Category Archives: Observation

Yes, I am in love but —

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I am also misunderstood.  I take the blame.

I am in love with Mahesh Rao who wrote an article about libraries and librarians.  I am in love with the article.  That is what unexpectedly popped up on my screen yesterday morning.

Here is the link to that article: LINK

Not many people read Spoonbeams, so when “likes” come in, as they did for what I wrote yesterday LINK, I’m always very appreciative and try to figure out what there was about my writing that my likers liked.  Very few people who read my “love” post actually clicked on my link.  They didn’t see it?  They didn’t know it was a link?  When I realized what was happening I tried making the link more prominent but that didn’t help.  That’s why you see the awkward links above.

Does it matter what or who they thought I am in love with?  Not really.

This morning’s view from my “eerie” is nice but not as grabbing as yesterday’s. I do like the addition of fisherman down at the landing — especially when, like these two, they are quiet and don’t start fires in the night.  But the sky is not as blue, there are a few stink bugs and flies crawling on the windows, and that clear-cut box in the trees shows up ugly as sin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Two-Legged Ones

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Walter Kirn, who writes the “Easy Chair” column in Harper’s, reported on his August visit to Standing Rock  in the December 2016 issue.

In August Standiing Rock was

“a spectacular sight: thousands of Indians camped on the banks of the Cannonball River, on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. . . awaiting a federal court decision on whether construction of a $3.7 billion oil pipeline from the Bakken region to Southern Illinois will be halted.”  — New York Times

On the fourth of December, with thousands still standing ground but now in freezing cold

“the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that it will not be granting the easement to cross Lake Oahe for the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline. Instead, the Corps will be undertaking an environmental impact statement to look at possible alternative routes.” — standwithstandingrock.net

Now on March tenth thousands marched at the White House, for as we know, President Trump with a quick flick of his pen, signed

“an executive order that reversed a decision by the previous administration of Democratic President Barack Obama to delay approval of the Dakota pipeline, a $3.8 billion project by Energy Transfer Partners LP.” — New York Times

Tribes gathered in D.C. for several days ahead of the protest.
Paul J. Richards/AFT/Getty. Huffington Post

It was a very personal article, quite thoughtful and revealing both about the happenings at Standing Rock and about Kirn himself.  But the highlight in it for me, and the reason I sought out his website which has led me to add his books to my reading list, was the next to last paragraph.  A little mistake caused me to chuckle.  It wasn’t the error that the editor appended to the Letters section in January 2017’s edition, so I know they check for errors.

“Because of an editing error, “Standing Rock Speaks” [Easy Chair, December], by Walter Kirn, misstated the year of the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee. This event occurred in 1973, not 1972. We regret the error.”

Here’s what made me smile.  Kirn wrote:

Photo: Joe McKenna/Flickr Creative Commons

On my way to the camp, I parked along the river’s banks and watched it drag last spring’s Montana snowmelt slowly south across the prairies. There was a crow, of course, yakking on a tree branch, grouchy, ornery. Crows are often considered tricksters, and in some legends crows created the world. But now it is all ours, not theirs. It belongs to us, the two-legged ones.

Crows have two legs, the right one is peaking out from behind the left, believe me.

The Ultra Bulk

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2016-04-15 21.13.34 copy (1) Germantown Channel on the Hudson River at 9:13 this morning

The Ultra Saskatoon, known to her friends as Ultra Bulk, passed by this morning as I was attempting to take a photo of the many fishermen who were beginnning to fill Cheviot Landing.  There’s a full parking lot right now, mostly boat trailers, but relatively few  fishermen in the park.  One boat is coming in as I write.

There’s been a lot of car traffic going up and down the tracks, although only one very big barge. Looking north I see cars parked here and there, and I’m sure there is lots of activity in the other direction also.  Hope there are enough fish to go around.

2016-04-15 21.12.44

I looked up Ultra Bulk to see where she was from and maybe what she had carried on different voyages, and found her! along with her full name, that she was built in 2012, that she is 656 feet long, she can carry 34778 tons and that she sails under the Panama flag.  Someone told me there was a site like this several years ago, but didn’t know the name.  I looked in vain and finally gave up.  It’s marinetraffic.com.

Ultra Bulk is currently on route from New York City to Albany at a speed of 8.3kn.  Her ATD was 11:23 last night and her ETA in Albany is 6:30, sorry, 18:30 this evening.  I’ll check to see if she’s on time and if my photo is posted there.

Eight in the morning

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Houseboat Closeup by LeeTwo men, one in a salt and pepper beard, both in tan caps, hooded sweatshirts and faded jeans, standing and talking and drinking coffee at the park. One smokes a cigarette. I can’t get a good look at them since my eyes are so bad even with my binoculars, but they could be Louie. They look out at the river, at the house boat, at the island and the causeway and the barge that just passed by going south. They meander about but don’t cover too much ground — down to the water’s edge and back to the fence. Two cars. Did they plan to meet or just bump into each other on the way to work. They spend some time looking up at the sky. I want to make up a story. Oops. One just walked back from the waters edge. I started typing so I missed seeing what he did down there on the rocks. Perhaps he peed. I’d love to catch one of them peeing. But now they’ve taken out fishing gear. They must be the two that were there late afternoon yesterday.  Is it striper season already?

They don’t look up at the house. Do they feel as the twenty-something year old me did when I went with a neighbor to visit friends in Brooklyn Heights?  We walked along the Promenade and saw people on their decks having drinks and barbecuing and children doing children things. I wondered how it must have felt to live there, in such a singular place, and yet have a parade walking by every day looking up at you living your life. I guess I know now. Sometimes you watch them and sometimes you don’t. And you wonder about them as they do you — or not at all.

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Republished with Poetry — because I think that’s what it is.

Fourteen joys and a will to be merry

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IMG_0067Tuesday morning the flag that flies in the park outside my kitchen window was flying at half-mast. It was important to know why.

Two of my friends had died quietly the day before: one was more like family. Although they lived next door to each other, near the park, neither of them had any clout in town. The flag wasn’t lowered for them. It was eerie.

My friends were in many ways similar.

Both spent a lot of time by themselves. It seemed by choice. They did enjoy socializing, and each of them could be great company.

Both loved the Hudson. One kayaked on it, the other swam in it.

IMG_0062They both spent a lot of time gazing at it from their back porches, and they knew that it was forever changing, and that it would always be revealing more but not all of its secrets.

DucksThey loved the birds – the birds in the air and on the water. They watched each other watch a duck family that crossed through our contingent yards several days in a row on their way to the water. We never did find out where the ducks were coming from. Perhaps they nested at the pond down the road. It seemed a long walk for little ducklings, but one theory is as good as another for the story.

foxBefore&AfterTuckThey both observed the animals that darted out from the lilacs and sumac that bordered the tracks – mostly bunnies, but there were others. One took a picture of the sickly fox that roamed the shore, the other took the fox out of its misery.

They both were survivors. She fought breast cancer and was determined to beat it. She reminded me of my husband Clark who fought until he didn’t have the strength to sit on the tractor and mow the orchard anymore.

My other friend’s body was full of buckshot. We knew it was in his ear, but not until the xrays the day he died did we know that his body was riddled with shot, especially in one leg. He started gagging and gasping for breath on Thursday, and by the weekend Lee and I knew that he deserved a better life than the one he would have if he started the regimen to cure himself.

IMG_0055They both were creative. She maintained beautiful gardens, mostly in large planters. I like to look down on them from my top deck. We talked plants a lot, and also animals, and neighbors, and always the river. Her husband gave me one of her pottery pieces for our “tower toasting” just a few days before she died. It is next to me on my desk. Lee and I knew when she went into the hospital the last time she might not make it to our celebration.

Tuck 2 062013 LeeMy other friend, whom if you haven’t guessed was my dog Tuck, was creative too. He could find a way to get out of anything – almost. She called him Houdini. I think she would have loved to find a way out of her body and run with him.

What does one do when two friends die on the same day? I got into the car and drove to see my mother. She has had to depend upon someone for help in her daily life for the past ten years. She acknowledged me and smiled and I told her the news of the family, and in five – ten minutes she dozed off again. I held her hand drawing in whatever motherly comfort I could.

When in transit, I’m nowhere, a good place to be when you don’t want to be anywhere else. I sing with favorite music or listen to books. This four-hour round trip the book was A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of my Father by Augusten Burroughs. I hurt for the little boy who longed for his father’s love and had created a reality where he and his father shared a special relationship complete with little rituals. Finally Augusten discovered how wrong he was.

The tape kept running. I was no longer listening, but had had my own breakthrough. Life, death, love, loss, yesterday, tomorrow had all come together and I was happy to be alive. The memories of these two friends, whose times were up, were now part of me, along with the memories of others who had touched me in one way or another.

At home I read the blurb on the audiobook cover: “. . .Though harrowing and brutal, [the book] will ultimately leave you buoyed with the profound joy of simply being alive.” Come on, I thought, this is ridiculous.

It’s now Thursday and I’m somehow picking away at this feeling of joy by wondering if I should feel guilty for loving life while others are struggling just to live another day. Every now and then this pesky theme of mine surfaces and Lee, bless his heart, tells me it is good to enjoy life. I always come up with qualifications.

But here’s to a great neighbor and my dog Tuck, and here’s to my neighbor’s husband who shall grieve as long as he needs, and here’s to Lee, my constant companion and our lost spouses, and here’s to my mother, my sons, my friends, my extended family, Tuck’s vet, and here’s to you.

Love,

Spoonbeam

Tuck loved to be free —

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Tuck 4 062013 LeeWatching him bound across
the field by the creek made
my toes curl.

Even when he bolted
it was impossible to scold him.
He always came back – full of burrs
and sticks and leaves,
soaking wet,
satisfied and glad to be a dog.

We’d leave the gate open if he were
still out when
we went to bed.

Sometimes I secretly really wanted him
to break away,
squeeze through the fence,
escape the leash,
chase a bunny,
but I
wouldn’t admit it.

What if he
frightened a child?
dug up a garden?
snatched a chicken?

What if he were
hit by the train?
attacked by a coyote?
snagged on a wire?
shot by a neighbor?

He had no use for treats or bribes,
could take or leave his meals,
didn’t sleep on a pillow,
fetch sticks, bother with toys.

He had been wild once,
I was told, in his life before
I knew him

but it must not have been all good

because always he came back to us,
because he always tried his best
to be a loyal, beloved pet,
extending his paw to all, and
keeping an eye on Jaxon,

because he walked proudly at my side,
tail tall and curled,
fluffed like a drum major’s feathers,
on lookout for suspicious dogs on leashes,
and people who might hurt me.

At least that’s what people told me —
that he would protect me.

He was a proud descendant of wolves:
his body peppered with buckshot,
he preferred to sleep outside.

He had a fierce bark, which he didn’t use often,
and it surprised me each time I heard it.

His ballsiness was well noted:
his kennel name was Manly.

His last few days were Hell.

We said goodbye.

He closed his eyes
and went to sleep.

Deer on the Road

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IMG_0147There are a lot of deer in the Hudson Valley.  They are beautiful to see in the fields and troublesome to see five feet in front of your windshield.   I have been in four collisions with deer, the worst of which was an $8000 front-on with one that dropped out of the sky. The policeman who came to my aid asked if I wanted him — the deer that is.    

Watch the deer.  They appear to be gaining street smarts.  Some deer stop at the side of the road.  I like to think that they are looking both ways, or maybe they are listening, and if they see or hear, or maybe they feel it in their bodies, that nothing big and fast is coming, they will cross.  My theory is that in six generations the deer will evolve to the point that they can live in harmony with automobiles.  This may sound ridiculous, but the findings of University of Minnesota biologist, Emilie C. Snell-Rood, reported on in today’s NY Times by Carl Zimmer, back me up.

Dr. Snell-Rood’s research shows that mice, moles, shrews and bats living in areas where humans have changed their environments, cities for example, have larger brains than those in rural areas.   

My inspiration came from New Normal, a RadioLab program on evolution, which I chanced on while driving around the deer-rich back roads of Columbia and Dutchess County last year.  (I love RadioLab. Thank you Alan Chartock and WAMC.)  I’ve also spent time observing my dog Tuck, a mixed breed Border Collie/Shepherd/Akita.  Lately he seems to look down the tracks behind the house before we cross them   Not Jaxon, Lee’s rolling English lab.  He’ll stop to scratch right between the rails.   No contest on which bloodline will survive here.

Just making sure my theory gets into print before someone else beats me to it. 

 

It wasn’t all roses

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Today is Fathers Day and I had a show-stopping conversation with Morgan.  His dad, my husband, passed away in 2006, when Morgan was 22.  We were talking about choosing a partner for marriage.

Mom & Dad at JFK 1990

Morgan said a thoughtful, tender thing to me, at least that’s what I heard.   He said that he and his younger brother Alex have an idea of what a good marriage can be because of the way their parents, Clark and me, stayed together and remained committed to each other for over 25 years.  That’s the model they have in mind, and they are looking for partners with which to do the same.  But oh, my words are so clinical and cliché.  His words were so very much more human, more Morgan.

Clark and I were truly each other’s best friend, there for each other, no question.

Morgan and I spoke about other things too – work, the addition, his cats, air conditioning, July 4th weekend, the cicadas.  And then we hung up.

And then I began to worry.  

In my efforts to make sure my sons are certain that Lee does not mean more to me than their father, have I led them to believe that Clark and I had a fairy-tale marriage?  Will they be endlessly looking for fairy-tale relationships?  As a young girl I believed in fairy-tale romances and marriages.  As an older woman I believe in fairy-tale romances and marriages.  But in-between I learned that it isn’t all lovey-dovey and happy til death do we part. 

There were days during my marriage, and sometimes there were weeks or months when I wondered why or how or when.  Do I really love him?  Would I be happier with someone else?  Am I trapped?

We never fought and I can’t remember ever raising our voices at each other.  I’m pretty sure that is true.  Two of the men I dated after his death, and the one that I am living with now get to that frenetic, shouting state so quickly. 

Arguing with men, with anyone actually except my mother and a few employees (I loathe being in a supervisory position) was new to me, and very uncomfortable, and so I talked about it, trying to understand this hurtful dynamic in a relationship.  One of my “dates” thought that Clark must have been hen-pecked.  How else could he not have gotten angry with me since I was such a controlling, demanding woman?  I don’t see that. 

Clark was level-headed, calm, comforting.  When I totally crashed the computer in our bookstore, leaving us without any inventory or purchase and sales records, he treated me gently and with concern as I walked around constantly crying, mute, and in a shadow for three weeks.  Even when he was hurting with cancer, he found the way to help me through my anxiety and craziness over my mother’s violent and ugly onset of Alzheimer’s and the difficulty of getting her, her friends, and her independent living facility to accept the fact that she needed help.

Another one of my “dates” thought that Clark must have been a saint.  I don’t see that either.

Lee doesn’t analyze.  He just knows that we are both a little bit (hah) high strung, and get frustrated easily.  Of course, I think he is the provocateur, but we won’t go there.  If we’re not laughing at ourselves in an hour, we kiss and make up in the morning.   We know we’ve got a good thing going and we aren’t going to let our big fat egos and our insecurities mess it up.

Clark and I may have talked and discussed, compromised, but I don’t even remember doing that.  We just thought the same way.   We successfully owned and operated two small businesses together.  We built one house and did major improvements on two others.  I guess we were a good match.  

When we were courting he had a dream of sailing around the world.  This sounded like heaven to me.  After several years I realized this was definitely just a dream.  He was much too cautious, too responsible, and he had a nightmare of an experience sailing the Marion Bermuda Race in 1979.

Only once did I see him lose it.

That was right after Morgan was born.  He had recently changed jobs, and had given up smoking.  Who knows exactly what brought on the anxiety attack that sent him to the hospital and then to bed for months.  If ever I would have left him, it would have been then.  But somehow both he and I got through it.   Yes, he did get stuck when he was diagnosed, but who wouldn’t, and he soon started looking for answers.

Later on, as he got sicker and weaker with his non-Hodgkins, our life got smaller and smaller, but it was actually a dream.  We were living in a 200 year old home that smiled on us.  We hardly ever left it.  Our children were off on their own. 

It felt to me as if I was getting to know a new Clark.  We spoke of what was happening to him and what would become of me.  We were delving into places that we never had entered before. We were falling in love again. 

Perhaps I have rewritten history for myself and for my boys.  It is hard when you are juggling jobs and children to take the time to love each other.  As I look back now, which I am so lucky to be able to do, I wish we had taken more time for ourselves and were more expressive of our feelings.  At the time I was proud of our stoicism.  It seemed to me that we just understood we were with each other and we didn’t have to prove it to each other over and over.  And I think he felt the same.  We never doubted. 

We were fortunate we had a quiet, close time at the end of Clark’s life.  He made it possible.  He is the one who wanted us to buy that big, rambling house – a bear to maintain – on nine acres which needed constant mowing and care.  I wanted to say “No.  We don’t need an apple orchard.  What are you crazy?   All that spraying, all that work?”

But because I knew I had another life on the way, I would have done anything with him.  

And we did good