I love being middle-aged, although my friend Nina (rhymes with Dinah) tells me I am only middle-aged if I expect to live 115 years.   I’ll put it like this: the joys of being 57 out-weigh the nuisance of it.  The biggest nuisance is the squadron of odd body parts that twinge and whinge with no predictability, and over which I have no control.

It’s driven me to try something I haven’t tried in 25 years. Yoga.  Down the street from me is a lovely place called Whole Life Yoga.  They have a class called Yoga for Real People which says a lot about the flavor of this studio.  The last time I did yoga, the studios seemed to be mostly for Un-Real People.

I’ve been attending the mild, hour-long Yoga For Over 50 on Mondays but I missed it the other week because of an appointment with my *book designer.*   So I upped and decided I would go to Yoga with Core Focus on Friday which on top of not being the least bit mild, was an hour and fifteen minutes, the last 15 minutes of which was quite unforgiving.

At the time I didn’t think I was doing all that badly.  It’s just that in Yoga for Over 50, we never do downward dog and we never squeeze bricks between our legs to enhance our attention to the pelvic floor.   I am new enough to yoga that the bricks have a kind of mystique, kind of like the black keys to a piano beginner and that tic-tac-toe looking thing next to a note.  So I might have used my brick rather too enthusiastically.

The stretches certainly knocked out the sciatic pain I’d been having but on Saturday morning I found that a lot of my muscles had rather enjoyed the fresh air and didn’t want to go back inside.  They had a list of complaints, had organized a hearing, and expected their demands to be addressed. All weekend, I crept around trying to accommodate everybody.   Every move required thinking, planning and the juggling of conflicting needs.

By Monday my various precincts were reasonably happy.  I would have gone to Yoga for Over 50 except it had been canceled. I fussed over the weekly class schedule.  I didn’t want to lose what small in-roads I had made. There was a Mom and Baby class.  I thought perhaps I could go as the baby.

I finally decided it was going to be Yoga with Core Focus again.  Since I knew what was on offer, I planned to modify the poses somewhat.  But there was a different teacher and she had a whole different regime.  I tried taking extra breaths between the movements so I wouldn’t overdo and the teacher kept checking to see if I had passed out.  I swear that last 15 minutes went on for an extra hour.  I didn’t dare watch an advanced student for fear I would start trying to keep up with her.  She stayed after and did extra stretches –that’s so annoying.

I went from yoga to meet my friend Nancy who is so much more than someone who can tell me every time I have deconstructed a thought, at Green Lake.  If you aren’t familiar with Seattle, Green Lake is encircled by a walking path that is just shy of three miles long.  It’s a great favorite of walkers, with or without dogs; strollers, bicyclers, and roller bladers.  I like it because it’s finite.  No one says, “Do you want to go a bit further?”  You go around it and you’re done.  Except maybe that advanced student might go around it twice.

There was a cold wind coming off the lake.

“Let’s walk briskly,” Nancy said.

This was a terrible suggestion.  When Nancy and I meet every Friday afternoon at Green Lake, we do the Walk for Over 50 so we can talk.  If we can’t walk and chat, I’d rather have a conversation over a latte at Peets.

We did do about 25 yards at a faster pace but then dropped into a rhythm that invited catch-up news, gossip and philosophical musing. I started feeling stiff when we were exactly halfway around.  Like Life: it’s finite, you get stiff halfway around and there’s no advantage to turning back.

I was walking like Frankenstein by the time I got home and fell into an Epsom salt bath.  Well, actually I fed the cats first.  Otherwise they might  have tried to drown me in the tub.  I sank into the warm water with a Jameson and my Boden catalog.  Boden is a British fashion company that I originally got interested in purely because when you register on-line, you get a drop-down menu with twenty titles to choose from: the usual Mrs., Ms., and Mr.  But then it goes on to Princess, Wing Commander, Lady, The Hon, The Duke of, Viscountess.

Since there was no option for Queen—and I suspect one would have to be British to fully appreciate why–I chose Squadron Leader.  All my Boden catalogs come addressed to Squadron Leader Elena Louise Richmond.  My friend Chris, the unclassifiable except she was in the Army, is the only person who occasionally acknowledges my title. I wish it were more widely appreciated.  It would be so great if I could use it to command muscles and joints to be At Ease.

This is a companion to my previous post illustrating how much I am benefiting from having no television. https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/10/going-to-the-dogs/ .  It stars that well known personage, Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything.

Gwen used to be the head designer Opus 204, an exclusive Seattle boutique from 1968 to 2009.  By day she came up with haute couture, and in off hours, she dismantled and rebuilt computers and Volkswagens.  She still does the latter.  And she still looks at all the fashion advertisements in Vanity Fair rather than rip them out so it’s easier to hold the magazine. https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/08/the-life-of-a-curmudgeon/.

Gwen is the person I go to when I think it matters how I am dressed.  Like when I am out of my milieu– weddings and fine dining– and I don’t want to look like I was raised by wolves.  I walk across the street in my black handkerchief dress with black tights– so far so good– and clogs.

She sighs because she knows me so well, and says, “You can’t suck it up for a few hours and wear real shoes?”

“Nope.”

“Then wear sandals and go bare-legged.”

Gwen reviewed the jaunty, nautical-looking jacket I bought for my Alaska trip of last summer.

“It looks all right on you.”  Slight, but suspicious emphasis.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning it’s fine.”

“Meaning you wouldn’t wear it.”

“Right.”

Gwen is only this brutally honest when it comes to clothes. Ordinarily she would rather set herself on fire than say anything even borderline impolite.  She’s from Wisconsin.

Evenings at The Gwen began nearly a year ago, just before I let go of cable-TV. Gwen and I spent a week racing through the three Stieg Larsson books, followed by a fest of the three movies.  https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/01/tattooed-ladies-on-fire-reading/

We carried on with weekly foreign films. Up until then I hadn’t watched a movie with sub-titles since Babette’s Feast showed up at the Crest in the late 80’s and I saw it three times.  I’ve always liked foreign films.  My mother used to say that unlike in an American movie, when someone gets up from a chair in a foreign film, her clothes are wrinkled. The actors seem like “real” people who just happened to stray in front of the camera.  I get tired of American actors’ gleaming white teeth and movie endings that balk at reality. But after I reached a certain age, it was just too much trouble to read the sub-titles in foreign movies, cue the violins.

There’s something about the set-up at The Gwen that invites one to enjoy a foreign film.  For one thing, there’s the Plaid Room where the flat screen commands two thirds of the wall, and where Lucy, the black and brown tabby with the smudge on her nose, snoozes on her heating pad.  There’s a large ottoman which Gwen generously shares with me and a selection of wool blankets which make it unnecessary for me to wear a parka, Uggs, and wool mittens when I spend the evening.

The Drink’s Tray has been a recent innovation and I don’t know what we did without it.  We keep it stocked with mini bottles of Jameson and Bushmills, and a sampling of bourbon: Crown Royal, Woodford Reserve, George Dickels. Once in a while, I’ll bring my Laphroaig and Gwen will share her Maker’s Mark.  There’s a tiny water pitcher should we need to dilute.  The pitcher is a piece of whimsical Bayreuth porcelain.  Gwen thinks it’s a Pierrot figure.  I think it looks like a roguish Pan presenting.  In any case, you pour the water through the top of his hat.

Our on-going foreign film fest began with the Stieg Larsson trilogy, then a string of ones we had both enjoyed years ago like The King of Hearts and Le Cage Aux Folles.  I was afraid to re-watch Jean de Florette/Manon of the Springs since I saw it in the 80’s and was stunned for days.  But after twenty five years and a few shots of Jamesons I coped with equanimity.

Moving on to new ones, we both loved Så som i himmelen (As It is in Heaven), not the least because it starred the engaging Michael Nyqvist who played Mikael Blomkvist in the Stieg Larsson movies.  We loved Antonia (Antonia’s Line).

Blessures Assasins was a little too grim.  Europa Europa was a little too stark.  Recently we’ve been watching WW II British propaganda films: Cottage to Let and Millions Like Us.  They’re wizard!

It’s great to be able to slouch across the street in my jammies, and enjoy an evening with my wonderful neighbor in the Plaid Room at The Gwen.  When I leave, the street is peaceful except for the insistent little meow of Freud come to meet me (American version) or to demand why I have to spend my time away from him (foreign version).

There’s an old Sylvia cartoon in the “The Devil Talks About Hell” series.  The devil says that some of us will feel like we had never left home.  Then there’s a roll call of people to report to the backyard for violent misunderstandings with their neighbors.  I know what that’s like.  But I never expect to find Gwen there.  She’s from Wisconsin.

On my current austerity budget, I don’t have cable television.  In addition I don’t have a digital receiver since I did not have the foresight to avail myself of one back when the city was handing them out.  Because of the aforementioned budget, I won’t buy one.  Gwen my neighbor who knows something about just about everything, insists we can rig up an antenna with an angel food cake pan but so far that hasn’t happened.  Hence for the past year, I have had no TV.  It’s turned out to be a good thing.

For one, I don’t miss the News Torture Networks, and their mechanisms whereby one is swollen into a ball of fury that bounces from floor to ceiling because of something a congressional prick blabbed over national TV, and then is suddenly deflated a day later when the story dissipates.  Repeat.

I get a lot of news from my friend Nancy who can tell me every time I have deconstructed a thought, and hates it that I continue to use that tag-line because she thinks it makes her sound one dimensional which she assuredly is not.  We walk around Green Lake every week and if something critical (or juicy) is going on, Nancy tells me about it.  I would like to say that I rush home and read about it in the New York Times on-line but that would be misleading.  What my Aunt Frances would call A Lie.

While I am not a bit adverse to misleading you (or lying) for literary reasons, I can’t write this blog without revealing that I still watch TV.  I just don’t do it at home.  Once a week I spend the evening watching TV with my multi-dimensional friends Chris and Dee and their three Chinooks.  Chris, my unclassifiable friend recently proof-read and justified all the margins of my book that is currently at the publishers (yay!) Dee always misses church because she is continually out practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.

Chinooks look kind of like German Shepherds but they are sled dogs like Siberian Huskies.   The difference between a Chinook and a Siberian Husky is that if you fall off the sled, a Chinook will notice.    Nancy and I sometimes have her friend’s Siberian Husky with us when we walk around the lake.  Rika sets off with a job to do, one which doesn’t include a lot of socializing.

Chris and Dee’s Chinooks are Willow, Starfire and Enzo.  I began a major campaign a few years ago to ingratiate myself with Starfire because it disturbed me that she was afraid of me.  I won the campaign.  Now she likes to be on my lap gazing adoringly at me with her nose between my breasts.

When Enzo joined the family last spring, he was a cute little doofus with enormous feet.  When I’d come in the door, the girls would rush over to get their Paul Newman organic dog treats.  Enzo would wrestle his way to the front, excited and pleased but with no idea what was going on.

“Here I am!” he’d announce.  “I’m here!  I’m here!”  He’d look around, tail wagging joyfully.  “What am I here for?”

Enzo is still a puppy except he’s already taller than both girls and weighs close to 50 pounds.  He still comports himself like a puppy.  When he decides he has to do what Starfire is doing, he launches himself at me from across the room, wriggles all over me, licks every inch of exposed skin and chews my feet whether there are shoes on them or not.  I wish to point out that between Starfire and Enzo I often have nearly 100 pounds of dog on me. Starfire shoves him away and licks my face.

I generally come home from an evening at Chris and Dee’s fully moisturized.   My cats look pityingly at me, mouth “whore” to each other, and request doorman services.

Willow is my final conquest.  It’s my great goal, my Siberian Husky-type goal to so ingratiate myself with her that she will do for me what she does for Chris and Dee when they first walk in the door: bring me one of her stuffed toys.  The opossum is cute, but the lobster will do.  I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

I’ve got my sugar ration down to just fruit.  I had to do something.  All my summer play clothes are loose and diaphanous.  With the recent chill in the air I tried to pull on some real clothes and the biggest thing in my closet was tight.  Not for the first time.  For some of us, it’s always a struggle.

But now that I’m off sugar, I feel so much more energetic.  I feel capable of anything.  My joints ache less.  It’s wonderful to be alive!  I could go on and on.

Except I’m now on a list.  Actually I’m on several lists.  I come up at least twice on the Lord High Executioner’s hit list in the The Mikado.  But that was written in 1885 and some attitudes have changed since then.  Maybe.

In the story, the Mikado has declared flirting to be a capital crime.  In the town of Titipu, the authorities have frustrated the new law by appointing Ko-Ko, a prisoner condemned to death for flirting, to the post of Lord High Executioner.  They reasoned that Ko-Ko could not cut off anyone else’s head until he cut off his own. Since Ko-Ko was not likely to execute himself, no executions could take place at all.

The Mikado retaliates with a decree that unless someone is executed within a month, the town will be demoted to the rank of village.  So someone must be executed.  Ko-ko has a list of people no one would miss:

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed, who never would be missed!
There’s the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs,
And people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs.  .  .

The list goes on in the ensuing verses: The banjo serenader, the piano-organist, people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face, third persons who insist on spoiling tête-á-têtes, and “that singular anomaly, the lady novelist.”

The song ends like this:

The task of filling up the blanks I’d rather leave to you.
But it really doesn’t matter whom you put upon the list,
For they’d none of ’em be missed, they’d none of ’em be missed!

In the spirit of filling up the blanks, I’ve got my own list:

People who should be put in cages for two years until they get over themselves

People who have discovered yoga

People who have learned to meditate

People who have stopped imbibing caffeine

People who have become vegetarian or vegan.

People who have discovered the runner’s high.

People embracing the New Age belief system du jour.

People who have “found the Lord.”

People who have stopped eating sugar.

W.S.Gilbert was just cranky and looking for words that rhyme but my list has a thread: people whose self-congratulation has infiltrated their sense of what it means to be human.  Not that everyone who takes up yoga is insufferable about it, but I speak as someone who has made my own list several, ok, many times.

It’s fine, it’s good to cultivate healthy new habits.  Except in the case of spiritual experiences, it’s good to be pleased with ourselves.  But we’re alive and life trumps stoicism.  Actually life laughs at it.

For one thing, there are People.   A student brings in a piece of birthday cake she saved just for me. A friend needs a ride to the emergency room because he is bleeding profusely during my meditation time.

Now I’m cranky because I just remembered there’s sugar in chocolate.

I feel better because of my sugar ration and I hope my winter clothes start feeling more comfortable soon, but I am too old be stoical and I have never been a perfectionist.  I will do the best I can and this spout of virtuous living will last as long as it lasts.

This attitude is what gets me off my own list.  It’s what lets you out of the cage.  If you live in Titipu, you’re on your own.

In this recent spate of late but glorious summer, I did something I haven’t done in years because it hasn’t been warm enough.  I dragged a chair into a shady patch of my yard where the lilac branches meet the tops of the black currant bush and create a cool cavern.  I maneuvered the chair in different ways before I found a spot where the ground was level, and where the sun wouldn’t find me through the leaves.

I repaired to the house for a large iced tea, a plate of melon, and a napkin.  I tested the glass on the uneven ground before I was satisfied it wouldn’t fall over.  Finally I went back for my book.

When I returned with my book, there was a cat on my chair.

Now if you are not a cat lover you are probably wondering what the point of this boring narrative is.  If you are a cat lover, you can guess where it’s going.

I looked at my cat.  It was Freud, the orange tabby; as sweet and smart a cat as I have ever known.  He looked at me. A bit defiantly, I thought.  I looked at my carefully arranged chair and repast.  It had taken a good five minutes to get everything just right.

But, you know, one just doesn’t upset the cat.

I sighed and went back to the house for another chair for which I never succeeded in finding a level spot.  I spilled the tea while I was making my new arrangements and most of the melon slid off the plate onto the grass.  When I got myself all arranged a second time, the sun was shining through the lilac branches, making shadows move across the page of my book so I couldn’t read it.

Freud had gone to sleep.  As soon as he knew his territory wouldn’t be challenged, he lost interest in anything I might do.

There was a related incident the next day. I got all set up to do paperwork at my desk.  I arranged bills in one pile.  I made a mound of slips of paper with notes and dates to transfer to the calendar.  I collected a pile of those artifacts we use to call letters and which I wanted to answer.  I brought out the recycle box.

I reached for my chair with the expensive memory-foam pillow, the one I plant my butt on when I have to sit for a long time.  There was Freud again, curled up and fast asleep.

I consider myself a mildly reasonable person.  I don’t like to be bullied, patronized or controlled, for example, and I will defend or offend as needed.  I have told off priests in my lifetime.  I have gone off on mechanics and thrown things at my therapist.  Once I so aggravated someone at the IRS, he hung up on me.

But faced with a cat on my $50 chair cushion, I meekly use a less comfortable chair.

Don’t judge me.  If you have pets, you may not behave as I do, but you have your own version of life as a peasant under tyrants.

I used to tell my friends that if I ever started dressing my cats up in little nightgowns I had run up on the machine, they should shoot me.  Now I think of it, it seems they all smiled rather too patiently.

I have a cutesy green jacket with images of French cartoon cats labeled in curlz font.   It catches people’s eyes just like it caught mine in the store window, and I get comments about it all the time.   When I first began wearing it, I asked several friends, “Do you think I’ve maybe crossed a line?”

“Oh no, nowhere near.”

“Maybe, but it’s still cute.”

My painting friend, Madelaine, said, “You crossed that line a long time ago.”

I didn’t think I liked cats until I first owned one.  That was 30 years and six cats ago.  When one of them goes to work on me purring like a sewing machine, kneading up and down with its little needle-claws, well, I think I would sit on broken glass for this.

I love the library.  Librarians are right up there with pharmacists as people who are completely on my side.  They are my advocates against censorship and insurance companies, respectively.  So I don’t want to turn around and censor librarians but I have to wonder what exactly they are thinking with some peculiar signs I have seen in two of the branches I habitually haunt.  In one women’s room there is a sign that says,

“Please use paper towels appropriately.”

I looked at it for a long time, wondering what had happened in here that would result in this sign.  Had someone tried to paper the walls with them?  Or jimmy open the dispenser?  The most likely misdemeanor is putting paper towels in the toilet.  But if so, why didn’t the sign just say, “No paper towels in the toilet.”

“The people who are using paper towels inappropriately probably don’t read signs like the one you have up in the women’s room,” I mentioned –as a good citizen–to a librarian.  She looked up from her sleuth.  It took a while for her eyes to focus.

“Good point,” she noted.

I haven’t exercised my good citizenship in regards to another sign currently up in another branch library:

“Strollers block our entrance. Thank you.”

Does this mean they are inviting strollers to block the entrance?  Because that is certainly what’s implied.

Aren’t I annoying?  Most English majors of a certain age are annoying if not cranky.

Schoolchildren are experts at knowing exactly what they mean and saying it anyway.  I had a piano student from St Alphonse’s school come in one day singing a Christmas carol whose chorus went “Noel, Noel, sing in exultation!” But he sang the words the St Al’s kids were inserting:  “Noah, Noah died of constipation!”  Then he did an imitation of a nun frothing at the mouth.

Schoolchildren are also good at saying what they aren’t sure they mean, but they can be forgiven because they are earnestly struggling with why anything means anything.  Most of the rest of us are too tired.  One of those humorous Internet forwards that make the rounds of everyone’s e-mails contained answers children had made on Bible tests.  My favorites were:

*Solomon, one of David’s sons, had 300 wives and 700 porcupines.

*Throughout history the Jews had trouble with unsympathetic Genitals.

*Christians have only one spouse.  This is called Monotony.

My friend, Terry, who is the most diplomatic person I know, sent me an email of the Bible test answers.  I saw her at an OK Chorale rehearsal later that evening.  Walking over to where she was sitting with the altos, I marshaled my thoughts in order to make a funny comment.

But what came out was, “Hey Terry, how are your genitals?”

Four alto heads snapped up.

“Oh my god, I’m sorry!  That’s not what I meant to say!”  I quickly explained about the email.

Terry just laughed, “What are friends for if one can’t inquire after their genitals once in a while?”

Context is what makes language a casualty or a fortune.  Here’s the funniest exchange I’ve heard in a long time, compliments of Jim, husband of Debi, aka Putzer, the attorney. (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/02/away-with-discrepancies/)

Jim was in his front yard doing manly stuff like pruning when a car pulled up in front of the house and the driver rolled down her window.

“How much do you charge for yard work?” she called out.

“Well, the lady at this house lets me sleep with her,” Jim said.

The driver gunned her motor and was gone.

There’s been an on-going Facebook progress report on Jim’s construction of a cradle for his soon to be born grandchild.  It occurred to me that it is taking a long time.  I was trying to formulate something funny to say –on Facebook, mind you–about the lady of the house letting him sleep with her, but I remembered my faux-pas with the genitals comment in time to stop myself.

But I will say this because I want to end this blog: what are paper towels for if one can’t stuff them down the toilet once in a while?  And if your marriage gets monotonous, you might consider a three-way with a porcupine.

My blog topics are a result of little frissons I get in my solar plexus.  Something funny happens and it laughs down there.  Or something thrills when I feel passionate about an idea.  Or I get triggered by something that upsets me so much I want to pretend it doesn’t.

I got one of those triggers on Wednesday.  It is now Sunday.  So that’s five days of trying to pretend I was above it all, above being bothered by something I read on a UCC web site.  UCC is the denomination of the church where I am the choir director.  It’s so liberal that after UCC, you can only go on to Unitarian and from there, well, we all know where that leads.  So it’s about two degrees removed from new age, pagan, atheism.

Anyway a UCC pastor had written that she dreads a particular conversation that ensues after someone has found out she is a minister and feels the need to tell her he is “spiritual but not religious” as though this is some “daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the status quo.”  Next thing she knows, said person is telling her he finds God in sunsets.  “Like people who go to church don’t see God in the sunset!” she says.

“Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn’t interest me,” she continues. “There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself.  What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you.  Life with God gets rich and provocative when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.  .  .  .You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating.”

Wow, I think.  That’s quite a diatribe. That’s quite a load of assumptions about people who have had the misfortune to sit next to you on a plane.    It bothered me so much I got heartburn from my bland American sandwich of white bread and Miracle Whip that I washed down with Sanka.

I am getting heartburn over this piece, but I am pretending it doesn’t bother me while I make dispassionate (and dissociative) observations about it.  When I was involved in a religious tradition I did not invent for myself, that heartburn would have been called “conviction by the Holy Spirit.”  My fundamentalist mother would have said “You’ve gotten away from God and you aren’t eating enough broccoli. That’s your problem.”

This “Reflection,” as the author calls it, is fundamentalist-speak.  This is how war starts.  Someone reduces part of the human race to a small capsule of imagined characteristics and there is a reaction from the other side of the new barricade.   Ancient religious traditions are very good at provoking this.  Next thing you know, there’s a “holy” war and everyone is running around being religious but no one has even approached spirituality.

My war right now is internal.  I have let this writer’s language pull me out of balance.  I have projected her into an enemy out there so I can be infuriated by her complacency, and lack of imagination, the latter being my deepest judgment of another human being.   Her nanny language makes every inch of my skin grimace.  The psycho-analyst in me sees a ten year old child telling adults what is and isn’t appropriate.  I want to spew a comment at the end of her (non) Reflection but there is no place to comment.  I have sarcastic thoughts about that.

My opposition has made it a battle which I have already lost. All my fighting but articulate thoughts (more articulate than hers, so there!) have already spoiled five days and fogged the atmosphere.  I have lost my equilibrium and have heartburn.  It’s too late.

Finally, after five days, I am starting to settle into my rich but non-religious depths.  This pastor is doing something we all do.  It’s so condescending and sounds so awful that I developed amnesia there for a few days.  I have a blog.  I bloviate about anything I want to.  I introduce my prejudices.  I lecture about live music, and my theories of learning.   I even have a category called “Spirituality” where I put blogs that aren’t “religious.”

We meet ourselves in each other.   We are solitary and we all live in relationship with each other.  Do we really have to choose just one?  And do we have to vote between religious or spiritual?  Wars have been fought over less.   Above all, when we demote our uniquely fascinating selves to the one or two characteristics that happen to be on top today, could we at least have some awareness about what we are doing?  Even  if it takes us five days.

We really don’t know what it’s like to be anyone but ourselves.  We are alone no matter how much we “work in community.”   We can only approximate connections.  Billy Collins has a lovely poem that’s about many things, including marriage and relationship.  Here’s the surprising last stanza of “Osso Buco” from The Art of Drowning,

In a while, one of us will go up to bed
and the other will follow.
Then we will slip below the surface of the night
into miles of water, drifting down and down
to the dark, soundless bottom
until the weight of dreams pulls us lower still,
below the shale and layered rock,
beneath the strata of hunger and pleasure,
into the broken bones of the earth itself,
into the marrow of the only place we know.

The only place I know is myself.  What it feels like in the marrow, when I am alone or with people, whether conscious or unconscious, that’s my spirituality.

I’ve slipped into one of my spy phases so even though I am compromising security, it’s currently the only thing on my mind.   For purposes of this blog, all use of the word “drop” should be considered what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: the plot device of using an often ambiguous thing which the characters  will sacrifice almost anything to get their hands on.  It doesn’t matter so much what the thing actually is, only that everyone wants it.

This spy phase began–we who go into espionage have such varied motivations–when Genevieve of the unearthly beautiful voice  (https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2010/10/please-dont-grovel/ ) came in carrying a Dorothy Sayers book under her arm which in itself could be a coded message.  She was re-reading Murder Must Advertise in which mentioning the product Nutrax for Nerves in the correct pub would bag you a half ounce of cocaine in your jacket pocket.  Genevieve and I got to talking about Dorothy Sayers and that was enough for me to review all the old Lord Peter Wimsey BBC productions and to re-read The Dawson Pedigree and Murder Must Advertise. 

Then it was nothing to move on to “‘Allo, ‘Allo,” a sort of French resistance Hogan’s Heroes where they spend nine seasons trying to airlift the same two British airmen out of France; and where German, French, British, and various Communist groups all try to leverage their lives after the war by passing around the valuable painting they call The Fallen Madonna with the big boobies.

Wish Me Luck is a series about British women spies made in the 1980’s in England.  It had me preoccupied for days until I had watched all 23 episodes.   I watched them a second time.  Then I started in on The Sorrow and the Pity.  I usually watch sub-titled movies with my neighbor Gwen who knows something about just about everything, but I have kept my espionage interest to myself.  It’s one of the first things you learn: keep your mouth shut.

Especially with my good neighbor, Gwen.  There’s a high fence around her yard.  She says she is doing a lot of reading over there, but who would know?  Someone who knows something about just about everything?  That’s a useful skill.  Then every so often she gets all dressed up and goes somewhere.  She says she goes out to lunch with a former co-worker, but I wonder.

My painting buddy Madelaine paints beautifully.  But then she draws wickedly funny cartoons and signs them Hilaire Squelette.  That’s a cover story if I ever heard one.

I don’t even want to get started with Chris, the unclassifiable but who was in the Army.  There’s a reason she was in the Army and is now unclassifiable.  Oh, wait.  I guess I am the one who calls her that.

I myself have a sweet set-up.  I could write counts under the fifth measure of the first two-page song in a lesson book as a message that sets off a chain reaction resulting in a drop. The only drawback is that it uses children.  My voice students are adults, though.  I could write vocal exercises for them to hum as a secret signal like in The Lady Vanishes.

After spending way too much time reading mysteries and watching spy movies, I don’t see brick walls any more.  I see crevices where a message could be lodged.  And the cemetery behind my house is a perfect drop-site.  Although generally speaking, when something ends up in the cemetery, it has already dropped, so to speak, anywhere from one to five days previously.

The other Sunday in church after I played the hymn before the sermon I went to sit in the back row even though my little friend Marvin, wasn’t there. ( https://www.elenalouiserichmond.com/2011/04/choir-dogs/) I wanted to get a closer look at The Hair that was sitting three rows up.  There was about a foot of hair sitting on top of a woman’s head and I wanted to figure out if it was teased up like we used to do in the 60’s or if it was a wig.  My re-con was inconclusive but it did occur to me that she could have a whole drop lodged up there.

I come from a family of robust paranoids so I think I understand something about the popularity of spy novels, crime literature, and mysteries.  Concentrating fear and oppression into stories neutralizes them somewhat.   Not because everything turns out all right in the end because so often it doesn’t.  But the story contains itself in such a way that I can think.  The ability to think is its own freedom.

I believe that safety and freedom begin in our own heads.  The more we can acknowledge our full humanity–the good and the bad–and accept that we all have a spectrum of motives, the less there is to fear outside our own heads.  That drop is not a MacGuffin.

This week I finished a painting inspired by a photograph of a wheelbarrow full of pumpkins, and Eugene, my first little soul-mate cat.  He’s the cat who liked raisins, broccoli and ear wax –I don’t need to get into how that came about—and who played my answering machine when he was bored.

I wanted riots of color in this painting and the colors turned out to be a way of making the shadows in front of the wheelbarrow.  But Eugene, my little familiar, did not look quite right until I gave him a little shadow.   He came alive, sitting in the little shadow that belonged to him, that he alone could make.

A shadow is a companion of the thing itself.  Remember “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,” the children’s poem by Robert Louis Stevenson? The poem treats shadows benignly.   But the word “shadow” in this post Jungian age, has acquired an unfortunate rep for something we ought to be able to get rid of.

But our shadow is our companion.  It’s that vast part of our being that we are not conscious of but who communicates with us as much as we allow.   When we meet our unconscious, it feels like “it” is outside of us.   But our unconscious is the shadow only we can make.

The classic engagements are when we dream and fall in love.  Slips of the tongue can alert us to something we didn’t know we felt or thought.  We meet our shadow when we discover that we’re sexually aroused by the war paint in the movie, Braveheart; or when we realize we love roller derby or the surgery channel.  Or when we discover a capacity for jealousy or tenderness or competitiveness or gratitude we didn’t know we had.  It throws us into a confusion that is an opportunity to expand our ideas about what it means to be human.

No matter how rational we like to think we are, I believe that our unconscious steers us if for no other reason than there is so much more of it in our beings.   It can’t be expunged but it can’t be known either so it seems good to try to live in acknowledgment of its existence and to be-friend it when we can.  Because there is always shadow.  It goes in and out with us.

When you are trying to Create Art, you think a lot about light and dark and how the two need each other.  When I first started learning to draw, I began to see the world in terms of dark and light.  The dark of the trees furthest away is what makes the closer trees look closer.  In other words, shadow gives depth.

Shadow brings relief from the intensity of the sun. If, as David Byrne sings, heaven is a place where nothing really happens maybe it’s because your retinas have been seared and your brain burnt out from the excessive light.  “Truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind,” says Emily Dickinson.

Adam Phillips, my favorite psychoanalytic writer, writes, “Everyone feels themselves prone to feelings and desires and thoughts that disturb them. And we’re being persuaded that by acts of choice, we can dispense with these thoughts.  It’s a version of fundamentalism.” (from Going Sane.)

Speaking of fundamentalists, I have a story about my mother.  It’s also a story about a shadow that wasn’t and a spark of light suggesting that she was in the light in which she had always believed; and she didn’t be-grudge me the part I played in our tumultuous relationship.

I got a visitation from her a few months after her death.  I had taken a copy of her death certificate to my bank along with a check for $300 made out to Mary K. Richmond. The check was from a class action law suit against one of many semi-criminal organizations who manipulate money out of elderly people in the form of “pledges.”   Her mail was coming to my house while I tried to get her name off close to 500 of these organizations.  I knew on sight which mail to throw in the re-cycle en route from the mail box to my front door, and which inspired further investigation. I had opened this particular letter. I got together the documents and walked to the bank where they seemed unconcerned about cashing the check.

On my way home I came through the cemetery. It was a cold winter day and there was an unusual amount of snow lying around Seattle.  As I rounded a corner, I saw a shadow come up behind me so I moved to let whoever it was pass.  No one passed. When I turned around there was no one in sight, but there was a momentary glint of sun on a piece of ice, high in a bare tree.  It blinded me for a second, and then was gone.  The bare branch waved.  I smiled a small smile that slowly got broader until I laughed outright.  My first thought was that my mother was pleased to do this small thing for me from beyond the grave. Then it occurred to me that, of course, my mother would come checking on what was happening with her money.  And finally I heard her voice saying, “There. Don’t say I never do anything for you.”

I thought this blog had become rather dark and wanted to end it on a light note.

Last Harvest

A year ago today I launched this web site.   Joan, my friend with the theological chops, had been telling me for years that I ought to consolidate all my mischief into one site.  She designed the first OK Chorale web site but she said her skills weren’t up to anything more complex.  Not wanting her chops to go to waste, I set her praying.

Gwen, my neighbor who knows something about just about everything, and I spent one miserable afternoon trying to create a web site on one of those Do it Yourself sites.  Gwen made one for herself (https://sites.google.com/site/gphowellsite/home) but eventually I found my web designer, Nate, on Craigslist. (http://www.sterr-bros.com/)

Nate was great. He answered all my questions in language I could understand and he listened –so to speak, since the consultations were all done via e-mail–to what I wanted.  I love what he came up with.  He makes changes and updates for me and has been especially savvy, I think, with getting this website onto search engines.

Behind the scenes of the blog itself is a thing called the “Dashboard.”  I can go into the Dashboard to post and edit blogs and comments, and insert photos and links.

But the part of the Dashboard that I haunt is the “Counts per Day.”  I have watched the number of hits climb from 250 that first month to well over 1000 a month.  I knew in the beginning that my friends and acquaintances were reading my blogs but I don’t have hundreds of friends.  When I started posting links on Facebook, the numbers jumped.  My friends have friends.

The “Referrers” section of the “Counts per Day” tells me how other readers are finding the site. I keep an eye of wonder on the “Visitors per Country.”  In the beginning the U.S. was represented plus a few readers in Canada and the U.K.  Then there were two from Japan and four from Brazil.  Then suddenly Spain pulled into third place.  I don’t know anyone in Spain, Japan or Brazil.  By now I have gotten over 200 different visitors from Germany, and nearly 300 from Russia if you count the Ukraine as part of Russia which of course I do not.

I also have readers in France, the Netherlands, Romania (home of my maternal grandparents), Poland, Sweden, India, Latvia, Australia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

I would love to know who you all are!

Which brings me to the comments.

One of my closest friends, who shall go nameless but her name rhymes with Dinah, doesn’t want to leave a comment because of all she has to go through—name, e-mail address, URL.  I know it’s all very tedious and it’s not like you are going to get a package from Amazon later in the week for your troubles.  In addition, most of us don’t even know what an URL is let alone whether or not we have one.

Here’s what happens when you first leave a comment:  you type your name, email address and the comment.  No one can see your e-mail address except me (and Nate, but I doubt he has the time or interest). Leave the line for the URL blank.  If you don’t know what your URL is it’s because you don’t have one.  You don’t need one.

The first time you leave a comment, it comes to me.  I decide if I want your comment on my web site.  I can fix your grammar, punctuation, and spelling if I want to.  Then I mark the comment approved and it goes up.   When I do this, I am also approving of you and you get your own little quilt square as an identifying feature.

Thereafter when you leave a comment, it goes up immediately with whatever name you have given and your quilt square.  I am notified that a new comment has been posted.  If you have some grammatical error that is un-worthy of you, I can edit it after the fact.  If I don’t like your comment I can delete it after the fact.

Sometimes my friends send comments on Facebook or in an e-mail.  I can post these as comments on my web site.  The comment goes up attributed to me and with my identifying quilt square.  Since I only do this with flattering comments, it looks rather cheesy to have my name attached to them. So like the Wizard of Oz, I retire quickly behind the curtain and change my name to the name of whoever said such nice things about me.  The only catch is that I haven’t figured out how to change the quilt square so there’s a tell.

There’s yet another function in the Counts per Day that gives me a frisson.  It’s called “Currently on-line.”  I can see at any given point when someone is currently on my web site and the country they are in.   I like to look at 6:00 in the morning because that’s when I am most likely to find someone from Germany or Russia.  I imagine them saying, “Boris! (or Helga)  Here’s a new Local Dilettante.”

Anyway, thank you for reading.  I get such pleasure from writing this blog!  And Boris and Helga: please don’t be afraid to leave a comment!