape a person's thoughts and offer meaning?
Is there ongoing learning and growth?

There is also a fourth influence, not really a category...mystery.

I continue to wonder how I landed a condition (multiple myeloma) that was first reported among survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb explosions. Exposure to ionizing radiation or particular chemicals is often a factor. So what about me? That remains a mystery.

The atomic baby image (shown here) was a popular icon seen around NYC during the early 1980s. Haring died before age forty of HIV disease.

They Say It's Your Birthday

According to a recent news report, Hallmark sold about 88,000 birthday cards last year for people turning 100. The Census Bureau claims there are 70,000 100-year-old folks in the USA.

I suppose nobody imagines arriving at that birthday until the day you find yourself trying to blow out a hundred candles on a cake.

Some birthdays slip by quietly, but last month I blew out birthday candles on three chocolate cakes....three separate occasions (thanks to Lynn and Paige) in celebration of the unremarkable 54th year.

The hats in this photo were purchased in a small grocery store in Mexico (thanks to Toby, Corinne, Romney) during a 1981 vacation in celebration of my unremarkable 29th year.

29, 54, 100....Waking up each day is actually quite remarkable!