9.30.12       Siri-ously 

Hadley Moon, 2.25.13

Last Friday night, after collapsing from the work week, I spilled a little bit of water on the living room table without noticing. Then noticed it. Then my cell phone, which is my only phone, and little and red and old and happily taped together and working just fine, able to write long missives and contact whomever I need to, died. The end. And in case you too are going to suggest rice baths for two days and other errant solutions to wet cellphone maladies, nope. Too late. Of course, I’m also too old to mess around fretting  and wringing my hands. But I did wonder what my business would do until Monday when I made more money and could somehow navigate the world of buying cell phones.

So, lucky  I am to somehow be with my best friend here, who happens to be male, and despite not having a fancy dancey phone himself, quickly and happily got into what I derisively call ‘the man/machine excitement phase’, and ran right off and came home holding...a.....machine. Yes, folks, a new small machine. a man-thing machine, a new cell phone.

Or maybe there are women who get into a human/machine ecstasy kinda thing, staying out overnight in sleeping bags downtown in some city I don't know, to be closer in line to get a new....machine...before others can...and go have fun with their new...machine.

Thus, I find myself here with last years IPhone. Which has a mechanism that is built to sound like a female’s voice complete with complex and at times irritable intonations living in it ,that you can talk to.

Now, I know those of you with fancy dancey phones already think this is old news, the woman voice machine thing in the phone. It does remind me of someone I knew years ago, if you care to pull your cocoa into your hands to warm yourself while I diverge…

 Many years ago, I was having a hard time of it. I had been seeing two guys for a year or so and the two of them had simultaneously broke up with me around the same time, (and then twice, unbeknownst to each of them, would surface, within days of each other, to ask me to marry them, just when they were about to A. move in with someone or B. get married to someone.)Yep. I know.

I then relished knowing another wonderful person for a few years, but eventually that came to an end also, and I found myself, around age 25, single for a year or so, my life bashing about like a half broken muffler dragging along a dirt road.

I was going to Umass, living with a group of roommates in a haunted house with a ghost that whispered past you certain nights (seriously), and  I was working hard to find happiness and contentment in what each night and day offered. I  eventually got so good at this that the predictable happened, which occurs when you are not in dire need and desperately seeking anyone to complete you or your happiness- someone shows up seeking you.

 Somehow there was a nice handful of people suddenly all interested in me. And I thought, ok, maybe I’m not ALL that weird or smelly or have terrible breath or something mysteriously deflecting. And one of them was a cyber genius guy who was developing a way for computers to talk to us and write down what we say. Now, here, I’m finally rounding the bend, back to the point.

He went gaga for me the night I baked a huge mountain cake for my in-the-future sister-in-law’s elegant party, later in the evening helped deconstruct the mostly eaten cake with gusto and great enthusiasm, wiping off the leftovers in a semi food fight, finishing off the evening dancing and laughing.

He soon got in touch, invited me on a beautiful hike, and on this hike ,complete with lovely picnic lunch and polite conversation, did interview me for the job of wife/candidate/lover thing, with some trepidation  asking me if I planned to stop drinking and smoking so much. Which at the time seemed a ridiculous question, as all the things I know and teach today might as well have been lingering in Mars or the Milky Way, so little I had thought of them at that age. So I said 'of course not', at which point he kissed me nicely, and went off to find a better, cleaner candidate.

         Yet, here, years later, remained an older, not smoking, mostly not drinking newer model of my self, with a new a machine that reflects the labors of this genius guy and others, and my husband is happily presenting it to me. And it HAS the little machine voice that is politely female, answering your questions and writing down your texts and notes, to the best of their little machine ability.

     So, yeah, I did that thing where you are unquestionably silly even as a sixty year old, and ask the pretend machine person stupid things like.. . (and these answers are true- go try it)-

Me- ."Siri, what is the meaning of life?"

Siri- "All evidence to date suggests it's chocolate".

Me- "What is your favorite color?" (they must have been prepared for idiots like me)

Siri- "My favorite color is...well, I don’t' know how to say it in your language. It’s sort of greenish, but with more dimensions."

Wow. That floored me.

Me- "Who keeps the home fires burning?" ( I know, couldn’t' I have been more creative than that?)...

She asks if she should check the web. I say no, thanks. And to myself, geeze, Gwen, dig deeper.

Me- "Do you like James Joyce?"

Siri- "This is about you, not me". (Good boundaries.) 

Me- "It's cold in here."

Siri- " It doesn't seem particularly cold to me- 55 degrees."

I then enjoyed  exploring this website on my fancy dancy new phone that describes how Apple programmed answers for stupid human idiots who ask stupid questions of their new phone. I would still defend this stupid human activity in comparison to one a friend showed me, where people try to get their trucks to climb rocks and weird places, and then have fun standing around winching each other out. I mean, really.   

Now a few days have passed, and Siri and I have reached a compromise. She writes down texts and journal entries, helps me write books and poems and songs rather well, and I stopped asking her ridiculous questions.  

And besides, this new unsmall, untapped-together phone  is what my husband explained is “Gwen-proof”. It can be thrown from the Empire State Building, immersed in the deepest sea, have a grenade blown up on it, or just walk in the rain by the Connecticut River each night, taking photos that look like old paintings, writing things, and connecting me to others just well enough.

Of course, yesterday, I was trying to Siri-text my husband about something with the word ‘rot’ in it, which was incomprehensible to the Siri-thing. I was sick and tired, and kept at the siri attempts instead of having half a brain and simply using my fingers to text the word.

Rot turned into rock and Johnnie Watson (as opposed to Jonny Rotten) and yet like an addict, I kept at it, trying and trying verbally to convey the ‘rot’ tedness to him in the text, each time having the Siri response that became more and more hilarious until finally I helplessly slid to the kitchen floor, laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. Seriously.

And that was the moment I realized I had somehow morphed into that woman/machine thing or person/machine excitement phase ,myself. I had arrived. Completely infected

2.14.13       The Embrace of The Evening Dark

     For some reason I am drawn to go for a walk after dark, the world/my world seeming so much smaller and quieter and more subdued after dusk. 
     We live on the high point of a country road, small and slender, with the mountain range rising up directly on the opposite side of the road, a steep hill up to our driveway, and a steep hill leading down directly after, while our home squats upon a foothill of the range.
     Due to this geography, in order to get a good and safe walk and return in one piece, no matter the time of day, I often put the little old dog in the car and drive down to the neighborhoods by the Connecticut River. 
     There are a few streets that border our little, busy Rt 9, that have large greens where, hundreds of years ago, the town's livestock fed, and now retain a street on each side, then the sidewalks and old houses, the enormous Maples this spring wearing maple sap buckets as they have for so many years, and a wide variety of inhabitants within all the old homes. 
     So we pick a road, park, I go for a real walk about the block, leaning into the sometimes frigid wind, then go back and retrieve the impatiently waiting dog, for her meandering stroll. It is the older dog walk, that involves much  smelling, snuffling, walking very slowly to not miss a sound or whiff or aspect of the evening, and is almost completely centered upon the necessity to pee upon other's pee, meander, stroll, and pee once again.
       When my kids were younger and handed the task of walking yet another old dog, I would explain that she was having a chance to effectively 'read the paper 'of other dogs and life elsewheres. I asked them to please allow her three short stops and two long stops, and by then, going out of their 9 and 10 year-old-minds,  eager to get home and see friends and get homework done, they could bustle her along home. 
     Now, they are 24 and 25 (and 33) and here I remain, years older myself, with one more old dog, edging her away from unseen obstacles, ushering her along her delightful, much looked forward to walk, quietly strolling along behind her as she makes her way down the street, as I find myself struggling and managing to remember what delight she takes in this, and to give her the time to be somewhere other than my bed, doing something other than sleep. 
     And as we walk, the magic of light and evening pervade everything. Her pace irrevocably leads me to a quiet of angst and lists and urgencies left behind like so many sloshed footsteps in a late February evening. 
     A bobbing light approaches, and I turn my own head lamp on to be visible to whomever approaches, which turns out to be another soul such as myself, with another four footed soul on their own delight filled neighborhood walk. 
     We greet each other, smell for smell, and they quietly pass, the dog as eager to resume the trek as my own beloved here is, as she pulls impatiently upon her leash, to get back to business.
       I turn to look back a minute later, and both our lights have been turned off, both humans and dogs returned to the womblike quiet and embrace of the evening dark.

1.30.13        Any Minute Now

     I remember standing at the train tracks, 3 am in Brattleboro,VT, mid winter, the air frozen as soon as it left my nostrils, feet stamping desperately to keep any semblance of feeling, not a soul around, as I contemplated making a quick run around the corner, down the wooden planks approaching the beautiful old steel bridge ,to catch a peek at the endless Connecticut raging below and past the sleeping small city. Wondering would I manage to race there and back before the train came barreling down the line, without warning, to slow and stop only if I was standing, stark, under the one station light, letting the engineer know my intentions.
      On my way to New York,  I was to visit my extra parents, taking the only transportation I had...the only train option, arriving 4 hours later in time for their early morning pickup as they pulled round the corner into the small station, eyes creased with sleep, delighted to see me, one extra daughter to add to the mix of many sons. 
      I was wearing my Tasmanian Devil fur coat- a head-to-toe dead animal skin gift from a friend that kept me toasty when all else failed, my fancy dancy girl heeled leather boots, obligatory  softly worn jeans, a few packs of cigarettes, a small 8 oz of Black Velvet so as not to be caught without, and a woven carpet bag replete with underwear ,toothbrush and not much else. 
      Behind me, sleeping in the darkness, I left their son...far up in a northern town, his wandering eyes finally a tiresome trial to me, at almost 21 with almost 6 years together , slung beneath our belts.  
      And to the side, up the dark, freeze constricted hill, slumbered another guy, older, who it turns out was always fond of women who were with another......the both of them it turns out somehow inspired by their mutual intentions with me, becoming some sort of odd fast friends as I lived with one, wandered about with the other, not really thinking about the situation. Simply trying to find my way. Completely unaware that 18 or 20 was virtual infancy, something that none of us, especially in the tumult of the irretrievably tumultuous 70's, ever realized, so fixed we were on questioning and leaping toward what seemed true.
      Onto the train I boarded , alone in the dark night, after it rumbled into the deserted station and reluctantly screeched to a stop. I wandered in through vacant cars smelling of cigarette smoke, train exhaust, a vigorous frozen wind whipping in through the door with me, as I held bag and seat after seat, finding two facing each other to provide a place to put up feet, or turn on one's side and nap for am moment.
      Not a soul to be seen, the train slowly started moving again,  and after a time began hypnotically rocking back and forth as it sped up, then slowed for each small crossing it approached in the midst of the lonely winters night.
      Some time later,  as the huge iron creature straggled its way along the tracks, a quiet looking employee struggled down the aisle , coming to a silent stop by my seat, hip stabilized on the back of a nearby armrest, sold me a ticket with hardly a word, then slowly made his way back to the front of the train, using body weight to roust open the sliding door, the blast of sound from the passage of train down the track bellowing back through the car in waves to where I remained.  I lounged on the old cracked leather seat, alone in the carousing rail car, my cigarette dangling a long ash, my eyes on the moonlit forests that began to swim past. 
     Hours passed, the overhead lights blinking on and off, as I sat  with some e.e.cummings and other favorites, a journal of course,  drawing pencils, a sip now and again to take the edge off of pretending I was without fear or angst at being this young person striking out in the middle of the night.  In the early days of my small life, like many of us in the past and many more to come, here I was asserting that I could do these things, only to find myself collapsing without admitting anything, at the end of each day. 
      I sat there, bumping back and forth in that old train's soothing embrace, watching the sky slowly lighten, the colors gradually making themselves known. We  began passing through all the back yards and backs of businesses and backs of old rotting warehouses and the errant homeless person or the early morning factory worker, who would hurry along in the approaching dawn, strident, with black metal lunchbox under arm, in the approaching January dawn.  
      Sitting up by now, the lives and evidence mounting of so many kinds of existence and circumstance, I was spellbound, as always, observing humans and four footeds. Feeling how the train strained around a corner, until, ultimately restless after all the hours, I felt myself standing  up from the seat, stiffened from the hours in my lone railroad car, then ambled my way down the swaying car  to the awaiting door.
      Using all my slender self to grasp the worn handle, to push my way through as the vast wind plastered me to the side gates, not a soul the wiser if I slipped or fell, it not at the moment or in my life seeming particularly important, I found myself pushing a bit further back, alone in the dawn, to the  back perch,  where behind me fell all the miles and lives and history and events that would come up in everyones days any minute now.

2.1.13   Wonder,  Rendered Over and Over and Over 

     Everyone has such different lives. Filled with such different moments and habits and cirucmstance.
      All week long I have the nicest ,most appreciative people come into my office, one after the other, Prepared to ask questions and listen to observations and Health Education when it comes to healing their blood pressure or diabetes or bone density or painful neck or insomia or complex kid or what not.
      I listen all week in confidence and have some slight idea of what it's like to be other flavors of people, listening to people and having some conversations over many many years, sometimes 25. But still, we are all so individual in what we encounter in our days, and how we feel about it and what we choose or by default end up filling our days and nights with.
      For me, beauty in nature is as essential as food or air to breathe, and since childhood, is something that glistens, that calls, that waves its arms as I try to drive somewhere or focus on a task or get ready for dinner. It's remarkable and endless wonder awaits any moment in time when one stops and stands, watching, or listening to a tree or the birds overhead, or watch the changes in wildlife families and generations, or hike by a stream and get to know it, in silence, in all seasons.
     Knowing and seeing the evidence of so many other living beings in their habitats is profound. It enables us to be reminded that stuff happens. That we are not alone. That since the beginning of time, stuff has been happening to humans the world over, and every other species and every other living thing. When something difficult or even untenable happens, when we have this awareness of others, we can rest in the knowledge that we are in good company of others who have struggled and managed or not.
     Today on Fall Over Friday, I drove K. to work, catching sight when turning a corner of this field and this stream, a small universe that I sometimes visit and often glance at with tenderness and longing. After dropping him off, I rushed happily to  return to this swampy stream area .
     The rain had flooded us for a few days, followed by a deep freeze, and then receding of waters. In this low lying area, as I left my car and walked down the dirt path, was the flooded field, the mounds of grass plants wearing intricate skirts of ice, the water filled land warming in the early morning sunlight on still a freezing cold day. The ice remained, precarious, suspended a foot above the actual  levels of water beneath. All around me was creaking and cracking and smashing and popping as branches of trees that had been caught in iced over temporary lakes were released like small budded balloons into the air, frozen areas becoming thinner and falling under their own weight down to the surface of frozen soil or water below. 
     The hills of iced grasses stretched out before me, simply luminescent in the sunlight, the  abstruce patterns of ice in grass and soil, on closer look, like thousands of remarkable paintings, the stream rushing past and pressing into all the frozen areas around trees and stumps and small waterways, almost simmering with life and movement and loveliness. 
     Like a stalker or a devotee, I strolled around and around and around, unable to penetrate the depths of the small forest and swamp, but able enough to catch hold of the quiet, largely overlooked wonder of this ecosystem, with all its inhabitants, on this the first day of February. 
     Which is why I fall in love with people's stories and family photos and reminiscences and drawings and why I love one and then another and another photo of a beautiful place that I simply cannot rend into something that stays within me to any degree of satisfaction, which is why myself I love small videos of one place, just as if you are standing there, just standing and listening and watching, as the car drives by and the earth shifts a bit on its axis and the two redtails get scoulded by the huge flock of young crows and the small mice that migrated out of the flooded area slowly move themselves back in. And later, I get to watch little videos like ...these. Getting rendered, over and over and over.

2.23.13 Nao Mesmo Montes/Not Even Mountains

Nao Mesmo Montes

 Not even mountains

Remain unchanged

You, your countenance

stricken against the arrival of dawn

Olho escurecer

eyes darkened

from dreams, from the strain

of morning’s recalcitrant song

a minha espera

waiting for me

a pause with no moment

inverno de ponta a ponta

winter from end to end

2.23.13

2.21.13           Thankyou Kaylin Haught

 God Says Yes To Me

By Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic


and she said yes


I asked her if it was okay to be short


and she said it sure is


I asked her if I could wear nail polish


or not wear nail polish


and she said honey


she calls me that sometimes


she said you can do just exactly


what you want to


Thanks God I said


And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph


my letters


Sweetcakes God said


who knows where she picked that up


what I’m telling you is


Yes Yes Yes

2.20.13 One Fine Morning The Bears Are Giving Birth

With sleep eyes you stumble to the back door, open it, and lean out to greet the day.... brisk and cold and a snappy wind to boot, the conservation field covered with an array of Coyote and Fox and occasional Weasel tracks,  early morning clouds racing by, enormous, like huge Star Wars Ships, moving their  massive shapes through the neighborhood, silently, over head.

Squinting still, with pink homemade booties on, you bring the old dog out the front door to pee, tip toeing quickly over to deliver the contents of containers  to lavish berries and nuts and seeds upon the picnic table by the broad living room window, to toss upon the shrinking snow and spread beneath the suets and seed/nut/suets and feeders all, as one lone Chickadee admonishes the slow pace of breakfast delivery, the two black squirrels racing away even as you reassure them, the four greys leaping from tree to tree high above in the lanky aged Maples, with you thinking that at least the 20 Morning Doves, motionless in the Sassafras Tree, will have a first go at the breakfast spread til the squirrels regain either  courage or  appetite  enough to slink back and fill their furred bellies with their delicate hands.

 The families of Downy Woodpecker, Cardinal, ubiquitous Blue Jay sibs, the Titmouse en famille, the Juncos, the tiny yellow Finch family attending to their thistle bell, the Nuthatch parent and child chiding the others as they dart in and out for their own selections, the Flicker cautiously arriving at the suet offerings with their spectacular coloration and great trepidation, all descend and grouse at the four indoor cheeping cats, lined  on arms of living room chairs, at times coming head-to-head, nose-to-nose with the utter frustration of the eagerly dining squirrels.

The occasional Red Tail Hawk comes by the neighborhood , doing the late February getting-kind-of-hungry-waiting-for-the-lagging-behind-Dove dance, at times with luck, so that when I walk by, home from work, there will be an inevitable pile of small soft grey feathers…not often, but at times, the great Hawk dines here also.

All the while,  the neighborhood Coyotes are off in their nearby winter homes, the not-yet-dinner themselves Possum and Skunk and Porcupine coming nightly to the Compost Diner Site.

In the midst of this, we know, as we fall asleep in our warm beds and wake to the cold dawn, that the Bears are giving birth. They are giving birth while deeply asleep in their hibernation, and the miracle of tiny wet young are pushed out into a freezing cold winter land ,as were their parents and their parents and their parents, to blindly move toward a teat, to nestle into the pungent, warm, slumbering bulk of their mother, to feed and feed, and soon discover each other and play and tossle while still she sleeps...to push far beneath her bulk on a freezing cold morning, press beneath her thick fur when in comes a freezing rain, to suckle and grow and bumble about .

Until one fine morning, as the light upon the earth and the heavens shifts, as the Maples begin to waken and their sap thins and flows, as trees all about hear the differentiation of temperature and humidity and light and begin to slowly come awake, on possibly this very fine morning, her enormous eyes open, her body begins to stir, and there are her offspring...possibly one, or two, at times three, surrounding her, bonded as tree is to earth; imagine her gaze, her nostrils filling with the smells of her own young, their wobbly funny small bodies delighted with her wakened presence, possibly their confusion when, enormous, she rises, licks them each, stretches after her  long winter's sleep, and begins to think about lunch.