Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
My Quote to Live By
Yes, oddly I do have a quote that I try to live my life by and think of often. It is “Love is a place. Yes is a world.” This is inscribed on the inside of a little silver bracelet that I wear almost every day.
These are the first two lines in an E.E. Cummings poem called Love is a Place. Here is the entire poem.
love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places
yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds
I carry a handwritten copy of the whole poem in my wallet. It doesn’t describe my life, just my aspirations.
____________
E.E. Cummings, Complete Poems 1904-1962, 1961 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust, Liveright Publishing Corporation
New Notification from Ancestry
Every few weeks, Ancestry tells me that there is a new match, a person somewhere, usually in Michigan, who is the son of the daughter who was second cousin to an aunt married a second time to her sister-in-law’s brother and I sometimes look to see if they look like anyone I know but they never do and then I see that there were thousands of possible matches so no reason to think some long lost relative, some brother my father never divulged, a black sheep wandered off would suddenly appear to claim me as kin, the searchers are all just throwing handfuls of darts at a big bullseye, hoping to find somebody, anybody to make their investment in Ancestry worthwhile beyond knowing that your people came from northern Europe and settled in New York and then Ohio before trudging up to Michigan and apparently proliferating in dramatic and startling ways that would later puzzle and confound their descendants.
Dear Starbucks Barista, Ten Years Later
Dontre Hamilton was killed by a Milwaukee Police Officer on April 30, 2014, in Red Arrow Park, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The park is in the center of downtown, across the street from City Hall. It was in the afternoon. A Starbucks employee called the Milwaukee Police Department twice to complain about him sleeping near the park’s arrow sculpture.
Both times officers came to check on him, and after talking to Dontre Hamilton, left him alone and told the Starbucks staff that he was doing nothing wrong, and they should stop calling. But the same Starbucks employee who called the first two times decided to call the cell phone of yet another Milwaukee Police Officer.
That officer came to the park, rousted Mr. Hamilton and an altercation ensued. Panicked, the officer shot Dontre Hamilton more than a dozen times, resulting in Mr. Hamilton’s death at the park. The officer, Christopher Manney, was later fired by the Police Department for a failure to follow correct procedure although he was never charged with a crime.
I wrote this poem, which was published in Cries for Justice, Poems for Dontre Hamilton. That was ten years ago. Now, I am thinking about grace. And whether the young barista should have been shown grace by me and others. We were so quick to be angry at a young woman who didn’t kill anyone. A police officer did the shooting. Both acted out of fear and ignorance. And so, is that forgivable? I guess it has to be. I wonder if she’s forgiven herself. I wonder if she felt she needed to. There’s no way of knowing.
Dear Starbucks Barista
You called not once
but over and over, ring after ring
until the answer you wanted came to the park
to roust the sleeping man who scared you so
You needed the sleeping man to go away
be gone, be somewhere else, leave the grass empty
so he went away, covered in a sheet and many mistakes
leaving yellow tape strung from tree to tree
If I was your mother
I’d comfort you, an error anyone could make
I’d defend you, build a soft wall of whitewashed blame
lead you to recovery, celebrate Christmas and New Year’s
If I was your mother
I’d remember putting the fear in your bones
crossing the street just to be sure, holding your hand tighter
never speak to strangers, obey the rule, enforce it
If I was your mother
I’d want to shake the hand of the murdered man’s mother
cross the street to join the demonstration, carry a sign
pretend I am blameless, become part of the crowd, a blur
A Cat on the Bookcase Instead of Other Things
I share with you a picture of my cat eating his dinner on the bookcase. His bowl is placed there to keep it away from Swirl who has been known to take advantage of an accidentally left open office door to barrel in for a cat food appetizer.
The cat bowl is next to my father’s ancient Underwood typewriter, the one he used to type up my mother’s obituary while I sat next to him. He no longer typed like a bat out of hell, but he was pretty fast. When he died, I brought the typewriter back to Wisconsin from Michigan and now, of course, wonder what will become of it when I’m not here to claim it for my bookcase. It’s an awfully heavy keepsake.
My two university coffee mugs and a couple of awards are also on the bookcase. The cat picks his way around these things, careful not to disturb anything, but, still, it feels risky to have him leaping and stepping and eating where I have these little artifacts. They are important to me, but they’re going to end up at Goodwill someday, or the trash. Which is appropriate, although the cups are worth saving.
All of this is inconsequential. I am aware. But I write about my bookcase so as to not write about other things like the tenth anniversary of Dontre Hamilton’s death at the hands of a Milwaukee police officer or the fact that the dismembered body of a woman murdered in our city has not all been found, and her family and friends have been forced to wade through the shoreline and search rivers for her because, for some incomprehensible reason, law enforcement seems to have lost interest. There’s no doing justice to either of those things so I focus on my cat and my bookcase.
That makes sense to me.
Swirl’s Views on Cricket’s Demise
Swirl has a thing or two to say about South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem shooting her dog, but he’s too busy pacing in anticipation of the big storm that is coming. He just can’t sit down long enough to collect his thoughts.
Earlier today, at the dog park, Swirl tried to shake off his disgust by eating small pieces of mulch and once, just for a short while, chewing on a branch still attached to a tree. I believe it’s a stress management technique from ancient sled dog times, probably stemming from the initial, very harrowing trip across the Bering Strait and may explain why there are no trees way up there in Alaska.
In all the hubbub about Governor Noem shooting her dog, named Cricket (who could shoot a creature with such an adorable name?), the fact that she also shot a goat she didn’t like gets overlooked. I’ve only known one goat, named Willy, who roamed around a friend’s horse farm pretty much like a dog would. Even if Willy had been completely evil, I can’t imagine someone leading him down to the family’s gravel pit and putting a bullet (actually a couple of bullets) through his skull. But then we don’t live in South Dakota.
Swirl agrees. He’s lived his life as a peacemaker and abhors all violence, except to inanimate objects like towels and newspapers. Obviously, I am anthropomorphizing here, attributing human emotions and reactions to a dog. But, in my defense, I know Swirl very well, having lived practically every minute with him for five years and, on top of that, Swirl has channeled his unique voice and perspective through me on several occasions via this very blog.
Swirl didn’t authorize this opinion piece, but he would have if the storm hadn’t taken all his attention.
Vernon’s Workbench in the Garage
The lights in the garage flicked on and off three times. That was the signal that Greta was going to bed. He could feel her looking at him through the window of the kitchen door. He didn’t look up.
Vernon flicked the light over his workbench twice to answer. That meant he was staying up a while to work on the toaster that wouldn’t give up its toast, it just kept toasting and toasting until you pulled the plug out of the wall and then went after the toast with a sharp knife. It had been irking him for months, having to do all that just for a piece of toast. Greta didn’t care. She ate coffee cake for breakfast.
Vernon had taken the toaster apart. His dad taught him how to do this, well, not fix a toaster, but how to take things that didn’t work completely apart and put them back together.
The toaster parts – the outside panels, the inside baking racks and all the little springs and levers – were spread out on the workbench in orderly piles like a kid would organize Legos before building a ship.
Vernon liked this part, the part where he could see all the inner workings of a thing, all the inside riddles laid bare on the table. No mystery here. Only mystery was what was broken and how to fix it. That could take hours. Vernon sat on his wood stool and pondered the parts.
Bertie the neighborhood cat leapt on to the workbench. He did this often, because Vernon kept the garage door open when he was working, and every time, Vernon would shoo him away, lift him up and drop him on the floor, but this time he didn’t. Bertie meowed, screeched almost, and Vernon was so startled that he jumped off his wood stool, knocking it over. Then he saw Bertie’s tail. It was mangled at the end, bloodied and bent, like it had been crushed by a tire or caught in a heavy door. Bertie paced back and forth over the toaster parts, dripping blood on the racks and the springs, while Vernon watched, not knowing what to do.
He wished he had gone to bed with Greta and then he wouldn’t know about the cat’s tail or have to do anything about it. No one would know if he shooed the cat outside and then closed the garage door. Was it his responsibility to take care of the cat just because he came in the garage with a ripped-up tail? To fix the cat like he was a toaster? He didn’t think so. He had his limits. He knew that so he wrapped the cat in a clean paint rag and took him inside to Greta who had been sleeping but turned to look at him when he turned on the bedroom light.
_____________
Photo by Elmer Cañas on Unsplash
It Looks Like a Round-Up but It’s Just Thursday
The sound of the lawn being mowed by someone not me is delicious.
Later, I’m going to make myself a bowl of instant mashed potatoes and that will be a travesty but also delicious considering my current food choices.
This morning, I found my dog after he’d disappeared at a big dog park, and other people were looking for him (he was that lost), by going down a dense overgrown path to the river where he was standing very far away on a little slip of land in the river chewing grass like a lost horse.
The discussion in our writing group turned to the perfect sentence today, so a writing friend read one that he had been working on for some time and it was, indeed, beautifully constructed and quite compelling, leading me to think I should be more deliberate in what I write and not always be in such a hurry.
I’m revising a story about a dad and daughter who go fishing and how the dad’s expectations of the daughter’s toughness is both good for the daughter and very wearing to their relationship, a subject I know quite a bit about, especially the part about getting a hook out of a northern pike’s mouth while someone watches.
The NFL Draft is tonight which means New York strip steaks and double-baked potatoes for those of us not eating instant mashed potatoes, not the first time life’s gone on without me.
Goodbye to #15
My husband used his favorite flashlight to look in my mouth.
I warned him that where the dentist extracted my upper left molar this afternoon might look bloody. And so, before clicking on his flashlight, he said, “What if I throw up?” He is notoriously weak-kneed when it comes to blood and gore or stories that might imply later blood and gore. For instance, he didn’t want to know the details of how the dentist went about wrenching the molar out of my mouth, instead he regaled me with details about the handyman’s visit while I was gone.
I don’t mind. I just wanted him to look in my mouth and tell me that what I imagined to be a gaping, dripping wound looked okay. He said it looked neat, very clean, with a tiny little clot in the middle. (Is this more information than you usually get about dental care in a blog?) And even though he usually tells me everything is fine or looks fine or will be fine, I believed him, mostly because his description was so surgical and precise.
Marriage is these things. It was always these things but now seems more so.
After the session at the dentist, I walked to a pharmacy next door to buy some ibuprofen. Then realizing we had some at home, I walked around the store, marveling that they sold only over the counter and prescription drugs together with a pretty extensive wine and beer collection. This seems incongruous, though very Milwaukee, and I inspected the wine labels while I waited for my husband to pick me up. He’d texted that he was still talking to the handyman, so I’d have to wait a bit. I looked out the big windows on to the street, wishing for our truck to appear. I wasn’t in pain or upset, but feeling thin and weathered, like I was listing in some very ephemeral way.
“It’s important,” the dentist said, “you’re losing a part of yourself.” This impressed me that she would think about my #15 tooth in this way, but she was right. I thought about this while I waited in the pharmacy with people coming in and out and regarding me as an older lady in a hoodie. And then my husband pulled up in front of the store and we went home.
Question to the WordPress Community
It is slightly unnerving to see that someone is reading all my posts since the beginning of my blog in 2010. There are over 3,000 posts.
I appreciate new readers, for sure. But I’ve never had a new reader read all my old posts and so I wonder about that. Is it curiosity? Appreciation for my amazing writing? Or AI come to visit?
If anyone has any experience like this or thoughts about what’s happening, please share.
My blog is my fifth child so I’m very protective of it.
The Zoomies: A Rhyming Poem!
Zoom meetings I have to chair
Have me pacing here to there
All the faces in little boxes
Scare me down to my purple soxs
Nervous nose runs but many tissues
Keep me focused on all the issues
Camera-off spectators love to lurk
Swim by themselves in the chat murk
40-slide PowerPoints roll my eyes
Presenters love how they’re so wise
Important to be cordial and oh so kind
Never tell anyone we might have whined
On Zoom
For hours
In a hard chair
With cold coffee
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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