QUIET DAY

The days have become more quiet. Jr stays in the bed 23 hours of the day now. Anything to do with conversation is in the past. Ask a question, the answer is no. He's uncooperative in many ways, unconsciously. Reasoning is the same as seasoning. Just a word. Today he was worse than yesterday. It's been a steady decline.

Monday is the day I start reaching out for help. Like happened again this past Friday, Jr took a steep decline Fri afternoon. No getting any help until Monday. My truck sprang a gas leak at the point of the fuel pump, spraying gas in a steady stream. That happened Friday afternoon. Semi-emergencies always happen to me on Friday afternoon. Seems like a strange karma. Like coming down with the flu first day of Christmas vacation and getting well the day before school started. A little too perfect not to be self-created. But why? Maybe there isn't a why. It just worked out like that. There is a why. I just don't know what it is, and don't care enough to go looking.

But it seems curious to me that Jr's energy is going away at a steady rate as his mind swirls into the black hole in the middle of his head. The gas can be called energy flowing out of my truck's tank at the fuel pump. Same day, both Jr and I had a significant energy drain. He can barely get to his feet enough to shift from bed to wheel chair and back. All he wants to do is lie on the bed and drift. When I need to speak to him, like when the phone rings--I have orders to wake him for anyone who comes to see him or calls--I speak in a quiet voice asking him if he is awake. He speaks, saying he is. If he doesn't answer to that, I don't bother him further.

After he's been in bed about 23 hours, he gets up, is bright, mildly coherent, and comes wheeling into the living room, having figured out how to make it through he doorway. It's simple for him now. He scoots along at about 3 to 4 inches per push of the wheels. The carpeting acts like mud on the wheels dragging him down. At the facility the floor was hard and smooth as polished marble. Perfect racetrack for wheelchairs.

I get an Ensure into him and his daily pills while there's a window of opportunity. If there's a burger, he'll eat a burger. Nothing else. Maybe a bowl of ice cream. Then back to bed for 23 hours, aching all over, hurting all over, throbbing pain in right knee the pain pills only ease, mind gone.

A couple days ago he said, "My senses know more than my mind." This is something I've always found remarkable knowing Jr, the way he says things like this with a pretty big meaning, and that's the meaning he means. I remember the first time he said of something inexplicable, "It just is." Can't explain it. It just is.

I don't want to disturb his rest, so I don't play radio or cds or anything. I read and sit on the porch and talk on the telephone, like on watch, always ready for anything that comes up at any moment. Like this morning at 6:30 or so I heard him calling my name weakly. He was in the bathroom, sitting on the stool and couldn't get up. He didn't have to go, it just felt like he did. I had to get behind him, put my arms around his ribs, pull his pants up, pick him straight up and walk him, one step at a time with legs hanging like chains that drag the floor. Not a simple process.

He has the potty chair in the bedroom and a plastic bottle to pee in. He is told every day to stay out of the bathroom. The bathroom is where he falls almost every time he goes in there. Where does he go? To where the risk of falling is highest. There's something of a problem with the potty chair too. It is so light that when he tries to stand up by pushing down on the arms with his hands, one pushes harder than another and it tilts over to the side and takes him and bucket and contents with it. He prefers the probability of falling to the probability tilting over with the bucket. He's at a place where he just can't go. The body won't work, the mind won't work; he's like gone back to fetal the way he lies on the bed on his side with bent legs. The mind is shutting down saying it's time to go. The body is shutting down saying the same thing.

It's like he's ready to go, all that's left is full commitment to enter the unknown. He's so tired of being helpless. He is of a culture of men who don't like having other people do for them what they'd rather do for themselves. It humiliates him for other people to go out of their way for him. He's even helpless to show his gratitude. He can speak it from time to time, and that's it. It's more than acceptable to me and the others helping him along, but to him, it is far short of what he means, but it's all he can do. His consciousness, who he is, is still in there, but without expression now, like being in a paralyzed body, can't make anything work. Can't even think. He's becoming a living body that is a hollow shell.

What was once living in there can't express anymore. From the outside, it's the same as not there; from the inside, that seeming not there makes it all the more frustrating. He's become a helpless body to take care of now. The next phase.

John, Ross's brother, is home for a few days after being gone a couple months. He was shocked to see Jr has fallen off so much. Dean was there feeling sorrow, Ross too and Robin, his nurse friend. There was a quiet about everyone in the house for an hour or so, as everyone was feeling the helpless sorrow of being unable to do anything. I told Ross I'd tried everything to get him to drink water but put a funnel in his mouth and pour it down his throat. Ross said, "It wouldn't be that easy." It was a quiet, somber day for all concerned. For Jr most of all.

NO EXPECTATIONS

I have become a crusty old turd in my later years. You enter a zone where any day, any week, any month, any minute the spirit may leave the body. I like living in that zone. I'd like for each day, if it turns out to be my last, to be one in tune with the heart. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. To speak from who I am even if somebody disapproves is what I call in tune with the heart. It's inevitable there's somebody who will disapprove of anything that comes up. Disapproval is so self-righteous. I've felt it. That's what makes it fun. I think of William Faulkner, who never read reviews or criticism of his writing. Approval / disapproval, is nothing but a mental conclusion drawn on next to no evidence.

Yesterday a woman whose name I don't know and is only slightly a familiar face, like somebody you see at the grocery store a few times and don't know, told me she knew I could play an instrument. Her evidence was that I owned a music store; therefore, I can play an instrument. Oh really. I said, 'If that's what you know about me, you don't know much.' Then I heard myself say it and thought: Oh, there you go being insulting again. Is it really without intending to? It's something that once it's said it's said, and there's no telling how it was repated over the cell phone. And there's no telling how little it matters.

I find that happening a lot recently, like in years, talking with someone I have absolutely no previous experience with and find out I've not been acting as expected of me. I'm afraid I don't have a 'pardon me' for such as that. We learn to do what's expected of us when we're little kids, taught by parents and other adults in church and school, and other kids. The great code of What's Expected Of You, is unwritten, but everyone knows it and lives by it, and if you go against it, you're in trouble of one sort or another, according to the gravity of the rebellion, because rebellion is what it is. I came to the mountains partially to get away from the unspoken expecteds, and found them here too. Different ones, but it's still the same. It's the glue that holds culture together and gives it an identity. It seems to hold an individual together believing one is doing what is expected.

In our culture here, we have dozens of subcultures with their own expectations. Soccer moms. Lots of them. Bikers. Lots of them. Preachers. Lots of them. Teenagers. Lots of them. Men in suits. Lots of them. Men in tshirts and bluejeans. Lots of them. White men that pay attention to Rush Limbaugh and everybody else that does not. People that listen to country music. People that listen to death metal. People that listen to rap. Every one of us is a complexity of these choices. I see each of us a faceted gem, each facet a given belief, opinion, sense of humor, what have you. We connect with others facet to facet. Like I met a lifetime friend Lucas Carpenter because we were 2 of 3 people at the college listening to jazz. Other facets came in like interest in American writing and in writing. It's like we had several facets in common. That's where, I believe, we find our friends, where several facets of interest intersect, or, in other words, find we had a lot in common.

Remembering home as a child, all the unspokens everyone in the house agreed not to talk about or mention, by silent agreement, the expecteds that were expected, but never mentioned. It really bottles somebody up emotionally. I found that out in the world on my own I was drawn to people who communicated expectations in silent disapproval too. It was comfortable. It felt like home. I had a lot of practice. It's remarkable how obedient we are to unspoken expectations. You can always tell when you've dashed somebody's expectation they wouldn't admit to with a threat of waterboarding. Because it's so unconscious. First impulse is to feel guilty. I've been through that too. Rule by guilt works really well. You broke the unwritten law. Now, feel guilty, or else.

It gets way too weird when it's even more complicated by the tv shows different people watch. I don't know anything about what's on television, which, in itself is another subculture---not watching tv. Tiger Woods is about the only athlete in tv world I've heard of. It's become so pervasive that anything said against tv is breaking the silence where any criticism of tv is unacceptable. It was like that with Ronald Reagan too. Television is about money. Reagan was about money. Greed, another of the unspokens you don't challenge. In Alleghany County you watch what you say about Christmas trees and the highest cancer rate in the state. Christmas trees are about money. County tax revenues depend on the money. That's a big silent, unspoken, keep your damn mouth shut if you know what's good for you, expectation.

Since I've been staying here with Jr watching his mind fade away, I've been having good lessons in expectation. When I go to town for the drugstore and the grocery store, whatever expectation I might have of what's inside the door when I return will not be the case, whatever I expect. Once I caught on, approaching the door, I remind myself, no expectations. It's been a good teaching. I like going through everyday life without expectation. It makes everyday events fresher when I'm open to surprise instead of disappointment. Since I've found expectation is essentially empty, just a mind thing, I tend not to value it anymore as a motivation. As a result, I tend not to be controlled by unspoken expectation any more. Every once in awhile, I make somebody mad not intending to, and suffer no remorse, making it all the worse.

NEW DYLAN ALBUM

together through life

Something that runs through my mind fairly regularly, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now, was in my mind much of the time today. Somehow, I connect with that in ways I don't even have to think about. I first heard it in my early 20s and was struck by it as a curious enigma. All the way along, I've felt younger as I grew older. Now, the oldest I've ever been, I feel the youngest I ever felt. I had a "heavy" mind for a kid. Never understood why other kids didn't think about things like I did. Much gravity in the early years. Passing 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 it seems like I get lighter within, can let things go by and not feel like I have to do something about it. Years ago, Bob Bamberg told me I think like an old man. He was right. I didn't know it was so visible. One of those aspects of self others see that we don't see ourselves. Lotsa them going around.

Not long ago in months I heard somewhere on NPR about the world of poetry is now accepting Bob Dylan as a poet. Why'd it take so long? What is it about the obvious that is so obscure? And like it matters to Dylan. I knew it and my friend Lucas Carpenter knew it when we were hearing Blowing in the Wind, Times Are Changin, Mr Tambourine Man, Like a Rolling Stone. Dylan was out there on his own with no close second. The Stones and the Beatles weren't even in the same league. Dylan was his own league. American poets were sidestepping and avoiding issues Dylan addressed straight on. Dylan is as American a poet as Robert Frost and John Berryman.


It's not often that a songwriter is embraced by poets as one of themselves. One of the hesitations of taking him in would be that all would have to look up to him from the start, because any American poet not impressed with Dylan's body of work isn't paying attention. Dylan figures as an artist through his music who had something major to contribute of value to all humanity. I'd not hesitate to put Dylan in the league with Harold Pinter, who received the Nobel Prize a few years ago with an acceptance speech Dylan could have written. And he has the integrity of a poet.


I discovered him in 1963 when he had 3 albums in a bargain bin at one of the box stores of the day. I'd heard the name and it looked kind of interesting, song titles and pictures. They were so cheap I bought all 3. Talk about a mindblow when I got home. Kind of like the day I bought Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems. I stayed up all night reading the poems over and over and over. They were so beautiful I couldn't put the book down, didn't want to let it go. I appreciated his mind in the poems. That's how it is for me with Dylan. I've appreciated his mind as long as I've been listening to him.


He has so many albums it's too much to keep up with. Every once in awhile I'll get a Dylan album and love it. This one, Together Through Life, has pretty much stayed in my sound system since it arrived a few months ago. Dylan as a 65 year old singer/performer does it with the same grace as a black man like BB King and John Lee Hooker. Unlike Mick Jagger who brings the word shameless to mind when I see him jerking about like he's 18 in a video. Jagger did not age gracefully. Dylan did. Jagger invested in looks and Dylan invested in content.


He's not just a songwriter other songwriters look to as the master, he's been a rock star for 40 years, consistently good and continually getting better, always with one of the best bands going, and as a musician he has access to the best to make music with. It seems he talks the vocals more than he sings them, like Lou Reed, another poet rock star. He's not the kind of songwriter who comes along every once in awhile. Like Mozart only happened once, Shakespeare only happened once, Dylan only happens once.


In the early years, I bought every Dylan album as they came out. When he went to preaching, I backed off. Sorry Bob, can't support that. He had a strong didactic streak anyway. Songs that start, you gotta, turn my interest away. I remembered Little Richard throwing an expensive diamond ring in a river because he was going to give his life to the Lord. I drove to Winston-Salem one night in 1978 to see Little Richard preach at Winston-Salem State auditorium. About a dozen white guys my age were sprinkled throughout the audience. It was a riot to hear him go on about rock and roll being of the devil and he was working for the devil when he was making rock and roll. He'd just come out of a period of cocaine addiction and performing Little Richard the has-been Queen of rock and roll, prancing on pianos in chartreuse outfits to make Liberace commit a racial slur.


It was in this time Paul McCartney met him in Germany and Little Richard taught him how to do that Little Richard scream. Then Richard's back to preaching, then he's on tv talk shows wanting his royalty money for all his hits. And he looked so bad, so many facelifts you could play drums on his face. I wanted to say, Man, where's the integrity? I used to think he was the best there ever was. There's still nothing like Long Tall Sally, Slippin & Slidin, Rip it Up, Lucille, The Girl Can't Help It, Good Golly Miss Molly, Ready Teddy, Keep a Knockin, Miss Ann. This is raw rock and roll at the beginning.


This album of Dylan's, Together Through Life, appeals to me in a similar way as a good reggae album by Burning Spear. The lyrics have something to say worth listening to, the rhythms are easy to live with, the music more interesting the more I listen to it. The songs flow in a way that don't require you to jump up and start playing air guitar. Dylan's music has never dated. Mr Tambourine Man sung by Dylan is timeless, always current. Sung by the Byrds, it's 1965 oldies. I'm happy that Dylan's life has been parallel mine in time, a voice in the world of music that has spoken to me throughout my adult life. Without him, there would not have been one. An awful lot of people feel the same way, an entire generation.


The picture above is the back of the album cover.

TAPO

tapo

Tapo is the least'n of the three cats. She's the bottom of the pecking order, meaning Caterpillar and TarBaby can pick on her all they want, but she can't pick on them. It's like when a parent hits you and you can't hit back. You're at the bottom of the pecking order. If Tapo fights back, she's really in trouble then. She hates it. I don't know what to do to help, because bottom of pecking order is bottom of pecking order and nothing else. It runs through all animals, birds, humans. I see pecking order as the original form of hierarchy. Manager can fire somebody who packs boxes in the delivery department, but it doesn't work the other way around.

She's a quiet, shy cat, never demanding. Because her station in life is to be picked on by bigger brother and sister, she stays to herself. She likes TarBaby, who doesn't pick on her a great deal. She doesn't like Caterpillar. She's not liked Caterpillar in years. She did for a long time, but just couldn't like her anymore, because every time she was around Caterpillar, she'd be intimidated, backed into a corner, chased through the house by somebody who can get into the same small spaces.

They like to go outdoors and hunt, which Tapo used to like, but when they were outside, a battle was on every time Caterpillar saw her. I used to take all three on a short walk through the woods in the evening. Invariably, Caterpillar would hunker down and wait for Tapo, jump at her and growl and threaten her or even jump on her and tell her to get back to the house. In the beginning, she wanted to go anyway, would get beat up a few times, but tough it out. Then she finally just quit going on the walks. Next she just about quit leaving the house. When she does, she doesn't go far.

Caterpillar used to be the one that stayed in the house all the time. She ruled absolutely indoors. The house was hers. Now that Tapo is in the house all the time, the house is hers. Because the house is Tapo's territory, neither Caterpillar nor TarBaby intimidate her or jump on her for a momentary skirmish very much. TarBaby is outside nearly all the time and Caterpillar most of the time, so the house is all Tapo's.

Tapo, by the way, is pronounced like taco with a p. Her original name was tadpole, because she was tiny and black with a wiggly tail. She was wiggly all over. She was a charming kitten, desperately hungry all the time. I can attest she was born hungry. She was so ravenous she'd push away the container I was feeding her with, trying to grab hold of it. As a result of her ravenous nature, she's round like a coffee-colored soccer ball with 4 short legs, a little head and cat ears. The weight, however, works in her favor fighting bigger cats every day. It gave her an edge she didn't otherwise have. Tapo is a small cat and the other 2 are bigger cats. She needs the weight to help her out.

When Tapo was a few months old and I'd been calling her Tadpole, she let me know she didn't like the name, and asked me to give her a better name than that. I analyzed the sound and found the two syllables both have a sound that goes downward in the musical scale. Tapo was crisp and on the upward scale musically. I asked her if she'd like Tapo. She did. She's liked it ever since. Tadpole was just too "down" for her spirit.

It may sound implausible that I talk to cats and get answers, but if you have a cat or cats, you understand what I mean, if you pay attention to them. I've found that telepathy travels on wings of love. With someone you love, you have several telepathic moments. I love my cats and they love me, so we connect very well telepathically. Mostly, we're in silence, because they communicate by eye-contact and body language without words. So I do too. We don't need to talk. Sometimes, when I'm telling one of them something, I'll say it in words, believing the words trigger images in my head the cats read. I think they read the pictures like in the Chinese language. I know for a certainty they understand my meaning when I talk to them, because they behave afterwards like they did, which would be different from before.

Like sometimes I have talked with Caterpillar and asked her to please lay off Tapo in times when she'd be on her relentlessly. Suddenly she laid off Tapo and gave her a break. It's been my policy from the beginning to stay out of their relationships with each other. They're cats, they know cat language, they have cat minds, cat temperaments, cat thoughts. I have access to none of it except that which is similar to human behavior, like those words in foreign languages that are the same as ours, hot-dog, t-shirt.

When Caterpillar backs Tapo into a corner under chair legs, Tapo hissing and growling, attempting to be threatening, unable to be convincing, and Caterpillar is simply being cruel, I'll call to her in a non-threatening, pleading tone of voice and ask her to let Tapo rest. She'll start backing up, watching Tapo all the time in case Tapo decides to pounce like she's threatening to do, slowly, an inch step at a time, growling and retreating until she's out of range for surprise attack and walks away. I'm always struck by their obedience. Obedience has never been an issue.

I'm not going to interfere with something as deeply a part of who they are as the pecking order. Do away with hierarchical behavior among humans and everything would fall apart,having to start all over again in a new way. How many centuries would that take? So I don't like to train basic behavior out of my animals. I figure if I were to punish TarBaby and Caterpillar for intimidating Tapo, they'd really work her over when I'm away, like kids. I ask them not to be so rough and to give her a break. It works.

Tapo is curled up on the comfortable chair. I see as much of a soul there to know as in a human. If I called to her, she would walk up the arm of the chair, step up to the back, over to the desk and she'd step over my left arm, turn around and face the direction where she can see what's going on in the room, and lie down between my arms while fingers are working the keyboard. When my mind is too much in the monitor and she wants some petting, she'll push her nose under the heel of my hand and push up until she can get her whole head under my hand. That means: Pet Me!