This Ground You Stand on Is Holy Ground

NOTE: REVISED POST 1/14/2010

"Now Moses was tending the flock of his father in law Jethro....an angel of the lord appeared to him in a blazing fire out of a bush...he gazed and there was the bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. The Lord said to him...

"Remove your sandals for the place on which you stand is holy ground."



The Cycle of The Torah Portions rolls round and round. There are times I am drawn to favorite stories or powerful images and this week is one of them...

The moment is when Moses confronts the Burning Bush speaks to me this week.

Every time I have rushed off to Abbott Hospital with someone, my dear husband and now my father I go with great intrepidation and anxiety. I grab my sketchbook, my pen and I run. So afraid of what the coming hours will bring. And so I stand there in the rooms that have held so much pain attending to the one I love.

It is holy ground, those hours of vigil and worrying and waiting. Those moments of prayer. The prayer evoked by a hopeful drawing as we wait for answers. Yes, that is the holy ground I stand on. The plain gray floor in the busy emergency room. The place I have stood again and again.
And the burning bush...the flames, the fire. G-ds voice. What and how is that? It is the metaphor for the intense pain one must sometimes witness on the holy ground of the emergency room. There in the intimate sterile setting one comes face to face with mortality. There are times you pass through narrow portals. Wondering. Will he make it? Will we make it? When the fire of suffering flames up, you feel it. Every empathetic feeling fuses to the one you love and compassion is the cooling fountain that cools the fire of pain...yes there one hears G-ds voice. speaking to you directly in those moments when you hold onto the one you love for dear life.
Through drawing that moment I somehow make my peace with huge fears and am able to pass through to faith and hope....faith...such a tiny seed... as small as an amaranth seed...yet something to hold onto in the knowing that a tiny bit of faith can grow up into something large, beautiful and sustaining.
That ground I stand on is holy ground. And I am not alone. The wonderful nurses, the kind doctors, the orderlies who joke and make things comfortable. They are all part of that holy ground. There is the relief of humor and their deep well of compassion that we draw from again and again. We are blessed.
Nothing is so scary you can't draw it. This ground I stand on in the emergency room is holy ground.

Rollover January 8, 2010

Rollover

Star Tribune Friday January 8, 2010

“ Hundreds of accidents were reported on state roads, including many in the metro area, but none involved fatalities or severe injuries. Overnight temperatures-and windchills- were expected to plummet even further.”

Officer Kaiser stands in my parents dining room. Despite the freezing temperatures he is dressed in his uniform with no coat. He is a stocky muscular man who’s seen it all. He smiles when I point out the array of books in the house.
“See officer,” I say, My dad’s read all of these books. When you find him he may be disoriented, but he will recite poetry for you.”
I am filing a Missing Person’s Report. My dad has been gone for over 4 hours and we are so worried and anxious.
After calling all the E.R.’s the Jail and Detox it is now time to file a Missing Persons Report.
I feel like I’m in that movie Black Orpheus where Orpheo searches the afterlife and makes pacts with the spirits and the dead. I don’t know what to think and hesitate to think the worst, but I do in order to prepare myself.

Then the phone rings. “This is Pete with Lakeville Ambulance. We are taking your father James to Abbott Emergency Room. He rolled his car in Lakeville, but is coherent and does not have any injuries.”

We all go into shock! He is alive. And then we begin the nervous rush to the hospital.

I recall all of my times in Abbott E.R. with trepidation. My bad joke about all this is that if there is one place I know how to get to, it is Abbott E.R. in the winter.

When we get there we quickly go back to his room. There he is in his gown, smiling with a very small scratch on his nose. I am furious but relieved. There he is, my brilliant, sarcastic, humorous, intelligent father. My Texas Dad. There he is, alive and well.

Our nurses are wonderful and I see my favorite nurse from many visits ago.

So how do miracles occur? How does the car turn over through busy oncoming traffic on a very icy roads and not kill him? Not kill someone else? How? Whose hands guide these moments?

Today I will go over and see him. My fear has transformed into gratitude. Grateful that he is alive. Grateful that he has not hurt anyone. Grateful that he is not on Life Support. Grateful that we are not planning a funeral.
Grateful. Grateful that he has the gift of life.

Recalling New Year's Eve Night: The Provocation of Memory

The Provocation of Memory

New Year’s Day Evening 2010
Our here on the tundra where I live people plunge into an icy lake on New Year’s Day
Wearing only a swimsuit they dive into the icy waters….and emerge teeth chaterring and exhilarated….. And so it is with memory…memories…I dive into the past, ready to withstand the shock or realization that all this happened and now I also emerge exhilarated from deep waters to tell you these tales of long ago and how they relate to the moment I am in.


On New Year’s Day evening we are taken to Vienna via a beautiful program on TV. The minus below temps and the unyielding frozen ice mountains lining each side of the street are forgotten. We leave to visit my mother’s place of birth via TV show and memory.

There in the Music Hall where my mother sat we have a camera’s birds eye view of the richly carved balustrades and opulent statues that rest like indolent cosmic being, gods of some sort high above the audience and musicians. There is a sculpture of a marble woman that the camera rests on….I see it as a muse and a good omen for the New Year. Yes, I will let this marble muse of an indolent wise woman guide me as I gaze upon the televison set and plunge into my mother and father’s memories. Surfacing with a few insights of how I came to be watching new years now in 2010.

Strauss’s ineffable melodies weave around us. Light, nostalgic and beautiful. The house is full. Once upon a time, a long time ago my mother sat there, in a box or in the audience listening to these very melodies. She grew up in Vienna and was born there in 1921. Don’t ask the exact date It’s cloaked in mystery. Every time we check in at the hospital or the clinic we just go along with the fake one her mother put on the birth certificate so long ago .It’s a long story…………we don’t try to change it.

My mother was not raised with religion. She says proudly that she was raised on Opera. So this was her life. To sit listening to music under the ornate ceiling of the decorated Music house in Vienna.
The music cuts away to let Julie Andrews show us the amazing desserts of Vienna.
Demel’s. We see mouth watering close-ups of desserts made with precision. Cakes coated with chocolate frostings that are folded around like the rich cloak one would wear to the Opera. Small round cakes have chocolate dribbled over them. Colorful sugar concoctions are folded around and around…then pressed into a mold that transforms into
An array of candies. So that’s how they are made!

Whipped cream and history. Violet candies made as they were for an empress. Rich fruited delights for a king. Layers of sweets and then glasses of champagne.

Then as the music plays we are treated to the rich spectacle of the beautiful dancer in her frothy red dress dancing on toe among the marble statues of the art collection. Perfection and art and dance marry. Dancing, dancing along. Later a flock of pink cotton candy ballerinas perform on point with their handsome dancers lifting them up high. We too are lifted up high and forget winter.

At last the Blue Danube is played with such depth and emotion. As the music swirls around us we take a visual journey down the Danube….watching its eddies and flows with aplomb…..watching…as it moves through the small towns of Austria that my mother pronounces with ease and the perfect German inflection.

***************
My dad leans over the table, his false teeth slightly ajar as he tells us in great detail how he packed fresh tomatoes in crates for 10 cents an hour. He was walking along somewhere in Jacksonville east Texas with his brother Dan carrying a Tom Swifty book in his hand. A man called out…”do you want a job?” and so he gave the book to his brother and started working. 10 hour days in the hot shed, packing tomatoes. All day long he watched to make sure the crates were packed just right. Finally he got paid. He looked in the envelope and saw three crisp new dollar bills. Three long days of work. My dad thought they were fake and started to cry…His mother told him they were new bills and that he had earned his weeks pay.

One story leads to another. He’s a Texan you know. He relates a tale of how our great grandfather lived in Tennessee. He had three huge bales of cotton that he wisely put in a dry cave. After the Civil War was over he sold those bales of cotton for a fortune and moved to Texas. He was the father of L. R. Futrell, my grandmother’s father.
So, I say to my father. I am sitting here listening to tell me this because of three bales of cotton that stayed dry in a cave, that did not mold?
And I tell you now, it’s all true and it all happened. My mother later heard beautiful music played on the radio as the Nazis took over Vienna in 1938. She and her brother have recently published a small memoir that describes that time and their subsequent lives. There’s a family photo of her in a white dress, hands at her side as everyone around her salutes the Nazis in a large public address.
My dad left the South and later spent time in Japan. Those stories fill him as well. My parents met in California and later moved here to the Minnesota tundra.
There I sit watching the Vienna Music program, holding onto the tales of my dad’s upbringing in East Texas and my mother’s upbringing in Vienna. I am the weaver of stories, the teller of tales. I am the listener, the spinner, the one who takes the raw material of these lives and spins it into a story for you. I sit here on the humble bench by the lowly fire listening and imagining. Letting memory fill in the story line between the tales I hear. Come reader, listener, vagabond of tales. Come, come sit down beside me here in the old stone cottage on an island far away. An island of memory so far away in time. I relate these fragments of stories to you. I am the teller of tales, the weaver of stories. That’s all I have are stories…
I use cotton thread to pass across the shuttle of tales today. As I weave these stories a Viennese waltz plays. I am here to tell you these stories because of three bales of cotton stored in a dry Tennessee cave. I am here because of three bales of cotton stored in a dry Tenneesee cave.

REGIONS HOSPITAL/ A CARETAKER'S CONCERN

REGIONS HOSPITAL/ A CARETAKERS CONCERN

NOTATION: This piece about my mother is an excerpt from my ongoing notations of taking care of my parents called A Caretakers Concern. When I figure out my scanner I will included some illustrations from the many documented over the years.
My blog will move between realms of family recording, memories from long ago and a continuing reverence for what daily moments provoke from the vast realm of memory, ready to unfurl at a moment’s notice…..any where, any time…memory makes itself known.

The loss of Malcolm my cat begins to weave in slowly with the passage of time. When my sister hands me the photo of a white cat as we sit in the waiting room at Region's Hospital I muse briefly on what it would be like to have an all white cat.....someday...in contrast to having had an almost all black cat for so long. That photo makes it way to the table in the hospital room where I spend much time.
There is my 88 year old mother laying in recovery from having a pacemaker put in. She is tired and hungry and finally gets to eat after almost 12 hours of fasting and delays. I am so relieved to see her spirit strong and her energy improving. She has been through a lot and so have I as we moved through the slow spiraling hours of waiting for the procedure. Her agony of anxieties has been wearing, and yet I am filled with the blessing of being in attendance with her.
As we drove to the hospital tuesday morning I could not help but think ruefully, of how winter in its cruel iciness can hardly pass without being in attendance with someone at the hospital...I have been the caretaker for my husband numerous times, for my brother, my father and now my mother…………I recall a fragment from a T.S Elliot poem something about how the way forward is the way back...and my challenge of entering the hospital is woven into the memory of many times spent there before.
At some point, as I doze on a hospital couch I think to myself that I should write an illustrated manual for others:
"How to care for someone you love when they are in the Hospital"..these words would be surrounded by the ubiquitous pattern of a hospital gown.
First I would note that as you enter the hospital normal time suspends itself. Time does a double back flip and cartwheels down the hall. It lays on its side and then spins out in a long drawn out arc that one lives under as one stumbles along the mystical labyrinth that one has entered. Yes, as one enters the hospital one enters a labyrinth made up of feelings, pure facts and some kind of beseechment of the divine….accompanyied by the deep adoration of the one you love. Empathy reaches new heights and then there is that first blast of hospital smell. So hard to take at first, and then just there, as insidious as the hospital gowns that adorn each patient.
The hospital bag you carry as you enter should contain, excellent chocolate, a notebook to jot down information on, a thermos of tea, or coffee. ( I brought Beet Borsht along on this last journey), a positive attitude, a good dose of philosophy and a great sense of humor.

There at Regions Hospital I sit with my mother gazing out the window at the beautiful vista all around. The Basilica, the Capital and smaller buildings, the movement of cars with their ghostly tracks in the snow, is somehow knit together under a gray sky. I look down into my mothers furrowed brow. She has survived this procedure and she has survived so much.
Our time at the hospital against this stark winter landscape distills itself into a montage of inner black and white photos. These are the photos I neglected to take with my real camera, but they are the ones that remain registered in my inner eye, the ones Walgreen will not be developing.
Moments: sitting with Dr. Zhu the electrocardiologist who will dot the procedure. Watching the compassion and pragmaticm move over his features as he patiently explains everything to us once again.
Helping my mother undress in the room, as she turns into a patient.
Averting my eyes as the I.V. is inserted into her very thin arms.
Her hunger, her anxiety, her restlessness.
The spiritual wisdom we linger on as she reads to me from her Daily book of Spiritual Vitamins.
Moments of waiting that spiral into more waiting. Sketching her,
Noticing all the lines in her face again.

Seeing her after surgery, tired, splashed with Betadine. Relieved that it’s over.
Dim light in the room as we sleep.
Awakening in morning light at the hospital.
The length of the morning.
The view out the window as she sits there in her gown with her tubes dangling.

There at Regions hospital I contemplate the various regions one can inhabit at the hospital…the upper regions of empathy, compassion and
Service…and the lower regions of self pity, stress and anguish that one can just fall into after long spiraling hours there. It is possible to pass through several emotional regions in the period….and then I ponder the mysterious region of my mother’s heart…..where a pacemaker has been inserted……..that heart that has beat so steady and so long now has extra help.
Her heart sustains mine.
We leave the hospital and drive home…her pacemaker ticking away. My heart is beating steady and serene too.

I Saw Three Cats Yesterday.

Yesterday I saw three cats at my friend's house. Mysterious in their enigmatic way, they warmed my heart. They were the first cats I had seen since Malcolm's death. I touch and petted the orange fur cat who almost acknowledged me. Still, I was happy to be near a cat, cats again and to feel their prescense.
Memories of Malcolm come back. Memories of our really feisty cat Leo, the cat before Malcolm come back. And then I float back in time to when I lived on an island off the west coast of Ireland so long ago. Yes, there I had a sweet cat too whose name was Walnut. A companion to my dog Pumpkin....those memories will have their own story time too........

Cats, memories, moments. I am grateful to have been in the prescense of these cats yesterday.
Grateful for the cats in my life. Grateful to feel the possibility of looking ahead eventually to having another cat. Grateful for all these moments. Grateful to Malcolm. His affection remains.

TWO LANTERNS: for my cat Malcolm

INTRODUCTION TO MY FIRST BLOG
I am moved to start a Blog. The yearning and the desire to post my thoughts publicly has been with me for a while.
The passing of my dear Cat Malcolm this past week is my "Cat-a-Lyst". I am moved by his life, his comfort and his affection. The solace he gave so freely.
I am an artist, a write and a storyteller. I like to draw and add words to my pictures. In addition to this Blog I am grateful to be doing some paintings that reflect on his absence as well as resuming a fold out book I started a year ago about him.
Writing about my cat is also a "Cat-a-Lyst" for reflecting on other aspects of life. Ripples from one event lead to another, and the rich tapestry of memories woven through a life can take one on many inner journey reflecting backwards and forwards through time.
Thanks for reading this Blog. I look forward to your response.

TWO LANTERNS
The night the big snowstorm blew in I drove home sliding on slippery roads. My ailing cat Malcolm met me at the door as I stomped in from the cold.
I held him for a while and mused. Somehow I had an urge to make two simple lanterns for the front of my house. So I did. Out of plastic acetate, tissue paper and red shiny paper. I cut out two cats, two turtles and two foxes out of red shiny paper. I carefully placed the animals in a line
on the plastic acetate contact paper. As I worked, dear Malcolm our big affectionate black cat watched me. He watched me as he declined, in his old age, now ill. And I watched him, now with eyes of gratitude, with a heart of gratitude as my husband read nearby.
Yes, I cut the shapes out carefully, the animal shapes, knowing the shiny red cat shapes signified Malcolm and knowing that yes, these fragile little lanterns were his spirit lanterns, lighting his way into the next realm.
He watched me and carefully jumped on my lap as he always had. Loving, kind and gentle.
I cut a circle out of shiny silver paper and then cut a slit. I pulled back a portion for the hanger....The hanger!!?? What was I going to do for a hanger? I rummaged in a drawer and found some colorful velcro ties. It's a good thing I don't clean out my drawers very often. Those rich troves yield their treasures as they need to.
I stuck the velcro tie on and shaped the unwieldy cone onto the base of the lantern. Yes, it all just kind of fit together in kind of an awkward handhewn fashion. Yes, all done and ready. I found my two battery operated candles and cut a place for them to kind of glide in.
It was about zero degrees out there. Lavender and purple light glinted and mysterious shadows formed a harmonious whole.
Wind whipped my face as I walked out to where the metal arch with flowers and birds that welcomes visitors to our home.
There, as snowflakes fell I placed the lanterns slipping the velcro pieces on just so, and they hung there. Then I carefully pushed the teeny tiny switch on the underside of the candles and the candles lit up, casting a delicate but steady light in the cold winter night air.
I like to think Malcolm watched from the window, but I know he was dozing on the radiator, half in and half out of life.
I stood on the sidewalk. Proud of my efforts. The small lanterns shone mystically and mysteriously into the night sky twinkling barely like the stars above in the realm I knew Malcolm would soon join.
I turned and walke down the street, all the way to the park. There in the dark night the illuminated falls shone with its first array of icicles glinting. One cannot see the water flowing, you can only hear its swoosh as it makes it way to the great river.

SERVICE OF THE HEART
Tuesday I said good-bye reluctantly to Malcolm, telling him:"You are the Best " as I stroked his head as he lay there weakly.
Later that morning he was gone. Dead. We had to let him go from his suffering. Poor Kitty.
I found the small clay image of him I had made months ago and tucked it into my pocket. Tears flowed and flowed.

The next morning I hurriedly left for work and ran to Walgreen's first to pick up a sewing kit, a New York Times and some batteries. As I drove to work I flipped on the radio and the most amazing music flowed out as morning sun streamed over me. I drove along listening as the music in its generosity of melody and tune evoked Malcolm's wonderful life. The melodies captured his sweetness, his kindness and his frolicing good nature.
I could see him laying on his belly in the sun, running through the house, crouched in the shade in the summer heat, curled up my lap or my husband's lap. I could feel his head bumps of affection.
Crying I drove along, with each part of the music evoking some richer memory. Unexpectedly, it was a service of the heart for my departed cat Malcolm.
The music began as I started for work and ended just as I arrived there. A complete moment that stayed with me all day.

SOLACE
I have a cold. Sniffle, sniffle. Of course, I have a cold now. In winter. Grief and Loss. Loss and Grief. Malcolm's gone. I finally toss out the litter boxes, the litter, sweep up the cat food bits on the floor.
But I can't toss out the memories of him. They crowd in close.
Other times when I was sick, I'd hear those footsteps on the stairs. The claws on the wood floor and then a leap onto the bed and next to me, on top of me, bringing me Solace and Comfort.
There he's be, laying on me all the long hours of the day in the Sick Room, comforting me.
There's a large tree with huge upturned branches just outside my back door. It has a mystical prescence and reminds me of the Tree of Life with all the various attributes. Malcolm embodied the attribute of loving kindness.
Now I lay here, still sniffling, remembering all that. I knit, the electric heater roars.The house is quiet and now vastly empty after his death. So empty. I lay here sniffling. Kleenexes fill the basket.
I wait. Simply wait, out of habit...out of memory...out of yearning.
I wait....wait to hear the tread on the stairs, to feel his furry warmth and look into those mysterious green eyes. I wait.
Malcolm comforted me at every turn of the road. Through joy and sorrow. During the long hours I pondered my fate as my hours at work were cut, comforting me through my feelings of hurt and anguish.
Always there.
Now I sink into my winter dreams...casting out ...drifting.....I watch the lavender shadows lengthen....Evening falls. The house feels oddly silent.

At night I step outside and light the two lanterns. They move in the wind. The cat, the fox and the turtle. They move in the wind, glinting. Malcolm's spirit roams free. I watch the light flickering in the small handmade lanterns
and look up into the vast night sky.