By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A sign declaring him a sesquipedalianist adorned his office door. How like him, the lover of one-and-a-half foot long words, to proclaim his eccentricity so proudly and chuckle at it with the same enthusiasm. He ushered me in, showed me his computer, the Mobius strip I’d sculpted for him proudly displayed on a shelf, a mounted segment of sharkproof fiber-optics cable — his latest delight. It was my first visit as an adult to the place that consumed my father’s focus, second only to his church. I looked for clues to reveal his character, to teach me who was this man I’d known only as a father.

Returning briefly from another life, the opposite coast, his prodigal daughter, I was presented to his colleagues, had lunch in the executive dining room — and worried that he had designed a chance encounter with one of the bearded young PhDs. But the tensile strength of such an unlikely coupling was not to be tested, for I knew better: “Never marry an engineer,” my mother said, “They’re a humorless lot, too anal-retentive, your father excepted, of course.”

As we traveled the broad halls of Bell Labs, I saw a man in love with the potential of the human mind to realize a vision. A man honored by his peers and humbly delighted with their affections.

But still, I did not know him, this man who rolled up his sleeves but left his tie in place to putter in the yard after work. The weekend warrior who spoke not a word of the broken bodies he flew home from Vietnam. The same man who taught me to ride a bicycle, to catch and cradle a lacrosse ball without flinching, to search for answers not his own, to embrace the written word, to dream of fairy tales while digging life’s ditches.

There were many visits after that, one or the other of us leaping the bounds of human mobility to soar into the other’s living room and reminisce, dance around discussions of religion, gossip of absent family members, dine on ice cream and other sweet succor.

And as we aged together, my Great White Father slowly gained human proportions. He suffered a dose of cancer with discomfort and graceful humor, sobbed at a loved one’s addiction, lamented his failure to produce a hellfire of fundamentalists.

In his retirement, he built a boat in which to scour the seas for adventure. While it sat in his yard, never quite finished, he rigged a chair on deck and enjoyed his morning coffee — not too hot and just shy two-thirds of a teaspoon of sugar — at one with his horizon.

And I, at last, began to know him, this man who wanted me to be happy but was afraid to ask if I were. A man who reveled in sharing tales of the women he met during the last Great War, of the love letters he saved for fifty years. The man who drew lush pictures of my mother reclining nude and handed them down to those who drew their own. The man who danced with the feet of youth and cupped the ears of an old fogey to catch and cradle my words.

Later, he talked fondly of lost war buddies regained. He remembered the dying highway commuter he held, whose last words of love Father carried to the man’s wife. He bemoaned the foolishness and brash decisions of his youth, his failures as a father, his walk with a God unknown to me. And he laughed at escapades survived, disappointments endured, offspring playing the fool.

At times, when we met halfway across the country, I struggled to feel comfortable alone with my father, uncertain intimates in an uncommon place. No meal preparation for distraction, no siblings to bicker over bridge or charades. Just the amorphous relationship between us.

And then I watched him sleep, curled as a child, and I saw the vast years spread over him: seventy-three years, more than half of which we shared. There were a few I spent determined to hate him, but now I rue that we share them no more, for Father is long dead. But he surely soared to rest in the succulent hues of an Aubrey Beardsley landscape, his boat set to sail, for his is the soul of an artist, a fearful, brilliant artist turned to Christianity to sooth his passions and direct his life.

He was an aesthete, he was a genius, he was a holder of patents and a builder of sailing ships, he was one of the truly faithful and he was forgiven. Though he was not at peace with his progeny, he was loved and adored by us as only a good and kind man could be. And I am grateful to whatever God guided him that the Colonel Father Sir was mine.

He once said to me, “I am a dilettante; don’t follow in my footsteps.”

So tell me: How can I help but become him? Why would I want anything else?

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“You don’t mind if I sit here, do you,” he said. After his briefcase hit the empty seat.

I looked up from my book and was not surprised by what I found: older white male, expensive suit, assumptive bearing, and a physique to match the sonorous voice — he was too large even for the exit row. But upon a second, sneaky glance, while he stowed his luggage and adjusted himself into his seat, I noticed the faint hand tremor, the thinning hair approaching white, the hint of a stoop revealing his seventy, maybe seventy-five years.

I let a sigh slip. It was the damn tremor that swayed me, forcing me to close my book — Sue Townsend’s cruelly hilarious spoof of the British royals — and exercise the social graces Mother taught me. Besides, if he’d offered a question rather than a declarative before tossing his briefcase, I wouldn’t have thought twice about his claiming the seat. So I turned to him and said, “Of course not — please join me.”

He looked down at me without making eye contact and nodded a suitable smile in my direction as he unfurled his Financial Times, and I thought I caught disappointment flit across his visage. If only he had boarded a little faster, he might have landed next to the babe who’d sashayed down the aisle before me. She had a caboose even I noticed — as did the hungry hunter who snagged the seat next to her, licking his chops in anticipation of getting a mouthful of those sweet cheeks. So the poor old fellow was stuck with me — baggy jeans and sweatshirt (Father always said I dressed like an old boot) and a befuckled mood (I’d lost the joy of flying when the airlines stopped providing those cool little salt and pepper shakers in coach).

A flight attendant distracted our minimalist encounter when she requested verbal affirmatives from those of us in the exit row, thereby committing us to assisting in the event of an emergency. With the threat of terrorists misbehaving on planes, I took this responsibility quite seriously, but checking out my fellow prospective heroes, I had to question the legitimacy of the airline’s process.

There was one brooding skateboarder, who, upon declaring “Yes” that he was ready and willing to assist, reinserted his iPod earbuds, despite having obediently turned off the contraption, and pulled his baseball cap over his eyes, assuring neither social interaction nor emergency readiness. He was probably dreaming about the sashaying caboose.

Next to him was a gal who appeared to be on her first solo flight post aerophobia treatment. With clenched knees and jaws, her wild-eyed stare boring into the seatback in front of her and barf bag in her lap, she clutched the armrests as beads of sweat grew on her blanched face and nervous snot flicked from her nose.

Clearly neither she nor the kid could be counted on, which lent a new appreciation for my presumptuous seatmate. He looked as though he might still be strong enough to help me hoist the 70-pound door and I, having worked in social services, had proved my crisis-management abilities manyfold. In fact, the aerophobic’s nose reminded me of one such incident at the program I once directed for multi-handicapped blind adults.

I’d received a frantic call to my office from the nurse’s station one sunny California afternoon. “Conrad bit Nadine!” the shift supervisor shrieked.

“Is she OK? Did you isolate Conrad?”

“He bit her! He bit her!”

“Yes, I got that. Take a breath. Is Nadine OK?”

“He bit her! He bit her nose! In her room! There’s blood everywhere!”

“Bring bandages and an icepack to her room.” I ran from my office and met the supervisor at Nadine’s door, where Nadine stood silent and still, hands covering her face and blood drenching her blouse.

“Conrad bit my nose,” she said, dropping her hands to reveal a bloody void where her nose once was.

“Shit. Where’s the nose?” I asked the supervisor. “Did he swallow it?”

She was busy tossing her lunch in Nadine’s trashcan, so I had Nadine press a bandage to her new facial concavity, and I dropped to the floor. There I was, in my tidy little business suit and pumps, crawling across the institutional carpet in pursuit of a nose — which I found under the bed, right where Conrad had spit it.

Later, when I asked him why he did it, he said, “She was rude to me, so I felt for her nose and I bit it.”

So, yep, pushing people down the inflatable slide seemed manageable, as long as the old fellow could indeed help me lift the door out of the way. This thought shifted my predisposition from dislike to acceptance of the man.

Except then he blew it. After folding his newspaper and tucking it in the seat pocket, he settled his elbow on our shared armrest. Now, this alone is an annoying but common maneuver on a plane. Men do it to women without a thought, although bold women preempt it by getting there first. But it was the subsequent pressure of his upper arm against mine that set me off. I shifted every body part that I could toward the empty space between my seat and the emergency exit door, but it was not enough. Still his arm pressed to mine. It was surely an intrusion, and it was unbelievable that he couldn’t feel it.

Now, my Southern upbringing precluded my saying what I was thinking — that he move his fucking arm — so out of desperate discomfort, I leaned forward and buried my face in my book, determined to disregard him the rest of the flight.

But he had other plans. Having consumed his Financial Times, he proceeded to interpret it for the rest of us. “Obama Bin Laden,” he chuckled, “he is doing everything he possibly can to slow down our financial recovery.” My hackles began to rise, and I pretended to continue reading.

“People of wealth will never vote for him again,” he continued, “and the young derelicts who did in 08 might actually acquire the discernment to think twice in 2012, particularly the trust fund kids. I have one client whose offspring have probably voted away their inheritance.”

My pretense shattered and I turned to him, preparing to challenge him for likening the President to Osama Bin Laden.

But he prattled on: “Thankfully, it doesn’t much affect me. I’ve made a lot of money in my lifetime — of course, I am bragging — but, yes, I’ve made a lot of money in my lifetime. It’s long gone, now.” And then he paused, looked at me directly, and laughed a melancholy little laugh. “Most of my colleagues invested in commercial properties, things like that, but I didn’t. I saw the world instead.”

This time, it was that little laugh that swayed me. If nothing else, he deserved some consideration for his regrets, whatever they were. And there was that pesky Southern thing again. So I listened to his stories and nodded, oohed and ahhed in all the right places, and learned that as a young man he’d ridden his motorcycle across Europe; he was divorced years ago and never remarried; he didn’t usually reveal that he was an attorney, but he was; the district attorney and he barely tolerated each other, but he was friendly with a lot of the judges; he had no children he owned up to; he smoked fine Cuban cigars, but of course, he said, he was bragging again.

I patted his arm. “You’re entitled, Honey.” And he regaled me with his stories for the rest of the flight, while the skateboarder snored under his baseball cap and the aerophobic came to her senses and demanded to be moved from the exit row.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

The lawyer was on my mind as I drove home from the airport. When I arrived, I Googled his particulars and found his name in an attorney directory, where he mugged with one of his spiffy cigars. I searched for more and found an article. “Sweetie,” I called to my husband. “Look at this. I chatted with this fellow on the plane. In the 80s, he got into a wee-wee contest with a judge over wearing a turban in court.”

“Was he packing explosives in his underwear?”

“I think that’s probably racist, Sweetie. Besides, you joke like that and I’ll have to frisk you.”

“OK, then I’m packing explosives in my underwear.”

“Funny boy.” I kissed him. “Seriously. He refused to explain why he wore the turban, and the judge insisted that he couldn’t wear it without stating a ‘legitimate’ reason. He prevailed eventually.”

“Was he wearing it when you met him?”

“No. I suppose he’d made his point when he won.”

“Hmmm. So, what’s your point?”

“Oh, I’m not sure. It’s just interesting. Nothing, I suppose.” I went back to reading the case, amused by his eccentricities and disappointed I hadn’t been a little nicer. But I don’t know, maybe it was just that Southern thing again.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

*Oh the times! Oh the customs! – Cicero, 63 BC

(NOTE: Photograph by Nathan Rupert via a Creative Commons license.)

Writers

Want to submit your work to Excuse Me, I’m Writing for the sheer joy of having an audience? Email your original fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry — 2,500 words maximum — in an MS Word document or in RTF to kb@kbgressitt.com. If we publish your work, you keep all rights, including bragging.

A Fireside Chats excerpt
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Walter Johnson drifted in and out of the day, waltzing at a summer dance with Maud and thanking that sweet young nurse, the foreign one, for closing his window shades so he could take a little snooze. He was old, of course, although he couldn’t remember quite how many years he had accumulated, and he was infrequently aware that he favored his reveries when he might better have attended to the present. No matter. He was no dullard. He knew his days were numbered, although he couldn’t remember what his current number might be. And it occurred to him that maybe he’d just had that thought.

“Thank you, young lady,” he rasped through tubes and phlegm to his favorite nurse, Estela, a youthful forty-one to his ninety-nine years.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Johnson. You are always such a gentleman.” She patted his arm, as she checked his pulse, then brushed a wisp of white hair from his forehead.

“And you are a kind young lady. I will ask my Maudy to bring you some of her Scotch shortbread. It is the best in —.” He struggled through a strangling cough that swished everything around in his lungs, but without the strength to bully it out, he produced nothing but rearranged congestion pressing on his aching chest.

“Well, now, that would be so sweet, Mr. Johnson.” She finished checking his vitals and removed his forgotten lunch tray, dappled with droplets of canned peach and sputum.

And then he was gone again, hoping to stealthily slip a bit of verse to Maud under the bathing room door.

You are the blessed sunshine, a wild beauty rose
You stir such joy into my heart, it must be you I s’pose
Whom the angels sent to us, to make our town so sweet —.

He stopped there and resorted to prose because his mind fixated on “nose,” and he didn’t think it a properly romantic word, regardless of the call for a rhyme. He waited what seemed an eternity for Maud to emerge from her ablutions and accompany him to the ice cream social at the Willard Hotel, over in the center of town. Her mother and father and siblings were their encouraging chaperones. He tied up the horse, leaving it hitched to the cart as Maud hopped down, not waiting for him to offer his eager hand. She was a lovely woman with an unusually bold stride and a true gift for baking sweet treasures. Walter could not have been more pleased to have her compose her skirts and take his arm as he escorted her into the hotel.

“Mr. Johnson,” Ashley, a nurse’s aide, poked his arm. “Mr. Johnson. You awake?”

“Fresh as a daisy, young lady. And a great good morning to you.”

“It’s Monday afternoon, Mr. Johnson, and there’s a wildfire. We’re evacuating all patients. We’re going to be moving you, Mr. Johnson. We’re driving all the patients to another hospital.”

“We’re going for a ride? Splendid, splendid! I’ll crank up the Ford and we’ll have a gay time.” He choked on mucus, cleared it partially with a weak cough and wandered into the kitchen to help Maud with the picnic fixings.

Ashley pulled a collapsible gurney into Walter’s room and hurried on to the next. “He thinks the ride will be a ‘gay’ time,” she twittered over her shoulder to Estela, who was helping the more mobile patients into a herd of wheelchairs so they could be pushed out to the four buses on loan from the high school.

“‘Gay’ didn’t mean the same thing when he was young,” Estela scolded. “Did no one teach you to respect your elders, child?” She hurried off with another geriatric patient, gently explaining to her again that, no, she wasn’t going home just yet.

Walter was tickled that Maud was packing all his favorites, baking soda biscuits and Mr. Reche’s Fallbrook honey, chicken fried in pork fat, and peach pie made with fruit fresh from her father’s trees, nearly bursting ripe. He leaned over to steal a peck on her soft cheek, but stopped short when someone entered the room.

“Okay, now, Mr. Johnson. We’re going to move you to the gurney, and I do promise we’ll be so gentle you’ll think you are floating.” Estela and three aides surrounded the bed.

“Who are you?” he coughed. “What is happening? Is my Maudy here?”

“Mr. Johnson, it’s me, Estela, over here, Mr. Johnson.” She patted his arm. “You know me, Mr. Johnson, your favorite nurse, Estela.”

“Oh, oh, yes, of course. Estela.” He coughed and struggled to catch his breath. “And how are you this fine day?” he rumbled.

“There’s a fire, Mr. Johnson. We are evacuating the hospital — just as a precaution. There is not a thing to worry about, but we do need to move you to the gurney so we can put you on a bus and take you to another hospital.”

“Another hospital? But why would I want to leave our own little Fallbrook Hospital? Best hospital in town, it is.”

“Was that a joke, Mr. Johnson? Very good! But there’s a fire, Mr. Johnson, a bad fire, and we need to evacuate. We’re going to lift you now, Mr. Johnson. On three, everybody. One, two, three.”

“Oh, ooh, Maudy. Where is my Maudy?”

“She’s been dead —” Ashley started to say.

But Estela cut her off with a silencing look and said, “She’s just fine, Mr. Johnson. Don’t you worry.”

“You know, I do not deserve that woman. So lovely, so lovely. I do wish I could have finished her poem.”

“A poem, Mr. Johnson?” Estela sent the others away as she strapped him to the gurney.

“Yes, a poem I attempted to write for her the day I proposed marriage,” he tried to cough, “but I could not find the proper rhyme.” Walter waited for the air to squeeze a path under the murderous weight on his chest, and he thought of his lovely Maud.

“Okay, Mr. Johnson, we’re set now. We’re just going to wheel you outside.” Estela stopped to take the picture of Mr. Johnson’s wife from the bedside table and place it by his right hand, and then they headed out to the bus, Walter weakly fighting the smoke-filled air.

“Maudy and the girls, where are they? Are they safe?” Walter ran from his car and joined the well-water bucket brigade trying to douse his home so embers from the burning barn wouldn’t set into the house. As they hauled water, the town’s sole fire truck was aimed at taming the barn, an obvious loss, but Walter knew it was a dangerous one. Maud had herded the goats and the girls out of the way, and Walter wished her a kiss between buckets and thanked God for watching over them and for Maudy’s fortitude.

“Okay, Mr. Johnson, we’re going to lift you up onto the bus now.” Estela looked into his eyes, not sure where he was at that moment, but recognizing where he was headed. “Mr. Johnson? It’s me, Estela. We’re going to take you for a ride on this nice school bus here.”

“School bus?”

“Yes, this nice school bus. The high school let us borrow it. There are just not enough ambulances available with all that’s happening today. So, we’re going to have a ride, a gay ride, Mr. Johnson, on this nice school bus!”

“Ah, the school bus! Is Maudy coming?”

“She’ll be along, Mr. Johnson. Don’t you worry, she’ll be along.” Estela managed the mass of tubing, pump and IV bag and climbed alongside while the aides lifted Mr. Johnson through the rear door of the bus. “And then we’ll ride out to the coast so you can breathe that fresh ocean air. Won’t that be nice, Mr. Johnson?” They secured his gurney atop the backs of three seats. “There we are, Mr. Johnson. You have a view out the windows, and as soon as we’re all loaded, we’ll go for our ride.”

“Splendid, splendid! The school bus ride! Maudy and the girls are coming, too. Have you met my little daughters, Opal and Sally?” He tried to wait out the need to cough. “Sally married one of the Yoakum boys, a nice young fellow. He —.” Walter lost his voice to a rumbling spasm of congestion, and Estela rushed to help the next patient board.

When his throat was clear enough to breathe, Walter looked about the bus with pride, pride and deep satisfaction. It had taken the town the better part of a year, but they had succeeded. They raised the necessary funds and now they had themselves the finest school bus in San Diego’s North County. Used, it was, but still the finest and Fallbrook’s first. And all the donors were being treated to a grand celebration, a ride on the bus and a picnic at the schoolyard, a wonderful community picnic under the live oak trees. He knew his Maudy’s baking soda biscuits and peach pies and her almond shortbread would be standouts among all the baked goods. They always were. She was a lovely woman, a lovely woman with an unusually bold stride and a true gift for baking sweet treasures. She had given him two fine daughters who did well for themselves, yes they did. He was pleased to have such a lovely woman as Maud take his arm. If he could just finish that poem for her, before she left the bathing room.

You are the blessed sunshine, a wild beauty rose
You stir such joy into my heart, it must be you I s’pose
Whom the angels sent to us, to make our town so sweet —.

He stopped there, struggling to move his mind off “nose,” the only word that came to him, but he didn’t think it a properly romantic one, regardless of the call for a rhyme. He waited what seemed an eternity for Maud to emerge from her ablutions, and then it struck him: a couplet instead, of course, of course! He was tickled with his verse, perfectly apropos as it was, and so too, it seemed, was Maud.

To My Precious Maudy
From Your Adoring Walter

You are the blessed sunshine, a wild beauty rose
You stir such joy into my heart, it must be you I s’pose
Whom the angels sent to us, to make our town so sweet
If you consent to be my wife, my life will be complete!

Maudy embraced him and agreed to be his, and though he held her tight to his heart, his chest felt as light as the day he was born.

“Mr. Johnson?” Estela touched Walter’s shoulder. “Mr. Johnson, you’re sleeping through your ride, your school bus ride. We’re almost at the coast.” She looked into his face and she knew at once, she knew from years of nursing, from midwifing her own parents to their deaths, she knew he was gone. She pulled a tissue from her bra and dabbed away the spittle on his lips, the tears from his eyes, and returned it to her heart. She shut off the pump and pulled the line from his tired vein. And she placed Mrs. Johnson’s picture on his chest, put his hands together over it and held them as she hummed a love song for Walter and Maud.

And Walter and Maud laughed at his silly, lovely rhyme and fed each other baking soda biscuits with Mr. Reche’s Fallbrook honey as they lazed in the live oaks’ shade.

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Live oak tree photograph by Bill Ward via a Creative Commons License.)

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

For John Amen and Alfred Joyce Kilmer

“When did poetry stop rhyming?” the man asked the visiting poet.

It was a sad, an angry question, a plea for succor in a world where the man’s perfectly trimmed coif and manicured nails, his gem-laden pinky ring and custom-tailored finery could not stave off age or the crashing waves of a new era, splattering his tidy life with the spindrift.

The graying woman beside him, sipping wine, the gazpacho, whatever he ordered for her, made everyone chuckle with her innocent retorts to well-worn social graces, to the poet’s verse of dark mannequins posing and Jewish Ophelias, to things only she remembered, mortifying her husband to his chill bone.

He scolded her for fiddling with her napkin. Poor thing. Poor thing.

“When I was young,” he mourned, “we learned wonderful poems, poems that rhymed. Like ‘Trees.’ Now that’s a beautiful poem. But today, I don’t know. This poetry, this poetry is weird.”

The responding silence — of looks askance, awkward sips of flavored coffees, the oblivious few waiting patiently for an answer — was barely broken by a whispered suggestion of excess Chardonnay gone awry.

And then the poet rescued them, “Oh, around the late nineteenth century through the 1920s — with Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot, E.E. Cummings — poetry began to turn inward. Rhyme was replaced with intimacy.”

Lovely trees and schoolroom recitations, replaced with roiling innards shared in quaint cafés; with masturbatory imagery, rending sorrow, arching hope; with things that make well-trimmed folks blanch in horror and wonder what in God’s name is happening to the country, how the economic hurricane could prevail, how men could couple with men, how an African peacemonger could be elected to preside over landed gentry.

“The rhythm, though,” the poet soothed, “the rhythm remains. Like a song! Listen to the rhythm, the rhythm.”

Indeed, the poet did not hide behind pretty things, romantic notions, heroic meter and pattern like an eclipsed sun. No, he burst forth naked, compelling his listeners to contemplate tortured children, broken bonds, recovery, resolve — things other people simply called life.

Still, the man’s dismay seeped from the corners of his eyes. It would not be quenched with revelations of newly-beloved poets roaring through town astride freewheeling verse, rattling teacups and sensibilities. No, he wanted something else.

He yearned for her, for her to re-inhabit the body next to him. He longed for her loveliness, for her hungry mouth prest against his breast, for the intimacy of his rain dripping among her limbs.

For her, though, there was no longer rhyme or reason. Addled by tangled neurons, sticky plaque, fading familiarity, she was not always sure he was her husband.

But she could still recite “Trees.”

He wiped her mouth, applauded the next poem, then guided her out the door, a sad, an angry parting.

And the poetry continues.

Love,
K-B

Hiding

By John Amen

for Richard

I spend the morning
looking at photographs of my dead sister,
dark mannequin posing
beside husbands, parents, siblings,
her son—people who look like extras on a movie set—
the years’ battering superimposed on her face,
reminding me of Holocaust images, olive-skinned
girls who died in showers at Auschwitz.
Even in the photo where she
wades in a nurturing Atlantic, she
reminds me of some Jewish Ophelia, her
moribund drama hemorrhaging into the spindrift,
thick shadow snuffing a nirvanic beach.

Last night a friend told me she felt
my ex-wife had not been good for me,
that I had hidden behind her like an eclipsed sun,
and I thought about how my own mother was a piranha
who each morning at the breakfast table
stripped her sons and daughter to the bones.
Years later, my father would tell me
he sacrificed his children to appease his wife,
offered us to her as if she were some pagan goddess
who needed to drink daily her own family’s blood.

We all learned to hide; it is our legacy—
my sister and I, even my brother,
skulking in the custody of his own rage.
We grew out of childhood
like houseplants in a hurricane,
domestic pets abandoned in a jungle;
floating out of body in public places;
passing like ghosts through marriages and jobs;
watching ourselves fuck spouses and greedy strangers,
naked bodies move; not recognizing ourselves, honestly
not knowing how we were going to survive the relentless invasions,
the ambushes and slow, secret military movements,

this thing other people simply called life.

Click here to read more of John Amen’s poetry.

Trees

By Alfred Joyce Kilmer

for Mrs. Henry Mills Alden

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Click here to read more of Alfred Joyce Kilmer’s poetry.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

This health-care insurance reform thing is confusing. Are you confused? I’m confused, oh yeah.

Of course, I don’t really have time to actually read anything about the House’s draft legislation. I mean, what do I know anyway, you know? So I could sure use some sage counsel on this from someone more knowledgeable than I, someone with a better-informed perspective of all the complexities of health care insurance policies and finance, reimbursement schemes, pre-existing condition stuff, policy cancellation terms, the whole shebang. Yeah, this requires a real brainiac, a Solomon, a, I don’t know, someone such as, hmmm, well, let’s take a look at who all is out there offering up their insightful opinions of this critical issue. … Could it be … Chuck Norris?

Naw, not the kung fu guy? Yes, indeedy, the kung fu guy. No kidding.

So, what does old Chucky have to say?

Welp, in his townhall.com column, “Dirty Secret No. 1 in Obamacare,” Chuck tells us that he “decided to research the reasons so many are opposed to Obamacare to separate the facts from the fantasy,” and in the course of his research he found some “dirty little secrets buried deep within the 1,000-plus page health care bill.”

Now first, I have to say, I am so impressed that the guy read the thing. Whooee! That’s a whole lot of time away from pounding on bad guys. Second, I am so grateful that he read it so I don’t have to! And I’m sure I can trust his interpretation because, well, you know, he’s like famous — and a good guy. And good guys don’t lie. Politicians lie, but not good guys, like movie star types.

So I want to know what secret he discovered about this critical health-care issue that the darn politicians tried to hide from us, buried in the 1,000 pages of that, um, well, it is a public document. But no matter. They must have known hardly anyone would read it. Thank God for Chucky!

And what exactly did he find? Well, get a load of this: The government wants to go into people’s homes and usurp their parental rights over their children’s care and development. Can you believe it? The dirty rotten scoundrels! Bastard’s all! And I do feel quite right using the male, non-inclusive nomenclature, because that’s what Chuck does — no pandering to political correctness there. So what if we have a few women in Congress.

Anyway, Chuck writes that in sections 440 and 1904 of the House bill (Page 838) — and I must say my hat is off to the guy for honing in on this specific issue, among the whole 1,000 pages, and for sourcing the references so helpfully — the bill describes a program for educating new parents about early childhood development. In the home, no less! That’s so intrusive, so darn presumptuous, as though parents don’t innately know what’s best for their own kids, like we aren’t born with a deep understanding of “age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains” and “skills to interact with their child to enhance age-appropriate development.”

Why, this is an outrage, a blight upon the very freedoms our forefathers fought and died for as they birthed our great nation! (There were no female forefathers, obviously, because the gals didn’t know nothing about birthing no nations). Bravo to Chucky for bringing this most dirty of secrets to our attention, because this sort of thing could lead to the downfall of our nation. It’s just a disgrace, an abomination, I say!

Oh, except, hmmm, in my conservative little town of Fallbrook, California, our conservative little school district, which continues to preach abstinence only, despite our burgeoning population of teen parents, offered a very similar parent-education program when my daughter was a toddler. In fact, we allowed one of those “government agents,“ as Chuck describes them, into our home, and we adored her. She taught us some wonderful techniques for encouraging Katie’s readiness for school. It was, well, it was a great program, and it was free and we were grateful for the experience.

Oh, Chucky, I’m so disappointed. You happened to pick on the one thing in the House bill that I actually know something about, and you are so, so wrong. Bummer, man!

Now what do I do? I sure can’t count on Sarah Palin, with her bogus caca about senior citizen death squads, taking out the disabled — or was it disabled death squads taking out the seniors? I don’t remember. I just know better than to trust that nitwit to explain anything. Besides, she’s pretending to be all scared about “health-care rationing,” as though she’s not aware as a former governor that we already have that in so many ways. Of course, she quit that job, which might explain her ineptitude on the health-care issue.

So, I guess what it comes down to is I have to read up on this stuff myself, so I can form my own darn opinion about health-care reform instead of relying on someone else with her or his own nincompoop agenda. Jeez, what a bitch.

At least President Obama understands that I have a life. He put up a handy-dandy website, healthreform.gov, where I can get some for-real information about what he has asked Congress to come up with and the progress being made. This, despite Republican efforts to shoot down reform in a blaze of failure — in hopes of keeping Obama from being reelected — and despite the railings of folks who are lucky enough to have good health insurance coverage, both of which groups really kind of suck, because they don’t give a good goddamn about the millions of people whose insurance companies dumped them when they got really sick, who were denied coverage for life-saving treatments, who are not insured, who went bankrupt trying to pay for their health care, who died for lack of treatment! That’s the real bummer.

You know what would be really cool? It would be really cool if Chuck Norris and Sarah Palin and all the other naysayers would actually take a look at the president’s website and let us know if they agree or disagree with his goals:

• Reduce long-term growth of health care costs for businesses and government

• Protect families from bankruptcy or debt because of health care costs

• Guarantee choice of doctors and health plans

• Invest in prevention and wellness

• Improve patient safety and quality of care

• Assure affordable, quality health coverage for all Americans

• Maintain coverage when you change or lose your job

• End barriers to coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions

Declaring their support or opposition would put their opinions in an interesting perspective, because, if they agree, then they should be helping make reform a reality instead of trying to undermine it. And if they disagree, then isn’t that telling!

Yeah, that would be way cool.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Note: Chuck Norris photo from raindog808 via a Creative Commons license.)

A short film by Constantin and Nikos Pilavios — thanks, Kim!

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Many moons ago, before the birth of my daughter in California, my mother and father made the trip from the other coast to bestow their approval on our new home. They came bearing love gifts and rituals, tales of family who dared be absent, the comforts of a senior generation. We sat down to dine on the opportunity — the tumbling repartee and laughter that is our wont. We ate and gossiped and reminisced, and then did it some more.

Those who know our family, would not find it odd that we also determined the visit a fitting moment to explore the far end of life’s spectrum: Mother, a positively inveterate social worker, and I took a class on aging and family.

The course was interesting, fun, poignant, challenging, great fodder for dinner table conversation — and ultimately useless.

It did not result in our soundly preparing for my parents’ oldth and eventual demise — our own error. We did not follow the course’s wise counsel to create a financial plan for their elder years, to plot a rational and sensitive path to a final home where physical and emotional wellbeing — and independence — could be best assured within their projected means and sensibilities. We did not define roles and responsibilities suitable for each offspring to take on as our parents’ capabilities diminished.

Oh, we knew what we should do, the right and reasonable things necessary for when that distant time comes, we even gave them a nod or two, but we just never got around to doing them. Life was far too busy for us all to lend thought to aging and death.

And then Father up and died — first! — surprising everyone, most of all Mother.

Well-entrenched in congenital math anxiety and her generationally ascribed role, she was not disposed to address their small investment accounts and tangible assets. She was not prepared to manage the documentation of life that had been Father’s bailiwick. She was sure as hell not ready to be alone.

And so, we have gradually cobbled together a semblance of a care system, the nearest offspring providing Mother a nest, the analytic one taking on things financial and legal, the others providing counsel and encouragement. It is not enough, it is imperfect, it is riddled with ill-defined expectations and sibling dynamics, but it is imbued with love.

Still, for all the eager voices in our family, we are stunningly silent about the inevitable truths that roar around us. Amidst the roiling waves of emotion, we harbor concerns and conceits, doubts and distrusts; fear and sadness are muzzled. And the gossip that would entertain us at dinner is spun into pain. The mourning of loss, current and foreseen, is silenced with discomfort. Questions become accusations. Sorrow becomes depression. Goodwill becomes dismay.

Yet life persists.

We bumble along and babies are born. Hurts are soothed. Marriages are made. Familial waters are calmed, until the next storm. And our younger generation chalks it all up to humorous family dysfunction, overlooking the quiet shadow of age that gently embraces their own parents.

And what of my progeny, an only child; have I set upon her the prospect of an unbearable burden of elder care? Or can we do any better?

It’s possible.

With the lessons of many moons ago and those of today, our plan can be made, falteringly at first, but surely with good intent, perchance with the realization denied my parents. Things will go in my getting-old file — advance directives, wills, a reminder to toss the ashes on the vegetable garden. And I hope my daughter and I can ultimately give voice to our aging, the celebration of life entertainingly-lived, the acknowledgement of limitations and gifts, the acceptance that we each come to an end, one way or another, but preferably with grace and love intact, however imperfect, and the tumbling repartee and laughter that is our wont — and that, in our oldth, makes us clench our kegels.

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

He arrives after morning service, having thanked God for a new president and another day in an upright position. He stops at the nurse’s station, not to check in but rather to greet whomever is on duty by her first name, applaud the election’s outcome, ask about her family, chuckle over the latest joke and say something as sweet and charming as his tousled white hair and proper bow tie.

He makes his shuffling way through the unit to his wife’s room, wishing a good day to those he passes. He arranges tidy, fresh flowers in the vase on her bedside stand, saving the day-old blossoms for the orderly to give to someone who has been forgotten by family and friends. He pulls the chair beside her, takes her curled fingers in his hand and tenderly kisses her cool, brittle lips with his eyes closed and heart hopeful, remembering the day sixty years ago when he knelt before her, imploring her to be his forever, and she held his head in her lap, loving away his tears.

He begins reading her the news, his tremulous voice breaking at the 364 electoral votes inviting a new gentility and ethos to national politics. He touches her hand for emphasis, editorializing on the other campaigns, the fickle path of ballot measures, the hope of a neophyte era. He encourages her with questions, always ready to fill the silence. After the paper is read, he rises to stretch and adjusts the blinds. He checks her chart, which never varies, and says another prayer for her recovery.

His lunch tray is delivered as he tells her of the garden’s status, the latest goings on of the offspring. He eats intermittently, distracted from the stillness by the rhythm of her respirator, the beeping pumps, the steady tempos that sustain her. He closes his eyes, remembering the summer dance when they waltzed so closely in the gazebo and she whispered of a child to come.

When the meal is finished and cleared, his voice resumes to fill the poignant voids with talk of moments that make his eyes moist. He asks her if there’s anything he can do for her and adjusts her pillow, pretties the bow in her gossamer hair.

He selects a book from those neatly stacked on the small shelf, settles into the chair and begins the afternoon reading. This day it is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” He reads with the passion of the words on his tongue and strokes the vein on her pale arm as only a lover can. He reads to her until the dinner tray arrives and silence returns, the respirator and pumps carrying the conversation. After dinner, he touches her cheek, her thigh, her belly, absently tapping to the beat of the machines.

At 8:00 p.m., when visiting hours are over, he takes her curled fingers in his hand and tenderly kisses her cool, brittle lips with his eyes closed and heart hopeful, remembering the frosty day — the children long grown and gone — when they waltzed by the fireplace, grateful for the enduring joy of each other. Then he departs as he came, saying goodbye to the nurses and wishing them a peaceful night filled with sweet dreams.

And so he has done every day since her stroke, every day since she died in the emergency room and they made her breathe again, every day. And so he will continue to visit. He will continue to wait for her to awaken, to come back to him, to waltz with him again, the moonlight glowing in her hair and her arms so light around him.

He doesn’t hear the doctors who say there’s little brain function, little hope; the chaplain who says it is not a sin to let her go; the children who say she’s had a good life; the social worker who tells him to get on with his own. She is his life.

So he thanks God for Medicare, which pays to keep her lungs breathing, her heart beating and food pumping into her stomach day after day.

Just as he thanks God for President-elect Obama, whom he prays will have the wisdom to reform health care, to make the anguished decisions inevitably necessary for the nation.

Just as he fears what those decisions might be.

©2008 Kit-Bacon Gressitt