I ain't no turnip, least ways not yet.
I know of what I speak having served people demented and/or with Alzheimers. Or should I call them patients, friends or clients? None of them to the same degree/extent walking from the beginning to the end as I did, in my own half-assed fashion (or do I mean equivocally) as with my son. From diagnosis to death? Lest I forget my daughter at a different time and cause but same result.
For some of us hospice is THE WORK. Not simply a work like just a job. But that was what I'd still be doing were it not for being punished for doing it with love versus a pay check. Without fail in community I get trashed. Doesn’t matter Church or State.
So I awoke this A.M. thinking: “I am a writer in exactly the same sense my companion is a “rescue cat.” There is something of equivalent urgency: THIS IS YOUR LIFE about to end. I don't expect to wake up each time I fall asleep. Not to worry. It is only that I am surprised when I do. If I don't write, I dream about it, imagine it while reading others. Deconstructing the constipation of rage I find myself, unbidden, floating in space with fragments of 'civilization' twirling past.
I sense that culture is like gravity. That we are living in a museum with artifacts and truths; what to value and what to dismiss. And for me it is simply that I soar away in real time at peace in eternity with all the trivial evaporated. All the detritus returned to sender. Everything is recycled. The beginning and what will remain no history of our species possible. Save in my experience of love, that quiet small voice singing to me day-by-day otherwise we're just a cancer upon the earth.
Everything I might say has been said before. My museum is within books. While music, painting, drawing, sculpture and photography have lent me, briefly, a sense of ecstasy. It is words, as battered abused and bastardized, the symbols they are, remain singing and when I, as I am, writing it is the best high and greatest joy I've ever known.
Binge reading of individuals is my guilty pleasure. Running my fingers through an author's mind. Who in making sense of their chaos render a sense of what it is to be fully human and alive. Validation. Affirmation. Confirmation. We are not alone in our quest for meaning, value and truth.
After reading “redeployed”, the first virgin book I've purchased in years and years. I took a notion to pass it along to the Public Library, sure that the author and publisher would rather they bought another copy. I followed my impulse and upon placing it on the return desk, commenting that it was a donation, was astonished when the librarian hugged it to her chest in a semi-swoon. Saying “I was just about to order a copy!” My abiding sense: she was attempting to find funds to make the purchase.
Beneficiary of many small kindnesses, a lifetimes worth, it is surprising . . . no actually astonishing to see cause, effect and gratitude. It is said that the kindness we give may be the only kindness a person experiences in their lifetime.
The point I would make is that I remember words and music better than paintings and photographs. It might be different were it not for the fact that I'm hanging ten on the cusp of my death; disposal already paid for. Nothing eminent, just being real. My biological clock is ticking and there are so many people, regardless of statutes to the contrary, ready willing and able to render me either dead or paraplegic and being “sorry!” don't count for shit. Playing with electronic devices while driving a motor car is comparable to being intoxicated or buzzed. Which is always potential every time I get out and about. Which is maybe, maybe not, why I no long bump my flabby fanny miles and miles just to make medical insurance payments.
The Zen of driving is just driving with your full attention to that alone.
Public libraries and librarians (just the feminine ones) have been, since childhood, a refuge, succor, solace and source of education for which I didn't have to perform. True then. True now. Laughing at myself: I was reviewing photography books for the Providence Journal while writing a photo column way-back-when. I dutifully moved some nine hundred books through too many changes of address to remember until I finally donated the lot to Columbia College in Chicago. But it was a fellow journalist in Providence who turned me on to writing and sharing many of the new books (without pictures) received for review. In fact it was she who procured the column gig, teaching at the University of Rhode Island and a love affair with Americana demonstrated in New Journalism et al.
I am disappointed that Opera decided to discontinue their blog venue. I miss the community. Which was, in my experience, world wide. An arena for all ages, genders, proclivities etc. It was also integrated in a way I have yet to find elsewhere. My intention is to publish the volunteer portraits, my last hurrah photographically . . . maybe, maybe not. I'm still growing into this new environment in Snow Globe Vermont, seeking what's next.
Despite being trashed for it the project remains the single most significant project for a career that died with my son's diagnosis and subsequent death. I love people. It's crowds that I can't abide. The request was made that I photograph individually the one hundred and twenty or so of us who volunteered for hospice service. The camera never was a shield but a scalpel. But at that, in retrospect, inadequate to express my love any where near to what I can write of it or them.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
150105 0316 Mad Dog
© 2015 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved
