ehp.niehs.nih.gov/members/1989/082/82018.PDF

P.S. I disagree with the Snopes article.  They seem to think that people think the benzene comes from the air-conditioning (which wasn’t my interpretation of the email they mention) so they’re like “Hey your airconditioning is totally safe.  Yeah, you’re car’s leaching a well-known carcinogen, but it’s not through the airconditioning so myth is mostly disproved!”  (Forget their final sentence in the review and just look at the facts they’re listing in a sort of weird obsession with what it’s not, versus what it is).  I find their fixation with the air-conditioning part and the new car smell part, rather than the cancer part, eery.

I wish I could grasp Gordy’s shoulders now.  I wish I could give him a shake.  I wish I could tell him, “Forget the damn waffle cone.  Come out and play ball.”  But he’d only look at me and think my cheeks looked awfully familiar…like raspberry sorbet.

One day, he came over the hill, tower in hand.  A puppy god bounded up to him.  Gordy shut him down with one God-like, thunderous look (a skill I have yet to learn).  The puppy whimpered, and I watched as Gordy took pity, reached up to the top of his tower, and fed the puppy some lemon-lime icecream.

I have yet to see that puppy again.

It’s getting hot in Portland, finally, and apparently it’s a big heatwave everywhere else. There’s two things I do to stay cool. One is that I keep a spray bottle of rose water in my purse (and I heard it recommended to keep one in the fridge, which sounds lovely and decadent to me). You can buy rose water, or simply make it by boiling rose petals in a pan of water (until the smell is your desired strength) and straining out the petals.

The other thing i do is carry a fan with me. I stick it in my purse’s side pocket. It’s a cool breeze everywhere I go.

One day, Carol’s singing and wandering took her into the city.  There there were buses shoving puddles into huge waves onto the sidewalk.  Carol got soaked through.  People jostled and kicked her in an unfriendly way and weren’t even paying attention, like the bushes and grasses seemed to.  The sidewalk was slick and hard, like a knife it came between her and good fresh ground.  And the cars and the honking were far louder than her singing.  Carol’s eyes narrowed, and she bought a newspaper that was full of bad news.  She stopped singing, and worked in a corporate office.  She forgot all about singing when people didn’t ask for it.  And they didn’t most of the time.  Carol stopped wandering, and gave up her galoshes for high heels, which are pretty hard on chicken feet.  She never went back home.

more

even though it puffs me up

like an oily balloon

like a bird fed on hot air- no…

like a bird fed on fire

fear within is freezing veins

around a hot hole

all organs on the gangplank of my mouth

ready to dive into unprotected air.

safe is salt, safe is passive water

I want to fly

I can’t do that without walking on air

with creamy cold fear on my tongue

I leap, I fail miserably

I come down hard on my dreams

splat

but fear is strong, it won’t let me hide

it leads me up again

it lets me know I’m trying.

The baby was plastic. blue-painted matte eyes stared listlessly up to the sky as Thomas adjusted the blanket around it.  The dog sniffed suspiciously at my spokes a I gawked.  Then I realized I was gawking and looked up.  Thomas hadn’t looked at me yet as his attention was still focused on getting the blanket just right.

“What a cute baby!”  I said, at a loss.  Thomas didn’t look up.  I felt the need to talk more, to justify my stopping.  I didn’t want to seem rude or mean, “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Girl,” Thomas said quickly, standing up.

“I’d like to have a girl some day,” I said, jumping at any opening to prove I’m nice and don’t think he’s crazy, “Or a boy.  I’d love a boy, if that’s what popped out.”  I didn’t want to seem sexist.

“They’re a lot of work,” Thomas said warily.

“That’s what I hear!” I said brightly.  “Though I bet she’s an angel.”

“Oh well, she gets the devil in her sometimes but, yes, she’s my angel.”

“What’s her name?”  I asked.

“Linda.  It means clean.”

“That’s a lovely name.  I’m Sandy.”

“Thomas.  And this is Bill.   The dog.”

Bill looked up at us at the mention of his name.  He searched for signs of treat yielding.  Not seeing that, he began to lick the baby.”

“Bill!  Down!  She’s a newborn, Bill.  Usually he’s good.  He’s Linda’s little body guard.”

“It’s good to have a dog that’s good with children,” I said.

“Bill’s pretty good.  He’s good company.  And he takes good care of her.”

“Like a third parent!” I said.

“Second,” Thomas mumbled, “Second parent.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said.

“Car accident.  She was going to Babies-R-Us.  They delivered Linda, but she was gone.”

“Oh,” I said.  I could feel a little hole in my heart for him, and my eyes got wide to match it.  He must have lost them both.  And the grief drove him mad.  And he got a baby doll to fill in the grief.  Poor Thomas!”

“Well, it’s going to rain,” said Thomas and with that he started down the sidewalk.  I watched him go.

*

The next day, I biked the same route, the same time.  There was Thomas, in the distance, pushing Linda in the stroller, Bill close to his side.  I got off my bike, and as the approached I knelt to pet Bill.

“She’s got a bit of a cold today,” called out Thomas, “It seems like Linda gets everything coming down the pike.”

“Oh poor Linda,” I said, as I rubbed Bill around the neck.  He tried to lick me.

“No kisses Bill,” said Thomas sternly.

“Oh that’s all right I don’t mind dog breath,” Thomas shifted nervously under my gaze.  Why?  “What’s up?”

“I was going to take Linda for ice cream and I was wondering if there was some ice cream you would like to get.  I mean you could come, too.  Well, I mean Linda doesn’t actually eat ice cream because she’s a baby but you probably do.”

This sounded suspiciously like a date to me.  “Okay,” I said.

*

Gelato is a beautiful thing.  I got a scoop each of hazelnut and ginger.  Thomas got raspberry.  We ate in silence, watching Linda.

“She’s beautiful when she’s sleeping.  So peaceful.  So tiny,” Thomas said, “She looks just like her Mama did.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, watching his profile droop in contemplation.

“Cancer can strike any time,” he murmured.

“Car?” I asked.

“What?” he said.  “Just drifting.  Well, this gelato was nice.  See you around.”  Thomas stood up, then stopped, looking at me.  He looked so confused.

“You want to get gelato again some time?  Maybe Thursday?”

“That could be nice,” he said with the briefest of smiles, “Bye.”

For those who do read on, if you’ve never experienced vestibulitis, you might not know that candida comes with the territory.  Yeast infection.  Aunt Blanche, coming to call.  Since my surgery, I’ve been slowly, steadily improving.  I have a very talented physical therapist, who is good at listening, is good at smart holistic approaches with none of the cheese, knows what she’s doing, and an excellent thinker.  And I really am taking good little baby steps under her tutelage.  I’m dragging her into work at 8am tomorrow morning, what with her long commute from farmland, and I realized today I have another freaking yeast infection.

I don’t know what we’ll do.  But she’s smart, so maybe she’ll help me help my muscles deal with this kind of pain.  But I have guilt.

Taking a break from the pain of walking, I laid down to read Kitchen Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen.  She’s a doctor, a pediatrician, a professor, and a therapist.  She works with people in grave health come to terms with their process of healing.  After putting the book down, I thought, ‘I’m reading all of these stories, and they’re great, and I feel like I’ve learned something when I read them.’  But when my brain tried to lay these lessons down on my body, it didn’t know which one to choose.  And my body said, ‘No good if you haven’t lived them.’

As an English and Theatre double major, I had felt cheated.  Theatre taught me to look at the characters, to use what the characters want to understand what they are doing and to use the relationships to undestand the story.  English taught me to pretend I knew what the authors meant by inventing little symbols in what I read.  The more creatively I invented meaning in color or the inexplicable presence of a deer, the better grade I got.  “But what about the relationships?  What about the actual story, and not the blue raincoat symbolizing slippery virginity?”  I felt cheated, because I’d always been a good English student, and I suddenly realized that this thing I respected often had little to do with the action of the story existing.  I learned that living the story is more fruitful than reading it in your armchair.

I feel less cheated now, in this moment.  The stories I’ve been reading are good, memorable, and Dr. Remen draws perfect conclusions.  And I will live them by being patient and listening to my body, to my process.  And by understanding that I need to do that, I’m saying out loud that healing is hard, and that’s not a failure.  It’s not a failure that I can’t control my body.  I should respect the set-backs as much as the baby-steps forward.

I hope you get that, too.

Then we moved into a new house, and re-creating our home took all my creation energies.

So now I’m back to trying to write, and these are the things I’m trying:

1. Write every time I have the urge: For years, whenever my brain said, “I need to write now,” my mind would say “I’m not ready.  It won’t be any good.  I have to wait for the right moment.”  I’ve become aware of this conversation.  I’ve told my mind to chill out.  Prayer can happen anytime, as so can writing.  It doesn’t have to be the perfect moment, and so I’m no longer saying no.

2. Gave myself a writing timesheet: I have a word document where I track my time writing.  That way I have a sense of accomplishment no matter how good or bad my writing is.  And I can see how proportionate my time spent writing is to my love and need of writing.  Clumsy sentence, hope it makes sense!

3.  I write a poem every day: Looking at anthology submissions at Write Around Portland, I came across a short piece by a person in prison, who said something to the effect of: I exercise my body once a day.  I eat right every day. I write a poem every day.  He said it prettier, but he did say: I write a poem every day.  Using that as a vehicle to make oneself the person one wants to be..well I think that’s wise.  So this is the next thing I’m going to try.

4. Write in my diary, even though I’m no Anne Frank: As a child, I wrote in my diary in the hope that it would mean something, in the hope that I was a beautiful soul and a beautiful and wise writer.  As I progressed in age , and occassionally flipped through an old diary, I realized that was not the case.  So I thought there was no point, as it did no good for anyone.  Years later, I realized that the panicked, silent crowd in the back of my mind was composed of my choked thoughts, unable to get out.  And that I’m amazingly happy when I give them voice and get them out.  So, it does something for me, and I figure that’s what I should concentrate on.  So I’m trying to notice when the crowd is there, and let them out.

*

*

*

What do you do?