Squirrels on the roof

In the past when describing my studio in the back yard I have mentioned that there is a lot of noise out there. The roof to my studio is made of opaque corrugated plastic that lets in a lot of nice light during the day but it is uninsulated and acts like a drum when things hit it. The wind knocks acorns and small branches out of the oak tree and when they hit the roof they sound like gunshots. Pow!

And sometimes the birds are up there scratching around looking for bugs in the detritus that collects.

And sometimes the squirrels have fights or at least they are playing chase up there. They make quite a racket racing across the thin membrane of the plastic.

I have mentioned to people that there is also a sound that sounds like a squirrel has fallen out of the tree onto the roof. This sounds like an explosion and very startling.

The idea that squirrels are falling out of the oak is met with skepticism.

Well, this morning, while I was drinking my coffee out on my deck, I was watching the sun brighten the day and there were a couple of squirrels playing chase in the oak. They circled the trunk and went out on the branches and in general behaved like squirrels do in mating season; lots of frantic activity.

Then, believe it or not, I saw a squirrel miss a branch. It was upright and its little arms were spread wide but it didn’t have enough momentum to make it to the branch it was aiming for and it seemed to hesitate at the top of its arc. Then it fell 15 feet straight down like Wile E. Coyote off the edge of a cliff. It did not land on the roof of the shed but I heard it hit the weeds on the ground next to it. I did not see or hear it after that.

I think it is safe to assume that squirrels are adapted to sometimes losing it – I have never found a wounded squirrel squashed in the weeds or a squirrel skeleton on the roof of the shed. They are frequent road-kill but I think cars are the danger in that case. And their lack of brains.

Here’s a PowerPoint slide show about my morning

03-13-2024 what I did today slide showDownload

John says, “Write a Poem About the Sunset.”

Sunset
(After “Painting with John” HBO)

John says, “Write a poem about the sunset.”

The sun sets in the west.
red, orange, even a hint of purple.

Red sky at night – sailors’ delight
Red in the morning – sailors take warning.
Of course, now it is almost always red because of air pollution.

Close your eyes.
Listen to me.

The air is absolutely still
you can hear the grit and pebbles grinding under your shoes.

A totally blind person
will get it
without the light show.

The night critters
will take over from the
day critters.

The street lights will go on
the children will run home
sweaty and mosquito bitten
hungry and still wild.

A chill will grow in the
slightly spooky darkness.

I am tired of the past.
The stories bubbling to the surface
oatmeal burning in a pot on the stove
driftwood caught in a forever eddy
the Pacific Ocean garbage patches
stories told and re-told making the same point
from a different direction.
My mind drifting in circles.

Every sunset is new
every sunrise
there is no beginning nor end to the day
the clock is an illusion
time is an illusion
the earth spins effortlessly
the sun shines in the center
of our system
Each of its planets has sunrise and sunset
even though at the greater distances Sol
is just another star and night lasts forever.

John says, “Write a poem about the sunset.”
He is standing on a Caribbean Island hill overlooking the sea
and even with my large TV screen
the sunset he is enjoying looks kind of dull and distant.
It is clear to me that in that moment
he is feeling God-damned beautiful waiting for the light to fail
and the darkness overwhelm the sky
and the stars to shine.
He is writing the poem himself.

I face death every day.
When riding in a car I think about all the accidents that
DON’T
happen.
How interesting and miraculous it is that so few people die
considering how many people commute
down the same stretch of freeway
day after day after day.
You would think that more people would just decide that
ramming into the diverter was the best way to end their endless commute.

John says, “write a poem about the sunset.”
He back tracks on it later in the show and says that
he recognizes that it was unfair to ask me
to be able to get out a pen and start writing
about his sunset.
He was happy that night, looking at the sunset.
Good for you, John.
He’s something of a jerk but every once and a while…

He always gets pulled over by authority figures
TSA
cops
The Man.
So, he’s at the airport
the TSA agents always take him into a side room
they always go through his bags
they always frisk him.
He’s annoyed but after a lifetime of this he is patient
he doesn’t make things worse for himself by
adding fuel to their anxieties about
pulling people out of line and searching their stuff and frisking them.
But in telling the story I can hear the
bitter whining in his voice,
Always. Always. Always.
At some point my sympathies are lost.
He must project a certain assholeness that attracts
cops and TSA.
But let’s face it, he is a large man with wild hair, a beard, and a bent nose.
He looks like a criminal, an assassin in the movies.
In fact, he has played criminals in the movies.
Of course they worry about him.
Duh. What could he expect?
I start to tune him out.
I am getting ready to turn him off
But he keeps going with his story;

He finally gets on the plane and
nearby he sees a family
they’ve been through a lot
the man, his wife and 2 children.
The older child is a 10 year old girl.
She’s too big to be climbing all over her father
trying to get comfortable
she’s restless and anxious.
Nevertheless, the father is calm.
After much thrashing
the girl falls asleep in her father’s lap.
The sun comes in the window and falls on the daughter’s
face and the father holds his hand up
to shade her eyes.
For hours.
John forgives humanity
and that is when I forgive John for whining and being a jerk.

“Write a poem about the sunset.”
OK, John. I will.

The day can be hot or cold
dry or wet
but the sun will always set.

01-03-2024
Happy new year.

On Losing Sight of What’s Important

Had a bad night last night. Couldn’t get to sleep.
What are sleepless nights for, anyway?
I use my eyes a lot.
Sometimes I wonder (with horror) what it would be like if I lost my eyesight (more than usual – starting to have trouble with subtitles on the TV which is only about 6 feet away).
I know I could stumble around the house and figure out systems of comfort around blindness
but there are so many things to see even on a rainy day like today.
The rings that the drops leave in puddles on my black deck.
Sleeping cats (black on black)
favorite colorful blankets
The way the lamplight warms the desk
the calla lilies glazed on to the side of the lamp.
Anything on a computer, phone, screen, book.
Photographs
Utah
Yosemite
Stinson Beach
the massing of clouds over Mt Tam from the dog park.
Dogs at the dog park
sailboards
the bridges
the sky
the faces of people I love

This hole gets deeper and deeper
doesn’t it?
Being me though, I am simultaneously thinking of things I either won’t miss
like traffic and dark smudges around door knobs
and homeless encampment’s mountains of trash (guess when you have nothing
anything looks like an opportunity)

I am also
dreaming up adaptations that might be interesting
I could probably learn to throw pots blind
trimming them might be hazardous
glazing pointless

I could still smell the ocean and feel the sand on my feet
and get splashed by waves and
hear children and gulls shrieking over the thumping of the waves
The beach, being flat and somewhat featureless
would be safer than a hike in the mountains
Also handicap paths would become more than nice friends
they would become intimates for my feet.

There would have to be someone I love hovering nearby
I would be a pain in the ass sometimes
because I would be irritable
Writing would probably drop away quickly
as would cooking anything that doesn’t require a microwave

how hard is it to learn braille?
do people even use it these days with audiobooks
and lingering doubts about the safety of touching
any public surface

Women used to wear white gloves when they went to the City
Nice kid ones if they had the money
but often cheaper, lightweight cotton ones (cheaper than our bright blue latex disposable ones?)
My grandmother always wore them
but my mother kept her pair in a drawer
each finger had four seams so that each finger was neatly encased in softness
and might not be able to function practically because
all four seams came to a point at the tips of the fingers.
I’ve never liked gloves -my fingers are too long for most of them
and for some reason they make my hands ache
mittens are best for warmth anyway
each finger comforting the rest.

Oliver Sacks wrote about a man,
blind from birth, who had a surgery to allow him to see.
he didn’t know that talking and mouths were related
he didn’t know who was speaking unless he closed his eyes
and he didn’t like the distortions facial expressions caused
since they made people unrecognizable.
He got very depressed.
Luckily the man developed a rare disease that returned him to blindness
and he felt restored to normalcy.

That’s really the problem isn’t it?
What is normal for you isn’t necessarily normal for anyone else.
I am not talking about things like gravity or hunger
We are all subject to those rules
but all the things a blind person doesn’t see, drop out of
normal and freefall into strange and scary.

I think this is true for most things.
Most of us are blind to the nuances of cat fur
and waterfalls (I could bore you with infinite details about the flowing of rivers).

Normal depends on what you can pay attention to
if you have the time
and interest to skip over the physical
mess of the normal world.
Everything outside of your attention is invisible,
unscented, flavorless, silent.
so it is probably a good idea to keep your options open.
Adapt.
keep adapting
learn to see for the first time
accept that you will not understand most of it
don’t panic
adapt

Thanks

Prompted by this poem: https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-005/thanks/

Gratitude comes in many forms, doesn’t it? I haven’t been to war but I have had moments that are like memory tattoos. They color my skin in such a way that I don’t notice them all the time, like looking in the mirror and not seeing the dent in the tip of my nose. It has always been there, I got it from my father and when I do see it, I think of his nose and the dent in the tip of it.
Moments like having a friend, who was shoveling leaf litter off a roof, finding an almost perfect apple buried in the litter. I was below, aiming his shovel-fulls of debris into a green bin. When he found the apple, he commented on it and tossed it off the roof towards me. I could have let it fall but I reached out with my left hand and caught it and in the same movement tossed it, dead center, into the green bin. It all felt very choreographed, balletic, perfect. I was impressed with myself. But there is something otherworldly about things like that, where some mystery takes over your life and saves you, over and over. Catching the apple and tossing it into the bin didn’t save my life in the same sense that seeing the sun glinting off a sniper’s bayonet saves the life of a soldier, but the instinct is the same. As animals we are bred to survive and ‘think fast’ is one of the best tools we have.
And yet. And yet. This young man was finding this beauty in war. The glint, the glitter, the flicker of light caught his attention and he ducked or shot first or somehow, he was saved and saved again, by this unknowable insight we all have to a greater or lesser degree.
I am not a war monger. War is unbelievably horrific.

I was looking through a notepad I keep next to my desk for odd notes. Today I saw a note: 6 million missing in WWI. Not just dead but missing.

The first note on the note pad is: Drill Powered boat.
It is apparently possible to use a battery powered drill to turn a propeller fast enough to drive a small boat quickly across a lake. The charge on the battery doesn’t last very long, but I am sure there will be a $40 version of it on sale online soon. Just take a 6 pack of batteries along.

Anyhow, we all have things to be thankful for and that is the message here, so:

Thanks for all the things I did even though I was scared to do them.
No thanks for all the times I was scared for no reason.

Thanks for the imagination to see other worlds and to see the invisible in this one.
No thanks for imagining that the worst case was the only possible outcome.

Thanks for my eyes to see the splendor.
No thanks for the things I cannot unsee.

Thanks for the smell of summer evenings, heat scented trees, orange blossoms.
No thanks for the smell of a 3 day old suicide.

Thanks for the numbness to survive my childhood.
No Thanks for the numbness that has been a barrier to my life, all my life.

Thanks for the tea leaves brewing in my cup.
No thanks for the tea leaves that look like fruit flies.

Thanks for rivers and floods and deltas and rapids and just thanks for water in all its manifestations.
Thanks for deserts that are quiet.
Thanks for the sound of sand drifting down a sand dune.
Thanks for the wide silent river at flood when you can hear the pebbles and rocks of the bottom tripping downstream.

Thanks for the bones of this Earth
There is really nothing I can think of now to say No Thanks about.
Just
Thanks for it all.
Even the unreasonable
irritating
frightening
disgusting mess
of it all.
Well, there is a No Thanks lurking in the background.
No thanks for taking it all away.

Jabberwocky

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

By Lewis Carroll
 
When I was a kid I didn’t get Lewis Carroll. Maybe it was the age that he came into my orbit but he seemed nonsensical to me. I know, that’s the point, but I was at the age where I was struggling to make sense of the world and his nonsense was scary and vaguely insulting of my efforts to understand. I was not included in the joke, I was the butt of it.
I was much more attracted to Winnie the Pooh and Tigger.
We had a set of 45’s and a book by Disney records, possibly the first records I ever listened to. Jimmy Stuart read the Pooh books and if I remember correctly, there were actors doing the characters voices.
“Rum tum tiddly um tum tum! Did you turn the page?” That was how you knew to turn the page of the accompanying book. Golly, I wish I could find that. It’s probably in some attic someplace waiting for… Waiting for the record player to be reinvented, probably.
The part I remember best is the story about Tigger. He appeared and no one knew what he was or where he came from. There was a guessing game about that. Then they tried to figure out what Tiggers eat for breakfast. At some point Tigger says, politely but in a muted and almost David Attenborough stalking a real tiger voice said, “Excuse me, there is something crawling on your table.” Whereupon Tigger leaps onto the tablecloth and after a furious fight wrestles it onto the floor. He pops up his head and says, “Have I won?”
That phrase became a family joke. Whenever we were struggling with something, Mom would perk up and say, “Have I won?” It would always break the tension of being frustrated by some task my brother or I were working through. She also started using it when things were going so wrong that there was no possibility of a solution. When she gave up, she would ask, “Have I won?” It became a funny way in my family of admitting defeat, once again, by the absurdities of life.
I can still hear Jimmy Stuart’s voice and Kanga’s ultra-motherly voice comforting Roo and adopting Tigger.
I’ll have to spend some time on youtube to see if there is a copy of it someplace. That would be fun.
When I became as adult as possible, Alice in Wonderland really caught my imagination. The strange world she was wandering in, sliding in and out of nightmare, actually seemed to explain life to me. Things happen. Pansies talk, grinning cats disappear, Caterpillars smoke opium and pontificate. It all made sense.
I know that’s ridiculous but I accepted Alice because I admired her willingness to keep going. She was tough and yet, she filled a corridor with her tears. Then she got interested and progressed through the story. It was a weird Pilgrim’s Progress for me.
These days, there is all this completely absurd stuff going on, the prime example being Trump, our Queen of Hearts, screaming, “Off with his head!” and making bizarre pronouncements, just because he can. And all his followers a pack of cards. At some point someone is going to say, “Who cares for you?” (Alice had grown to her full size by now) “You are nothing but a pack of cards!” and it will all be revealed to be a dream; we will wake up with our head in the lap of a beloved sister and Dinah, the cat, will be napping nearby.
Of course, that’s a children’s tale and not productive politically but I still can’t get over the feeling that we are wandering in Wonderland or have stepped through the Looking Glass and as soon as we find a way back to sensible reality, everything will be fine.
I do know better, but I can hope, can’t I?
Have I won?

Inventing Heaven

            If I were in charge of inventing Heaven, what would I do?

I will have dandelions blinking, out of the grass, bright yellow then impossibly fragile white balls, then the little inverted umbrellas floating away on the breeze, tiny Mary Poppins hanging from each seed.

            I will keep my friends but I wouldn’t force them to come to my heaven, besides they will be busy inventing their own. I’ll throw in a few suggestions if I may.

            I will keep this room as full of its spirit of kindness as possible. I will probably redesign this cement walled room to have wood floors and walls and a lower ceiling to trap the heat. The cathedral ceiling is lovely but not efficient. I will keep the windows and I will allow the view to change every day. Sometimes I will substitute views of Yosemite, the deserts of Nevada and Utah, sunrises anywhere, sunsets. Sometimes I will give the view a rest by filling the air with fog.

            I will keep chocolate. I will keep Ben and Jerry’s ‘Cherry Garcia’ ice cream and their ‘chocolate fudge core.’ I will keep potatoes in all their delicious forms and corn on the cob, sometimes with butter and sometimes just the sweet kernels, and smokehouse almonds, and salads on hot days and soup on cold ones.

            I will have sudden rain storms to clear the air and snow storms to shut us in and make a fire to keep cozy and warm. I will have lightning and thunder in the mountains and a dry tent by a river.

            I will keep my jobs because I like the variety of people and experiences they provide. I like solving the puzzles

            I will keep my cats and my daughter – but not in that order.

            In heaven I will be busy but with some empty time where I can stare and think.

            The Christmas decorations will spontaneously appear all over the house and on January 7^th they will begin to disappear, one at a time, just when I stop noticing their glitter and shine. None of the lightbulbs will burn out.

            The furniture will all weigh 10 pounds so I can move it around. It can weigh what it likes the rest of the time.

            I will wash my face in many rivers and not worry about giardia. There will be sleek and cheerful otters on the banks. My cats will be able to transform into otters when they feel like it. I won’t need a boat to swim in Class II rapids and the water will be warm and there will be a large quiet pool at the bottom with friends smiling at me on the bank, tossing me a rescue rope. I will be able to hike the whole Pacific Crest trail in one long summer without a backpack. I’ll make it hard, but not impossible. I will raft down the Grand Canyon every time I want to feel small. I will paddle the Smith in Montana when I want to laugh and take pictures of wildflowers and eat dinner with Alice, Don and Karen and Jan and Ruth and Tallulah. We will sit by the river and watch Mergansers and Falcons and Night Hawks and Golden Eagles. There will be the damp smell of distant rapids on sunny days. There will be a piece of down floating on dark, silent waters. There will be dark places in deep waters.

            I want to take pictures of everything so I can show my friends what my heaven looks like.

            People will be assigned death dates where they will blink out of time. Those who want to know when they are going to die can send an email to the powers that be. The others, because they aren’t afraid of the suffering that often accompanies death, will accept death as a partner to their life. They will be looking forward to reinventing heaven.

            David Burney wrote, “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”

            That is not the heaven I would invent – things will happen —  I am going to invent a system that creates random events but I am not going to dread anything.

            Maybe that is the essential part of my heaven, the engine that runs it. No dread, no worry. I want to feel like I belong and that I will be able to face whatever comes next. Dread is the feeling I get when I am not sure about this.

            The thought that I am already in heaven keeps interrupting me. I know I am not there because I am always dragging that bag of anxiety and uncertainty behind me, but I am close sometimes. I can feel it.

            I can feel how close heaven is to me even when there is nothing I can do to change this world. Its like the beginning of a sneeze before you know its going to be a sneeze. There is something there but it hasn’t announced itself. There is already a heaven, I don’t have to invent one, and it’s very, very close.

            It would be a good idea to leave that nasty bag of woes someplace where it can’t do any harm. Maybe in Area 51. But it does provide a contrast, doesn’t it? And maybe that bag of anxiety is actually what is keeping me alive and when it is time to leave it somewhere, that will be when I get to invent heaven.

POST Canoe Club

POST is having a Holiday bash on December 9th. Please check your emails to see the time and place info.

Time – the coffee bean version

11-01-2023

1 minute = the time I allow my coffee to bloom.
A box of 40 coffee filters = 35 days of morning cups of coffee and 5 occasional second cups.
A box of 20 Sleepytime Tea bags = 20 nights.
5 minutes = the time lost looking for keys, or shoes or computer or my mind.
10 minutes = the amount of time trying to answer the question, “why did I come into this room?”

How long is the average stop light?
How much life do you gain by driving 75MPH instead of 25?
Are you wasting time by chatting with the waitstaff, someone at the bus stop?
If you follow the advice of, ”Be here now,”
What happens to your past?
What happens to all the things you have learned and know?
That can’t be what they mean…
You can’t be here now without all the seconds, cups of coffee, breaths, heartbeats, that came before now.
You are indebted to them all
every minoot bit of before
as led up to now.
It’s rude to ignore that.

The coffee filters pass into the compost bin
the compost bin goes to the processor
and comes back a zucchini and green beans from Jeanna’s garden
Every day is fertilizer for the next.

What an absurd thing time is –
a device to keep track of how long to boil an egg.
All that complex technology that replaces our internal clocks.
Days and seasons, obviously dictated life,
But before clocks, did people think in seconds?
60 seconds to bring my coffee to perfection…
Shouldn’t I be able to tell by the smell or color or the change in texture of the grounds?
Why 60 seconds and not 59 or 61?
What difference can one second make? How about 5 seconds? 15 seconds is ¼ of a minute.
In a microwave those tiny increments make the difference between rock-hard ice cream and mushy sweet stuff.

My kitchen becomes instantaneously cluttered with dishes
The compost pot fills up and goes bad in 30 seconds
The garbage cans go out today. Already?!
The oven takes 7 hours to pre-heat
The stop light takes 30 minutes to release its string of cars.
A movie can take 90 minutes to span generations
by skipping over trips to the bathroom and eating breakfast.
We skip over these things every day.
How many times did you pee last week?

We seem to spend time—
Spend?
Is time money?
If we drive to the store at 75MPH to save time,
where did that saved time accrue? What is the interest rate?
At what point in human history did the concept of ‘keeping time’ or ‘saving time’ or ‘spending time’ come up? Time just is. It is not a cash crop, there are no banks full of precious time.

One coffee bean per day for 70 years equals 25,550 coffee beans.

1 That is a lot of coffee.

2 I am not going to count the number of beans I use to make my daily cup of coffee.

Imagining 25,550 coffee beans stretches the imagination.
25,550 days? incomprehensible.
What is the point in counting them?

Time is short.
Can it be tall? Fat? Thin?
Is it a super-model or a circus clown?

Time is running out.
Is it training for the Olympic track and field team?
Is it warm, sudsy water draining out of the bath?

time flies like an arrow
fruit flies like bananas
time flies are the seconds of our lives buzzing against closed windows
fruit flies when you toss it into the compost bin

How many coffee beans have I wasted by counting coffee beans?

And soon enough time is up.
down?
sideways?

Hummers

02-22-2023

I have an alarm on my phone that reminds me to check the hummingbird feeder every three days. When it’s cold like this, hummers are in danger from starving to death in a matter of hours. They rarely drink all the nectar (sugar water) in the feeder before I change it out, but it can spoil in the feeder if left too long.

While I was filling the empty feeder, I could hear a hummer buzzing near my head. This is not unusual. I am not afraid of them. I ignore them so they don’t think I am a hunter.

Today, I could hear that the hummer was very close as I filled the feeder. I wanted to look up, but finished what I was doing and placed the feeder on the palm of my hand and held it out.

A beautiful male was hovering 2 feet away from me. He was trying to decide what to do. He finally landed on my finger to take a sip. Just a faint brush of his feet, much softer and warmer than I expected. Then a female came buzzing in and chased him off. She just hovered at me from 2 feet away. She stared straight at me with quick side glances at the feeder. I felt like she was daring me to get in her way, that she was more protective of her feeder than she was hungry. The male came back, but was intimidated by the female and he didn’t land on me again.

I always imagine that hovering must be tiring, like I would be after treading water for a few minutes, so I hung the feeder up and let them decide who sits at the table.

I wonder if the male expected my finger to be different, hard and knobby like a twig instead of soft and warm.