punk
Doctor says: Three weeks rest. Will put you on the NHS list for physio but it’ll probably be better by the time you get an appointment. Come back next Monday and I’ll write you out for the rest of the month. Take these: they’re for osteoporosis but they should help. Pop some paracetamol if you have to.
Three weeks! Who can do that? My muffin-top CANNOT handle it.
jaywalking, melon knees and gone with the wind
I feel like James Caan in Misery.
It’s cold. It’s winter. I’m crippled and drugged. A crazy person keeps popping their head around the corner with soup and crackers threatening to do me in if I don’t ‘hurry up and finish already’.
OK. I lied. The stranger’s in my mind. But the crippled and drugged part is true. My leg is elevated above my head and there’s nothing to do but read, write and sleep.
I jaywalked across a dual carriage way on New Years Eve and tore my knee apart for the effort. (Ok, I sorta fell down some steps too. But it was the crosswalk that did it.)
I’ve been hit by cars twice in the last five years (I’m not EVEN joking). Not my fault. At all. I blame it on rush hour madness and stupid drivers who think it’s OK to hit the gas (and any pedestrian in the way) at sight of a yellow light – even though people are still on the crosswalk and green’s a good two seconds behind.
Yep. Twice. And never got a scratch. Then last Saturday I stepped onto a sidewalk the wrong way and now my knee looks like a big fat melon. Did I mention it hurts. Bad.
The bite of it all is that I just got back from two weeks Christmas holiday. And now I have to take time off because I can’t find the disabled access at the train station and have to scoot up departmental steps on my rear (don’t ask). I called my boss this evening to let her know. Leave a message on Sunday night – empty office and all that. She answers the phone. Now that’s devotion brother.
So I wait to see what the good Doc says tomorrow morning when Uncle Bernard’s cane and I hobble into his surgery. I call my trainer and find out if the aerobics nut (her words, not mine) can do an hours worth of upper body and core only for the foreseeable future. I let the ladies in the office know I’ll be back as soon as I can walk up an incline. I take a double dose of ibuprofen for the knee. And use the time to finish this damn book.
Margaret Mitchell did it. Why can’t I?
procrastination
“Or don’t you like to write letters. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.”
Ernest Hemingway
death and dumplins
When I was three I began gathering flowers from the mountainside; placing them into open caskets of distant cousins. I ate chicken and dumplings in parlor rooms beside dead uncles of other uncles at least once a month when I was five. During a wake that same year I hid my cousin Dewey’s General Lee Matchbox at the feet of our great grandmother’s sister. She was dead and he never found it.
Death was never new or upsetting. My family was an old one and people had been dying all my life. It was the course of things. People were. Then they were not. Grown ups shied away from children to cry. They hid in bathrooms or basements and came out with hush on their face and said ‘be quiet’ and ‘don’t run’.
Death was never frightening. At its worse, it was only silence and we’ll never see her again – but we never saw her very much anyway.
Grandma said death was angels and lambs and chasing honey and warm biscuits with mason jars full of buttermilk – for those the Lord called home. She didn’t say anything about the ones who died because someone else didn’t want them to live anymore. The women of penny virtue who walked the streets and got spit up by the river. The men who put a gun against their head because life was too hard and they were too weak. Or the boys children sometimes find in the wood because….
Mr Avis, a spirit-whipper-upper at one of the town’s Free Will establishments, said death was the womb, where you’re born all over, onto one side or the other. He and his deacons were black and white with no shades of grey. They preached hallelujah or the fury of God in loud angry voices, like it was their job to scare you half to death and make you glad you were a Baptist.
Grandma, I didn’t understand. She was sugar and spice and a little bit of slaw (’cause slaw was good on everything) and that kind of talk just didn’t make any sense to me.
I ignored Mr Avis because my mother always told me to, and because everyone said he sweat too much for an honest man.
I asked Pa, because he’d know and he’d know right. He came by all his sense the hard way. Like when someone put a pillow over his sister’s face and smothered the life out of her. Or when his daddy stopped living right in front of him, with a bullet and a bang, because he didn’t have the patience to hate himself in the other room. You think and you know more about things when they happen to you. And just about everything had happened to Pa. But whenever I questioned him he never said much. He’d just give me a dollar and go play Amazing Grace on his organ.
So I never really understood. Not until……
All those bodies. In funeral homes and my grandparents’ living room. They were never dead. They were what happened after death had left. When the thing that comes after, had been and gone.
The kid in the crabapple bush wasn’t that way. He wasn’t a body at an all night wake, or someone to write an obituary about. He was dead. I knew it even though he didn’t.
I saw death in a child’s face for the first time in my life, and I understood. It hurt me and scared me and followed me around in a dream…where it lay beneath my bed, dressed in red with one torn eye. A young body over an empty grave full of hands and hell and things I couldn’t see, reaching for me, to pull me into something that wasn’t.
I never grew out of it, because its not the kind of thing you do; and when i got older, I was never sure the thing that tried to swallow me whole as a child was kept away. So I went away….from everything and everyone it followed.
Death became a stranger to me because those caught up in it were strangers.
Until Belle died. Then I had to go. Pa asked me to.
miners ladies
Country Roads. John Denver sang about them. Morning hours, teardrops and miners ladies.
There are two industries in West Virginia. Religion and Coal. If you’re not a preacher you’re a miner. Or you use to be.
Pa fed his family with a number four shovel. He still goes downstairs to pray … in a basement of concrete and coal. Old habits die hard.
Miners are religious men. They don’t have the nerve to be anything else.
“How a man can crawl in there and watch the mountain move above their head and not believe it God, I just don’t know.” My brother is 24. He’s been in the mines for three years.
Grandma was a miners lady. When she turned 65 she turned fierce and asked the question she had never dared before. “Why were you always gone? Out playing music. Fishing. You came in from work and left. You should have stayed home more.”
Pa told her what he had never dared. “Because if I sat too still I had time to think. If I had time to think, I would have never went back. I was scared Christine. My buddies were dying all the time. And I was scared.”
If the dust and the rock don’t get you…the mountain will.
Yes. Coal miners are religious men. They have to be. Because sometimes miners ladies, become miners widows.
plain and simple
“I notice that you use plain simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the best way to write English – it is the modern way, and the best way. Stick to it; dont let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable.”
Mark Twain
