Lizkdc Dislocation

A Roundabout Farewell (to Sarah Palin)

My own mother took me to task for what she termed the heartlessness of my reaction to the Sarah Palin resignation.

Now she's a woman who is so soft-hearted that she's a hero and a prize and also, incredibly annoying.  Like the other day there was a pot of dead flowers and I was throwing them away and she was, literally, trying to talk them back to life:  "you're gonna be okay, you just need a little more time!", and I was all, fine, I'll take them out to the back garden and plant them in a corner and we'll see if they come back to life, ok? Humoring her like a five year old. I poked a hole in the soil with my finger and jammed them in the ground. 

We went off on our trip to Ohio and it rained a lot and we came back and not only had they returned to life but put out little pink blossoms. The little floral bastards.  Mom still talks to them, commiserating in a condescending voice when I am in earshot: "See! Some people are so mean, but I knew you just needed One More Chance."

From a Distance

George's Island, Boston's Skyline, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Boston Harbor July 4 from George's Island

Boston Harbor on a holiday is this total crossroads--ferries to Provincetown and Salem, Hingham and Quincy, tiny water taxis speeding to the airport, boats headed to the Harbor Islands full of folks with gear to picnic, swim and hike, and some headed far out to the Boston Light or to whale watch, tour boats chuffing round the harbor with folks just laying back to see the sites.

The old battered wooden hull of the U.S.S Constitution (THE older commissioned vessel in the U.S. Navy, thank you very much) being hauled out by tugs for one of its regular turnarounds so it doesn't rot at its mooring, slender sail boats leaning far into the wind on this breezy fourth,

An enormous Death Star of a cruise ship, talller then the convention center, looming at the Black Falcon Cruise Terminal, shining superyachts tied up at the Boston Harbor Hotel, white with the useless gleaming white of celebrity teeth, unweildy Duck Boats, three masted wooden ships out of a time machine beginnin to arrive for Tall Ships week, police boats and working tugs, and a few battered fishing boats, still.

Take the boat out to one of the islands, and the city skyline fades to a peaceful, blue, toylike vision in the distance, and all the hubbub of the port quiets to the island docks and the quiet wakes of sailboats. A great place to gain some perspective, and look at the city where people began to take the actions that launched a nation.

A piece of it

A piece of it, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Flag, Rowes Wharf, Boston Harbor July 4

Sometimes an image is conventional and yet meaningful to you at the same time.

A year ago, I feared a worse time for our country might come out of the dramatic, exhausting, suspenseful, unbelievable,crazy rollercoaster election moment.

But the feared future did not come to pass, and a better one did. Imperfect but good.

What Up, Noah?

Burnt pink beach plum, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Crane's Beach Estate, Ipswich MA May 30 2009

Remember this stuff? Sunshine? Yeah, I took this on that great hike at the end of last month and it's rained, pretty much every day since.

Out of the blue, several folks told me this week that they wondered where my blogging had gone, and said they cared about my writing. What they said mattered to me. :-)

I could blame the addictive ease of Twitter and Facebook, the microbloggin and incremental socializing that comes easier then composing a proper bit of writing. But it would be toolish to blame the tools.

It's about the ego, as it always is, and getting around the voice that tells you to put off thinking and crafting sentences, or whispers that what you have to say is not worth the keystrokes. It's about being present enough to other people in your life to keep putting down the thoughts about the world we share, and stuffing them in the electronic bottle, and tossing them into the byte rippling river. Like so.

Twitter's Two Weeks: "Over", and Now, the World's Attention

Here's a startling and ironic juxtaposition

From the headlines of last week:
Twitter hype punctured by study (BBC)
"Nobody Tweets" (Harvard Business Review)

Both pieces responded to the same study, and both took a skeptical look at the hype surrounding the Fail Whale, and with good reason. A nugget which drew special attention was the discovery that 10% of Twitter users--the power tweeters--produce 90% of the tweets, while most users sign up, tweet a few times, then don't appear to speak again. 

Was this a sign that Twitter was yet another over-hyped plaything of the knowledge classes, a successor to the Blackberry in acting more as a sign of belonging than a tool that would actually be of use in the larger culture? And scariest of all for the immensely reputation-sensitive wired classes, was Twitter's aura fading so fast?

But wait! Just as the critics began drawing a bead on the tool's limits, the ground shifted with the dramatic events in Iraq.

Birds and the Bees

You know what's something I never knew before I gardened?

I never knew that birds have a community going on.  And when you come out and do something to the landscape, they get excited.

Not if you're just messing around a little.  But if you're in one of those phases where you're digging a big hole, or putting in a new tree or rearranging the landscape significantly they start making a lot of  extra noise up in the trees.

Birds:
What's she doing
Dunno
Turning over the dirt YES we like that YES
MORE WORMS MORE WORMS MORE WORMS
Ha ha ha ha and SEEDS more SEEDs more SEEDS
GO HUMAN GO dig that shit whooooo!!!
Finish that shit up so we can fly down and start snacking Ha ha ha

It's just like a whole chorus up there.

They're birds, so it's easy to get happy apparently.

The bees don't even wait for you to finish what you're doing.  They too feel like you're gardening exclusively for their benefit, and furthermore, why are you in their way to the blossomy goodness?  The huge jumbo jet bumblebees are like bzzzz bzzzz move your hand move your hand move your hand im inna hurry bzzzz

The worms, they do get the hardest break.  You can hear their tiny wormy cries: Gah why did you cut me in half  I was aerating!!
Me: Sorry, didn't see you.
Worms: Well watch where you've fucking digging OK HOLY SHIT THE ROBINZZZZ

Birds:  ha ha ha ha AWESOME!!!!!!

Giveaway

I spent the day hearing family stories, awaiting the wake and funeral that will happen over the next two days.

My Aunt A was quite an excessive woman.

She raised eleven children.

Then she took in a teenage refugee from Vietnam.   And several unwed mothers.

Then she was part of a program to visit mothers in prison and nurture *their* children.

And so on. 

And someplace in there she had a job outside the home for several years and was very proud of collecting a small Social Security check that symbolized having been part of the paid workforce as well as an epic homemaker. 

Proud, but each month she divided the check into several portions and gave it away. Anonymously.

Her children chided her for sometimes sending her donations in cash.  It could be stolen that way, they said. 

She said maybe the thief needed the money.

What are you gonna say to that? If that Jesus guy is up there, she and He will get along just great.

Fragile

Fragile, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Plum Island, Newburyport, MA

My Aunt Annemarie died yesterday.

Each of us is a bit sad for ourselves, and the passing of time, and our own fears for our bodies, minds, loves--the idea of aging and death does that.

But it was the best humans can make of death. She had a stroke a month ago, and never revived. So they brought her home, so she could die in her beloved house, with her husband of fifty years, and her vast crowd of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, sisters and brothers in law. Some old friends. Outside there was a magnolia tree in leaf that she planted in remembrance of her own mother, long ago. Mass was said. People told stories and exchanged memories. Life support was removed and a while later she stopped breathing.

She was a woman with a vast influence of love, so much so that you could hardly draw a circle around where it all ended . . . the influence spread out and out like the roots of a huge, spreading, ancient tree.

Now is the hubbub part of death. Hosting an out of town relative, and coordinating with my brothers, and drives and drop off, and wake and funeral. We will keep ourselves busy, and do ceremony, to give ourselves structure. The world has these losses, and reforms itself like water after you pitch a stone into it, closing again over the temporary hole.

Wordplay

Downrock, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Hip hop dancers, Quincy Market

Today I invented a new word in the shower and is this: "depressimist." A depressimist is that type of guy who is not a pessimist, but whom life hasn't supplied with the evidence for being an optimist.

Now, an optimist has a theory of life that involves things going well and also doing things well. It's obviously the best of the available choices, only, the more explosions, hyena attacks, corporate layoffs, and assassination attempts you survive, the harder it is to add it all up and maintain that shiny belief system.

Laterae Sunday

Here in Massachusetts, the last two winters have defied the long, slow warming of the earth and stubbornly reverted to the heavy snows I remember from my childhood.  There was snow on the ground from December 19 to the start of March, and the usual clock of spring has been set back.  The crocuses are just now struggling out, alongside the daffodil shoots, which usually they precede by weeks.  

This is Latarae Sunday, the half-way point in Lent for the Catholics, a stop on the way to the Easter festival of springtime and rebirth.

Our Aunt Annemarie is very ill, and my Aunt Mary has come from New York City to stay.   She, my mother, and Aunt Carol will head to mass at Holy Name, the church around which eighty years of family cycles are gathered.  Now,  Annemarie is a very tough ancient person, so she just might stick around awhile longer;  but folks are gathering because she's in a tough spot.

Recycled

Burrs, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

The March Day, Millenium Park

Nobody is loving on my previous post on Millenium Park in West Roxbury! They're, like, oooh, it has dog poop, oooh, it has Lyme disease. I ask you, where is the love?

It is the best damn former dump overlooking a municipal lot around, damn it, and if you squint really, really hard and kind of carefully angle your view towards the river, it is even kind of pretty.

And sure, reasoning like that has gotten me in trouble in relationships before, but that's neither here nor there.

The name may be ridiculously OTT and the City's description of residents flocking there a bit of poetic license for "too lazy to go somewhere nicer today" but . . .

You can fly kites there! The fact that it's windblown and lacking in trees is completely awesome if you spend a lot of time with kites! Which I don't, but I could.

Also, seriously, if you wander down to the canoe launch there really really is a little quiet spot by the river that is absolutely lovely.

Social Media: Recession-Fighting Machines?

Late winter grass blades, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Will social media help us from the worst economic downturn of our time?

One of the key destructive effects of a market collapse is that things of value aren't being connected to, and exchanged by, people who would value them. The contents of social media are people, their skills, creativity, insights, and communities, and the most powerful thing that media can do is help those valuable brains, hands, and hours not go to waste.

Skyline with March light

Skyline with March light, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

The March Day, Millenium Park, West Roxbury, Boston

Millenium Park in the West Roxbury section of Boston is a remade dump.

Tucked behind a Home Depot, municipal parking lots, and rail lines, along a long neglected narrow upstream tributary of the Charles River, these few acres were resurfaced and restored a few years back. The longer view remains one of urban clutter and the typical weary mundanity and sleepy lack of drama that makes up my hereditary homeland in the southwest of Boston.

But the old Blue Hill rises in the distance, the small riverlet runs and winds through willows and reeds and under a train bridge. Here people come and fly kites, run laps, stroll babies and dogs. Ducks paddle, a heron stalks, and red-winged blackbirds were calling to one another today, defying the still melting snow and half frozen stream.

It's a good place to focus on one's awareness, because there's nothing here, and everything.

A Holdout No Longer

March 2 Windowsill, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

An Albanian came to the house to install satellite television.

This is not as surprising as it sounds.

Ordinary Beautiful Things

Snowy Puddingstone, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

Today I ran though the light gritty snow that was falling this morning. The feeling of virtue was intense, as it tends to be when I briefly triumph over the inordinate laziness of my soul.

Yesterday my brother Doug sent me a link to this story about the life and death of Irish writer Christopher Nolan, a quadriplegic.

I think we have a tendency to react to stories of adversity and disability with a sort of weird sentimentality: "wow, how inspiring!" --without dealing with what that feeling is really about.