All day it snowed…

All day. I woke to five or six inches of white on the ground. Zeke’s school was delayed, and so were the home school district schools and a local university. I figured my institution would be delayed too, since it usually follows the home school district, and has done so ever since the then-new president canceled classes for 1/2 inch of snow, got into trouble, then didn’t cancel for 18 inches or the flood that followed a few weeks later! I kept waiting for the announcement that the first hour or two of classes had been canceled. I didn’t want to get up and go to work to find school was delayed or closed, so I kept an ear out in my warm comfy bed …. until I fell back asleep, and slept hard for two hours after a week of mild sleep deprivation.

When I woke, it was half an hour before my first class (conferences, actually, this week). I called a couple of colleagues to find out if I needed to go in, but got no answers. Were they in class? Or at home? There was no information ANYWHERE, about the status of my institution. All the local schools and the local university were delayed by two hours, so it made sense that my place of work would be too, but making sense and reality are not the same things where I work.

After 20 minutes, a colleague called back to tell me that, “Yes, classes are in session.” So I had to hustle and I arrived late to find my first two conference kids waiting.

“How was your drive?” I asked them.

“My little Honda slid all over the freeway,” one of them said. His words threw me back 16 years to the time I walked into a meeting on a dismally dark October day, and left an hour later to find four inches of snow on the ground. It was my first term at the college. It was my birthday. And I had a 35-mile drive home. It took me almost three hours, and I walked in the front door to tell my then-husband, “We’re moving!” My rear-wheel drive Toyota Starlet with the 3/4 bald graduate students tires had skated home like roller-blades on an ice rink. One guy in a 4X pick up tailgated me till he got tired of my slow speed and then zoomed past on the median of the freeway. Two miles later I saw his truck upside down in the median, and him standing by it, looking cold. I could hear sirens in the distance, heading to his truck perhaps, or to one of the other multiple accidents that littered that freeway that day.

Today I have a four-wheel drive car with top-of-the-line tires for my frequent drives over the mountain pass to my dad’s house. The anti-lock brakes kick on at the slightest sign of a skid, and the beast plows through six inches of snow as though it’s on a summer road. Still, I’m cautious. And when I hear my students talk of their hair-raising drives in their little cars with bald tires, of skidding into the ditch or fishtailing across intersections and praying that no one is coming,  I remember those days. “Don’t risk an accident trying to get to class on a day like today,” I tell them. “It’s not worth it.”

The snow has slowed down, and the temperature has lifted a little. Maybe tomorrow will be clear. But I’d prefer that it snows all night and we wake to five feet and wind-created snow sculptures like I did in Ireland in the winter of 1982. It’s unlikely, but I long for it anyway.

It snowded…it snowded!

When Zeke was 20 months old or so, we woke to a white world. She ran outside, crying out, “It snowded, it snowded.” She wanted to stay home from daycare and play in the snow, and although I was overwhelmed with papers at work and hated canceling classes, I decided the occasion of her first big snow was worth celebrating. We made snow people and threw snow balls and rolled around in the wild white world till we froze, and then we drank hot chocolate with marshmallows in it while our hands and feet fizzed back to life.

Today she doesn’t remember. She’s a finicky teenager who says, “yuuk,” when she sees the frosty light of a snowy day. She’s girly, not the tomboy of her earlier years. Something switched in her a few years ago, the thing that happens when you’re growing up and trying not to be like your mother, I suppose. My mother liked looking good and wearing the right clothes, while I fought her attempts to tame my wild hair and polish me up. Now Zeke, the incorrigible tomboy, has to have perfect nails, wear carefully chosen clothes, and spend an hour a day straightening the wild mass of hair she inherited from me.

When she was tiny, though, still young enough to love snow days for the pure joy of playing in the snow, she gave a hint at what she would grow into. I remember her, way back when she was two or three, picking out her clothes every night before “school.” It wasn’t a habit I taught her, or even suggested. It was just what she started doing one evening. I was getting her ready for bed, and she dragged a bunch of clothes out of her drawers and arranged them on the floor. She tried three or four different combinations of tops and bottoms before settling on the outfit she wanted (at the time a rather wild mixture that my mother would not have approved of). From then on, her evening routine included picking out her clothes and arranging them on the floor, so that one might be forgiven for thinking, in the dim glow of her nightlight, that a flat little person was lying on the floor. Sometimes her choices were interesting, but woe betide anyone who suggested she wear something different than what she had chosen. Even as a tiny child, her strong personality and absolute determination were obvious.

“That kind of personality is hard for you now,” her pediatrician told me. “But it’s good later on. Nobody’ll be able to convince her to do what she doesn’t want to do. And that includes drugs and drinking, if she’s set against it.”

Zeke has no interest in drugs or drinking, and she resists peer pressure, just as her long-ago doctor predicted. She still chooses her clothes and arranges them on the floor the night before school. And today, when she saw the world covered in white, she said rather nostalgically: “Maybe they’ll cancel school tomorrow and I can go play in the snow.”

I hope so. If she plays, I’ll play too.

After Thanksgiving bits n’ pieces

It’s 61 degrees in Dad’s house. I hate the cold. I’m wearing a coat and gloves to type, drinking tea. The milky morning light is burning off the water as the sun rises. The water is bleached and still now; everything seems to wait.

Later on, we’ll be finishing off a downstairs room in my sister’s house. Every time I come over there’s some project to do. Ruth May’s house is old and with the baby she can’t do much. Dad’s knees are bad and he can’t kneel any more. I’ll put on a mask and try to put the skirting board back in the room where she (we) put down laminate wood floor and painted in the fall. The paint will slip through the mask and I’ll cough and wheeze anyway. The three of us are worthless at home improvement.

The dogs try to help, but they’re not allowed in the basement. They’ll skitter around upstairs, angry at being shut out. Sadie will climb the gate and come down anyway, or push through and come down. She wants to be with me. She’s used to it. Yes, she’s spoiled, and I don’t care.

Outside Dad’s window, the cormorants sun themselves on the nearby pilings. They lift their wings to dry them, and their black feathers shine. Obadiah hasn’t been back since Leah’s birthday on the fourth. I’m glad. Every time the heron is absent on an insignificant day, her appearance on a meaningful day becomes more poignant. Still, I miss her. The year Mum died, she was here any time I came down, as though to convey her approval. Now, I guess, she just expects that I’ll be here quite often. She comes only for birthdays or gatherings, or when illness threatens.

I’ve been working on my young adult novel for my friend’s daughter. It’s to be a Christmas present, though the odds of me finishing it in time are getting slimmer and slimmer. It keeps getting more complicated. It’s got to be a series, like Harry Potter, but with theme of religious pluralism and respect for this spinning planet that we are hellbent on destroying. I started it three years ago, then stopped, then started again. I’ve stopped and started only because my friend’s daughter keeps asking about it, so finally I decided to write it for her, making a commitment to her that becomes binding on me. It’s slow going, though. It requires research, for it weaves in mythology and religion from all over the world. The protagonist, who is my friend’s daughter, of course, loves otters, so I had to find an otter friend for her. I found an Irish otter, Dobhar Chú, who is white with a black cross on his back, and who is dangerous in all the mythology about him. But the otter in my book, the “water hound” in my story, is not dangerous at all, except to those who would destroy that which he is charged to protect.

To write about him, I have to find pictures, read about him, find the core of his being in the stories about him so that I can present him to my friend. He comes alive that way.

Dad is downstairs…. Time to start the day.

If you’re not with us…

Not about the classroom, not really, my dream. It’s about now, today, living in the U.S., in a world where we must be guarded against terror at all times. Classrooms are supposed to be safe, secure. We shouldn’t fear for our lives in a classroom. Same with being alive here, in this historically powerful and allegedly peaceful country. But not anymore. Now it’s a world of “Orange Alert,” of “War Against Terror,” of bifurcation: “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” I guess that makes me with the terrorists. But I’m a pacifist. And I dream of a bodyguard in my classroom, a murdered bodyguard — and in the end my dream’s not about education at all, but about the state of the nation — a world in which we accept living in a place where the administration strips us of rights in the name of protection, where if we’re not fearful, we are automatically on the side of the enemy.

I don’t accept any of it. Not the fear of strangers or muggers or rapists. Certainly not the fear of terrorists. I walk my dogs alone in the Canyon. Several of my friends won’t walk there at all, let alone alone. I walk my dogs on the dark walkway behind my condo at night and early in the morning, when the path is lit by starlight only, or so shadowed by the sun’s absence that I have to feel my way in certain spots. I can’t see the gang graffiti at night, and if I could, I would ignore it.

I will not eulogize those who think they must protect us from threats, whatever those threats are. I rode my horse over big cross country fences for years, knowing that the wrong jump, a tilt in balance at the wrong time, could leave me like Christopher Reeves, or could kill me. I did it anyway. I don’t need protection from my own willingness to take risks. Nor do I need it from terrorists. And yet I conceded in my dream. Is that what’s happening to me, giving up, simply accepting the country’s plunge into f*scism?

Dang. It’s been a hard week, and I’m tired, and I have to drive three hours across a mountain pass. I’ll focus on something I can do something about, like driving carefully, and forget about my dream. That’s what we do, these days, isn’t it?

Sequel dream

I had a weird dream last night. I had been asked to speak a few words at the memorial service of a man who had been guarding my class. That’s right. Guarding it. I didn’t know what the danger was, but he’d been called in to sit in the back row of one of my classes, he and two henchmen, all three uniformed. Whatever the danger was, it was great. And I accepted both the presence of the unidentified danger, and the necessity of the guards as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

A couple of colleagues went up in front of me, the final one a tall thin man who works in our writing center. He stood speechless, his face drained, till someone prodded me and I went up to relieve him of his stage fright. There was scattered applause. The venue was terrible, a podium in the center of a room, so I had people behind me, and people in front and to the sides. I couldn’t address any part of the room without ignoring another part.

I launched into a eulogy on the dedication and reliability of the man who had guarded my students. Before I’d walked to the podium, I’d tried to take some notes on a napkin, and had come of up with a couple of phrases I had thought would do, but the ink wouldn’t stay clear on the napkin, so I had given up. When I spoke, the phrases I’d been trying to remember skittered out of my mind.

“When Mike joined the class to keep us safe,” I said, “he proved his dedication to our students and to this campus by being always diplomatic, dedicated and discrete.” It was a horrible line. I knew it. It didn’t mean anything.

I went on to speak about the day I arrived in class to find him not there. He was always there before me, sitting in his appointed seat, being discrete, no doubt. I spoke of the students’ growing concern as he didn’t show up, especially since he had been appointed to give a career talk about what it meant to be a bodyguard in a college classroom. After class, I said, I had immediately called the dean because it was clear that a bodyguard of Mike’s quality would never simply not come to work. Eventually, he had been found, or rather, his body had been found.

At about that moment, I began waking up, and in the suspended weird space between waking and sleeping I remembered that I had been dreaming this dream in sequels for several nights in a row. I had dreamed the event that had required us to call in a bodyguard in the first place. I had dreamed Mike’s appearance and his “discrete, diplomatic, dedicated” service. I had dreamed his disappearance and my anxiety about it. I had dreamed the week in which he was gone, and the weekend in which clues were added together to reveal the location of his body. And now I was dreaming his eulogy. All the previous dreams and the current one rose up in clarity and detail, as clear as the just-passed weekend. And then I woke up, and I was left only with the sketchy details of the current dream, and with the knowledge that for the past few nights I’ve been dreaming of Mike’s installation in my classroom and untimely demise. Weird. Like watching a favorite show on television, each night being left with a cliffhanger to bring you back to the following night’s edition. But in my waking hours, I’d had no memory of any of the dreams. Maybe it’s my mind’s attempt to hint that I really ought to be watching television like just about everyone else in my universe!

What intrigued me the most about the dream was my absolute sanguine calm about the necessity of having a bodyguard in class, and my matter-of-fact acknowledgment that Mike had been murdered in the line of duty — i.e. guarding my students. What on earth does that reveal about my subconscious attitudes towards my job!?

Does anyone else have sequel dreams? It felt weird.

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Kooky

“Kooky,” they say. “Crazy. Believing in superstitious nonsense.”

It’s alright. I’ve been called worse. I’m used to that attitude, being the daughter of an atheist physicist. And for me, it makes no difference anyway. The heron’s repeated appearance since my mother was dying could be a series of coincidences (extraordinary, I’d say. Why did it show up on her deck railing while she was dying, stay there until she died, reappear over Hedgebrook while we were burying her ashes, prompting the director to say, “Oh look, the heron. We haven’t seen it in weeks”? Why did it stand on the roof of my parents’ house the Thanksgiving after she died, turn to face me and dip its head in my direction, then turn again and fly away? Why did it fly onto the beach just feet away from Zeke and her friend, and chatter at them? Why those appearances and a dozen more to my sisters, my mother’s friend, me?) Or it could be synchronicities. The label doesn’t matter. In the end, it’s just what it is. How I interpret it is up to me.

I know the heron I saw on the deck while she was dying is not the same one that flew over Hedgebrook or that appeared in Ireland or that dipped low over Sadie a few weeks ago when she was on her first walk after her illness. It’s not as if my mother’s consciousness animates those lovely birds, not as if she is reincarnated in a single bird that flies all over the world. It is something else, something I see as a synchronicity that invokes the beauty and mystery of the world. And that a physicist would dismiss as just a coincidence doesn’t bother me, because coincidence or synchronicity, it is simply what IS.

What matters to me, to the four of us girls, is that the heron binds us. When I said I knew the heron’s appearance was a sign that the weekend would go well, the words represented my understanding that all of us, all four of us, watched the heron watch my mother dying. Because of that, and because of the heron that flew over Hedgebrook as her ashes were being buried, we all see that particular bird as a representation of my mother’s spirit. That it appeared once again the first time we were all together since she died, to look directly in at the table where we all were sitting, comforted us, allowed us for the first time to shed the anger and resentments of that difficult time.

Coincidence? Maybe. But who cares. What the heron does to us is real.

When I first started RCIA, almost three years ago, I was sure I would never finish. I went as a concession to my friend. A pamphlet handed out at one of the first meetings described faith in a series of steps. The first step is the fairytale world presented to children, with a literal personal God looking down on tiny humans in fatherly love and choreographing everybody’s lives. At the top of the journey towards understanding is the place where people like Jesus and the Dalai Lama and Gandhi reside(d). People who recognize that Buddhism and Catholicism and Islam and Shinto and whatever are essentially the same thing. Buddhism is an atheistic religion. Catholicism puts faith in a personal God. They seem on the surface to be totally incompatible, but they are not. Atheism isn’t incompatible either, though most atheists don’t or can’t see it.

So when literalists laugh because I invoke the heron as the spirit of my mother, because I recognize that all four of us sisters understand the heron in different ways (Ruth May, right now, has a far more literalist understanding of it than I do), it doesn’t bother me. I’m not by any means close to the top of the scale of understanding. Not close to enlightenment, whatever that means. Not close to anything but my own understanding, which is clouded simply because I’m alive and human and filled with memories that get in the way of equanimity and fearlessness. But I do know I’m not crazy.

___

Warning: Those who abhor superstitious nonsense, read no further!

I didn’t mention, in the last few posts about the heron and my sister’s birthday, that on the night of her party, my mother’s friend pressed an envelope into my hand. “For you,” she said quietly. “Happy belated birthday.” The envelope contained a pendant from China, from where she and her husband had just returned. China is significant to me because I have a personal connection to it through my mother’s grandparents, who lived there for 40 years. Mum always wanted to go there, and she, Dad and their friends made plans  for a trip the spring before she died. The tickets were purchased and the bags packed when the trip was called off because of SARS. A few months later the trip was rearranged for September and Mum began planning again. Only a couple of week before she was due to leave, she fell down in a hotel in Vancouver one night. The cancer had spread to a part of her brain that controlled movement and paralyzed her left side. Mum, Dad and their friends canceled the trip, and it was only this fall that my parents’ friends were finally able to make the trip they’d so looked forward to with Mum and Dad.

When I looked at the pendant, I saw a piece of green stone, jade I suppose, with Kuan Yin wrapped about it in metal. Between Kuan Yin warm against my chest under my dress, and the re-appearance of the heron just a few moments later at the birthday party, I knew everything was going to be just fine.

Love thy brother… and thy sisters

Continued from here:

“For the slaughter and violence done to your brother Jacob, shame shall cover you, and you shall be cut off forever….you should not have gloated over your brother on the day of his misfortune….you should not have looted his goods on the day of his calamity…. As you have done it shall be done to you.” Obadiah. 1:10-15

My mother witnessed gruesome fights between her mother and her mother’s siblings when she was growing up. I wrote about them in my creative thesis, a novel, turning my mother’s memories into my fiction. My thesis director told me people just didn’t behave that way. “You’ve been sheltered then,” I said. “They do.”

My mother lived in fear that we would fight after she died, as her mother and aunts had fought after their mother’s death. “I’ll come back and haunt you,” she said. “I don’t want you fighting.”

Of course we fought. My mother’s friend, the one who reminded me she had called the heron Obadiah, said on her way out after the party: “Someone should right a book about you four girls. You’re all so different, and so interesting.” Someone did. Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible. OK, it wasn’t exactly like us, but close enough that Mum saw clear parallels. And one of the things that was most interesting, I suppose, was the very different way we dealt with her dying, so different that it caused a rift that threatened to destroy us.

But last week, from the moment we saw Obadiah on Friday night till the moment we saw her again on Sunday evening, we didn’t fight. We had a good time. And the party was wonderful.

When my mother’s friend reminded me of my mother’s pet name for the heron, I wondered what I would read when I tracked down what it meant. Then I found out. Obadiah is a minor prophet of the Old Testament. His writings are short, 21 verses packed into a single chapter. In it, he threatens the wrath of God on Essau and the Edomites. Why? Because Essau fought with his brother Jacob.

Obadiah. My mother knew what to do to bring us together. I don’t know how it happened. I just know that it did.

Obadiah

Just before Leah’s party (the big reason for us to be all together again for the first time since Mum died), Leah and Rachel and Dad and I were at the beach and I got a call from Ruth May saying she was at the top of the hill. I headed up to the parking lot to help her bring Liam down, and on the way, I saw the heron again, on the pilings where it likes to perch. It’s been about a year since I’ve seen the great bird on the beach, so it was a surprise.

When I got to the parking lot, I told Ruth May and she bundled Liam into his carrier and we rushed down the path to the spot where we could see the pilings. But they were empty. I saw her face, realized her disappointment. She wanted the heron, AKA Mum, to see the grandson she’d never get to know.

Idiot. If you hadn’t told her, she wouldn’t have to know. She wouldn’t be disappointed. And now she’s going to be sad all evening, that once again Liam missed the heron.

But somehow I knew the heron would be back. “It’s OK,” I told Ruth May. “You’ll see him.”

“Her,” she corrected me. “It’s Mum. I really wanted her to see Liam.”

In the house, people were gathering. I leaned out the slider door, looking towards the empty pilings, then poured drinks for the guests and offered shrimp and crab cakes. When I checked again, the heron was there. I called Ruth May, pointed out the great bird on the pilings where the cormorants like to sit.

“Are you sure it’s a heron?” asked Ruth May’s partner.

“He thinks it’s all superstitious nonsense,” she said. “But I think it’s Mum.” She was smiling.

I pointed out the white head, the S-bend of the neck, the sheer size of the bird. Ruth May’s partner held up the binoculars, checking out the pilings and the gray shape on top.

“Aye,” he said. “I see the white head now.”

From behind me, a long-time friend of the family spoke. “Obadiah,” she said. “That’s what your mother called the heron. Every time I see it, I think of her.”

Obadiah. I remember now. She called the heron Obadiah. But what does that mean?

To be continued…

The Restaurant Heron

“Look,” Dad said. “A heron.”

Dad, Leah and I had just left a waterfront restaurant where, for the first time in the four years since my mother died, my three sisters and Dad and I were all together. Ruth May and Rachel had stayed behind for a drink, while Dad, Leah and I headed for the opera. And then, as we crossed the boardwalk bridge to the sidewalk, Dad saw the heron, not 20 feet away in the water in the dark at 7:45 at night, staring fixedly at we knew not what.

People passing by exclaimed too, as Dad pulled out his camera and tried unsuccessfully to get pictures.

“Oh well,” Leah said. “We saw it. All three of us.” Her words triggered something in me. I ran back into the restaurant and touched Rachel’s shoulder.

“Look,” I told her and Ruth May. When I turned to point out the window, I understood what the heron had been staring at. He was framed perfectly in the center of the window, looking at the table where we’d all been sitting together.

“It’s Mum,” Ruth May said, tears in her eyes. “I wish I had Liam here to see it.”

“She’ll be back,” Rachel responded, hugging Ruth May. “She’s always here.”

We had all been dreading this weekend. Actually, I hadn’t been, and Leah hadn’t been, but then again I don’t worry too much any more about family politics. Getting the four of us together might be a disaster, but I’m not going to go looking for trouble. If we can all just breathe and forget for a minute how hard Mum’s death was, we’ll be OK. But the Rachel and Ruth May? Well…. they dreaded it.

Leah was the one who insisted on the get-together. “I don’t want the next time we get together again to be at Dad’s funeral,” she said. “You know Mum wouldn’t want that either.” And she was turning 40, flying from Ireland for her birthday. She wanted us all there. When Rachel refused, Leah called on Dad, who called Rachel and insisted she come.

Now, looking out the window at the heron, Rachel leaned towards me.

“Even Dad knows about the heron,” she said. “Even if he doesn’t admit it in so many words. Did you know when he called me to insist I come to Leah’s party, he said, apropos of nothing, ‘oh, there’s a heron on the railing.’ Mum was there then, too, making sure I said yes, and he knew it.”

My parents had lived on the beach for nine years when Mum died. In all those years, we’d never seen a heron on the deck railing. Not till the one that showed up when Mum was dying and stayed there, watching her, till she died. And since then, at this time of year, the heron returns to the railing every year. I’ve never seen one on any of the other decks. Why our house? Why, for every meaningful event and moment in life, does a heron appear, sometimes to stay and watch us, as the heron last night did, and sometimes just to fly overhead, glimpsed for a second, then gone?

For me, it’s a sign that this weekend will go just fine. Mum’s back, uniting us again, reminding us that life is mysterious and inexplicable, and that she’ll always be here.

“If you four fight,” she said as she was dying. “I’ll come back and haunt you. You know I will. So don’t fight.”

I’m glad she chose the form of a heron, a flighted spirit, a natural inhabitant of these parts, but also usually aloof and wild. It’s perfect for her. For us.