CROW

Crow walking in the rain

What day of the week it is constitutes an ongoing mystery in the house. Neither Jr nor I is of this world enough to keep up with it. Sometimes, say on a Tuesday, he'll ask if it's Saturday. And I don't know. I have to go to the calendar and figure it out by days since the last time I knew the date. The radio never plays. The tv never plays. CDs never get played. Several months ago I played one.

The birds and the tires on Hwy 18 are the sounds I hear. The vehicles go by at random intervals, or random as can be done. The sounds of the birds are random, anyway from my perspective with no understanding of what they're saying. Random sounds are like a fire for random shapes that are never the same. It's the random, visual and auditory, that relaxes. The first sign of a pattern catches the mind and holds it. Patterns become pictures and music that pull the attention out of a relaxed state. Can't say one is better than the other. It's just what we want for a given time. I'm enjoying this time outside my life's patterns.

Jr is the random in behavior. He has taught me never to expect. Around here, whatever I expect is never the case, and everything is a surprise. I stay open to whatever comes next, little to no anticipation. I find I don't even hope for anything, except that Jr be as comfortable as possible. For myself, I want to be open to the flow of whatever is going on. Like right now I'm sitting on the couch with the laptop on a chair by the window. Between sentences I watch crows march around in the lawn. I threw sliced apple out there earlier. They're making their pre-roosting search for a bit of something good before bedtime. I'm more and more able to differentiate between the ones that come here regularly.

One of them, I got a photo of walking in the rain. I believe this one is the cock. His (I presume) breast feathers are always showing several patches of what appear to be ruffled feathers, like he's been in a fight. But it's like that every day and I doubt he fights every day. Perhaps he just doesn't take care of his breast feathers. Or it could be insignia marking his status in the greater crow colony, like scarification in our more primitive societies, like medals on an officer's chest. He is the only one that will walk through the lawn by himself when I'm standing on the porch. I sit still and he walks by, looking at me and scanning for an apple slice too. When we look at each other like that, I feel like we're communicating. I don't mean any kind of big deal something or other, just that I, from the species that kills everything, and he from the species that warns all the forest creatures of possible threats, we, with several leaps in consciousness between us, like evolution's generation gaps, can only look at each other in the eyes and say, "Howdy," with a feeling of peace between us.

To be an adult bird and walk so near a human is the bravest of the brave. This leads me to suspect his mottled chest is significant of rank and bravery, because it's that way every day. I even have a feeling that he keeps this place for his hen and their five younguns. No other crows come here, except when I've thrown out an abundance of something. I never put "garbage" in the trash. Anything I throw outside but onions, egg shells and watermelon rinds, the crows consume within ten minutes of it going out the door.

They never bothered the garden that I could hit easily with a rock from the house, leading me to suspect it was a gesture of gratitude. After things were grown up in the garden, I've seen a crow walk through picking bugs from the leaves and the ground. There was quite a lot of corn in the garden and it looks like every seedling made it. I mention the crows to illustrate how quiet I've become in mind. Getting acquainted with country crows cannot be done on the go. Thinking of how wary they are, I've noticed they are not hatched that way. I've seen the adult birds teach wariness to the younger birds. Early on, the younger birds would walk toward me sitting on the porch with no apprehension until mama flies off a few feet to get their attention shifted to flight. By now, they don't seem as wary as the older birds, but they're learning.

I never had any idea it takes crows months to wean fledglings. Never thought about it. The young ones hatched back in the spring continue to go to mama with fluttering wings and beaks open calling to her. The flattest, most monotone sound of a "caw" you hear that has no music in the tone, is the young ones calling to mama for a morsel. They've learned to eat on their own by now, but they still get overtaken by childhood impulses. Sometimes mama chases them away, sometimes she feeds them, mostly she tries the best she can to ignore them. She's patient with them like only a mother can be.

The sky is changing, not so much light coming through the clouds. Everything is in shade before sunset. The crows have stopped their barking, gone to roost. I believe my friends roost in the trees at the top of the hill behind the house. I hear all the different sounds crows make and wonder now if they need to be taught to the young ones coming up. I have a feeling they do. They certainly have a natural inclination to the particular crow calls, but evidently need to learn them too. Only the young ones make that monotone caw of feed-me, evidently all summer long. I've been wondering if crow calls amount to a language, minimal to be sure, compared to ours, but complex and advanced in the world of birds. Suspecting strongly they have to learn their language like we do, leads me to suspect they have accents from tribe to tribe, and know their own by accent. Perhaps. Whatever the case, I'm glad to be going slow enough to appreciate a more subtle world outside the realm of the human mind.

SLIPPING AWAY

3aug09

Over this week just past, I watched Jr's mind go away. It went like pulling the plug on a bathtub drain. He slept most of the morning. When he started to sit up on the side of the bed, he couldn't make it. I put my hand in the middle of his back and helped him rise. I asked what he wanted to do. He didn't understand me. I asked again. I said, "If you'll tell me where you want to go, I'll help you get there." He said very weakly, "I know." I asked if he wanted to go to the bathroom. Yes. I brought the walker around so he could use it to help himself stand up. It took a long while. Then his knees wouldn't separate to allow him to take a step. Neither foot could make the effort of a step.

When he was finally able to get some forward momentum going, he crept like a snail. About half way he didn't have energy for one more step and started fading. I ran to the back room where I'd put a wheelchair bought a couple weeks ago toward a day like this. I brought it for him to sit down in. He was so grateful, there was no mention of the wheelchair as acceptable or not. Suddenly, it was acceptable, because it was all that would do. I wheeled him to the bathroom door. It wouldn't go through the door. I lifted the walker over his head placing it in front of him. All of it turned out to be quite awkward. He managed to hit the toilet seat when he sat down.

He wears sweatpants and sweatshirt day and night now. He didn't get the pants down very far and peed into the back of them, which I spotted when I put him on the bed, seeing the sheet was wet where he sat. I told him to sit up, we're changing pants. I picked up some other s and pulled the wet ones off and put on the clean ones. Then I had to change the sheet. I lifted him over to the wheelchair and let him watch me change the sheet, arranging the covers to receive him. I lifted him from chair to bed, him calling to me, "Don't hurt yourself," like he was in a minor panic. As soon as he lay back on the bed, he went into quiet, turned within, and was gone.

Then his woman friend called. She asked what she could do to help. I mentioned needing to get to town for the grocery store, and asked if she could come here and stay with him an hour while I get groceries. My motive asking her was for her to experience him as he is today and see how far he's gone in just a few days. I want to get everyone who is close to him here to see him in the next day or two while he's able to see them. It hurts to see him this way, but it hurts worse to be this way. Perhaps the worst part of it is that he's aware of it. His consciousness is still clear, but mind is gone and he can't find it.

When she drove up, I went into bedroom, told him she was here and helped him into the chair. I rolled him into the living room and transferred him from wheelchair to his customary seat on the couch. She came in and sat beside him. He was perked up, performing like he's not as bad off as he is, and they talked pleasantly while I prepared to go out the door.

When I returned, carrying groceries in the house, she said as I passed on the way to the kitchen, "I don't know how you do what you're doing." She was at her extremity of what she can handle. He never made any sense. He said no every time she asked if he'd like some chicken she brought or some strawberry pie. No. He hadn't shaved good enough to suit her. And that is a problem. He has an electric razor given him last Christmas that wouldn't shave teenage fuzz. He tries to make it work and it never works. He shaves with bic razors, but doesn't like them. I've been wanting to find him an electric razor that works, but can't get away.

She was glad to see me return, because she didn't know what to do. She has a difficult time with him being "stubborn" anyway. I think it's a little different from stubborn. It's just that 3-year-old way of answering no to every question. Ask him any yes-no question and no is automatically the answer.I don't believe he chooses to say no consciously. He doesn't like being asked questions, because he needs to think to answer them, and he can't think, so he says no. I don't know if that's the reason why, but I've had to quit asking him if he'd like this, that or the other. Back from the grocery store, where my primary mission was to get some ensures, I handed him one and said, "Drink it." He did.

I expect much of the time she was here, he sat with his chin on his chest dozing. After the initial performance of the usual talk, I imagine him dozing off as he does, and she trying to wake him up to talk to her, and him muttering something she couldn't decipher. She was glad to get out of here, mentioning several times she didn't know how I stood it. She gets mad at him when he's like this.

He looks to me like he's not coming back this time. Yesterday he mentioned he didn't believe he was going to come back. I've been seeing this all week as his mind slipped away. I see him fading on out in the next week or so. I don't mind him going on, because he's so miserable now and has been for so many years. In the back of my head is anticipation of charges for manslaughter brought by the Absentee Police, and every kind of accusation there is: he could have lived a week longer in a nursing home! But I don't care. I've done what I was given to do, and that's all that matters to me. I look out the window and wonder how many more days I'll be seeing this view.

EYE OF THE STORM

2aug09

I've begun to feel like a character in Patrick White's novel, The Eye Of The Storm. It's the story of a woman in her 80s in bed, the richest woman in Australia in her time, unable to care for herself in any way, but she's still able to think and talk. She has 4 nurses round the clock. The family accountant. Son in London, an Olivier kind of actor, and daughter in France married to a Prince. Everybody in the story dislikes everyone else. A big hurricane type whirlwind of deception goes on around this still individual in the bed. The drama revolves about her, but none of it considers her. Everybody is there for what they can get, wrangling with each other in tempest in teapot dramas. Waiting for her to die.

Change the particulars and the whole story is right there. The man is in poverty according to federal guidelines. What's left is what his last wife didn't take and what hasn't been stolen since. For me, it's crazy-making to see the goings on, such seriousness over so little, and it's heart rending to see a man who has worked hard all his life, whose spirit has been bashed time after time along the way, a good bluegrass musician, which is no small thing, who can no longer play, someone so full of life he spent his lifetime working hard, sawmilling until he was 78, until he was physically unable, and with a brilliant mind, disregarded by so many. Evidently, it's that he's no longer a player. Waiting to die. But the whole Jr Maxwell is still there. Though his mind doesn't work right, it's the same soul, the same heart, the same ethical foundation, the same man who cares about everyone he knows.

This evening he apologized to me for being grumpy all day. I had grumpy feelings all day too, and I told him I felt that way too, and I'm ok with it. We both had a grumpy day and there are no hard feelings, because nothing happened or was said that could harden feelings. I got a little frustrated trying to get him to drink some water. Didn't want to. I tried to explain, drink water you stay at home--don't drink water you go to the hospital. There, you will drink water. Drink water here and you won't have to drink water there. His reply: mm. So I handed the cup of water to him and said in a meaningful tone of voice, "Drink." He took the cup and drank. Now I see that from this day forth I will several times a day hand him a cup of water and say, drink. He said water makes him have to piss. I told him it also keeps him out of the nursing home. Piss, you stay at home. Don't piss, you go to nursing home. One second later, it's the same as if I'd said nothing.

I'll make it a vow to myself right now that I won't talk about nursing home like that to him anymore, because nursing home is out of the picture, and it scares him, scares him deep. We'll find a way, albeit with resistance from my servants who boost us along our way in their efforts to hinder. One step at a time. He's in an especially vulnerable time right now. He's taken on the behavior of a 3 year old. To any question, the answer is automatically no. Would you like something to eat? No. Would you like to get in the car and ride some back roads? No. Would you like some ice cream? No. Though he's given me instructions when his woman friend calls on the phone to wake him up. When somebody comes to the house to see him, wake him up. He wants to see everybody who comes to the door. He'll even carry on conversation with telemarketers, not understanding anything they say; and they understand nothing he says.

Until now, I've always given him a choice, pushed nothing on him, forced nothing. But I see that as of now I need to be more firm. No more asking if he'd like something to eat or drink. Just say, Here it is. Eat. Drink. Another way he's like a kid is when I list possibilities for nourishment, he'll say no to everything, then Yes to burger. Sometimes, I'll put a boiled egg in front of him on a saucer and a salt shaker. He'll eat it. If I ask if he'd eat it, he'd say, no. It won't work again for weeks. Every day is unpredictable from start to end. I want to tell him every day that if he'll just cooperate with me a little bit, he can feel a lot better and go on sleeping in his own bed. Mm. Periodically, he'll say, "I need to drink more water." And that's the end of it. A sentence to say.

Every phase in his decline I go with him and see Jr in this weak, bent over, frail old man time of his life. People who see him now are taken by

how far he has declined just this past week in his mind. The mind is like it's swirling down a drain. There's a black hole in his head drawing mind into it. Seeing him every day, I keep up with where he is. I can translate for him when he has company. Most of the time I tell him what each pill he takes does for him when I hand him the cup for morning pills. Yesterday, he asked what they were for. When I came to the aricept, saying it was for his memory, he said, "I don't want it." And wouldn't take it. I knew this was a one time thing, so I let it go by. I tried to remind him that it's for his mind. Wouldn't have it. His mind is all right. OK.

WOMEN'S VOICES

1aug09

This morning's radio show felt good all the way through. Played 4 songs by Alice Gerrard. I play her among the locals because she lived in Galax for a few years, and around here is where she learned mountain music, the sound of the Central Blue Ridge. She started the Old-Time Herald, the magazine about old-time music now based in Durham, then in Galax in the basement of Bobby Patterson's Heritage Records, and just a few pages.

Alice Gerrard's album, Songs of Love and Loss, new 4-5 years ago, is a beauty from start to finish. I could have played from it the whole hour, did when it was new. But today I wanted to play several women, an hour of feminine voices singing beautiful songs. I felt I needed it for myself, the nurturing sound of a woman's voice, positive feminine energy, and felt it would be a good energy to send out over the county this morning to the people listening who love these mountains.

Katy Taylor from W Jefferson started the show with her rendering of Single Girl, Married Girl with the band Alternate Roots, a bluegrass band that made four albums, each one a gem. As a bluegrass singer, Katy's voice and talent equal any woman on the bluegrass charts and is better than most. The only difference, to my ear, between Katy's voice and Rhonda Vincent's, Allison Krauss's, and Cherryholmes's voices would be the experience on the road singing every night for years that makes a more "professional" sound. Katy never wanted that world of living on a bus months at a time an the struggle to make it big. She likes it here. Played 4 songs by Katy, ending with Killing the Blues, a beauty.

I'm remembering a time about 5 years ago when I had been having a drink with Jr in the evening on the way home from work. We always listened to bluegrass on WBRF when a Wake Forest game or NAASCAR race wasn't on. Driving down the driveway a song started that was familiar, but it left my mind what band it was and whose voice it was. The song was Out of the Blue by Alternate Roots, a song Scott Freeman wrote. I know Alternate Roots songs inside out, and was puzzled, trying to figure out whose that familiar feminine voice was. it was like hearing it the first time, though the song was intimately familiar. I couldn't even make out that it was Alternate Roots, primarily, I think, because I wasn't expecting Alternate Roots on the radio, though WBRF plays them quite a lot. I heard the song all the way through and still didn't get it until the dj said it was Alternate Roots. I raised my right hand from the steering wheel and bopped myself on the forehead with the heel of my hand in a body language way of saying duh. I have to add that Katy is a fine human being too. She lives by real values.

Played 4 songs by Appalachian Mountain Girls. I don't believe any of the girls in the band have an inkling of an idea how good their album is, even now that it's been sold out for years. Everybody in the band is an excellent musician and they all play old-time right. It was a blow when Amy Michaels had to leave the band. She did the vocals and has a hillbilly voice to rival Hazel Dickens. Today I played Amy and everybody in the band singing Chew Tobacco Rag, Grandpa Jones's Old Rattler, made it their own, and Sixteen Chickens and a Tambourine, which I love all-out every time I hear it. It always brings to mind William Carlos Williams' poem of the white chicken and the red wheelbarrow. Amy the banjo picker and lead singer of the band left the mic to Lynn Worth to pick banjo and do the singing. Lynn can't be beat at old-time banjo---obviously she can as she doesn't win Galax every year---but that's not what I meant. When Lynn is on the banjo, it's some good old-time pickin a-goin on.

After Alice Gerrard was the Carter Falmily. I believe 5 songs by them. Down by the River of Jordan, Wildwood Flower, Can the Circle Be Unbroken and 2 others. I like to play the Carter Family in among other singers of our mountains. Played all by themselves, outside context, they sound from way back when, even kind of slow and draggy, like a history lesson. Played in among other old-time music and singing, I hear how the music is moving along such that it can be flatfooted to. When I think about the Carter Family, I tend to think of singing only and the words to the songs. But when I hear them, I'm always moved by the music they're making too. Maybelle's guitar and Sara's autoharp made a complete band.

On the way to the station this morning, I left a little early to stop at the bank and Betty's Dollar Mart on the way in. I stopped by Backwoods Bean to get a big cup of chocolate coffee to take to the radio station to sip over the course of the hour. Finished it at end of show. In the Bean I met Cynthia Grant, the new director of the Teapot Museum. We talked about the present show going up of the various instrument makers here and nearby. I have to say I like the new turn the little museum is taking. It's not big, but we can't afford big. We can afford small, and small is better than none. I like the name Teapot Museum now that it has nothing to do with teapots. That makes it fun. I'm not making suggestions. Just an amusing thought. Being condescended to by representatives of Los Angeles ruling class society doesn't seem to me like it would be much good for Sparta's self-esteem.

It seems like Cynthia is doing something wonderful with that space. The Penland show was top notch, and now the makers of musical instruments is making such a good show it's making home look richly unique, which it is. I'm getting a feeling that in this time when Sparta is groping about in the dark to find it's identity, direction, its own life, Cynthia is tapping into a genuine art form in these mountains. She might be onto something. I hope so.