Delia Marshall Turner's Blog, page 12

Trying out new neighborhoods

I have been joining and unjoining online communities of various sorts for the past three or four decades. I don’t know if the Usenet rec.sport.fencing group was the first, or the CompuServe HOM-9 forum. I still know people from both places.

In the meantime, I also physically moved, and had to build a whole new community in my new neighborhood, too. Mobility is tough.

Facebook was fun for a long while, and I posted a photo a day on Instagram for a couple of years. On Twitter, I tried out a bunch of different purposes and ended up using it mainly for following lists I had compiled rather than for following individual people. And then, as happens, I abandoned each of them, always for good reasons.

Now I’m trying out Mastodon, which people are hailing as the new utopian wonderland. (How are people so naive? Have they not gone through this before?) I’ve already seen something I can’t see on the federated timeline, and I have silently scoffed at a number of opinions, as I used to do on rec.sport.fencing and HOM-9.

But that’s what it is like moving into a new neighborhood.

I have a neighbor who parks her car on the sidewalk, for instance. Not up on the curb, across the sidewalk so you can’t walk on it. A couple of nice young persons who sell drugs on the corner make sure to say hello to me. Yeah, we have the occasional murder two blocks over or two blocks up, but on the whole my block is pretty sedate. Well, except that the cross street north of here is unexpectedly blocked off for construction, so an eighteen-wheeler tore down my street ripping down street signs and crashing into cars a couple of weeks ago, but well, you know, things happen.

My Mastodon address is @deliaturner@mindly.social. New neighborhood, new address.

Let’s see if I can get “verified” on Mastodon.

“Holiday newsletter”

You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. An older relative or friend sends out Christmas cards with a folded sheet of paper inserted, dense with text about people you have never met, or whom you saw once as an infant. Or they shoot out an email newsletter, if, like many of my family members, they’ve been online since the BBS days. My other relatives are all on Facebook, which I quit last year, so I don’t see their online holiday updates; I wouldn’t see them anyway because Facebook insists on showing me people I’m not interested in. (I quit Instagram because it was turning into TikTok Lite. I just left Twitter, because billionaire megalomania and mean-spirited conservatism masquerading as libertarianism is boring to me. I am not myself on Reddit, so no family members will find me; and I doubt if many of them are on Mastodon yet. But I digress.)

Here’s my holiday newsletter, which explains why I haven’t been updating for a while.

I published Dog of the Dead on Kindle. People liked it. My aged, weathered, arthritic, toothless cat developed cataracts and glaucoma. She has gumption and an appetite, so she’s still with me. Boris Johnson resigned. The Queen died. Russia invaded Ukraine. Bolsonaro denied the election. My home state elected a governor who wasn’t an election denier, and a Senator who actually lives in the state and isn’t a snake oil salesman. I can’t remember the order in which these things happened. The Phillies made the World Series but though they didn’t win, it was still miraculous. I took care of my grandchild two days a week. Loving someone small with all your heart is very good for the mood. Also, small children are hilarious. And his parents are raising him beautifully.I finally got COVID, but because I was vaccinated and double boosted, Paxlovid got me through pretty well. Actually, the RSV I got recently was worse. I continue to wear an N95 mask because why not? My city isn’t truculent about it. People are dying at the rate of 300 a day still, mostly people my age and older. The last couple of years I realized that people don’t think they’re ever going to get old, and they think being old means you’re not having fun and might as well die. I managed to qualify for another World Over-50 US team, went to Croatia, and won my third official Over-50 World Championship in 70+ women’s sabre. I did it so I could fill up the plaque I have with all my medals listed. And I also did it so I would have an excuse to fly business class for once in my life (It’s nice, but not that nice). My husband of 46 years died of the cancer that was diagnosed two years before. We had a lovely graveside service and a festive memorial picnic, and he is buried in a pretty place. I am fine now, thank you. No, seriously. People keep coming up to me and looking grave and haunted because death scares them terribly, and I have to tell them I am actually kind of okay. I’m not sure they like that answer. The grief counselor I’m seeing took a while to adjust to my attitude, which is that pain happens and the only way out is through. I think he’s used to fierce denial and avoidance. Everyone is different. Also, I had two years to grieve before my spouse died, so there’s that.I rejoined Facebook, but only to use my neighborhood Buy Nothing group. People take anything: A smart TV, some exercise equipment, boxes of nitrile gloves, a rowing machine, Bottles of Ensure, incontinence bed-pads, two percolators, and a jewelry box I never used, for instance. You might say I should sell everything and get a little money, but that’s too much like work. I could get a junk hauler to come and take them away for a large sum, which is easier but expensive. Or I could link people up with their heart’s desire, and have them take everything away themselves for free, so my husband’s nice things can help him live on and so I don’t contribute more than necessary to the planet’s wealth of discarded playthings.

There you go. All caught up.

The function of these newsletters, I think, is partly to reassure people that you haven’t been sitting home alone ignoring them, nor have they been ignoring you. And believe me, I meant to update. But somehow all I could do for a few months was play solitaire on my phone.

I’m off to deliver a pair of baby gates to a neighbor. Let me know how you’re doing if you have a moment.

Hot wheels

I have a grandchild who is now two and a half, and who lives nearby with his parents. The grandchild was born prematurely, just before COVID locked everything down. His grandfather is immune compromised, and until recently the grandchild couldn’t be vaccinated, so he has spent his entire life mostly inside his small family, often out of doors or in one or the other house, avoiding infection.

The plan originally was for me to watch him two days a week until he went to day care at six weeks, but his parents worked at home, so we just kept going. He has his own room in my house, because I had the space, and it has a crib (now youth bed) in it and a closet.

The closet is a place of unimaginable treasure, because I have added things to it gradually, and because two and a half years is a long geologic period if you’re talking accumulation of toy sediment. Along with Legos, wooden train tracks, balls of various types, some art supplies, random household objects, some dress-ups, and a few changes of clothes for those occasions (every time he visits) that he gets thoroughly soaked with the hose in the back yard, there is a bin of tiny cars, scores and scores of them. A pack of five Hot Wheels or Matchbox cars (both the same general size and both now made by Mattel, I think) is really cheap, so I buy him a pack and surprise him with a new vehicle every time he comes. I have a cigar box I found that is called the “car box,” and I change its contents every time he comes over. I always put a new one in the car box and he always finds the new one right away and shows it to me, even though he must have over a hundred vehicles by now. There are sedans, race cars, food trucks, steam-rollers, dump trucks, bulldozers, hot rods, boats, and even helicopters. The grandchild prefers things with wheels. Wheels are the main thing. He also likes bulldozers and other construction equipment, but only if they have wheels.

Not that long ago, I also bought a cheesy-looking blue-and-orange container of Hot Wheels tracks for the tiny cars.

I cannot express how indefinably awful those tracks are. The colors are unpleasant to the eye. The pieces are out of true and they bend and flex in unsightly ways. The joints are not easy to connect, and also not easy to disconnect, but they come apart on their own just fine without any warning. The joints are also oddly unstandardized – depending on whether you are attaching two curves or two straight pieces, or if you are locking a track to the bin that also serves as a foundation, it attaches a different way with different hardware.

He loves those Hot Wheels tracks. When I ask him what he wants to do, he said “Hot Wheels,” in his husky little voice, and he climbs up the stairs ahead of me unless I bring the container down to the living room first. We can spend 45 minutes, which in toddler time is a full day, assembling the tracks, putting the cars on the tracks, and letting them career down the vertiginous and warped tracks to spin out on the wooden floor. Some of the vehicles are too wide or too high to fit, and we discuss their size. I tell him something won’t fit because it’s too big, and he tries anyway, and sometimes it fits and sometimes it doesn’t. The joints, which vary from place to place and are not intuitive, are too finicky for him to assemble just yet, so I have to do it. We sit on the floor surrounded by scattered cars with tracks swooping around us, working intently on the important task of making cars go.

I have the urge to buy a bigger, better set, but then I remember my Grandma’s place. It smelled of cat pee, dirty dishes, and old newspaper, that place, because Grandma was very confused from an early stage of her life and lived with her equally confused oldest son, but she had a wooden ark with wooden Noah characters, and well into my tweens my sister and brother and I enjoyed playing with that thing. We also loved her collection of mantelpiece elephants, and we dug into her piles of newspapers to read the Sunday Inquirer funnies that we missed because Mom and Dad subscribed to the Bulletin. Yeah, the place smelled funky and Grandma and Uncle Brink were beyond peculiar, but we enjoyed it.

My other grandmother, Obie, had an objectively even more wonderful place, because she lived in the countryside with a stream, a pasture, sheep, a pony, a big carriage house full of dangerous outmoded equipment, and a chicken house full of chickens, but in the cold weather and at night, she also had a closet under the stairs. There she kept some white proto-Legos in a cylindrical cardboard tube, a box full of used playing cards, and some jigsaw puzzles. My sister and brother and I, and often our five cousins who lived next door, built card houses and brick castles on her big Oriental carpet in the big room, and then we cleaned up for dinner because Obie was tidy and compos mentis, unlike Grandma.

I am now the grandmother, and therefore I am part of particular brand of childhood memory, but I’m not the one who makes the memories. The grandchild is the one. I don’t get to judge the aesthetics of those twisty, flimsy vinyl tracks or yearn after something crisp, well-designed, and possibly made out of sanded finished wood. It’s the grandchild who says, when he enters the house, “Hot Wheels?” and we go upstairs because I am his grandmother and this is his grandmother’s house.

Deleting the archives

I understand hoarding. I also understand throwing stuff out. Hoarding is only fun when I’m doing something with what I have acquired. Throwing stuff out is fun no matter what, though it’s scary. So many bags of paper hauled to the shredding service, gone forever! It’s cleansing.

Over the course of a life, I hung on to crates of letters I wrote, as well as old transcripts, photos, pamphlets, and programs. A few years back, I threw out most of them and scanned the rest so they wouldn’t take up space in my house and so they’d stop making me sneeze.

I also long kept a daily handwritten journal, first sporadically and then, starting thirty years ago, almost daily. For a while, I took great satisfaction in the accumulation of composition books on my shelf, but at some point I realized they, too, were just so much crumbly clutter. I put about a year into re-reading them, typing up the bits I wanted to remember, and shredding the rest. It’s the daily process of writing that I value, not the physical writing itself.

I was an enthusiastic blogger for a long time, in addition and in parallel, though I kept it mostly friends-locked. Blogging got me through my spouse’s mid-life crisis, my graduate school ordeal, my ten-year span of being my mother’s caregiver, and my teaching career. A while back I downloaded all my blog posts and put them on my computer, then deleted the online blogs. This is the only one that’s left and it’s very occasional.

The process of paring down my archive continues. For instance, I have had a Twitter account for a very long time, but I regularly delete my old Tweets. I mostly have the account so I know the breaking news before it’s encapsulated in the Washington Post. I was an early Facebook adopter, but a year or two ago I got rid of all my old updates, likes, images, tags, and shares, and then deleted my account because it was clear I was the product they were selling. I have another Facebook account so I can keep up with some groups, though the new Meta policies make me suspect I won’t be able to do that much longer, either. I just downloaded and deleted my Instagram account, because it’s trying to be TikTok. I like TikTok okay when I’m bored, but I don’t post; I joined Instagram so I could take photos of things I saw on the street and share them with friends.

And now, here I am, with a tidy folder of digital files. With what’s left, I could write a memoir.

I guess.

Memoir has its down-sides. Among the digitized documents on my computer is an “autobiography” that a nice volunteer helped my mother write when she was in the skilled nursing center. Both my mother and the volunteer were amiably confused about just what Mom had done, and when. It’s really disconcerting to read her autobiography, because I know for a fact that a lot of it is out of order or just downright wrong. I don’t want to write one like that, if I write one at all.

I haven’t come to any conclusion about all this. I’m just making a timeline right now, with some notes, and it’s mostly for my benefit. It’s both awful and lovely to remember some of the things I did. And it’s a great opportunity, once I’m done, to get rid of most of the rest of the “archives.” Somehow, I think that would be the evental goal. To organize it all, to sieve it and boil it down, until all that’s left is a story I could read to myself when I am bored and want to know who I was, once.

Off my mind

When I get mired in a sinkhole of avoidance, as one does, I often turn to keeping a little bullet list of sorts to get me back into action. Everything I want to do on each day goes on a handwritten checklist, and as I achieve something, I tick it off and cross it out with parallel lines. The more trivial the task, the better, because it means I will get something done. Every time I get something done, I feel braver, stronger, and more ready to tackle the next thing. Not to mention that making lists is an achievement in itself.

In the mornings, I journal, and I almost never skip, but it goes on the list. Most days I meditate for a minute or three, and on the list it goes, complete with a little check-box, so that I make a neat little “x” in the box and put three lines through “journal.” Dishes. Laundry. Clean out inboxes. Check. Check. Check.

At the end of the day, I regard my page with all its checks and line-outs, and if I didn’t get something done, I just put a wiggly line and an arrow through it and put it on next day’s list if I still want to do it, so that everything on the list is marked.

Thus, everything is achieved. Everything is processed.

Yesterday, for instance, I picked up a package, returned another package, wrote a synopsis, did laundry, watered plants, went to fencing, did the grocery shopping, and picked up a few items I needed.

I only know that because I just looked at yesterday’s list. I had forgotten all of it. It was out of my mind entirely. I don’t have to keep any of it in my memory, so yesterday presented itself to me this morning as a vague, industrious humming blank.

I have outsourced my life to my little page, and there it stays, all crossed off.

Being organized, it turns out, is sometimes a process of detaching myself from reality. I’m all in favor of that, mind you, but maybe I should put “Pay attention” on my little list. Or “Be present.”

Journaling and moving on

Many books on journaling seem to think of the habit as practice for real writing, but for me it is the real writing, and all the rest is just projects.

I write with a fountain pen in a bound, lined-paper book. I date the entries. I write almost every day, almost always in the morning, almost always just once a day. I write about whatever matters to me, such as:

Events: What happened yesterday that I want to remember? What’s awful or joyful in the news? What stories would I want to tell? What would I rather nobody knows? Was my husband feeling better yesterday, or am I fooling myself?

Fiction: Begin a story. Write the next scene. See where it goes. Take something I think or feel, or two things that don’t seem to match. How does the character ignore awfulness and go on with life? How might the character handle grief? death? loss? Why is it funny? Why do I want to make it funny?

Processing: How many organizational systems do I have, and which ones could be combined or abandoned? What’s working? What’s not? What do I need to give up in order to keep going? What is the function of keeping up with social media? What do I need to keep doing while my husband is so sick for so long? What do I need to start doing for him, and will it make him feel helpless?

Plans: What do I need to get done today? What can be optional, and why? What is my problem and what is not? How will I protect my sanity today? Which things on my endless task list can I stand to tackle today? Should I go with my husband to that oncologist appointment on Monday or let him take a Lyft? They’re just going to give him IV fluids and he will talk at length, often confusedly, to the doctor, who will listen, god bless him.

Questions I can’t answer: Why has the oncologist’s office started calling my phone instead of my husband’s? Should I go ahead and buy that cemetery plot without telling my husband? What should I do next? How long will someone with a terminal disease survive? Years? Months? Days? What will it be like without my spouse of 46 years? How long do I have myself?

Advice: What have I told someone recently that I should take to heart? Which books should you keep, which ones should you donate, and which ones should you just chuck because they’re worthless or worse than worthless? What would I tell someone else about living with someone who’s dying? Why don’t I want other people’s advice?

Feelings: How do I feel? Why do I feel that way? Why are some things important to me, while others aren’t? Why do I like the neighbor’s new dog so much, when I don’t generally don’t like dogs? Why am I sad? happy? angry? impatient? stuck? How should I feel about my husband saying he’s not sure he can go on like this? Is maintaining a matter-of-fact demeanor always appropriate, and why?

What I notice: The weather. How I feel. What’s happening around me. Things I like about my house. Why is that electric company truck parked outside my house with a man in a cherry-picker? Why are those teenagers screaming as they walk? What is it I like about that dumb bronze squirrel I keep on my windowsill, the toothy grin or the little paws? Do I hear the toilet flushing upstairs and the occasional groan, so I know my husband survived the night?

Everything else: Lists. Things I want to get done. Rants. Bitter complaints. Illuminated letters. Little sketches of birds. What I’d like to learn how to do. Things I wonder about. Why my feelings are hurt or why I am feeling accomplished. What my husband’s arms look like and why they make me so sad. Is it the huge red blotches, or is it how skinny they are? Why does he keep rubbing my feet at night? What will I miss about him? What won’t I miss? How lucky am I, in comparison to so many people? What does it feel like to be almost crying when the utility employees are going on with their job outside my window and my husband is alive and just as silly and sweet (and annoying, and boring) as ever?

Then I close my journal and go on to the next thing on my list, and all those thoughts are out of my head and safe inside the book, where they will stop bothering me and protesting that they are important, dammit. Then I can move on.

I got paperbacks and COVID

Well, my luck finally ran out. Or rather, my precautions finally weren’t enough. I couldn’t hold off a callous, indifferent world any longer.

Also, conditions worked against me. My spouse had to go into the hospital for a procedure last week, so I had to be in the hospital (masked, but many of the hospital personnel were letting their masks hang under their chins). I had to take lots of public transit (Philly riders are awesome at masking, but there’s always someone pulling their mask down to talk on the damn phone). I was at a gathering of friends where, as I was walking in, a friend announced to me she had COVID the previous weekend but her doctor said it was fine to go to meetings as long as she was masked (I was masked, N95 as always, but I left immediately, went home, and attended remotely). I have been wearing a mask everywhere for over two years.

Yet all my individual efforts were unsuccessful, finally. I figured I was having seasonal allergies (that’s what it feels like) but just in case I tested on the 15tth (negative) and today (positive).

My grandchild is unvaccinated. My spouse has stage 4 cancer. I have asthma. Right now, I am proud that I lasted this long, but honestly right now I am exhaustedly angry at people for being people. For everyone wanting the world to be the way it always was. For getting so annoyed about a face covering that they’re willing to let old and sick people die. For people I know going out in public when they’re infected. For scientists and doctors telling people they can go back to normal too soon after infection. For human beings spreading misinformation like air, just like infection, and for other human beings being fatalistic.

I’m fine, thanks. It feels like bad seasonal allergies. I can smell. I’m coughing, and will end up with bronchitis, but I always do when I have an upper respiratory infection. I just don’t want my husband to die and I don’t want to infect my grandkid, my kid, and my son-in-law.

There’s a limit to how much my individual efforts count, though. Obviously.

In nicer news, I got paperback copies of Dog of the Dead today. They look pretty good.

Writing the ghosts

The other day I was sitting in the hospital waiting room, as one so often does when dealing with a family member’s illness.

While I was there, I drafted half a short story, because I had remembered to bring my journal with me.

The story didn’t come into my mind just then. Instead, it was assembled from various ghosts racketing around my brain: A character from Dog of the Dead. A book of spells I bought in the bookstore. The sadness I feel about my family member’s illness. The regrets of getting older. All the tasks I don’t get done around the house. Failures. Losses of all kinds.

My story bubbled up out of all those things, as stories do. I don’t believe in magic, but I do believe in stories and in the way our brains make magic out of reality.

The beginning of the story was complete by the time we were called for the procedure, and I left it to percolate. The spell was for banishing ghosts from one’s house, specifically a departed mother, but I disposed of the mother’s ghost quite nicely in the book. She caught a plane to the afterlife. (Really.) What other “ghosts” might someone have who didn’t believe in ghosts, though? I thought about it for a couple of days, realized that we all have regrets that haunt us, and then I finished the draft today.

Here’s the story.

I’m not the main character, I don’t think the way she does, and I don’t share her ghosts. But writing stories allows me to put things together and think about them deeply. When I was finished, I read through it a couple of times and noticed things I hadn’t even thought about while I was writing.

Worthwhile expenditures of time

Because of the recent noise about Elon Musk acquiring Twitter, I was forced to think about how I want to spend my time.

I realized immediately that “spending time” is a metaphor. I don’t actually spend time, nor does it spend me. There is no currency involved. I am in time, and it carries me along. I can occupy myself by floating, diving, flailing, grabbing onto passing detritus, zig-zagging from bank to bank, but I’m still carried on at the same rate, eroding around the edges as I go.

Time isn’t a river either. (I recommend looking up Kay Ryan’s poem, “The Edges of Time” if you would like to digress even futher). It’s not a container, nor is it any of the other things people compare it to. So I’ll stop considering the expenditure of time and the philosophical and and linguistic aspects of that metaphor out entirely. Great brains spend much time and thought (see what I did there) to much better effect.

The fact is, I get a few things out of reading Twitter, but mostly it doesn’t make me feel good. I like the satisfaction of having a nuanced view of the world and an early notification of what’s going on as it happens, and I enjoy a number of creative accounts, but mostly when I look at Twitter, I feel bad and I don’t get anything done. It’s an unsuccessful distraction.

I don’t get the choice whether or not to be distracted, however. I will always be distracted. My entire life is a racket of distraction. The choice seems to be what distractions I would like to choose. Yesterday, then, it seemed to me that the choice was not about Twitter (I’ve given up Facebook, and I only use Reddit to keep up with fencing and to fight with strangers in r/Philly when I’m in a bad mood), but about my phone. I have an Apple Watch that serves just fine for seeing who is texting or calling me, and it lets me check the weather and control my music, so honestly I don’t have to have my phone out of my pocket. And I even have a hearing aid with Bluetooth that I can use in a pinch to answer phone calls I have to take.

Focusing on technology is a digression too. Half of the books I read are on my phone, and a good thing too because it has allowed me to get rid of a lot of unnecessary hard copies. The point is, what makes me feel useful, productive, or happy? What seems, after the fact, to have been a good activity? Reading is one of them, of course, though generally not reading Twitter. Writing is another, though again, not writing on Twitter. Both reading and writing are enormous categories. Some reading, and some writing, just isn’t worth it.

What else is worth my time? Petting the cat. Talking to strangers on the bus. Playing new music and deciding what I like. Texting friends and family. Having enlightening conversations with the two-year-old grandchild. Opening the back door on warm days and hearing the sounds of the city.

What’s on your list?

Footnote: A reader wrote the nicest review of Dog of the Dead and I realized I needed to re-upload the manuscript again (I found the missing words she refers to when I was trying to format the paperback [my wonderful graphic designer is helping me figure out how to format the cover]). I did that while I was thinking about this blog post. All of that was absolutely worth doing but I notice an hour has passed.

Dog of the Dead Giveaway on Goodreads!

Free copies of Dog of the Dead to the winners of the giveaway!

.goodreadsGiveawayWidget { color: #555; font-family: georgia, serif; font-weight: normal; text-align: left; font-size: 14px;<br /> font-style: normal; background: white; }<br /> .goodreadsGiveawayWidget p { margin: 0 0 .5em !important; padding: 0; }<br /> .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink {<br /> display: inline-block;<br /> color: #181818;<br /> background-color: #F6F6EE;<br /> border: 1px solid #9D8A78;<br /> border-radius: 3px;<br /> font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;<br /> font-weight: bold;<br /> text-decoration: none;<br /> outline: none;<br /> font-size: 13px;<br /> padding: 8px 12px;<br /> }<br /> .goodreadsGiveawayWidgetEnterLink:hover {<br /> color: #181818;<br /> background-color: #F7F2ED;<br /> border: 1px solid #AFAFAF;<br /> text-decoration: none;<br /> }<br /> Goodreads Book Giveaway Dog of the Deadby Delia Marshall Turner

Giveaway ends April 26, 2022.

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