The Apostrophe Blog
Some musings I found in an old Stream of Consciousness blog that seemed worth recycling to the forefront again.
Dateline July 2008—
If you take care of each moment, you will take care of all time.
– The Buddha
It’s nearly nine p.m., a July summer night. I’m sitting out in our garden on one of the new chairs that go with the new table where four can comfortably sit, even eat—en plein air entertaining finally and at long last. It’s actually quite nice to have a large enough table. I put hydrangea in a vase in the center and even with my sunset clutter—telephone, two magazines, a glass of white wine—there’s still plenty of room to breathe. Even my pink and orange oilcloth from Corvallis days fits. Maybe this will become my new summer writing room. Especially this time of day when the sun is nearly down and there’s no glare on the iBook screen.
I continue to be the woman now with only twenty-three teeth. With a hole in my upper left mouth where tooth #13, the molar just after my canine, has gone missing, victim to an ancient filling that led to a too-deep-to-fix crack. When I smile, I look like a character out of Deliverance. I now get to live on “spoonable” foods for two weeks. Fruit and yogurt smoothies. Mashed potatoes. Soups. Tonight I whipped up a many days supply of macaroni and cheese. Next week, I head back to the periodontist for a check-up then a week later (I think) stitches come out. This is all about putting a flap of skin over my existing bone (which was luckily in better shape than the dentist anticipated so I did not need an extra infusion of freaky cow bone) which will then grow and strengthen enough, I guess, to hold a screw which can hold an implant which can then take, finally, next February or March a freaking crown. All for the price of a small used car. Welcome to health care in America.
I continue to hole up in our wonderful home now with a hole of sorts in my mouth. The standard poodle/poodles two doors down is/are out doing their lovely (not!) annoying bark. Life in the city. In the Corvallis woods, it was the hoot of the great horned owl. The sun over the Columbia is westward ho, lilac tonight and the palest white and orange, edging toward indigo. I can still see the reflection of the Y-shaped trunk of one of our big leaf maples in the smooth old glass of our bedroom window. Birds do their evening singsong thing, the freight train down on Lombard lumbers past. The winds rustles the branches of the trees. I can hear one of the ice cream mini-vans or cars wending its way on a nearby street. Why is that such a happy sound?
I walked to Alberta today to buy cat food. Noticed an orange-backed ladybug on the arm of one of our new chairs. Planted purple petunias in between the orange and red and pink impatiens out front below the Obama yard sign. Strung laundry out on the driveway retractable line. There were poems in the works, too, today’s two about Bob Dylan in a way, of all odd things. I whipped up macaroni and cheese from scratch, whole wheat elbows, the top a bread crumb and fresh savory and marjoram from our herb-garden-in-training in the driveway’s pots.
I called my Los Angeles son and left a jokey message about my missing tooth. I read movie reviews in the two issues of the New Yorker that arrived today. Who knows what that delay was about? I watered flowers, washed dishes, scooped food into bowls for the cats. Listened to k.d. lang’s wonderful songs all written by Canadians. Damn, I love that CD. Picked a spider from my older Cape May sweatshirt as I’m sitting here now, and still the daylight is just starting to fade enough to warrant lighting my campfire, as I call it, my various garden candle holders and votives.
Most of my relatives on my father’s side were missing teeth. That thought occurred to me earlier today as I was continuing the journey of getting used to the gap on the upper left side of my mouth. A tiny voice in my head saying something like, “Who do you think you are, missy? None of us escape what we come from, our fate.” There are days when I think I have so much to atone for—the way I ran, the way I dismissed those folks, the embarrassment I so often felt mixed with the confusion of the intense love and devotion I also felt for those people. The generation before my parents, my father’s people, all living there almost in a communal household in the small house on Shonk Street in Plymouth. For quite a while now, that entire world has been long gone.
And now here I am, edging into my middle 50s, three thousand miles away from home, that home, wondering at least once a day how did I get here. Wondering at least once each day how much time I have left. Wondering if those people, my family on Shonk Street, wondered the same thing in between their stories (as they called soap operas) in the afternoon, in between the endless pots of coffee made for Uncle Jackie and the carefully planned trips to the Acme for their weekly “order” that also included his can of Chase and Sanborn and Viceroy cigarettes. Friday night fish dinners from B&Js, the bar on the corner, were maybe their only weekly treat. Did they sit in that house, not unlike post-modern, far-removed me, wondering as well when, when, when?
Today, as I walked, I listened to the tiny iPod shuffle. Bob Dylan came on. It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. That’s where I sit right now, waiting, watching the day’s last light fade. Pretty soon I will need to kick in my touch-typing skills in order to see the keyboard. A nice way to end a quiet, un-busy day. It is, however, quite remarkable how long one can sit outside and still see light in the sky…
The public domain photograph above is by Jon Sullivan.
Interests: Reading, writing, not arithmetic. The art and craft of poetry. Photography. Vegetable and flower gardening especially heirloom bulbs and dahlias. Movies in real theatres. Theatre on real stages. Art in real galleries. Crossword puzzles and, of course, Wordle. Singer-songwriters like Aimee Mann and Patti Griffin. All kinds of music especially 1930s jazz. Venice, Italy! The Dude abides.
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