Barbara Ardinger's Blog, page 5

We all deserve to be happy

Instead of writing my own blog this month, I’ve asked my friend
Flora Morris Brown, Ph.D.,  to present an excerpt from her book,
Color Your Life: Create the Success, Abundance, and Inner Joy You Deserve(2nd
edition), which I am editing. As I read along, correcting spelling and
punctuation, I keep telling myself, This is a really good book! Flora’s
telling us things we need to know.

Why? Well, just pay attention to the news. It seems more and more that
we’re living in a dystopia, that our world is coming closer to the world
of perpetual war described by George Orwell in his novel

1984 . This is the world where “Big Brother is watching you” all
the time and where the government has invented a language called Newspeak,
in which nothing means what the words seem to say. I believe that maybe
we can work individually to, first, act to make ourselves happier and improve
our own lives and, second, to aim at creating a critical mass that can
save the planet. This is precisely why I love Flora’s book. She says we
all deserve to be happy. She’s correct.




I met Flora via a referral, and then I met her in person at a writers
club meeting. Turns out, we both grew up in St. Louis, which led to a long
email conversation about the
Veiled Prophet Parade  and other things we both remember from
the good ol’ days. Now we live about an hour down the freeway from each
other. She was a college teacher for many years and co-authored language
arts textbooks and academic articles while raising four children. After
she retired, she started blogging and writing self-help and motivational
books.




Here’s what Flora writes in Chapter 1 of
Color Your Life:




Happiness has been described in many ways in literature and research:
being satisfied with life, being content, and being engaged in fulfilling
activities. Happiness is an emotion of inner joy, contentment, and a feeling
of well-being. Researchers seem to agree that happy people tend to see
the positive sides of things, even in pain and tragedy. They see opportunities
rather than problems. They make choices that lead to doing what they enjoy,
often find pleasure in simple things, and believe in a power greater than
themselves. They have close relationships and express gratitude for their
lives.




Ladies and Gentlemen—I present the wisdom of my friend, Dr. Flora Brown.




Discontent Can Be Your Savior




The moment you realize you’re not satisfied with a situation, person,
job, location, or even yourself, your mind gets to work—processing ways
to get out, over, or around it. If you don’t heed the solutions that bubble
to the surface, then your discontent will only grow.




A common habit and often our default reaction when things don’t go our
way is to reenact the situation over and over in our heads. We then call,
email, or text our friends reliving the wrong, and maligning the perpetrator.
These reactions may give temporary relief, but they are not helpful in
the long run.




After you get past the initial upset, help yourself in two ways. First,
ask yourself what lesson did you learn from the experience. Second, ask
yourself how did you benefit from the experience.




You’ll be surprised how your answers put your upset in perspective, build
your confidence, and prepare you for the future. No one wants to invite
trouble or discontent, but being prepared for handling upset is smart for
the same reasons you carry a spare tire, buy insurance, and/or learn CPR.




Left to fester, your discontent can lodge itself in your body and mind
with the potential to move from sadness to hopelessness and even physical
illness. All of us experience some sadness, but when sadness persists,
it can become depression, which is a chronic medical condition that most
people do not just snap out of without help. Depression brings on physical
and chemical changes in the body, causing sufferers to lose interest in
life. Depression makes it difficult to manage daily tasks. If this sounds
like you or someone you love, seek professional help immediately.




If you have a friend or loved one who is suffering from prolonged sadness
or been victim of trauma, please resist the urge to comfort them by saying
any of the following useless sentences:


     I know how you feel.


     Stop feeling sorry for yourself.


     Snap out of it.


     It’s God’s will.


     Maybe God is punishing you.


     Don’t worry; the sun will come out tomorrow.


     There’s someone worse off than you.




Well-meaning though these clichés are, they can be more harmful than comforting.
The best comfort you can offer is listening and being present. When appropriate,
encourage simple actions, such as completing one small manageable task
each day or getting out in the sunshine and moving the body by walking.
In addition to seeking professional help for yourself or someone else,
consider joining or suggesting a support group. Begin the search for support
groups. http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/go...




If you let your discontent spur you to positive action, it becomes your
savior. You will no longer need advice or permission to do everything.
You will no longer wonder whether the thing you need to do is the right
thing to do. You will just know that it’s time and it’s the right thing
to do. You will know, at the deepest level, what you need to do. And you
will know that you will be okay.




You may decide to act quickly—just as you would jump to safety out of
the path of an oncoming truck. Or you may decide to act carefully and deliberately,
as if neatly packing for a very long trip. There is no right or wrong way
to act when you make this change. As long as your actions for change are
positive, do no harm to others, and are in harmony with the universe, then
your success is assured.




In your search for happiness, look inside yourself. Here are some ways
to start:


     1. Get quiet. It doesn’t matter whether you choose
meditation, yoga, prayer, or just sit still. Choose what feels comfortable
and natural for you.


     2. Try to remember some meaningful activities
or accomplishments in your life and then focus on things you really enjoyed
doing. Maybe it was building model cars, making a surfboard, speaking to
your son’s Boy Scout troop, or trying new recipes. It doesn’t matter what
it was. Only you know what made you feel good about yourself and gave you
joy—not only while you were doing them, but even now as you remember them.
They may be things you haven’t done since childhood or youth. Write down
as many as you can.


     3. Make a plan to do at least one of these things
as soon as possible. Plan it, put it on your calendar, treat it with the
same importance as you would any other appointment. Don’t let anyone talk
you out of it. And don’t stand yourself up for this appointment.


     4. Before the event, think about how much fun
you’ll have. Visualize yourself smiling, laughing, and enjoying the event.


     5. After the event, share with a friend how much
fun you had. Describe the activity in full.


     6. Savor the memory. Take pictures or journal
about the event.


     7. Repeat the process with another activity.




At this point, I must issue another warning




Don’t postpone doing what you enjoy in hopes of finding someone to participate
with you. If you can’t locate companions who share your interests, then
go alone. Depending on the activity, you may find others already there
who are alone, too.


Before I discovered a theater-going group, for example, if I couldn’t
find a companion, I attended the theater alone. During intermission, I’d
always find someone to chat with before we scurried back to our seats.
I go to the movies alone if I can’t find a friend or relative to join me.
Why should I miss a movie because it’s not convenient or interesting to
someone else?




When I decided to tour Italy, I signed up with a tour group. I had never
used this tour service, but the timing and price were right, so I flew
to Rome alone and met up with the group there. Three ladies were also traveling
alone in the group of forty. We became good companions and everyone had
a great time.


When you view discontent or upset as a signal that something in your life
needs adjustment, you can take positive action and make a commitment to
create your happiness.




Once you set out to be happy, only you can decide what will make up your
personal happiness.

Breathing Is Good

Last month I wrote about my cat’s respiratory distress. As a chronic asthmatic,
I know something about respiratory distress. Here the story about my adventures
in breathing. Breathing is, of course, one of our magical meditational
tools. Energy races round the circle when we’re intoning
Ommmm or
Maaaaaa. That’s one way we build the container for the energy of
a ritual. When the climax comes and everyone is taking their breaths at
different times so the rising sound is unbroken, the hair on the back of
your neck stands up and you know something’s really working. That’s the
power of breathing. Energy also rides our breath when we chant—
om tare tutare ture soha. Or Deena Metzger’s Goddess Chant—
Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Inanna. Or Starhawk’s
She changes everything She touches, and everything She touches changes.
Chant on one sustained breath, and you raise magical power.




But this is fancy breathing, and asthmatics like me don’t get there very
often. We can’t sustain a long-enough breath. We can’t sustain the breath
that we follow through our whole body when we meditate. We can’t sustain
the healing breath of color that we’re supposed to send to some needy part
of our body. There are times when the only color we “get” is blue…and that’s
because our lips are turning blue because we’re not getting enough oxygen,
and every part of our body is suddenly, desperately needy. What do we need?
Oxygen. Pure, sweet oxygen. Oxygen should have a goddess to whom we can
give thanks. I’d build a temple to her and use my re-enabled breath to
chant her praises all day long. (See Puffy, the Found Goddess of Oxygen.)

I have adult-onset asthma triggered by stress. It came into my life in
the 1980s, probably because of the stress of trying to make it as a freelance
writer in a corporate world where anyone who could hold a ballpoint pen
or sit at a keyboard thought they could write. Everyone I knew smoked cigarettes.
All my pagan friends burned enormous amounts of sage and incense. I was
inundated by stress and smoke.

At first, I didn’t even know I had asthma. I just knew that every night
around bedtime I started wheezing and choking. Then I started having panic
attacks. Being afraid to go to bed added sleep deprivation to the stew
of my panic. I went to regular doctors; one of them recommended Alka-Seltzer.
I went to holistic doctors; homeopathy and kinesiology are nice, but they’re
no help when you’re oxygen-deprived. When you’re not breathing, you want
something that works Right Now.




By June, 1992, I’d learned I was suffering from asthma, but I’d been in
this spasmodically breathless state for five or six years without getting
adequate treatment. I was too busy to pay adequate attention to myself.
I was making the rounds of every leads club and professional women’s networking
organization in Orange Co. I was finishing my second book,
A Woman’s Book of Rituals & Celebrations. I was teaching a Goddess
class every Wednesday night in my living room. I was doing temp office
work, for which I was hugely overqualified and grossly underpaid. And my
cats (my first Schroedinger and my first Heisenberg) had fleas. Yeah. Stress.
Big time. My lungs were too tight to inflate, my diaphragm was as supple
as a piece of plywood.




June 17, 1992, was typically busy day. When I had lunch with my tax preparer
and a PR specialist, I was already sucking on my inhaler way too often.
That afternoon, when the publicist at New World Library phoned about a
book tour for
Rituals & Celebrations, I was in another room and couldn’t get
to the phone. Only two students came to my class that night. One was a
nurse. Hearing me wheezing, she gave me a closer look. “You need to go
to the ER.” All I could do was nod. These two women, Louise and Rose, bundled
me into Rose’s car and we sped off to the nearest hospital, which was a
mile away.




I remember seeing the glass doors of the emergency room. The next thing
I’m sure of in mundane reality is that I was lying on a gurney, an oxygen
mask over my face and tubes stuck in the backs of both of my hands. A doctor,
two nurses, and my friend Louise were standing around me. They told me
I had been gone for twenty minutes.

Where had I been? I have no idea. I didn’t see any tunnel, didn’t fly
toward any white light, didn’t hear the voices of dead relatives. What
I remember is a great dark Being, Someone as tall as a mountain, Someone
who looked kind of like the Willendorf Mother…except that I could see the
sun and the moon and the stars through Her body. She didn’t speak. I don’t
think She even moved, but there was a feeling of—what? Stillness. A soundless
voice:
Relax and be still. I am here. A touch, a presence, a hovering. I
was accompanied. She shrank to about twice human height and I felt touched
again, this time near my heart.

As I started to regain consciousness, I found myself still in the ER,
but now I was cruising around just below the ceiling and watching the clocks
go really, really, really slow. I was unaware of the doctors and nurses
and other patients, but I knew that Louise was sitting next to me and Rose
was talking to the charge nurse. When I got back down on the gurney, the
Goddess was standing behind my right shoulder. She stayed there, even when
they admitted me and kept me in the hospital until Friday. When the respiratory
therapist learned that I had written two books, all he wanted to do was
talk about publishing his book. I felt flattered, but my priority was breathing.
Simple breathing. Breathe in. Breathe out. Regularly. Without working at
it.




She healed me that night. A week later, I was in Berkeley leading a ritual,
reading from
Rituals & Celebrations, and signing books in the Gaia Bookstore.
It wasn’t a complete healing, though. Yes, we trust the Goddess. Yes, we
still have to do our homework, so I found an acupuncturist who said that,
among other things, my chi was depleted. I got acupuncture every day, every
other day, every three days, every week, every two weeks. Six months later
I was breathing normally nearly all the time. I had another asthma attack
in the late ’90s—in an M.D.’s office, where his receptionist said I was
too noisy and made me sit across the room. The next attack was in early
2001, when I had a temp job in an emergency department. One of the nurses
grabbed me before I could get to my office, shoved me into a cubicle, and
hooked me up to a nebulizer.  




I have a modest sign on my wall now.
Things to do today: Breathe in. Breathe out. That’s something I pay
attention to. Like many pagans, I tend to be one of those cerebral types
whose energy is mostly in our heads. It’s breathing that gets me grounded.

I used my experience in the ER when I was revising

Secret Lives before I published it in 2011. In Chapter 23, when
Jacoba is in the hospital, she has a visitation from the same goddess.

      

A woman was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, the corner where
there should be only a bathroom door. She was black, as black as ebony.
As black as the coal under the old West Virginia hills. Did she have a
face? Jacoba was too groggy to see clearly. The woman stood up and moved
to the foot of the bed. I am keeping watch, she said, and as Jacoba kept
trying to focus her eyes, the woman began to grow. She grew as tall as
the ceiling. Taller. The ceiling wasn’t even there anymore. Jacoba stared.
She could see right through her—no, through Her—and what she saw was the
universe. Stars, planets, everything. The Milky Way. In Her black womb,
an entire nebula was spinning. Still trying to see more clearly, Jacoba
blinked, and when she looked again, it was an ordinary woman standing there,
and then she was fading away. Soon there were only dust motes dancing in
the sunlight coming in around the shade.

(Note: A somewhat different version of this story was published in
SageWoman Magazine around the turn of the century.)




 

Notes of a Nervous Nurse

(Well, some of you voted for the alliteration.) Having had a near-death
experience following an all-day asthma attack in June of 1992 (I’m thinking
I’ll retell that story in next month’s blog), I can recognize respiratory
distress when I see it. Every year when the pollen comes out, my thirteen-year-old,
rescued Maine coon cat, Schroedinger, and I spend a couple weeks sniffling
and sneezing. (Heisenberg seems to be immune to pollen.) This year, though,
Schroedinger seems to have been hit by more than mere allergies. I became
afraid she was dying.

Sunday, May 11. Schroedinger has had great difficulty breathing for
two or three days and it’s getting worse. A few years ago, Dr. Ridgeway
told me to cut a Benadryl into four pieces and give her one little piece.
But she hates pills. I hold the back of her neck and with a finger push
a pill between her teeth. She struggles and squirms. Spits it out. Hides
it under her tongue and spits it out a minute later. Then foams at the
mouth and fusses and struggles some more. Even when I hold her mouth closed
and stroke her throat and say, “Swallow it. Swallow it,” pretty soon we’re
both covered in pink foam. Not good. I’m calling the animal hospital and
getting an appointment. Thank Bast, they’re open every day.

We have an appointment with one of the other doctors for 5:30. But about
2:00, she’s sitting by an open window and her breathing seems stabilized.
Cancelled the 5:30 appointment. I hope this isn’t a mistake!




Tuesday, May 13. She’s worse than ever. She can hardly breathe, bubbles
are coming out of her nose, drool’s dripping out of her mouth. Her eyes
are so full of gunk she can hardly see. She must have a bit of diarrhea,
too, because she smells awful. She won’t eat or drink. I called the animal
hospital. Appointment this afternoon with a vet I don’t know.




At the hospital. Dr. Ridgeway’s in surgery all day, but when he comes
out for a cup of coffee, I ask him to come see Schroedinger in her carrier
so she’ll at least see a face she recognizes. He does so and comments on
how much she stinks and how awful she looks.




In the exam room, I answer the usual questions, but she’s been coming
here for as long as she’s lived with me (since 2005), so she’s got a pretty
thick file. Then we sit and wait and wait. A doctor I haven’t met before
finally comes in and examines my cat. She says Schroedinger has a tumor
in her eye, she’s got digestive difficulties maybe analogous to gallstones,
and the bleeding is the sign of something serious, maybe liver or kidney
failure. They have to hospitalize her.

They carry her back and leave me in the exam room for I don’t know how
long. It seems forever. Then I am permitted to go in and say goodbye to
her. She’s in a nice cage and looks bewildered and disoriented. (I'm sure
I do, too.) I know they’ll take good care of her. I
hopethey’ll take good care of her.

Wednesday, May 14. Even with Heisenberg beside me on my bed purring
and demanding to be petted, I tossed and turned all night. Will I have
to make the hard decision again and euthanize another cat? In addition
to all the other stuff, she’s lost weight and is slightly dehydrated. That’s
what happened to my first Schroedinger, but she was twenty-one years old.
I got to hold both of my last two cats as they were euthanized…but it still
broke my heart each time. I’m so afraid!




At the hospital for my first visit. They’ve got her in a nice clean
cage with food and water and an IV for hydration and a big, plastic collar
so she won’t pull the IV out. They also cleaned her eyes—no tumor! The
stink by her tail is from an abscess the size of a nickel. She had some
little scabs at the base of her tail (a flea allergy), but I thought that
was cured. That’s why she’s been biting herself. Hence the collar. She
looks so little and pathetic in the cage, and when I pet her and talk to
her, she hardly responds. One of her arms is shaved for the IV, and the
base of her tail and half of her magnificent tail are shaved. She’s very
lethargic. Barely breathing. But they’re keeping close watch over her.
I can’t stay long. Gotta go home to my hot apartment. This heat wave is
making me sick.





Thursday, May 15. It’s 104º where the hospital is, 102º closer to where I live in
a building that’s older than I am and no doubt has no insulation at all.
No sea breeze for days. And this is what I bring my recovering cat home
to. Is this a mistake?

And the medications! Flagyl, an antibiotic. Orbax, another antibiotic.
Ursodiol, used to dissolve gallstones. Carafate, for stomach problems.
Prilosec, for heartburn (I didn’t know it worked for cats). All of these
to be given to her with little syringes. One of the nurses put tape with
a red line at the dosage level for me. Schroedinger likes liquid medicine
only marginally better than pills, which is to say not at all and she squirms
so much it’s hard to shoot the medicine into her mouth. Her throat fur
is nasty and matted. Plus Nolvasan to clean the abscess, a cream to treat
it, and eye drops. I’m terrified. How do I follow a schedule of some medicines
three times a day, some twice a day, and one two hours later than the others?
How do I keep the syringes with their bottles? What if I do it all wrong?
How can I keep anything sterile in this apartment? (They didn’t tell me
I had to do that.) What if we all melt in the heat? What if I accidentally
kill my cat?

Well, when Charles was born, his father was stationed in Florida. It was
just Fred (my first cat, an Abyssinian-tabby mix) and me. I had just finished
my M.A. When I came home (alone) from the hospital, I took a deep breath
and said to my newborn son, “Well, I’m as new at this as you are, but I’ll
do the best I can.” So that’s basically what I just said to Schroedinger,
and then I laid a big, fluffy towel on her favorite table and figured out
how to fill and lay each syringe beside its bottle so I could keep track
of which was which and “feed” her one at a time.

Saturday, May 17. I took the collar off her neck so she could get
to the bowl of water I set on her table-hospital. What I discovered this
morning is that sometime during the night, she was biting at the abscess.
It probably hurts or itches. So when I’m not around to keep an eye on her
(bleach and haircut this afternoon), I put the collar back on her. I still
have zero confidence in my ability to give her all those syringes of medicine,
but we’re struggling through it. She still won’t eat. One of my friends
suggested baby food. I bought five little jars—chicken and turkey. She
declines to eat any, and if I try to force some into her mouth, she shakes
her head and bits of baby food shoot all over. Very messy. Another friend
suggested an eye dropper to give her water. I have another syringe from
the hospital, but she resists being fed water that way.

Her eyes are clear now. And her coat looks better, even though all her
shaved places still look pathetic. I still have very little confidence
in my nursing abilities, so when I talk to her about how well she’s doing,
I’m really talking to myself.

Sunday, May 18. She ate most of her little dish of kibbles last night!
And drank some water. Then threw up the kibbles. And as I’m writing this,
she’s eating the tuna another friend suggested. Only a teaspoonful, but
it’s a start. Being a nurse is apparently partly being a waitress. She’s
got her own little deli on the table—tuna, a few kibbles, some water.

The best sign—she’s breathing more easily and waving her tail back and
forth a lot, which she’s always done. She keeps getting it in her water,
but that’s okay. My friends have been sending healing energy and Reiki,
lighting candles, and making useful suggestions. And I know some majorly
talented people—shamans, healers, Reiki masters, priestesses, even a wizard
or two. Thank you, my friends. I think we’re doing all right. Our next
visit to see Dr. Ridgeway will be on Thursday.

Wednesday, May 21. She’s stronger now, which means it’s harder than
ever to poke those syringes of medicine into her mouth. In fact, I probably
missed a couple times. But she’s eating more (love that tuna!) and is walking
around with her tail in the air. Which makes me think I’m doing OK as a
nurse. Our next appointment is tomorrow afternoon. I’m going to take two
bags of cookies as a thank-you to all the staff members at the Long Beach
Animal Hospital for taking good care of my cat and answering my multitudinous
questions.

Galileo was right. Shakespeare's birthday is coming up.

This is bargain month. Two blogs for the price of one. (Okay, so I couldn’t
make up my mind what to write about when I started this blog last week.)

I know Galileo was right because I watched the lunar eclipse on Monday
night, April 14-15. Living on the earth as we do, we are seldom aware that
the planet is spinning on its axis and traveling through space in its elliptical
path around the sun. That’s why we say the sun and moon rise and set. That’s
what it looks like is happening every day.




Galileo, who was born in Pisa in 1564 (two months before Shakespeare)
came into a world ruled by the medieval Roman Catholic church, which taught
that the earth is the center of the universe, and the sun, the moon, the
five known planets, and the stars all revolve around it (and us). Most
of us know that after Galileo heard about the “spyglass” that had been
invented but not patented by a Dutch lens maker, he stole the idea and
built his own telescope. In 1610, after long observations of the heavens,
he saw that the Copernican theory that the sun was the center of the solar
system must be true and published his findings in a book called
The Starry Messenger. (In 1600, Giordano Bruno had said that the
earth moves around the sun and been burned at the stake.) In 1632 Galileo
published his
Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the World, which was also largely
about the Copernican system. When he was hauled before the Inquisition
and threatened with torture, he made a public confession and said his thinking
was in error. It’s said, however, that after his public confession, he
also said, “
Eppur si muove. It still moves.” He spent most of the rest of his
life under house arrest. Bertolt Brecht wrote a fascinating play about
Galileo that was made into a
movie starring Topol.




So on Monday night, I said to the cats, “I’ll just go outside and see
what’s happening.” I ended up sitting on the steps outside my apartment
for over an hour, watching the shadow of the earth (it moves!) cover the
moon. The eclipse was advertised as a “blood moon,” meaning the light looks
red. Mars, the red planet, was (from where I was sitting) about six inches
away from the moon, so there were two red objects in the sky.

As I sat there, I started thinking about eclipses and how this may be
the last full lunar eclipse I see in this lifetime. Which put me into a
nice
weltsmertz-y mood in which I pondered all the things I’ve done wrong
in this lifetime. That lasted about fifteen minutes. I shook the mood off,
spent a few minutes chanting the Tara mantra—
Om tare tuttare ture soha—then opened my eyes and looked up again.
Earth’s shadow was still moving. (I just did some Internet research. I’ll
get another chance. The next lunar eclipse visible from the western U.S.
will occur on October 8, but the ones after that won’t be visible from
Long Beach.)

The earth moves pretty slow, so while I was sitting there, I also had
time to remember previous eclipses I’ve seen. One memorable event turned
into a party. I was living in Garden Grove at the time, and a friend held
an eclipse party in Long Beach during which we danced in the empty street
under the light of the full moon, then watched the eclipse together. It
was a precious night and is a precious memory. That friend is long gone.




I’ve seen a couple solar eclipses, too. The first one I remember was when
I was maybe a junior in high school. I was sitting at my mother’s dining
room table writing a story. I noticed that the light coming in the windows
was fading, but silly me—I was so busy with my writing, I couldn’t be bothered
to get up and go outside. But maybe I saved my eyesight that day because
I would probably have looked right at the sun. Thirty-odd years later,
I saw another solar eclipse, but my boyfriend gave me a piece of very dark,
smoked glass to look through. Writing this reminds me of Rodgers and Hart’s

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court   (1927 and 1943),
which is based on Mark Twain’s 1889 novel. The plot turns on the handy
fact that when he is arrested, the Yankee just happens to know when the
next solar eclipse will occur and—guess what, folks—it’s coming today!
The Yankee thus tricks the knights and ladies into thinking he’s a great
magician, and when he makes the sun come back, they cheer and release him.
Then they make him Sir Boss, and he inaugurates a funny industrial age
in King Arthur’s court.




I’ve also seen a comet. This was the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 of 1994. I
was walking down the street in Westminster (in Orange Co.) and thought
to look up, and there it was! This is the comet that later crashed into
Jupiter.




April 23 is the 450th birthday of William Shakespeare. If you know me
at all, you know I’m a big Shakespeare fan and that I earned my Ph.D. in
English Renaissance literature with an emphasis on the drama—Shakespeare,
Jonson, Marlowe, and that bunch. I’ve been to Stratford upon Avon and seen
the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose Macbeth left me speechless. I own
the
BBC Shakespeare Collection, which is all the plays. I think I’ve watched
them all, but I keep losing track. I also have forty-odd more DVDs of the
plays, plus more books than I want to count right now. And I go to live
productions of the plays as often as I can. I’ve seen some good ones and
some awful ones.




Some people say “the man from Stratford,” who didn’t attend a university,
could never have written all those plays. I’ve seen the Oxfordian movie

Anonymous ,  which posits the idea that Edward de Vere, the
Earl of Oxford, secretly wrote the plays and that Will was an illiterate,
ham actor. There’s also the Marlovian theory that says Christopher Marlowe
was not murdered in 1593 but exiled to Italy. Funny thing, the Marlovians
say—many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in Italy. So it’s obvious that
Marlowe wrote the important parts of the plays and then sent them to his
buddy Will in London. Will wrote the comic bits and put his name on the
plays. But you know what? To paraphrase James Carville,
It’s the imagination, stupid. You don’t have to actually be at the
Elizabethan or Jacobean court—or in Ptolemaic Egypt or Bohemia or Rome
or Venice or Ephesus—to write plays set in those places.

My favorite plays? Probably
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
The Winter’s Tale, and
King Lear. A couple years ago, I saw a production called
A Midsummer Saturday Night’s Fever Dream. Yeah, Shakespeare plus
the Bee Gees’ music. I’ve also seen
Fleetwood Macbeth. More recently, I saw an MND by the Bristol Old
Vic and the
Handspring Puppet Company,  the company that also did
War Horse. When I saw that play, there wasn't a dry eye in the house
at the end. Their MND is the most creative production I think I’ve ever
seen. Spend some time at their website, and you’ll see how wonderful they
are.

I used to be a hard-core Shakespearean purist. Productions had to be done
on a thrust stage like the Globe’s and the actors had to wear Elizabethan
or Jacobean costumes. But then I started paying attention. I have the DVDs
of Kenneth Branagh’s productions, which I mostly like, even though he generally
does quite a lot of adapting, like setting
As You Like It in Japan. I even pretty much like his Broadway-musical
Love’s Labour’s Lost, in which he gave himself the best part (Berowne)
and most of Shakespeare’s actual lines. (But he also made a couple really
bizarre casting choices.) I like his repertory company a lot—Michael Maloney,
Gerard Horan, Jimmy Yuill, Patrick Doyle (the composer), the late Richard
Briers, et al. If you want to see a really nifty quasi-
Hamlet, rent

A Midwinter’s Tale ,  which is about out-of-work actors putting
on a weird version of Hamlet. The acting is so good that for a long time
I thought the characters were all real people. Another really nifty DVD
is

Shakespeare Retold .  This is a modern retelling in modern
settings of
Much Ado about Nothing (Damian Lewis as Benedick),
Macbeth,
The Taming of the Shrew (Rufus Sewell and Shirley Henderson as Petruchio
and Katharine), and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream…but not using any of Shakespeare’s language.
It’s very strange and lots of fun because the actors are so good. I have
more DVDs piled here on my desk, and I could go on…. But I won’t. If you
like Shakespeare, too, you know where to find his plays. And I bet you’ve
seen
Shakespeare in Love.

Gooder (and Badder) English

Take a big, deep breath before you read this:

At the end of the day, there are movers and shakers out there who step
up to the plate and demand a level playing field as they go to bat for
the rain makers who seize the day with their skill sets to utilize their
passion to hit a home run around the crisises whilst sending out distress
calls about personnel going rogue by scrubbing databases and making other
end runs because they’re not in sync with the power brokers and appeal
to the lowest common denominator—and they’re all doing it on steroids.

Ninety-four words! And it’s a word string that makes no sense at all.
Where did I get all those clichés and how did I learn to pile them up like
that? From listening to TV commercials (especially for the pricey consulting
firms) and pundits, politicians, and experts on shows like
Meet the Press and the
PBS News Hour. Don’t you just love that “crisises”? It’s pronounced
“crisiseez.” I heard a financial expert seriously use that word. In the
same interview, she also said “processeez.” I’ve heard lots of so-called
experts say “processes” that way. Why do they say it that way? I have no
idea. And that “whilst”? Who actually says that?

Another example of verbal nonsense came to me last night before I went
to sleep. (Picture the words parading through my head.)
When we viewed his plan through the lens of our passion for perfection
and drilled down and unpacked it, it was unacceptable, so we hammered that
fact home and hit him where he lived until he shot himself in the foot
and fell on his sword. Forty-six words in another meaningless, redundant
string pretending to be a sentence. Who talks like that? People in corporations?
People who got D’s in high school English? People trying to impress other
people? Maybe it works with them. But not with me.

A month or so ago, when I read a blog with a word string close to this,
how a heteronormative hegemonic discourse is shaped, I went, “Huh?”
The blog was filled with jargon taken from deconstructionist literary criticism,
which is the in thing these days in the academe. Another example:
distinguish between performance and performativity. Again, huh? I’ve
read a lot of this post-modern, lit-crit jargon in theses and dissertations
I’ve edited, too. Lots of people think this is proper intellectual English.
Back in the olden days when I was in graduate school, we wrote in regular
English. Sometimes I have to call my son and ask him to translate this
stuff for me. The regular definitions of the words just don’t add up to
a sentence that makes sense.




Why do we write (and speak) in redundant jargon and clichés? I think we
repeat ourselves to make sure people hear us. Even when we read silently,
there’s a voice in our head that reads out loud. We also repeat ourselves
to make sure people get the point we think we’re making. Jargon marks us
as insiders in an exclusive group marked by social background, profession,
or a common interest. We’re speaking in shorthand to our in-group. We hold
secrets (of marketing, science, astrology, any profession) that the outsiders
don’t share. We’re special, and we have special terms and redefined words
to prove it.




Some of our favorite clichés come from sports and may go back to the English
Victorian public schools, which were actually very elite private schools
for the sons of the imperial ruling class, schools like Eton, Rugby, and
Harrow (and Hogwarts), where sport (they didn’t use the plural form) and
war became metaphors for life among those upper-class gentlemen. Sport
and war were how they ran the British Empire. Here in the U.S., nearly
everyone (except me) is a sports fan, so we all know about home runs and
end runs (two different sports, right?). The martial clichés march right
along with the sporting ones. They’re a useful way to inflict damage on
the other side. Yes, language can be as damaging as real weapons. Just
ask anyone who’s been bullied.

My concern as a reader, an author, and an editor is gooder English. Which
is a phrase I stole eons ago from
Charo, a Spanish-American singer and classical guitarist who was married
to Cuban bandleader Xavier Cugat. But don’t fall for Charo’s act. Like

Carmen Miranda before her, this Latina cupcake was a lot smarter than she acted.
When I was a technical editor, I worked with engineers who were really
smart but lacked skills in written communication. When they turned in a
chapter to be edited for a proposal, I’d meet with them and pat them on
the knee and say, “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll just turn this into gooder
English for you.” I did it, and none of them complained. Not even the scientist
who wrote in Russian and used a software translation program.
Hmmm…let’s see now…here’s the subject of this word string, and…umm, maybe
this is the verb? and maybe this phrase modifies the subject—no, maybe
it’s a predicate nominative, and is this the right word? and I’ll have
to ask him what this technical term means. Software translation programs
seldom speak gooder English. (And yes, grammarians have their jargon, too.)

But you know what? If your intention is to write badly, writing this stuff
is fun! It’s fun
if you want to write ridiculous English. One of the characters in
Secret Lives is Frances J. Swift, the manager of the Center Towers
where some of the women and their friends live. Frances is the compleat
bureaucrat. Writing her dialogue was more fun than writing anyone else
in the book. Here’s a bit of one of her conversations with Bertha. This
takes place shortly before the talking cat turns herself into the Cheshire
Cat and drives Frances into a nervous breakdown. Note that Frances is not
stupid. She’d have to be smart to run a retirement center. Her sins are
linguistic. She talks like a corporate memo. When I worked in corporations,
I knew people who talked just like she does. Now I know smart people who
write like my examples at the top of this blog.

          She would accept
no sad stories today, not here, no, sir. Frances regrouped and faced Bertha.


          “Now, as you must
know, we cannot tolerate wasteful habits and practices here at the Center
Towers. Our esteemed management, that is to say, our highly trained culinary
dietician, plans our culinary menus with the greatest possible care to
fulfill the daily nutritional needs of our elderly senior citizens who
reside here with us, such as yourself. And we hope and expect that all
meals will be taken in our luxurious dining room, except in the case of
unavoidable illness, that is…of course unavoi—”


          “I eat there every
day. I’m almost always nutritionally and culinarilly satisfied.”


          “And you…er…carry
purloined food away.” She leaned toward Bertha, peering at her as if to
detect evidence of a guilty conscience. “I’ll come plainly to the point,
Miss Bertha. Are you…ahem…saving, collecting, or hoarding food to save?
So many of our elderly residents feel such a need to hoard, to clutter
their…now you must be aware that hoarding is unnecessary and unsanitary.
It betrays an exhibition of poor citizenship here at the Center Towers,
as it could lead to inexact and imprecise planning and significant overexpenditure
from our already generous nutritional food budget line. And hoarding can…ahem…also
lead to infestations of noxious insects, which would lead to the further
monetary expense of fumigation.” She took a deep breath. “This is only
a teensy hint, Miss Bertha, but if you are in need…if you would wish to
counsel and speak with our good Dr. Kingman, who is, as you must know,
a recognized and acknowledged authority on the gerontological diseases
of the aged, I would be only too happy and pleased to arrange an appointment
for you at your mutual convenience as soon as possible. And,” she finished,
“we also frown upon any wastefulness of our table napkins.”


          Bertha couldn’t
help but blink. “Paper napkins?”


          “They do add up.
If we watch our pennies, you know, our dollars will…ah…additionally take
care of themselves. We must always strive and reach for fiscal responsibility
here at the Center Towers.”




Hooray for gooder (and badder) English!

The Sweetest Songs I’ve Ever Heard

Back in the olden days when there was more on the radio than loud men
regurgitating their political views and music for teenagers, there was
a weekly program in which the host invited a famous people to imagine they
were going to be trapped on a desert island. What ten musical pieces, the
host asked, would you take along with you? The famous people selected everything
from Gregorian chant to grand opera to Beethoven to Rodgers & Hammerstein
to Johnny Cash. I listened to the show regularly and heard some wonderful
music. The only guest I specifically remember is John Raitt (the first
Billy Bigelow in
Carousel in 1945); all Raitt took along were his own performances.
(Gee, any ego there??)




This month I’m doing my own desert island show. I’ve been making my song
lists for about six weeks, and I’m down to about twenty now. As I write
this, I’ll reduce it to ten and attach links so you can listen, too. If
you want to hear these songs, therefore, turn on your sound. (I sure hope
all these links work!) Let’s begin the countdown.

10.
Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin. Gershwin (1898-1937) may have
been America’s greatest composer. The songs he and his brother Ira wrote
for Broadway and the movies in the 1930s are now part of the
Great American Songbook. George wrote Rhapsody in Blue in 1924 for
a concert by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. The story is that he promised
to write the concert piece, then got busy with a dozen other projects.
A few days before the concert, he saw in the newspaper that he was writing
the Rhapsody. So he got busy and wrote it. He died from a brain tumor in
1937. We can only wonder what wonderful music he would have written if
he’d lived another thirty or forty years.

9. “
About a Quarter to Nine,” by Harry Warren and Al Dubin, sung by Al
Jolson, tapdanced by Ruby Keeler. This is from the 1936 movie
Go Into Your Dance. Jolson (1886-1950) is said to have been the most
egotistical SOB ever to be in show business (though when I think of some
of today’s pop stars, I kinda doubt that), but he sure could sing. The
blackface is a shameful relic of the past, but it’s said that Jolson hid
behind the “mask.” You no doubt know that he starred in the first talkie,
The Jazz Singer (1927). He and Ruby, the star of
42nd Street(1933), made
Go Into Your Dance, it’s said, to save their marriage. It didn’t
work. Harry Warren (1893-1981) is said to have written more hit songs than
anyone else. I smile like the Cheshire Cat every time I hear this song.

8. The
Papageno Papagena duet from Mozart’s
Magic Flute, sung by Nathan Gunn and Jennifer Aylmer.
The Magic Flute (1790) is the only opera I really like. I own five
versions on DVD. This aria is from the Julie Taymor production at the Metropolitan
Opera. Although the opera is mostly about ceremonial magic (Mozart was
a Freemason and was accused of revealing their secrets in the opera) and
Prince Tamino and Princess Pamina are being initiated, all Papageno wants
are food, drink, and a girlfriend. He’s almost a perfect pagan. I’ve seen
Gunn (b. 1970) in person. He’s also done Lancelot in a new
Camelot and Billy Bigelow in a new
Carousel, both of which have been broadcast on PBS.

7. “
I Have a Song to Sing, O” from
Yeomen of the Guard by Gilbert & Sullivan (you may remember the
version of this song by Peter, Paul and Mary), sung by Alfred Drake and
Barbara Cook. I was somehow bitten by the Broadway bug when I was about
ten years old. That’s when I first saw and heard Drake (1914-1982) on TV.
He was the first Curly in
Oklahoma! (1943) and went on to star in
Kiss Me Kate and other great shows. But he made few movies and didn’t
sing in them. Fortunately, some of his performances were shown on TV in
1950s. Barbara Cook (b. 1927) is one of our greatest singers. She was the
first Marion the Librarian, and now gives master classes. I’ve seen her
in concert. If you know anything about me, you know that I love Gilbert
& Sullivan’s operettas. Here’s a bonus performance by Alfred Drake
and Doretta Morrow, the final scene of

Marco Polo (broadcast in 1956). 

6. “
Rose-Marie” by Rudolf Friml, Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach, sung
by Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. Ahhhh, pure sentimental schmaltz,
but ya gotta love it. This is from the 1936 movie. Eddy (1901-67) wasn’t
much of an actor, but he sang beautifully. MacDonald (1903-65) starred
in movies all through the 1930s and 40s. My mother used to walk around
the house singing songs from their movies. Makes me wonder if it’s genetic………

5. “
It’s De-lovely,” sung by Robbie Williams and “
Let’s Misbehave,” sung by Elvis Costello, both from from
De-Lovely (2004). The movie is a reasonably accurate biography of
Cole Porter (1891-1964). Yes, I really like Robbie Williams, even though
I’d never heard of him before I saw the movie. I already knew who Costello
is, but not singing like this. There’s a new Broadway show called
Let’s Misbehave. It has a very thin plot….but nearly forty songs
by Cole Porter. I saw it a few weeks ago. De-lovely, indeed!

4.”
Bridge Over Troubled Water,” sung (of course) by Art Garfunkle. I
first heard this song in graduate school. I was a terrible snob in those
days—all I ever listened to was classical music. (I didn’t even like the
Beach Boys at first.) But when a friend played this song for me, I nearly
fell over. Like everyone else, I was sad when Simon and Garfunkle (both
born in 1941) broke up, but I’m glad they came together for the Central
Park Concert.

3. “
Quand j’étais roi de Béotie” from
Orphée aux enfers (1858) by Jacques Offenbach, Hector Crémieux, and
Ludovic Halévy. I love Offenbach’s operettas, especially the modern productions
from Paris. (And hooray for subtitles! I can more or less read French,
but I can’t understand sung French.) This exquisite little aria is sung
by tenor Stephen Cole as John Styx, Pluto’s house servant. Eurydice is
soprano Natalie Dessay.

2. “
Love Changes Everything” sung by Michael Ball (b. 1962). I’ve been
a member of the Michael Ball Fan Club since maybe 1996. He’s an English
musical star whom I’ve seen twice in the U.S. and flew to England to see
in Kismet. All I play in my car are his CDs; if you ride with me, I’ll
turn him down but not off. This song, from
Aspects of Love (1989) by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black, was
one of Michael’s first hits. He is very young in this clip. More recently,
he has played Edna Turnblad and Sweeney Todd.

1. “
” sung by Pete Seeger. Pete (1919-2014) was one of the
two greatest men on the planet in the 20th century. The other one was Nelson
Mandela. I was lucky enough to sing along with Pete in a concert he, Arlo
Guthrie, Ronnie Gilbert (one of Pete’s partners in the Weavers), and Holly
Near did in L.A. some years ago. Any recording you hear of Pete live in
concert, you hear the audience singing along. Even though he was blacklisted
for seventeen years, through all that time he worked to bring peace and
kindness to the planet. He’s called the father of the 1960s folk revival,
which I remember. Here’s a bonus: “
Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” which Pete wrote. 

My top ten turned into twelve. And it seems to be the mostly baritone
list. I’ll come back some other time and do the mostly soprano list. I
loved writing this blog and listening to the tunes again. I hope you take
the time to listen now. Or come back later and listen.

As I stand (metaphorically) on the hinge of the year…

Back in 46 BCE, when Julius Caesar still thought he was master of the
universe, he decided to reform the Roman lunar calendar. The ancient lunar
calendar year begins in the spring, but by 46 BCE, the Roman calendar was
ninety days out of joint. That’s why Caesar and his advisor, Sosigenes,
gave the calendar a solar base and fixed the mean length of the year at
365 ¼ days. To shove the spring equinox back where it belonged, they also
inserted two months between November and December. The year 46 BCE was
thus 445 days long. People called it the Year of Confusion. By the 16th
century, the Julian calendar was also slipping, so it was further reformed
by in 1582 by order of Pope Gregory XIII. It’s his calendar we still have
today.




Caesar’s reformed year began on the first day (the kalends) of January,
which is named for Janus, the Roman two-faced god of the doorway (
ianus). Janus looks both forward and backward, as does Cardea, the
Roman goddess who represents the hinges on the door. Because I see today
as the hinge of the new year, it’s time to review 2013 and see what I can
project into 2014.




So what did I accomplish last year? I edited books or parts of books for
thirty-five authors and one nonprofit organization. Ten of these authors
are still with me as we move into 2014. I’ve done five books for one of
them, three for another. One book I edited is one of my all-time favorites:
Jonah’s Belly by Tony Wittwer. It’s a nifty, Stephen-Kingish epic
of modern mythology. Tony’s a good writer with his own voice, though we
did have some “conversations” about punctuation. I told him he’d used up
his entire lifetime supply of colons and semicolons. Another favorite was
a book about country music back when the Grand Ole Opry was still in the
Ryman Auditorium. And the author of children’s books who lives in New York
flew to L.A. to visit his family and came to Long Beach to take me to lunch.
He may move to Long Beach, which means I’ll have another theater buddy.




Other books I’ve edited? Healing from childhood abuse. An adventure on
a Mississippi riverboat. What to do if you get arrested for driving DUI.
(Don’t talk. Get a lawyer.) The “real story” about cosmetic surgery. A
sf novel about the separation of the sexes, with the men banished underground.
Haunted hotels in SoCal. Metaphysical books and a doctoral dissertation
in education. While most of the books I edited have been published, as
some of the authors learned that writing a book is Really Hard Work—and
getting it edited injures tender feelings—they gave up. And a few projects
didn’t go very well. When an author rewrote his book after I’d finished
with it and put “partially edited by Barbara Ardinger” in the acknowledgments,
I explained that I never “partially” edit anything and asked him to remove
my name. Another author, a psychiatrist, wrote such nonsense about women
that I fired him.




I went to the theater forty-five times in 2013, which counts seeing a
magical production of
The Fantasticks three times and seeing Arlo Guthrie, Marin Mazzie
and Jason Danieley, and Rachel York in concert. Only two of the shows I
saw were not musicals. These were heart-shattering productions of
War Horse and
Death of a Salesman. I went to the movies maybe five times, including
two filmed stage productions (
Merrily We Roll Along and
Private Lives) from London and Joss Whedon’s wonderful
Much Ado About Nothing. Not being a Buffy fan, I had no idea who
the actors were, but they sure were good! I saw
Saving Mr. Banks because Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks can do almost
no wrong as actors, but I walked out on Llewyn Davies because I decided
there was nothing inside him. Besides, he abandons cats. Which is unforgivable.
(Remember, I live with two rescued cats.)

I also invented my very own conspiracy theory last year. The company that
manages this building (which is older than I am) installed a smoke detector
and a something-else detector in every apartment. Mine are in the hall
between my bedroom and the bathroom. When I get up in the middle of the
night to go to the bathroom, the something-else detector sometimes flashes.
Like a camera. That obviously means some guy is sitting somewhere watching
me walk around in my jammies. I shared this theory with my friend Steve,
who admitted he’s seen flashing detectors in hotels…but he didn’t agree
they were cameras. Well, I think conspiracy theories are interesting. I
used to review books published by Inner Traditions—you know, those wonderful
books that say the Templars are responsible for everything that has ever
happened, that aliens built the pyramids in Egypt and South America, that
the Nummo came from Sirius and gave the Dogon their religion (which, says
an author whose two books I edited a few years ago, is the basis for all
the religions in the world), that the
Iliad and the
Odyssey took place not in the Mediterranean but in the Baltic. And
so on. Ya gotta love 'em. I love to read ’em. I seldom believe ’em. Except
Velikovsky. Him I still believe, I do, I do, I do. I admit I was also a
captive—for a while—of
Holy Blood Holy Grail. Now that’s a conspiracy! My own theory? Not
so much…but I sure would like to know why that light flashes and what that
guy’s doing with those photos of me in my jammies.

What about the coming year? One of my authors already has ideas for two
more books, another author for book five in his private investigator series.
One book I’m editing is a huge and hugely interesting opus on Islam by
a Muslim author who was born in L.A. and lives in Pakistan. He says we’re
climbing a mountain together. If so, we’re just past the foothills. I’m
learning a lot from this book, but, then, I always learn something new
from my authors. I know there’s a lot in the news about Islamist extremists,
but the two Muslim authors I’ve worked with (the other one’s a retired
engineer who lives in Tehran) have been consistently courteous and respectful.
Unlike the Southern preacher who visited my website and promptly took every
one of my edits out of his screed. He was obviously removing the “satanic
vibes” I’d snuck in on him. If every man in the world were as courteous
as my two Muslim authors, the world would be much more peaceable.




I will also continue to write blogs for Feminism and Religion. My next
one will be posted on February 2. (I’m such a technological nincompoop
that one of the founders of the site posts my blogs for me.) My February
2 blog is about building an elemental, pagan-style altar as an aid to meditation.




Happy New Year. And thanks for reading what I write.

Lucina in the Underworld--a True Solstice Story (sort of true)

 




People who read my
turkey tail/tale on FAR last month asked me to write another story.
So here goes.




Once upon a time in a golden city at the edge of a golden desert surrounded
by towering snowy mountains there lived a husband and wife in a luxurious
mansion on a bluff overlooking the great Western Sea. The husband was a
world-renowned folk singer named Offenbach. The wife, Lucina Cecelia Solis,
was the demigoddess in charge of the shining Magic Lantern that crossed
the sky every day and shed its sacred light on all the world. Thanks to
the unremitting (and usually unremitted) work of the Harpy who lived next
door and published a news sheet called
l’Opinion Publique, Lucy and Offenbach were seen by one and all as
the happiest, swingingest, most glamorous couple there ever was. What no
one knew, however, was that this red-carpet pair actually loathed each
other. Offenbach, who had once participated in a yacht race across an unknown
sea, now just loafed around the house all day playing his guitar while
Lucy tried to keep up with her work, which was tending the Sleeping Gods
and the rites and mysteries associated with the seasons and the whirling
of the planet.




It was a very cold day. “How many roads must the Hare hop down,” Offenbach
began singing, “before they call him an archetype or a prototype or an
iconic figure or a metaphor or a magical animal that’s a symbol of the
zeitgeist?”




“Offalbach,” his wife said, “it’s the middle of winter! Don’t be singing
about the March Hare.” She was answering fan mail and didn’t want to listen
to his dumb songs. “Offalbach, you’re so stupid! I hate you!”




He tried again. “Puff, the magic reindeer—” At this, she threw her pen
at him. It struck his guitar and left a huge ink stain on it. “Whoa,” he
protested. “I am a Poet-Philosopher. I am a Popular Oracle. I am Divinely
Inspired and my music has been known to charm wild animals and cause stones
to dance. I write the songs that make the whole folk sing. Hey! Give a
listen to this.” And he began strumming again. “Hello, Sunshine, my old
friend, gotta look at you again like a bridge over frozen water, gotta
row that boat ashore, hallelujah, C is for Cookie—”




“Well, you can’t charm me,” she yelled. “And I hate your stupid songs,
too!”




And that’s how it went with them. Thanks to the Harpy next door, they
were rich and famous, so they occasionally tried to be nice to each other,
especially in their public appearances at the solstice and equinox festivals
held in famous amphitheaters. Away from the spotlight, however, they led
almost entirely separate lives. Offenbach was, in fact, serially dallying
with the enthusiastic [a word that means “filled with god”] members of
his worldwide fan club and Lucy was carrying on with an Irish cowboy.  




And that’s how it went until this cold morning when Lucy went outside
to tend to the Magic Lantern in the sky. But look! It had disappeared!
Although the earth was mysteriously aglow, there was no light in the sky.
Where had the Light of the World gone?




Lucy knew what to do, of course. This happened every year. She had to
fetch the Magic Lantern and put it back up before the land and the people
all froze over. She’d been doing this task ever since she was young and
her mother, a Goddess of the Sun, had run off to Hyperborea with some hero
or other. Although she hated to admit it, Lucy knew that Offenbach’s music
helped keep the Magic Lantern shining, so she turned to her husband and
said, “Offalbach, the Magic Lantern’s fallen into the Western Ocean again.
It’s our duty to fetch it back up. Let’s go.”




With a put-upon sigh, the Poet-Philosopher-Oracle picked up his battered
guitar and set off with his wife down the stairs to the beach at the edge
of the Western Ocean. “I have a song to sing, oh, take me down by the river,
I’ve been hot and I’ve been cold, oh, and I’ve got a friend, oh—”

“Oh, Offalbach, can’t you ever shut up?” They were on the beach now, and
she led him to the Great Stone Door that opened into the Underworld, in
the anteroom of which her Irish cowboy boyfriend kept his sacred red cattle.
But she had no time today to speak to the cowboy. She and Offenbach had
to fetch the Magic Lantern and set it back up in the sky. They kept walking
and were soon standing before the three famous doors. Door #1 led to the
zoo where the King of the Sleeping Gods kept his menagerie of strange beasts.
Door #2 led to the limitless treasuries of the God Who Reigned Below the
Earth. And Door #3 led—where? Every time anyone opened the third door,
it seemed to open on somewhere else. One year it had opened onto a long
hall lighted by torches held by arms mounted on the walls. Another time
they had found themselves facing a brightly colored world filled with little
blue people dancing along a yellow brick road. Another year they had stumbled
into a boring existential dinner party, and some years back, they’d come
upon a fellow wearing horn-rimmed glasses and doing acrobatic tricks on
a clock hanging on the side of a building, while somewhere below him another
shabby little fellow was twisting through the gears of a great machine.
They had often watched a prince and a princess pass the challenges of fire
and water with the assistance of a magic flute and glorious music, and
just last year, they’d witnessed the slaughter of a dozen French students
standing on a barricade and singing in chorus and waving flags. What would
they find today? One never knew, did one.

Lucy opened the door. There they were, all the Sleeping Gods, except today
they were wide awake and dancing, and as they danced, they pulled Lucy
and Offenbach into the dance. After thirty-two bars of vigorous waltz music,
the King of the Gods took Lucy aside and told her where the Magic Lantern
was hiding this year, though as usual he had no idea why it was hiding
in the Underworld or how it had gotten there. Lucy immediately went into
the next room and picked up the Magic Lantern. Then she danced back through
the Wide-Awake Gods and Goddesses, who were now doing a lively French Can-Can.




Blowing a kiss at her Irish cowboy, she went back to the beach, drew a
labyrinth in the sand and walked the winding path. In the center, she turned
toward the east and set the Magic Lantern back up in the sky, where it
winked at her and went back to its customary business of shining upon the
all the lands.




And the folksinger? He was trapped by the members of a symphony orchestra
who cut off his head and hurled it into the sea. The head was still singing
as it floated away. “Hang down your head, sad husband, hang down your head
and cry….”




Happy Solstice! And now you know What Really Happens.




P.S. I thought up this nonsense while I was watching

Orfée aux enfers   by Jacques Offenbach, Hector Crémieux,
and Ludovic Halévy, an operetta in which the gods are asleep until Jupiter
drags them down to the underworld to party while he turns himself into
a fly and seduces Eurydice, who was previously fooling around with Pluto
disguised as a shepherd. This operetta introduced the famous can-can music,
which is actually called an “infernal gallop.”

Remembering a friend

I attended a funeral earlier this month, the first one I’ve gone to in
nearly a decade. Back in the late ’80s when I was an AIDS volunteer, I
went to so many funerals I never wanted to go to another one again. But
then my friend Arlene was attacked in 1995 by
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also called Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
ALS is a progressive neuro motor disease that renders the body totally
helpless while the brain remains as bright and clear as ever. Steven Hawking
is the most famous example of someone living with ALS. It’s an awful disease.
It spent two years killing Arlene. I cried at her funeral.

ALS also took two years to kill my friend Gregory Taylor, the owner of
a spectacular gift shop here in Long Beach named Babcock & Cooke. Every
September and October for more than twenty-five years, I went to Gregory’s
store to buy witches. I bet sixty percent of my 350 witches came from him.
I’d walk around and pick up this witch and that one, and then Gregory and
I would stand and talk for upwards of an hour before I’d make a decision
and buy just two or three new witches instead of a dozen. I wrote about
collecting witches and visiting with Gregory a year ago. He used to tell
me about the business trips he made every summer to artists across the
U.S., when he bought the most beautiful witches and other gifts he could
find.




And then, two years ago, I walked into Babcock & Cooke and there was
Gregory leaning on a walker. He told me the news. He sounded as cheery
as ever. As we talked about ALS, I told him about Arlene. It hit her first
in the throat; it got him in the legs. He said he was lucky because he
could still drive and pick his son up after school for some quality time
together, also that he was still seeing his regular customers. One year
later, the disease had overtaken him so thoroughly that he made the hard
decision to close the store. It broke my heart and the hearts of all his
other friends and faithful customers.




I found Gregory’s funeral very interesting. I can’t remember the last
time I was in a Catholic church. Basically, I stood up or sat down when
the priest gestured to the congregation, but I didn’t know the responses,
so I sat quietly and behaved myself. (That’s a lesson I learned a long
time ago: be respectful of other people’s churches.) I also watched as
the Catholics present took communion. There was a picture of Gregory—boy,
was he handsome!—on an easel in front of the altar. The funeral mass opened
with “Amazing Grace,” and then the families of Gregory and his partner
walked forward and took their seats. His son carried the box containing
his ashes. I met Gregory’s partner and their son when they adopted the
boy, who was, I guess, about ten years old at the time. Now he’s a freshman
in college and an accomplished surfer, a skill he learned from his father.
The priest began his sermon (homily?) by quoting the song “Seasons of Love”
from
Rent. You know it, of course—“Five hundred twenty-five thousand six
hundred minutes….” Gregory spent the seasons of his life gardening, running
his store, doing good works, being kind to people, and making friends.
Gregory’s brother, his partner, and his son all eulogized him. After the
service, I spoke briefly with Gregory’s partner. “I’m the one who came
in every year and bought witches.” He remembered.




There’s a new store in Long Beach now. It’s a sort of Son of Babcock &
Cooke and is right next to the old store. (The space is now owned by someone
else.) I don’t know the details of the transaction, but Gregory gave his
long-time employee, Mike, permission to use the name Babcock & Cooke.
The new store is about a quarter of the size of the old one and sells mostly
cards. Realizing I had a tradition to maintain, I went in last month looking
for witches. Hooray! Mike had half a dozen on a front shelf. We had a long,
friendly conversation, during which he said Gregory was still cheerful
but failing, and then I bought a small witch. She is now standing on a
bookshelf with a dozen of her sisters.

Gregory—thank you for being my friend all these years. To paraphrase the
crones in
Secret Lives, who would have gone shopping at your store (which,
I think, was newly opened at the time the action of the novel takes place)
if I’d remembered to send them to you.
And when he comes ’round again, let him come ’round in joy, let him come
’round in peace, let him come ’round in love.

Walking in Long Beach

You can call me The Little Engine That Could. I’m taking daily walks again.
“I think I can [pant] I think I can [puff] I think I can [finish that mile].”
A decade ago, when I lived in a different neighborhood along busier streets,
I was walking a mile or so every morning, and sometimes when I finished
editing in the afternoon, I felt restless and walked some more. I started
walking when I was diagnosed with a small, annoying cancer, and my friend
Margaret (a retired nurse) told me I’d heal faster and better from the
surgery if I were in better physical shape. Fear is a good motivator. I
walked nearly every day for five or six years. And then I got lazy.




I moved to a better neighborhood three years ago, but now I’m older. Lazier.
Fatter. Walking is Good For Me. I live five blocks from the Pacific Ocean
in a
Long Beach neighborhood that’s about a mile square with major streets
on all four sides of the square. I usually walk about a mile, varying my
route and time because I know that even a good urban neighborhood is still
an urban neighborhood and you just don’t want to take the same route at
the same time every day. What do I like about this neighborhood? It’s a
mostly quiet, working-class area. It has sidewalks, mostly in good repair,
under nice, shady trees. No hills. Stoplights at the major intersections
and generally courteous drivers and bicyclists. Though I almost got hit
by a kid on a skateboard who was staring at his iPhone. I yelled at him.
Loud.

What do I like most about walking in Long Beach? It has a diverse population,
and the people I meet are of all ages, colors, and income levels. Nearly
everyone I pass is friendly and responds to my friendly “Howdy!” In fact,
when I said that to a man who was unpacking the trunk of his car the other
day, he looked up and said, “Are you from the Midwest?” I said yes, and
he said it’s people back there who say howdy. (I say it because it’s two
syllables and doesn’t sound like a grunt. It’s also folksier than “hello.”)
We had a ten-minute conversation about Missouri and Illinois before I went
on down the sidewalk. When I encounter people walking their dogs, I always
say, “Hello, Doggie!” which makes their people smile. (I originally wrote
“owners,” but I don’t believe we can “own” the animals that live with us.)
When people pick up after their dogs, I always say, “Thank you for being
responsible.” I also see people feeding cats. One night it was an old guy
with three or four bowls of cat food halfway under a decrepit, rusted,
Oldsmobile. The cats were sitting on the curb watching him. He and I talked
about the strange habits of cats.

And then there was Liz, who lives in a blue-violet cottage with emerald
trim. One day I spotted a couple chunks of what I once learned to call
carnival glass in the parkway between her yard and the street. Carnival
glass is obsidian, except it comes in colors. I bought some big chunks
of red, blue, and striped glass from a garden store in Huntington Beach
several years ago. Stopping in front of Liz’s house, I picked up a piece
that’s as big as the palm of my hand and half striped black and half white.
A few days later, a yellow piece, after that, a sort of liquid green color
with blue splotches. By that time, I was looking at Liz’s driveway for
little pieces every time I went by, so one evening I walked up to her front
door and rang the bell. “I’ve been picking up bits of your glass.” “Yes,
I’ve seen you.” “I’d like to pay you for them.” Turns out, she and her
husband once bought a load of the glass and dumped it in their driveway.
At first, she said I couldn’t have any more pieces, but then she refused
payment, and then she said, sure, I could pick up some more. So I’ve picked
up a couple dozen pieces, most of them blue and white and smaller than
my thumb. Most of them are on the altars in my home. One’s right here by
my keyboard.




Another afternoon I met Beverly, who lives in a cottage with a xeriscaped
front yard, which is all native plants that don’t need much water. There
are cat-shaped signs with names on them, which made me suspect that her
cats are buried there. When I asked her, she said no, she just wanted to
decorate with cats. (She lives with about a dozen cats, some rescued.)
When I complimented her on the xeriscaping, she said she was looking for
a good gardener. Well, gee, I said, I have a friend whose partner is a
gardener. They live in a house surrounded by a jungle that is, like her
yard, an official wild animal habitat. I got Beverly’s name and phone number,
phoned my friend Penny, Penny told Trish, and Trish has now worked several
times in Beverly’s yard.




There’s hardly a day, in fact, when I don’t have a brief, friendly conversation
with someone. A few months ago, I met Carlinn, who is a retired ballerina
from New York. We stood on the sidewalk and talked for forty-five minutes.
I also pass Fire Station #2, on the lawn of which there is sometimes a
plaster sheep. One day the fire fighters were outside, so I asked them
where the sheep was. They said it was on vacation. This week it’s wearing
a pirate hat. Just this past Tuesday, I came to a bungalow where three
gardeners were scurrying around under the trees. When I spoke to the woman,
presumably the owner of the house, sitting on the porch, she and I agreed
that it’s good to watch other people working. Finally, there was the kid
(maybe nine or ten) on the bicycle. He had fishing gear strapped behind
his seat and was holding a fishing pole in one hand. He told me he was
heading for the ocean, going fishing for supper. So we talked about fishing
(I once caught a fish) and his gear and his hopes for supper. Nice kid.
I hope he was successful.




Another joy of walking is the scenery—the houses, many of which are older
than I am, and their gardens. Most of the single-family houses in my neighborhood
are California (or Craftsman) Bungalows, which were built from around the
turn of the last century until the 1970s. Actually, there are Bungalows
in a multitude of variations all over the city. (Click
here for history plus photos.) On Appleton Street, there’s a palatial
Bungalow that is highly decorated with fish-scale tiles and has its own
fountain. On other streets are gorgeous California Spanish and Box
Stuccos with their thick stuccoed walls, beautiful arched windows,
and flat, tiled roofs. An apartment building I often pass has gorgeous
tiles on the risers of its external stairs. One Box Stucco I sometimes
pass has the most glorious sidewalk and front porch I’ve ever seen—garden
gnomes, birds, frogs, other little ceramic critters, fairies, whirligigs,
fancy pots, sun catchers, streamers, and fey little signs. (But no Feegles
that I’ve seen, but—
crivens—I’m sure I wouldn’t see one.) One day I added a green marble
to the collection. (It was the only thing I had in my pocket.) One night
as I walked by, I heard country music coming through the screen door; the
next night it was opera.




There’s also a multitude of apartment buildings, which helps explain why
there’s no place to park. A typical apartment building is about as wide
as a house but maybe a city block deep, meaning you’ve got eight or ten
apartments, but (unless they built garages, which they mostly didn’t) only
two or three parking spaces. The Henley Court on Third Street has its own
courtyard and gazebo between two two-story buildings with Bungalow façades
and pillars. I don’t know what’s behind the gazebo, but the complex is
wondrous to behold. Another one is Rose Towers, a gorgeous pink stucco
with no towers but wonderful landscaping. There’s also a white Streamlined
Modern building with curved ends and a palm tree one of the tenants keeps
decorated with strings of colored lights. (There’s also a dentists’ office
that is Streamlined Modern.)




Thanks to my friend John, who loaned me his master’s thesis, “House Styles,”
I now know what I’m looking at when I get out into the sunlight and fresh
air nearly every day. Yep, I’m walking in Long Beach. I knew I could, I
knew I could, I knew I could.