Having a Little Drink
Ceserio Xecotoj School
“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink”-The Ancient Mariner
We brushed our teeth huddled around the blue pila on our first night. We were a gringo family of four keeping up our hygiene despite no potable water. The water appeared innocent enough but we had been warned that free-ranging microbes hazarded all 50 gallons now stored in its central storage tank. No splashing our toothbrushes or taking a swig.
Instead, we shared a few drops of bottled Evian bought accidently in an Atlanta airport by Olivia, our teenage daughter. My husband, Joe, used Coca Cola after the Evian ran out. We were an American family 4,000 miles from home set on teaching English in San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala.
As my family brushed I contemplated the pila, a square concrete sink with one central chamber full of moonlight sparkling off the surface. Like a desert mirage, it invited more thirst than it quenched. From my small knowledge of Latin American history I knew that except for the preceding hundreds of years of greed, wars, genocide, racism and intolerance, the water might have been clean. Nothing in the natural world could outdo man at creating such a colossal catastrophe.
Getting to Truth
Dedicated to my dear friend Ellen Becker,
January 28, 1949- November 15, 2016
The truth is that you died
Even though you weren’t supposed to
Even though you were just having a prescribed
Heart operation
because your frayed and torn heart muscle
struggled in that dark cavity.
Even though you told us you might not make it,
we chose not to believe you
so much that some of us didn’t visit you
or call you in your last days
because we were sure there would still be time to
tell you how much we loved you.
Even though we told you not to die
and we told you we would all be waiting
with our soup pots heating
and SALT put away forever,
even the Kosher kind.
Even though you had 79 people on your email thread,
all reading your email reports,
that were the picture of civility,
just like you.
Containing nuggets of humor
and brilliant medical knowledge.
Even though you had a doctorate and forty years of successful practice,
holding the hands and heads and (damaged) hearts of so many.
Even though you were everyone’s momma and Bruce was waiting.
Even though you may have been ready
Who is truly ready?
Even though you warned us that you might die
and if you did you were satisfied with the life you had lived.
I ask you,
were WE supposed to be satisfied with the life
you had lived because
you told us you were?
Or were you doing that signature Ellen thing you did so well?
That thing where you figure out what it is that we all need to hear and
then you say it so that if the worst possible outcome were to happen,
and I mean the WORST possible outcome,
were to happen
we could take it
because you told us you were ready to take it.
So instead of saying, when we gather:
“it’s a blessing because she isn’t suffering any longer”,
like we often say when someone dies,
We could say:
“She told us she was ready.”
Then we could feel comforted
Then we could go back to the rugala and the rice balls
All the while hearing the tinkling sound of your laughter just out of reach.
Climate Change Changes Everything
I got up early this morning
to visit my garden.
A baby bunny
nibbled the native bushes
planted by Jennifer.
It was Jen’s idea to return indigenous plants
to my neighborhood.
A small brown bird,
the common kind,
bounced between the fuchsia and pink colored peonies,
He sampled an ant here
and a caterpillar there.
Then, without a warning,
a yellow goldfinch,
dressed in his solstice suit,
bright as a wedding,
swooped in to land on the purple catnip.
It was too limp to hold his perfect body,
even though he weighed
the equivalent of only 10 fingernail clippings.
He kept slipping off,
but even then he persisted,
long after I would have given up and
moved on to the emerging cornflowers.
It was fun watching the life in my own microcosm
until I remembered that climate change was real
and the flowers and animals already knew it better than I.
They travel 11 miles north every decade,
to catch a little relief.
As the goldfinch struggled to land on the purple catnip,
and the tiny bunny chewed the flox greens,
and the brown bird pecked at last season’s deadheads,
I envied the animals and plants moving on without protest.
I envied the climate change deniers
still enjoying their gardens.
Decadacious Earth Calling
Sweet decadacious earth
Slimy with slender nematodes,
Slithering maggots and worms,
Absorb me.
Break apart my clumps of
Skin tendon muscle organ.
Fuse me in mud,
Crumble me
Into an atom soup,
A quantom froth,
A seething foam,
Impatient to fly away.
Worm holes, black holes,
Swarmy fabric of
Airy nothingness,
Reform me
Into arms that must encircle babies,
Legs that scale mountains,
A single heart beating
to the rhythm of human-kindness,
And fingernails caked with
Sweet decadacious earth.
Bikes and Elections
First official bike ride of the season. I ignore the fact that it is March 10 and 60 degrees as I climb on the saddle. Hooray for climate change, it means I am out earlier! I have high hopes for the season ahead. I will be riding every day and by the end of May, slimmed and tanned, riding 30 miles a day.
By May we should have a good idea if Trump, Cruz or Kasich will be the Republican candidate. I don’t want to take any chances on Trump. If all the angry people show up to vote I’m afraid he could be elected.
Analysts tell us there is a large middle and lower class electorate who feel ripped off by globalization. They think it’s a rigged game that America is losing. I can see this in the industrial midwest where manufacturing jobs have disappeared. And yet “an American having the average income of the bottom U.S. decile is better-off than 2/3 of world population.”
Of sidewalks and bolos
Torrential rain poured off the man’s head and dark clothing. He was piled in a jumble of bones near a resident’s front door, yet no one came to rescue him. One dim streetlight cast a shabby ray of light further on.
In addition to the pelting rain against my parka, I could hear gurgling water making its way to the river below through the additives to the gutters in this garbage laden town: cow dung, dog feces, candy wrappers, corn husks, plastic bottles and dirt.
It was mid-evening in May 2015 in San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala. This otherwise busy enclave of 40,000 residents, 1,500 cows, 1,000 cornfields and 2,000 feral dogs was quiet, like a Sox game in a rain delay.
Neoroplasticity and the writing process
This past winter was a day at the beach for a writer. Buried under 100 inches of snow, surrounded by 10 ft. tall drifts, my office became the adult version of a child’s snow fort. Trapped in a blue crystalline world with my imagination and my muses I was hard at work. Sorta, kinda….until the snow melted and the muses abandoned.