I got interested in George Orwell because I was looking for something to listen to in the car that was not music—something to give my ears a rest.  At the library I noticed a series of lectures on disc called The World of George Orwell.   I thought, “He has a world?”  Actually we all do, but as a writer he has given us entrée into his.

In one of his earliest essays– and a small masterpiece– called A Hanging, he describes an incident from his days as a policeman in Burma.  As the prisoner is being led to his death, he steps aside to avoid a mud puddle.  In that action Orwell suddenly has a realization that they are about to take away the life of a healthy, conscious man.  “.  .  .in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.”

I loved his acknowledgement that a mind is a world. Reading Complete Essays I found George Orwell’s world refreshingly hard to classify.  I had running and unanswered questions as I read. He talks with approbation about Marx. Is he Marxist? No. Communist? No. He writes for leftist publications and talks about socialism but is he a Socialist?  Not really.  Feminist?  Hardly.  He was apparently “awkward” around women and he did not think himself attractive to women.  On the other hand he married a woman who was intelligent, independent and beautiful—as nearly every Eileen is.

He’s not any kind of an “ist.” Two consistent strains are his intense dislike of Totalitarianism and of the Catholic Church, seeing the latter as an institution of the former.  A phrase that Orwell uses a lot is “a society of free and equal human beings.”  What gets us there defies labels.  In The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius he says, “It is the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.” I think he didn’t go in for dead “isms.” He liked language that breathed.

I love his Englishness.  It’s an Englishness influenced from the bottom up, not the top down.  Orwell didn’t go to Oxbridge.  He lived among the homeless.  He’s English before American culture infiltrated English society so he’s writing to English people who know what it means to do physical jerks (calisthenics) or to “guy (ridicule) an official” or to “fetch up” something in his mind.  Every so often he says that someone or something is “not worth powder and shot.”

He has lovely descriptions for Americans whose DVRs hunt PBS: “.  .  .the beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant.  The crowds in the big towns with their mild, knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners.  .  .the clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labor Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings.  .  .  .It is a culture.  .  .somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes.  Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as a living creature.”

Then he turns over the stone: “.  .  .it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons.  It has rich relations that have to be kow-towed to and poor relations that are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income.”(The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius.)

The essays are full of nuanced observations, and dry, throwaway, funny lines.  Make yourself a pot of tea (as per the Orwell essay A Nice Cup of Tea) and read on:

Politicians and politics.  Insert whatever name you want:

*“.  .  .I saw in Picture Post some stills of Beaverbrook delivering a speech and looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose.”  (As I Please 6, 1944)

*In a prosperous country.  .  .left wing politics are always partly humbug.  There can be no real reconstruction that would not lead to at least a temporary drop in the.  .  .standard of life, which is another way of saying that the majority of left-wing politicians and publicists are people who earn their living by demanding something they don’t genuinely want.  (Review of Union Now by Clarence K. Streit, 1939)

*Mr B. is not the most effective of the many guns now firing the counter-attack of the conservative party—indeed he is less like a gun than a home-made mortar with a strong tendency to blow up.  .  . (As I Please 29, 1944)

*Monomania is not interesting.  .  .no nationalist of the more bigoted kind can write a book which still seems worth reading after a lapse of years has a certain deodorizing effect. (Notes on Nationalism, 1945)

 In the Midst of World War II:

*Racialism is.  .  .a way of pushing exploitation beyond the point that is normally possible, by pretending that the exploited are not human beings.

*Hitler is only the ghost of our own past rising against us. He stands for the extension and perpetuation of our own methods, just at the moment when we are beginning to be ashamed of them.

*I thought of a rather cruel trick I one played on a wasp.  He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half.  He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus.  Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him.  It is the same with modern man.  The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period during which he did not notice it.

*Marx’s famous saying that ‘religion is the opium of the people’ is habitually wrenched out of its context and given a different meaning subtly but appreciatively different from the one he gave it. Marx did not say.  .  .that religion is merely a dope handed out from above; he said it is something people create for themselves, to supply a need that he recognized to be a real one. ‘Religion is the sigh of the soul in a soulless world. Religion is the opium of the people.’  What is he saying except that man does not live by bread alone, that hatred is not enough, that a world worth living in cannot be founded on ‘realism’ and machine guns?”(Notes on the Way, 1940)

 *Why is the goose-step not used in England?.  .  . Military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.

 *Over against the Nazi Storm Trooper you have got to set that typically English figure, the hanging judge, some gouty old bully with his mind rooted in the nineteenth century, handing out savage sentences.   .   .that evil old man in scarlet robe and horsehair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in.  .  .

* In the years between 1920 and 1940 it (the decay of the British ruling class) was happening with the speed of a chemical reaction.  .  .a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden and Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent.  As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt.  He was simply a hole in the air.

*The British ruling class could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end.  .  .Clearly there was only one escape for them—into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being unable to grasp that any improvement was possible.

*.  .  .the naked democracy of the swimming pool. (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941)

*A column about how shortages and rationing had democratized clothes, he goes on about men’s evening dress: 

“.  .  .hedged around with all kinds of petty conventions, which you could only disregard at the price of being made to feel uncomfortable.  .  .to have two studs in your shirt front when other people were only wearing one, even to have too broad or too narrow a stripe of braid down your trouser leg was enough to make you into an outcast. (Banish this Uniform 1945)

 *Anti-Semitism is simply not the doctrine of a grown up person. (As I Please 9, 1944)

 Dickens and Kipling:

*Kipling is a jingo imperialist; he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.  It is better to start by admitting that, and then try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly. (Rudyard Kipling, 1942)

*Dickens seems to have succeeded in attacking everybody and antagonizing nobody.

 *All art is propaganda.

*What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.  Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one.

*Dickens is able to go on being funny because he is in a revolt against authority, and authority is always there to be laughed at.  There is always room for one more custard pie.  (Charles Dickens, 1940)

Language

*twice-breathed air in the movies  (As I Please 8, 1944)

*‘Tain’t Gonna Rain No More’ (1924)and ‘Show Me the Way to go Home’ (1925).  .  .went ‘round the world like an influenza epidemic. (Songs We Used to Sing, 1946)

*The butter ration is only just visible without a microscope (As I Please 19, 1944)

*Gazelles are almost the only animal alive that look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look at their hindquarters without thinking of mint sauce. (Marrakech, 1939)

*Re: ‘Endless use of ready-made metaphors’: This filthy stew of words.  .  .” (As I Please 16, 1944)

*Re:Book reviewers: These wretches churned forth their praise—masterpiece, brilliant, unforgettable and so forth– like so many mechanical pianos.  (As I Please 28, 1944)

*Until Surrealism made a deliberate raid on the Unconscious, poetry that aimed at being nonsense.  .  .does not seem to have been common.  (Nonsense Poetry: The Lear Omnibus, 1945)

As They Tickle Me (unclassifiable quotations)

 *Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible toward the nearest suitable patch of water.  .  .

.  .  .at this period after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent.

I mention the spawning of toads because it is one of the phenomena of Spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from the poets. (Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, 1946)

 *“If you put a dozen English people together, they form themselves into a queue, almost instinctively.” (But Are We Really Ruder? No. 1946)

 *“Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.” (Can Socialists Be Happy? 1943)

 *(He takes on the high rate of deaths due to speeding with a long list of why it’s difficult to get people to slow down.  Then he says:)“In other words we value speed more highly than we value human life.  Then why not say so instead of every few years having one of these hypocritical campaigns (at present it is Keep Death off the Road).  .  . in the full knowledge that while our roads remain as they are, and present speeds are kept up, the slaughter will continue?” (As I Please 60, 1946)

 *.  .  .those who really have to deal with nature have no cause to be in love with it.  On the East Anglia coast the older cottages for the fishermen are built with their backs to the sea.  The sea is simply an enemy from the fisherman’s point of view.” (Review of The Way of a Countryman by Sir William Beach Thomas March, 1944)

*Except for the few surviving commons, the high roads, the lands of the National Trust, a certain number of parks, and the sea shore below high- tide mark, every square inch of England is owned by a few thousand families.  These people are just about as useful as so many tapeworms. (As I Please 38, 1944)

*.  .  .the cotton-wool with which the B.B.C. stuffs its speakers’ mouths makes any real discussion of theological problems impossible.  .  .(As I Please 46, 1944)

*A thing is funny when.  .  .it upsets the established order.  Every joke is a tiny revolution.  (Funny, but not Vulgar, 1945)

Final lines

*“So progress persists—or at any rate, it was persisting until recently.” (Review of My Life: The Autobiography of Havelock Ellis)

I was going to subtitle this post “The essays of George Orwell” but then no one would read it.  I’m afraid it would have the same result as something Orwell says in Poetry and the Microphone: “Arnold Bennett was hardly exaggerating when he said that in the English-speaking countries the word ‘poetry’ would disperse a crowd quicker than a fire-hose.”  I know that I would have skipped over such a sub-title until a month or so ago when I read the essay Such, Such Were the Joys.

Before reading Such, Such Were the Joys, my image of Orwell was of a rather shadowy and paranoid individual whose insistence on saying unpopular things made him seem somewhat of a crank.  But this lively, poignant, sad and funny memoir of life in St Cyprian’s boarding school contrasts with his 1984, a book so stark that it scared me when I read it in high school. I never want to read it again. Yet Little Eric Blair, (his real name) who even then was developing one of the sharpest, most extraordinary minds of the century, being mistreated and misunderstood broke my heart.

He describes a beating that went on for so long it frightened and astonished him.  He recalls that it didn’t hurt, however, because “fright and shame seemed to have anesthetized me.”  He cried partly “because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.”

From all that I can make out, the adult Eric Blair was a bit of a crank, but he was cranky about a lot of the things I am cranky about so that’s just lovable.  He was also funny, imaginative and curious, qualities that I admire and prize.  All my friends are required to have at least two out of the three.  He saw not just two but several sides, and then the layers to ideas.  He picked through issues like he picked through items in junk shops.  He said the things that everyone else subconsciously knew but no one wanted to admit to. And he has some of the greatest first lines I have ever read.

He left St Cyprian’s on a scholarship to Eton.  From there he did not do the expected, that is, go to Oxford or Cambridge.  He joined the police force in Burma.  Upon his return to England five years later, he lived with the homeless for years and eventually wrote the book, Down and Out in Paris and London under his pseudonym.  He got married.  He studied the poor and working classes in northern England and wrote about them in The Road to Wigan Pier.  By now Big Brother was beginning to watch George Orwell.  What agitating was he doing up there in Lancashire?  MI-5 probably started what would become a big, fat file on him. The day after he sent in his manuscript, he and his wife Eileen left for Spain and joined the Spanish Civil War.  He was wounded.  The two of them escaped back to England.

When the Second World War began percolating, Orwell got a job with the BBC, which he hated.  He hated office politics and pretensions. He hated having a boss.  He hated censorship. He lasted two years.  He wrote essays for various publications and created his own column for the periodical,Tribune.  Reading his wartime essays enhances the experience of watching Foyles’s War.  Orwell already had me with Such, Such Were the Joys, but the name of his newspaper column made him my comrade.  He called it As I Please.  The topics are diverse, but even within one column he writes about whatever is on his mind, and there is always more than one thing on his mind.  In his first As I Please he transcribes a conversation in a tobacconist’s shop, comments on who has legal jurisdiction when Americans who have lately over-run the country are involved, has a paragraph about Fascism, and refers to a 19^th century novel by one Mark Rutherford in reference to London slums.

There are 80 As I Please columns, numbered, not titled because they don’t have one central topic. Here are my notes to remind me what it was I enjoyed most in some of the columns: the honor’s list, short stories, anti-semitism, flying saints, Joyce, political language, fascism, war revenge, newspapers, women’s make-up, I.A. Richard’s poetry experiment, C.S. Lewis, children’s toys, executions, writer’s magazines, Tories, shopkeepers, propaganda, popular songs, Fairchild Family children’s book, dead metaphors. 

In other published essays he writes in depth about Dickens, Kipling, the English people, the Spanish Civil War, socialism and fascism.  He writes about poking around junk shops, how to make a proper cup of tea, Tolstoy’s sour grapes in regards to Shakespeare, and titillating comic post cards.  He gets cranky about the degradation of language.  T.S. Eliot, Thackeray, and Marx come up a lot.  He writes book reviews that I enjoyed even if I had never heard of the book and wasn’t interested in reading it. In short I will read anything Orwell wrote (except 1984 for a second time) even if I am not particularly interested in the subject because he writes so well. I’ll get interested in the subject.

To finish out the biography, Eric and Eileen adopted a baby boy in 1944.  Eileen died unexpectedly from the anesthetic in an operation in 1945.  1984 was published in 1949, and Eric Blair died in 1950 at the age of 47. 

I have a huge list of Orwell quotations that made me either snicker, marvel, or sit up and think but I will save those for the next post and begin here with some of his first lines:

*As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later. (Marrakech, 1939) 

*Dickens is one of those writers who is well worth stealing. (Charles Dickens, 1940)

*In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. (Shooting an Elephant, 1936)

*As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. (The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941)

*The time was when I used to say that what the English climate needed was a minor operation, comparable to the removal of tonsils in a human being.  Just cut out January and February, and we should have nothing to complain about. (Bad Climates are Best, 1946)

*This trip was a failure, as the object of it was to get into prison, and I did not, in fact get more than forty eight hours in custody.  .  . (Clink, 1932)

*The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of the “Daily Mail” reporters whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm.  (Spilling the Spanish Beans, 1937)

*When Henry Miller’s novel Tropic of Cancer appeared in 1935, it was greeted with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned in some cases by a fear of seeming to enjoy pornography. (Inside the Whale, 1940)

*It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling’s poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his work. (Rudyard Kipling, 1942)

*In peacetime, it is unusual for foreign visitors to this country to notice the existence of the English people. (The English People, 1947)

*Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. (Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali, 1944)

*Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian’s.  .  .  I began wetting the bed. (Such, Such Were the Joys,1948)

Previously on this blog, my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything had fixed my wireless connection (without my interference because I was asked to leave the house) and had cabled my computer up to the TV with the cable that she bought (so as to get the correct one on the first try.) I can now stream videos from the tens of thousands that are out there. 

For people who aren’t sure what streaming means, here’s an easy way to understand this formidable power: movies and television programs are out there in the atmosphere.  When you stream, you divert one of them into your computer. When your computer is cabled up to your television, you can watch them on the big screen.  All that’s left is to be savvy about how to find the best resolution for the best price, preferentially nothing. I can’t explain resolution because I don’t know what it means.  That’s where I am.

In any case, last week was a busy one and I conscientiously went about my work, piously pronouncing that I would only use my new capability in the evening when I finished teaching, answered all my e-mails and when my checking account balanced.  Sunday night after watching bits of a few things from You Tube, I changed my Netflix account from discs only to streaming.  I filled up My List.  Then I went to bed.

Monday when I emerged from my reading time (which continues to be an inviolable two hours) the computer was at my desk.  I did some writing, some busy work, some practicing, some fussing about this and that, and played a word in Scrabble.  I wandered into the kitchen around eleven thinking I needed some elevenses.  I picked apart a pomegranate.  As it was shooting and spitting juice all over the wall, ceiling and floor, I remembered Netflix. Maybe I’ll just watch something for a half hour, I thought. I hooked up the computer to the HMDI cable (I don’t know what that means either.) For the rest of the day I watched:

The Lady Vanishes
Cottage to Let
All Over the Town
Two episodes Law and Order Criminal Intent
One episode Everybody Loves Raymond
One episode Midsomer Murders

All of which I have already seen with the exception of All Over the Town.  And in the case of Everybody Loves Raymond, I own the disc.  It’s in the other room.

I emailed Gwen: “This is like having a box of chocolates that I don’t have to share.  I can take a bite of one and if I don’t feel like eating that particular one just then, I can put it back.”

She replied: “I wish I could say that one gets tired of even chocolates.”

I emailed Gwen the next day: “Poirot. Season One.”

That was pretty much all anyone heard from me on Tuesday except for the students I saw that day.  My hairline is spontaneously growing little curls like Miss Lemon’s.

Wednesday was Law and Order Criminal Intent Day.

Thursday was more old English movies: Encore, English Without Tears, Black Orchid, Millions Like Us.

Every evening when I started to feel almost sick with satiety, I moved the computer back to my desk so that’s where it would be in the morning.  Friday I was so sleepy, I just left it by the couch, all hooked up and ready to stream.  That was a mistake.  Everything I do in life, I do better between the hours of 5:30 AM and 12 PM: thinking, reading, concentrating, warming up my voice, playing the piano, painting, writing, and even exercising. I peak out at noon.  I can’t afford to lose those precious 6 ½ hours to 130 episodes of a little Belgian dandy clipping his waxed moustache. 

Saturday night The Gwen was open so I took my Macallan across the street and Gwen and I finished watching Parade’s End together.

Gwen said, “I was afraid that when you could stream movies, you wouldn’t want to come over anymore.”

I said, “I thought when you were so eager to get me hooked up, you were trying to get rid of me.”

Aww.

My new student Alexis is six years old, directive– bossy actually–and bright.  She walks into the house in high-heeled sandals, and swathed in layers of leggings, dresses, and sweaters.  She comes into the house talking about the dog she saw on the way to my house.  She tells me what she has done in the week past. She tells me what we are going to do today at her lesson. 

 We sit together at the piano and I try to find a way into her energy so as to match it, and divert it to a place we can inhabit together.  She is just learning to read middle C and treble G.  We manage to get past the dreary business of playing middle C 18 times so as to experience it in quarter notes, half notes, and whole notes (crotchet, minim, breve to my British friends.  To my American readers, isn’t that interesting that all this time on the other side of the world people have been calling quarter notes crotchets?) We manage to locate treble G.  I turn the page.  Finally something mildly interesting: playing C and G together. 

 “Oh, this is fun,” I say.

 I show her how to play C and G with her thumb and pinkie.  She tries it.

 “How is that fun?” she demands.

 “Busted,” I think. “Well, listen.  It sounds like a car horn,” I say.

 I play C and G together over and over. Honk, honk, honk. I honk it an octave higher.

 “This sounds even more like a car horn,” I say.

 Alex tries it.  She listens.  “No, it sounds more like a car horn down here.”

 She’s intrigued.  Temporarily.

Alexis plays the keys like she’s swatting flies.  I’ve never seen anything quite like it.  She appears resistant to the suggestion of any other technique. She’s going to flail on those keys until she decides it would work better to soften her fingers a little.  I’ll be waiting for her.

I am familiar with the insistence of doing it my way.  I have it.  My neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything has it.  All the really interesting people have it.  Gwen has lately acquired a halo so it isn’t just Alexis that floats my mind across the street to her.  It’s the persistent glow emanating from her house.

A couple of months ago, Gwen got a huge flat screen TV, which I like to call The Plasma to differentiate it from her old flat TV screen, which she gave to me.  Just up and gave it to me.  Our mutual handyman, Matt carried it into my living room and hooked it up.  He moved the large CRT television that Gwen had also given me from the front room into the bedroom, and took the tiny TV that had belonged to my father out to the street.  I put a free sign on it and it was gone in 12 hours.  Now I have what feels like a movie theater screen in my house and what feels like a sister rather than a neighbor across the street.

After Matt had hooked everything up, Gwen swept in with the remote, eager to show me all its features.  Well, maybe not eager.  Gwen and I have different styles.  Gwen is used to doing, not talking about what she’s doing.  I am used to fumbling, whining, figuring out what I can on my own, and finally formulating one or two questions to get the rest of the information I need. And I am highly susceptible to over-stimulation and too much information at one time.  We have learned over the years to divert our energies to places that we can inhabit together.

Gwen pushed buttons on the remote and showed me, talking in half sentences, how I could find the menu and change the picture to wide or panoramic screen.  I grabbed the remote one inch before I tipped into overload.

“OK,” I said. “Let me try.”

I pushed buttons.

“No, not that one,” Gwen said.  “You have to.  .  . here, give it back.”

“No, let me do this.”

“But you’re not doing what I said.”

Right there something crystallized.  Something about me I had never thought about. “Gwen,” I recall that I spoke slowly as the realization was dawning.  “That’s what I do.  I do the opposite of what you say and I fumble around until I get to whatever you said to do.  That’s how I learn.”

Gwen acquired sister status when she gave me the TV.  She got the halo a few days ago when she got my wireless connection to finally work. She emailed me: “Is there a time you are going to be out of the way for fifteen minutes so I can do this?”

That made me smile.  I try to “help” when Gwen’s doing things for me.  I don’t know whether the impulse comes from guilt or gratitude for her generosity.  I do know that “help” doesn’t help:  “What’s that icon there?  Maybe that’s what you need.  Try that link. That sounds like what you’re looking for. What’s that thing for?  Can I make you a cup of tea?”

So I gave Gwen a wide berth and she achieved a wireless connection for me.  Last night she brought an HDMI cable over and showed me how to hook it up so I can throw my computer screen up on the flat screen.  There was the home page of my web site on the television. Really, it’s like living across the street from a magician!

Now I can stream videos.  I can catch up to my friends Susan and Mike, not to mention Gwen, and probably everyone else in the world who incidentally also own Smart phones, and who get to watch all kinds of things I can only hope to see once or twice a week if I can get the disc from Netflix or the library.  As I relax after all this excitment, I am grateful–not for the first time–for my neighbor, and I’m really curious about what shoes Alexis will have on next week.

In an effort to prolong the aura of my recent thirty hours in Portland I am writing up notes made over a bowl of beef stew in the Heathman Hotel restaurant.  My former piano student Anna got me a rate at the hotel “where service is still an art” through her work at Rubicon International with the condition that I leave an autographed copy of my book 99 Girdles on the Wall in their famous library.

I took the train.  Four lovely hours to think, to read and write, and to gaze out the window at a ghostly gray January day.  Before I learned to paint I hadn’t the eye to distinguish the gray of Puget Sound’s water from the gray of the mountains, the sky and the clouds.  There was a subtle palette out there, which set off the stark black etches of bare trees and along with the rhythm of the train, invited meditation and reflection.

At Vancouver, thirty eight kids from Camas climbed aboard and filled up the car behind me.  They were on their way to Sacramento with their projects for a Brainy Kids Convention: one boy had a trebuchet; a girl had a presentation about genetics.  Within thirty seconds the chaperons were making sure their charges weren’t bothering me.

I took a taxi to the Heathman Hotel where the amenities in my room were tastefully hidden in black boxes that blended in with the furniture.  It took more than the usual amount of exploring to locate all the free stuff in back of the mini-bar and the four dollar KitKats.  I explored the hotel and went for a walk before Anna got off work and whisked us both up Alder Street to the Multnomah Whisk(e)y Library.  Yes, that is the spelling.  You can’t imagine the venom generated over the controversy around how the word is spelled.  The Scottish and the Canadian spelling is whisky.  In Ireland and the U.S., it’s whiskey.  Here’s a comment from Britain on a NY Times blog post about whiskey:

“I cannot pass over the unforgivable use by a serious writer on wines and spirits of ‘whiskey’ to refer to Scotch whisky. I am afraid I found the constant misspelling of the product made your article quite unreadable. . .”

Solomon would have spelled it like the Multnomah Whisk(e)y Library has chosen to.

We entered a dark passageway and climbed some stairs to the faint sounds of Louis Armstrong.  The music exploded when the door to the library opened onto a high-ceilinged roomed lined with bottles that sparkled and gleamed in communion with the huge chandelier.  Three or four ladders on wheels rolled back and forth in aide of procuring bottles. I was nearly sick right there. Equipped with diaries to document our exploration of whisky, we sank into two deep leather armchairs.  

After long deliberation of the book-length menu, and with some tutelage from Anna and Tom, the curator, I chose three “half-pours:” Laphroaig (Triple-Wood was my only note, I don’t remember the age or anything else a connoisseur would want to know), Bruichladdich (Peat Project), and Bunnahabhain (12 year).  I tasted them in that order but if I had it to do again, I would have reversed it, and ended with Laphroaig because its finish lasts about three days. 

Anna had Glendronach (12 year, sherry cask) and Talisker (10 year) and went wild over the Talisker.  When Anna was 14 her family made a tour of the Isle of Skye where Talisker is distilled.  There she first tasted whisky, which she predictably thought was about the nastiest stuff imaginable.  What a different ten years make!

Multnomah Whisk(e)y Library

I stayed up past my bedtime, got over-stimulated, and was not able to fall asleep til about three in the morning.  Anna collected me at 10:00 for coffee at a café called Case Study.  We explored Martinottis’ Café and Delicatessen, one of the few places in Portland Anna does not personally know.  Charming and European, it also had the look of having not slept all night but in its case, it was due to the calm after the Christmas storms.

We split up, Anna to her tutoring commitment and me to continue being a tourist.  I got caught in a downpour which dis-oriented me.  I kept walking and thinking I would get somewhere warm and dry. But when the rain stopped, I found myself in a park that looked both familiar and a place out of a different world.  I stood dripping until I realized it was both.  “It’s that place,” I thought. “That place where I–.”  But couldn’t think what that place was. Finally it focused.  Sheet Music Service of Portland used to be here.  I had made a pilgrim’s detour on the way to the Oregon coast in the 1980s just to visit the store that was, along with Johnson and West in Seattle, a holy site for the classical musician. 

I ended up back at the Heathman with two bottles of Scotch–one for me and one for Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything– from the Tenth Avenue Liquor Store,conveniently located around the corner so it could be my last stop before catching the train.  But first there was the ordeal of wrapping the bottles up in my pajamas in the luggage room of the hotel, and then repacking my entire bag in the ladies’ lounge where I wasn’t under surveillance by the hotel staff.

Anna met me at the train station to say goodbye. I feel so lucky to have had a student who grew up to be not only an articulate, reflective, funny, and beautiful woman, but she also has become my friend.  There’s an affinity I didn’t see coming when she was a shy twelve year old sitting at my piano and I was in the middle of the psycho-analysis that would finally bring peace and clarity to my life. This weekend as I listened to her and watched her, I felt nostalgia for the enthusiasm and energy of being young. The complexity of Anna’s life is layered with primary colors, not with values of grey and the black etches of trees seen from a train window.

It was lovely to be in the company of primary colors.  And I need to start watching Portlandia.

Finally this story can be told.  It should be said at once that the whole business is anti-climactic, but I am going ahead with it.  It begins shortly after Thanksgiving Day when Gwen my neighbor who knows something about just about everything and I were planning our Christmas debauchery, to include a movie, a chicken, mince pie and whiskey.

It was the movie that was under deliberation.  I mentioned a movie I had seen in the 1960s on television that had stayed with me.  For the past ten years I have periodically checked to see if it was available on DVD.  It’s a 1950s English film called The Holly and the Ivy, starring Ralph Richardson (who steals every scene he’s in), Celia Johnson, Margaret Leighton, and a very young baby-faced Denholm Elliot who at the beginning of the movie is denied 48 hours leave to go home for Christmas and I personally think that is why he always played such embittered characters in later life.  It was that beastly sergeant-major.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  All I remembered about the movie from the 60s was that it was Christmasy, English village-y, (fake)snowy, and that one of the daughters was a bad girl, something I would have liked to have been in my teens, but couldn’t pull off.  I found some obscure references to the movie and sent the links to Gwen who did the advanced research that only Gwen can do.  She actually found it available from a little business in California that called itself Santa Flicks, and that apparently guaranteed your Christmas movie.  She ordered it!

Five days before Christmas, it hadn’t arrived.

“Did you tell them we wanted it for Christmas?” I asked Gwen.

 “Yes, I said it was our Christmas entertainment.”

 “But did you tell them this was our dying sister’s last Christmas?”

 “You know I can’t lie.”

By the 22^th Gwen and I were signing our e-mails “Fingers crossed.” To no avail.  The movie didn’t come on the 23^rd.  It didn’t come on the 24^th.  On Christmas Day I made Gwen find Dylan Thomas reading “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” on YouTube.  Not the version with Denholm Elliot.  As noted above, he isn’t convincing as a warm sort.

On Dec. 26 Gwen sent an email to Santa Flicks that was so strongly worded for a person from Wisconsin that out of respect for her privacy, not to mention her image, I won’t reproduce it.  But the gist of it was she wanted to know what the hell had happened to The Disc as we now began calling it, Christmas being completely over with.

Santa Flicks came back with the tracking number and the information that the order was shipped with Two-Day service.  The tracking information revealed that The Disc had gone out on Christmas Eve with the expectation that it would arrive on what, Christmas Day?  That would be Santa Service, and neither of us has a chimney.  Maybe that’s why it wasn’t delivered.  Actually I have a chimney, but it’s for a wood stove that’s very small.  The model is called The Leprechaun.  Room for one elf with a DVD.

The tracking information also revealed that The Disc had traveled from Encino to Santa Clarita, California, then to Washington where it had been processed in Federal Way, had been sorted in Seattle, and had turned around gone south to Kent.  For those readers who don’t know the geography of the west coast, the travels of The Disc describes a shepherd’s crook: it made a long journey north to within a few miles of Gwen’s address, looped around and went south.

On Dec 28 there began a series of late afternoon e-mails between Gwen and me. Let me set this up: The mail truck sorts mail at Gwen’s hoity-toity secure group mail box at the end of the block.  It cruises by my house and delivers mail to everyone on the south side of my street, loops back and delivers my mail.  When I see the truck go by my house I know that Gwen’s mail has been delivered and that I have five minutes to mail a letter from my box. 

Dec 28
Elena: Mail’s here.

Gwen: Nothing. 

Dec 30
Elena: Mail’s here

Gwen: I checked. Not there. It’s either heading back to Encino to be re-shipped north or it’s in some eternal loop.

Dec 31
Elena: Mail’s here.

Gwen: I just checked tracking. The Disc is back in L.A.  Santa Flicks has shipped a new one as a first class package.

Jan 2
Elena: Mail’s here.

(This time the routine was varied by the excitement of my actually seeing Gwen trek out to her mailbox a few minutes after getting my e-mail.)

Gwen: Nope

Elena: I suppose you checked to make sure they had the correct address, maybe even the correct city?

Gwen: Long ago.

Jan 3:
Elena: Mail’s here

Gwen: It’s HERE!  It says Fragile and Rush all over its padded package.  That probably held it up a few days. I think it makes people want to stomp on it.  But I won’t watch it til you have time to enjoy it with me.

Elena: 6:30 tonight?

So we finally saw our Christmas movie.  I had too much Scotch, dozed off and missed the part where the bad girl is forgiven.

It’s Christmas Eve (morning).  There are streaks of rose madder in the sky.  All is calm and bright before The Onslaught of Holiday.  This morning I read Robert Browning’s (very) long poem “Christmas Eve.”  A dream is set off by the poet going into a dreary church service on Christmas Eve, falling asleep during the sermon (more sympathetic I could not be) and having a magnificent dream that takes him all over the world to see how Christmas and Christianity in general is understood.  When he wakes up in the pews with the church’s peculiar congregants shrinking away from him –he had been snoring—he concludes,

Looking below light speech we utter,
When frothy spume and frequent sputter
Prove that the soul’s depths boil in earnest!
May truth shine out, stand ever before us!

One of the reasons that all is calm and bright for me is that I resigned from my job as a church music director.  (It’s a story you will have to pay money to read when it someday works itself into a novel.)  In any case what that means is that I didn’t have to run choir rehearsals all month, I didn’t play at the children’s pageant, and I don’t have to work Christmas Eve for the first time in ten years.

Warning: a digression. Here’s the thing about church musicians: they are working.  Saturday night is a work night for them. They don’t get to lie in bed on Sunday and decide they’d rather go out to brunch that morning.  They can’t waltz into church five minutes late.   Maybe you think the musicians at your church are members of your congregation.  They might be, but more often they are not.  Their spiritual community is elsewhere. They may seem to be enjoying themselves, and I expect most of them are.  I enjoyed my job at the church, but it was a job.

So all has been calm and bright this month, where was I? Oh yes, choirs. A quorum of The OK Chorale caroled for my friend Doris.  Once a month I spend an evening with Doris who has Alzheimer’s.  She comes from an illustrious family of musicians whose idea of a family sing-a-long is to gather around the piano and sing Italian Art Songs from the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  Nick (bass), Eileen (tenor), Heather (alto), and Nina (rhymes with Dinah, soprano) joined me during my evening with Doris and sang this quarter’s OK Chorale program.  I had brought my Christmas cardamom bread for the occasion but had made the mistake of giving Doris a slice of it before her dinner.  She wouldn’t eat dinner after the bread, and to my knowledge all she consumed for the rest of the evening was chocolate so it was rather a night of debauchery for her and I’m almost afraid to call and see how she was the next day.

After the OK Chorale finished their quarter with a moonlit, magical performance at the Green Lake Luminarias, I was looking at ten days of little responsibility, something that happens so seldom to me that it takes me a few days to actually stop working. I wind down like a music box, getting slower and slower, making less and less music until finally I ping here and there.  As I approached pinging, I spent one glorious day moving from wrapping presents to writing cards to baking cookies and back to wrapping presents.  These are pleasures that I don’t always have the leisure to enjoy.  There are years when I stuff  gifts into bags on my way out the door and practically throw them at their recipients.

It’s been a season of teas. I had three friends over for a Christmas tea.  Nancy, my good friend and weekly walking partner, and I eschewed the walk and had a Christmas tea.  Anna and Julia took me to tea at the Sorrento Hotel’s Hunt Club, our tradition of twelve years except that I used to pay for it.  Now they are grown up, they treat me.  These days we order two meals and three pots of tea. Anna and I don’t eat wheat, I don’t eat dairy, Julia doesn’t eat meat, and all of us try to keep the sugar consumption low.  We divvied up the food like the dignitaries at the Paris Peace Conference. I scraped the cream fraiche off the cucumber and offered it to Julia. I kept the caviar, which is what she really wanted. Other than that I think we settled things amicably.

One small joy was the gift I gave one of my newest and youngest piano students.  Alex is a tiny and exuberant child.  She looked at my collection of porcelain and wax caroling figures surrounded by miniature gifts, Christmas ornaments and old, old pieces of candy.  There’s some Cornish fudge wrapped in cellophane from 1980.  But Alex fingered the chocolate coins.

 “I’ve never had these,” she said.

Did I hear wistful? I looked at the six year old and thought how many other things she hadn’t yet experienced.  I remembered how it felt to be six and how hard it was to speak my desire.  I remembered the adults who had picked up on just such hints as I was getting from Alex.  I had planned to make little packages for my students of homemade cookies and candy canes but you can bet I bustled down to Bartells and bought some chocolate coins.  Two per package except for one package that got three.  That was the package that Alex happened to pick.  It was one small joy in a season of overwhelming excitement, and perhaps she forgot all about it as she went out the door and I wiped the chocolate smears off the piano keys.  But maybe not.

Tonight I am going to a big-ass Christmas Eve service with a friend. (“You just can’t stay away from church, can you?” another friend asked).  Oh, I think I can, but for once I want to sit in a pew and not be responsible for anything or anyone.  Maybe I’ll fall asleep, dream a magnificent dream, and write a 45 page poem about it.

Whatever your plans in the next few days and whatever boils in earnest in your soul: May truth shine out! Merry Christmas!

The OK Chorale has sung itself into performance mode: two down and two to go. You still have a chance to hear us if you live in Seattle.  We sang for Pinehurst Court, a senior housing complex, and home of the grandmother of one of our sopranos.  It was a hot, crowded, noisy venue but the audience was enthusiastic.  One man told us he heard the sound of angels.  I asked for a show of hands of the angel voices in the Chorale.  Their angel qualities escape me during rehearsals.

We sang at the Norse Home for an informal tree decorating evening, which was also hot, crowded and noisy.  A small boy began running his metal truck over a slate floor at about the time we began singing the anti-war carol, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”  By the time we got to the sentimental “Auld Lang Syne,” I got up from the piano with every intention of kicking the truck right out of his hand, but, speaking of angels, my better one got to me, and I stood with the choir to finish the song a capella.

It was my intention, however, when I started this post, to tell you about a chap named Andrew D.R.Greenhill because we sing an arrangement of his every year during fall quarter.  I try to rotate it out but everyone complains when I do.  The song is called “The King,” and in the early 70s it was a hit of a British group called Steeleye Span.  We do quite a number of their songs through-out the year, some that I have arranged and some arrangements that I have bought from Andrew.

I discovered Steeleye Span in 2000, and loved their repertoire and their four-part harmony.  I had already arranged a few of their songs for the OK Chorale before I found a website that sold actual transcriptions of the voicing and progressions from the recordings.  Gold!  I picked out some titles I wanted.  But there was no shopping cart, and no order form.  I clicked away until I came to a page with ordering instructions from Andrew D.R. Greenhill.

Here was the routine: I wrote to him via snail mail and told him what arrangements I wanted.  (He lives in Leicester, which leapt into the news last year as the place where Richard III’s bones were discovered under a parking lot.) He responded “by turn of post” as is his wont:

“You may have copies of “The King,” “Gaudete,” “The Boar’s Head Carol,” and “The Holly and the Ivy” for the princely sum of ₤26.75. The aforesaid sum must be in sterling. The usual method of payment is by cheque or cash.  I look forwards to hearing from you again. Thank you for your enquiry.  Yours faithfully.  .  .”

In 2000 every little outpost bank couldn’t do international money orders. I had to travel to a bank in Wallingford to obtain the princely sum of ₤26.75 in the format required to purchase the aforementioned music. I sent off the money order.  A package duly arrived with a cover letter bidding me “find enclosed herewith the music which you ordered in your letter of .  .  .”

I ordered more arrangements from Andrew.  In fact, I ordered from him four times. Eight letters crossed the world. Their language became less formal.  Four times the price of the music was stated as a princely sum in pound sterling.  Four times I kicked my heels at the bank in Wallingford while a teller waited for his supervisor to get off the phone so he could learn how to do an international money order.  It was quite an adventure–one I could experience again because Andrew’s methods are still the same ten years later.

The song “The King” is charming, majestic and gruesome. Here’s the tradition: on Twelfth Night, a wren, symbolizing winter, is hunted and killed to symbolize the death of winter.  The dead wren is placed in a decorated box and carried from house to house.  At each house this lovely song is sung and people pay to have a dekko at the dead wren:

Joy, health, love and peace be here in this place,
By your leave we will sing concerning our king.

Our king is well dressed in silks of the best.
In ribbons so fair no king can compare.

We have traveled many miles over hedges and stile
In search of our king, unto you we bring.

We have powder and shot to conquer the lot,
We have cannon and ball to conquer them all.

Old Christmas is past, Twelfth tide is the last,
And we bid you adieu, great joy to the new.

We don’t sing the fourth verse in the Chorale.  I carefully excised that verse from Andrew’s arrangement. Literally, I scissored it out. It’s too much for our delicate American sensibilities.  My friend Terry and I like to sing it, though, just because we can. Here’s Steeleye Span singing “The King.” You’re welcome.

You can hear The OK Chorale sing it at the Green Lake Pathway of Lights on Saturday, Dec 14, 6:30 PM at the Aqua-theater.

It’s Thanksgiving Morning.  We all do this day differently.  Not everyone loves the big, jovial family dinners.  Not everyone even wants a big, jovial family.  One of my students this week told me that the best Thanksgiving she ever had was spent with her dog, a bottle of champagne, and a box of chocolates.  There are years when that’s what I want.  Some years, I wouldn’t mind the big, jovial family. This year I am thankful for my neighbor Gwen and the tradition that has evolved between us ever since she stopped thinking she had to get on a plane for the holiday.

 I am especially thankful because I’ve been ill for the last two weeks and but for Gwen, I might have needed to order in that box of chocolates.  We started confabbing about it last week.  Gwen volleyed the idea of getting everything from Smokin’ Petes.

“It’s our chance to really be lazy,” she said.

Smokin’ Petes was considered somewhat on the weight of their key lime pies.  We wanted pumpkin pie but if the key lime pie at Smokin’ Petes was good, the pumpkin was bound to be as well.  I liked the idea of a good pie but I don’t care for smoked turkey.

“Why don’t you get what you want from them along with the pie and I’ll scrounge a dinner from PCC or something?”  This sounds self-pitying but at the time I didn’t feel —OK, it was self-pitying.  At the time I remember thinking that by the day before Thanksgiving I might feel like crawling into the car and going to PCC.

But when Gwen went shopping she came back with the announcement that she had bought a turkey and a pumpkin pie from QFC.“That way,” she said, “We can carbo load on my stuffing.”

I must pause here to note that this is what Thanksgiving comes down to with us no matter how many alternative ideas are floated.  Gwen does the turkey and (traditional) stuffing and she gets all the leftovers.  I do a vegetable and the cranberries. We negotiate for the dessert. 

Usually I do my mother’s Celery Almondine but this year I am roasting yams, carrots and cranberries.  It’s amazing how sweet the root vegetables taste up next to the tart cranberries.  It’s easy and can be done while wearing surgical gloves and a respirator mask.

Yesterday afternoon, Gwen relayed the information that she had tasted the pie and it was awful. “I knew I shouldn’t have bought one,” she said. “I don’t like store bought pies.  I like the ones I make.”

This was gloomy news indeed.

“I have organic pumpkin over here,” I said. “If you want to make one.”

“No, I don’t want to have sugar in the house.”

“I can supply the requisite sugar.”

“Well you could make it if you want to but it’s harder starting with just the pumpkin. I need Libby pumpkin pie filling.  I add more spices with the eggs and milk.”

“I suppose I could make it.” Whine, whine. “But I don’t have the eggs.”  Or enough respirator masks.  “Listen, If I get you a can of Libbys pumpkin pie filling, will you make the pie?”

“OK, if you do that, I’ll make the pie.  I can scrape out the filling from this QFC one because their crust is really good.”

Nina (rhymes with Dinah) picked me up for OK Chorale rehearsal. “You can think about for the next two hours,” I said. “But will you run me by Fred Meyer on the way home so I can get a Libby pumpkin pie filling for Gwen?”

Nina said immediately that she would take me to Fred Meyer on the way home.  Then almost as a reward for her selflessness, she remembered that she had forgotten to buy cranberries for her dinner but could now do it at Fred Meyer.

“I was at Ballard Market with about a billion other people today,” she said.  “I decided I wanted a small turkey for the weekend so we could have leftovers.”  (Ah, the leftovers.) “But the only small turkey they had left was an organic one, somebody’s pet”—she practically spit out the word—“for $35. Thirty-five dollars for a ten pound turkey!  And someone had the nerve to tell me that the pricy organic ones aren’t always any better. I didn’t need to hear that.”

After Chorale rehearsal Nina and I followed a billion other people into Fred Meyer.  The first thing I saw were cans of Farmer’s Market organic pumpkin filling with a BPA free lining. “Wow,” I thought. “Even better!”  I grabbed two.

My alternative angel got to me before I got to the cash register. “Libby,” it said. “Libby. You aren’t making the pie, remember? Gwen is.”

Nine o’ clock last night I called Gwen. “I’m coming over with the Libbys,” I said.

“I’ve scraped out the QFC filling,” she said.

We’re such a team.

My other contribution to the day was the movie.  I have waited 15 years for “A Midwinter Tale” to come out on DVD.  I ordered it with the hope it would arrive in time for Thanksgiving.  It’s the story of a bunch of out-of-work actors who bring their quirks and egos together to put on a benefit performance of Hamlet. 

It’s particularly timely for me because one of the things I did during my two weeks of being sick was watch Hamlet six times.  I watched the David Tennant performance for the first time and liked it so much, I watched it again.  Then I decided to re-watch the Kenneth Branagh performance which up until I saw David Tennant, had been my favorite.  Then I watched The Kenneth Branagh with audio commentary.  After that I had to re-watch David Tennant and when I still hadn’t gotten enough of it, I watched the David Tennant with audio commentary.

We all have our quirks.  It’s nice to have a holiday that supports them.  And now I need to get to those yams.  Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

I knew I’d be writing this post at some point but I thought I had another few weeks.  Last night a friend named Karen died.  For the ten years I was music director at the church, Karen had been popping her gum in the pew and feeding dog biscuits to Marvin, her Miniature Pinscher. As far as anyone in the church knew, she was alone in the world except for her succession of dogs, Marvin being the last one.  For a long time I thought it was Marvin I loved and I put up with Karen because she came with him.

Karen was unto herself.  During sharing times in the church service, we heard all about her early childhood abuse, about how positive dog training had helped her not just with her dog but with herself, about garlic as a remedy for fleas, and about the dangers of beef and chicken by-products.  I used to keep a tally of how many times I heard about animal by-products in food.  More ominously, in the last year of her life, we heard about the electrical grid eating out brains, and about viruses in buildings.

Karen sang tenor in the church choir.  The first one at rehearsal, she and Marvin walked to the church and came quietly in the kitchen door. When I arrived at about the same time, coming in the front door, Marvin sometimes leaped ecstatically at me in the dark and scared the life out of me.  The ecstasy had to do with my pockets being full of dog biscuits that contained no animal by-products.

One day Karen announced to me that she was joining The OK Chorale.  At the first rehearsal of the quarter she watched people handing me checks and told me that she couldn’t pay that much money.  My plan all along had been to let her come, see if it took, and then think about some kind of reduced fee.  That would have been the better course to take; but Karen wanted to do yard work as an exchange.

 I learned immediately that it did not matter what I needed done or wanted done, Karen was going to do what she wanted in the way that she wanted. Her first job—at her suggestion—was to weed in the front garden.  Eight hours later she was still on the same two square feet of garden, tweezing out little roots one by one while Marvin rolled in the grass to the deep disapproval of my three cats.

 “Karen, you don’t need to take out every little root like that,” I said.

 “Yes, I do.”

 “I’d rather you get more of the bigger weeds all over—“

 “I have to get all these roots out or it won’t work right!”

Then there was the lilac tree that broke off its trunk and fell spectacularly in the yard one June. My neighbor Gwen (Gwen Almighty) who knows something about just about everything chain-sawed the big pieces leaving the slender branches and twigs for the re-cycle bin. After Karen had spent 16 hours on two square feet of the front garden and complained that it was too hot to do any more, I moved her over under the remaining lilacs to deal with the remains of the downed tree.

 It took her three days.

“Karen, you don’t need to break them into such tiny pieces.”

“Yes I do!”

“They just need to be small enough to be crammed into the recycle.” I snapped one about a foot long. “Like this.”

“NO! They have to be smaller than that to fit them all in.”

“I don’t have to recycle them all in the same week.”

“NO! They have to be smaller than that.”  She looked with contempt at my foot long branch. “They need to be like this.” She showed me a toothpick-sized twig.

“Karen, they don’t!”

“Yes, they do!”

In due course, the lilac tree was disposed of.  Karen spent the months of July through October repairing a screen door. I just left her to it. I didn’t even want to know why she needed a planer, a drill, two different kinds of clamps, and three electrical saws.

In the beginning Karen and Marvin showed up at my house four and five times a week, at varying times and unannounced.  It was close to impossible to nail down a day and time with her.  She had no phone, but collected messages left with a neighbor and used his phone to return calls. Gradually I enforced the schedule of Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1:00, and that held for a while until it morphed into Tuesdays between 10 and 5 and anytime Thursday maybe, except when she couldn’t come til Friday.  She’d come in the back door while I was teaching, and stomp into my living room like Marley’s ghost, clanking the enormous chain that always attached to her belt.

Last Christmas I noticed that Karen’s affect was more depressed.  I asked her if her meds had been changed.  She said something non-committal.  By January other people were noticing the change in her and the speculation mill turned as she remained non-committal.  Last spring she went into a physical decline that made her appear zombie-like.  She lost 100 pounds, she had difficulty moving her limbs.  She fell down a lot. 

 She gave Marvin away.  I thought she was preparing to suicide, but that was not Karen’s way.  Karen gave Marvin away because she could no longer take him out for his walks and care for him the way she used to.  It was an act of love and it almost broke my heart.

 Karen’s self-diagnosis was that the electricity or alternately the virus in her building was killing her.  It was, in fact, ALS.   A slice of The OK Chorale sang for her in hospice last Saturday: “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Pilgrim,” “Amazing Grace,” and a song that begins “when I’m on my journey don’t you weep after me.”  I like to think we sang her out.

Karen haunted me. She was like an animal in the wild, vulnerable and yet fiercely determined to be herself.   She reminded me of me. Her raw vulnerability scared me. She also reminded me of my mother: her gum popping, her cackling laughter, her unreasonable demands, her outbursts of talk that nailed you so you were stuck listening to her ramblings.  She was relentlessly herself.  My mother died six years ago tomorrow.  I’ll keep her and Karen together in my thoughts.