Actually, it's not that simple

Yesterday my peaceful mood was thrown by a medication problem.  I ran out of a major immune-suppressant medicine, which keeps my body from rejecting my transplanted kidney.  This medicine is thought to be very important. How does such a thing even happen?

It's easier than you think. I take about a dozen prescription drugs, 30-some pills a day.  I get some at a local pharmacy, some by mail-order, and some from a specialty mail-order place that handles unusual things.  I expect the special mail-order pharmacy to do things right---they always have.

Two weeks ago I ordered a refill of Neoral from them.  Four days after that I received a box from them with sirolimus, my other special med.  I have plenty of sirolimus, so I thought, "Well, huh, I don't need this but they sent it. Okay."  

That's the last I thought of it until yesterday morning when I went to get a fresh box of Neoral.  I didn't have any.  None.

I was rightly anxious about not having that drug, and made several attempts to get it.  (For one, I left a message with the nurse who handles my kidney doc's prescriptions.  He never called back.) In the late afternoon, I saw that the specialty pharmacy's website gave email addresses for its executives, and I wrote to the pharmacist in charge of their midwest division.  That worked. She called me within the hour, apologized, and assured me that it was being shipped overnight.  I'm tracking it, it's on a FedEx truck somewhere in my neighborhood. (Update:  It arrived that day around 5:00.)

Okay. I intend to track pharmacy refills on my calendar from now on.

I was struck by how confused and depressed I got.  I needed some anxiety to propel me into action. But I didn't need to go into a bleak mood.  It came to me pretty easily that I owed that to my father.  He would have been spitting with blame.  How could you be so stupid?  Don't you keep track of these drugs? And so on.  He's been dead 20 years this month, but that voice still pops up now and then. Ah, his legacy.

How could you be so stupid was one of his refrains especially for me.  I have wished sometimes that I could sit down with him then as an adult and say, I wonder if you've ever thought about how this affects your daughter when you talk to her like that.  Who talked to you like that when you were a child?  How did you feel?  But I wasn't an adult back then and couldn't respond rationally. I was a child, and these attacks wounded me. Many children of alcoholics are physically beaten.  I just got emotional abuse.  So did my brother, sister, and mother in other ways.

Everyone in the family was molded by my father's hypervigilant perfectionism, which was quite irrational.  It was based on a belief that you were in complete control of your life, even though he'd been a soldier and knew better. This radically oversimplifies life, and is a logical fallacy.  Karma is vast and complex.  We just do our best.

I worked on this post yesterday. In the evening it occurred to me that I'd spent all day defending myself against that internalized blame, when in fact the pharmacy made the mistake. This is a symptom of the complex PTSD caused by an abusive childhood.

Getting Over Their Self

I have been enjoying Jeni's ice cream and thinking about writing a post.  I was touched to find three comments on old posts sitting there, waiting for moderation, going back to July 11. I think notifications are going to my old email, and haven't figured out how to change that.  A couple of people have also told me they tried to comment and couldn't, so I want to get on the forums and see if other bloggers are having that problem.



One of the comments asked me to write on deprogramming from an alcoholic family, which is such an interesting term. Makes you think of what some people did to young people who were sucked into weird cults, I'm thinking back in the seventies.  A reversal of brainwashing. Then again, it's interesting to think of your conditioning as brainwashing. Here is the insight that has helped me recently:  the past does not exist.

Meanwhile, I've been watching the above video of a talk by Thich Nhat Hahn about The Art of Happiness.  Tom liked it a lot when his Zen group watched it, and I like it.  Thay (as he is often called by students, meaning Master) says we can learn how to "make good use of our suffering." Joko Beck called this "Suffer intelligently."  This is where Buddhist teachings are about human psychology, but older and better, and might lead me on in this topic of getting out of the sucky quicksand of the past.  Okay, enough for now.
~~~~~~
update:  When you comment on a blog, you might have to "prove you're not a robot" by transcribing some letters and numbers.  Scroll down and make sure you've done the whole thing.

Need Demotivated? I Can Help You

Yes, you read that right.  I think it's time for Grandma to share some of her own tips for constantly demotivating herself.  Not sure how funny this is going to be, though I started with an idea of parodying yet another of those about 8,790,000 online articles about how to get yourself to do something you ought to do when everything in you cries out No! Or at least, most of you does, and hey, it's July.

But what about demotivating yourself?  A mere 59,000 entries about something all of us do most every day.  You can see this is a field crying for more content.  Meanwhile, exploring this got to be fun right away.  I took the quiz on demotivate.com, whose motto is, "If you're happy and you know it, find another site."  Their other motto is,

 Life sucks, give up.  

The quiz told me I am ~

On your way to true demotivation You are headed on the right path, just pick up a few bottles of vodka, wait til your dog dies and you will begin to finally feel how worthless your existence really is!

It's interesting to a demotivator to look up images for "Life sucks."  On one hand, you quickly get sidetracked into things like Cheezburger, which collects "epic fails," the best of which involve trucks whose drivers were probably both stoned and working above their pay grade.

At least half of what comes up on Google about demotivation is trying to motivate you in a sickening sweet way.  Now, I don't blame the people who make those posters, and sometimes put them on Facebook.  I know lovely people who do that now and then.  They are just trying to feel better.  I blame the society for making us all want to BE SOMEONE, and telling us that you can do anything if you try.  Especially when it tells you you can feel better if you try.

(Parenthetically, you really can't make yourself feel better, take it from an expert.  What you feel, you feel, including long bad moods that are profoundly karmic in nature.  But you're not allowed to be depressed and listless, are you?  It makes your friends nervous.  Actually, moods - energies - are catching, that's been studied, too. It feels good to be around a hypomanic, for a while.  Same is true of a depressive, except backwards.

[Even more parenthetically, I had the perhaps unique experience of being yelled at in a psych ward by another depressive for being depressing.  Specifically, I was playing Barb'ry Allen on the piano, which is not nearly so bad as cracking gum loudly and glaring at someone who is playing a sad song.  Psych wards are full of passive-aggressives, of course, the resident doctors being the worst.])  

Okay, where was I?
 
I wanted to be a little Zennish for a moment. I wanted to say that, while demotivation from outside can work, unfortunately, motivation from outside does. not. You can find learned articles about experiments that demonstrate that, if you are a scholarly type.  If not, allow me to summarize:  a sign on your wall, a post-it on your computer, people telling you to cheer up (don't you hate that?), these things do. not. work.  I know I am annoying you with my feeble cliched attempts to emphasize the point, so I'll make the point and run:  to be sustained in an effort, your motivation has to be internal.

Nor is internal motivation always good.  For example, you may have internalized at a very young age that if you were only good enough, your father would love you.  At least respect you.  And actually, painful life things like the delusion that you can make rejecting parents notice you often lead people to work hard and do good things.  Though mental constructions like that (if you only work hard enough . . . ) are often proven to be incorrect (are delusions, in Buddhist terms) with disastrous results.

And this post is long enough, so click here for a coffee mug that will help you stay pessimistic.  It's hard, with all these puppies and kitties on Facebook. Remember, they only enjoy life because they have little tiny brains not capable of hanging onto elaborate mental constructions.  Bless them.  Well, bless us all.

It's a Long, Long Trail: Some Thoughts on Spiritual Practice

This is a popular quote, and there are a lot of images of it on Google.  I like this one, which shows a woman who is experiencing some "negative" emotion.  Negative emotions are those the culture doesn't want women to have, like being royally pissed off.  Men are allowed to have those; in fact, they're the hallmark of a Real Man, the kind who beats his wife, then apologizes abjectly, blubbering, drunk, of course, then beats her again and again and so on until something gets her to a safe house.  It should be called Rage Disorder, but the women could not get that into the DSM-IV.  There's a whole book about that.

Or maybe she's experiencing the astonishment of realizing what she's been put through because she was born with a vagina.  Not leaving out you men; there are victims among you, too.  But in my category - intractable PTSD caused by childhood sexual-and-emotional abuse, it seems that more of the victims are women. This is usually not diagnosed.  Instead, the locked-off pain manifests as chronic depression or bipolar disorder or fibromyalgia or underachievement, or all of these with anorexia and psychosomatic ailments thrown in.  Don't leave out the alcoholism.  Girls Wine and Whine.  And then, Smile!  There are no effective medications for any of these effects of abuse.  How could there be?

Here's the truth that pisses me off: the quote is true.  Reality is sometimes hard to face.  That would be why a lot of people don't.

What you think when you start meditating is that it will cure you, relieve your stress, make you happy, and also nice.  Yes, it does allow a space for healing, it will relieve stress for a while, maybe even for a few hours afterward.  But that just gives you fresh eyes on your condition, your life.  After a while, little unwelcome insights will start creeping into the meditation itself, Yow!  The mind clamps down on that, and the meditation becomes boring.  You get restless.  You think, This isn't doing a thing for me.  You decide to try something else.

The road to realization is less traveled for a damn good reason, in other words.  There are passages on the Way that are subject to avalanches of unwelcome memories, tears, rage.  Most people - even those who've had a chance to work with  genuine teachers - quit the Buddha way.  From where I live, it looks like half the Buddhist Teachers in America are in California, but you wouldn't believe how many unenlightened people are lying around beached out there.  People with opportunity.  Some of them - most of them, I bet - tried meditation.  My (estranged) sister once told me she went to hear Thich Nhat Hahn.  Shrug.  "It didn't do anything for me."  Well, neither did the desert in bloom (a wonderful metaphor and fact.)


If you are practicing outside an authentic system, if you don't have a teacher who's actually walked the whole damn path, you haven't got a chance.  Facing life will scare you to look for another self-styled Life Coach or Guru, another cheery book, another sweet quote, a great new recipe, oh, of course, new shoes! - in short, another way to escape reality.  That's the road more taken.

You wouldn't believe how I had to search to find a version of this as I remembered it.  Thank you, Kenneth Moody-Arndt.   I especially like this verse:
You must go and stand your trials.
You have to stand them by yourself.

What to do when you just can't meditate

Can't, won't, don't want to, whatever.  Seriously, I did enjoy watching this amazing invitation to a mixture of overwhelming self-pity and glee.

You didn't watch it, did you? Five minutes is more time than I am usually willing to give a video these days, and I understand that's now normal.

But if you did, it might destress you some.  That won't last.  I liked it and laughed at the sheer joy of surfing, but I had to think, I so wish I'd done that shit when my bones were good.  Latest bone scan showed severe osteoarthritis with high risk of fracture.  I'm supposed to see a specialist.  Yet another specialist.
 
I am in what I was trained to think of as a "bad" mood, i.e., one that made my parents uncomfortable.  Can't you ever smile?  On the other hand, if I was smiling, my father was likely to say gruffly, What're you smiling about?  My mother always tried to get me to ignore him by saying to me, Oh, grow up.  Just the kind of thing that makes you want to sing the Peter Pan theme song,  "I won't grow up."  You do see from this, perhaps, that I was not a popular item in the house I grew up in.

Why don't I blog more often these days?  Well, yes, I'm sick 50% of the time with a weird cycling depression no doctor so far has any explanation for.  There's that.  Should I waste a couple of hours on a good day writing this?  What's in it for me?  And same with my status updates on my Facebook page.  It does not grow because why?  Because the people who subscribe FOR FREE don't share anything, and rarely comment.  Why?  Because they got it free, and don't value it.  Just hit "like" and move on.  Same reason you readers don't bother to comment or write to me.

But see, I'm no fun.  As a blogger I'm nowhere, since I'm not hysterically dramatic in recovery famous holding contests, and blablabla.  I'm not selling fun.  All I have is reality, and that's never been big.

I've been doing a little Naikan lately - GIYA - and it has made me notice what I give and what I receive.  I give have given used to give to this blog, over 1000 published posts, and people think it is quite sufficient to mention to me or Tom in passing that they love my blog and follow it religiously.  But they don't write to me to ask why I'm not publishing, do they?

I should have been an electrician.  That's all.  Do something concrete, important, and well-paid.  This contemplative English major writer introvert thing - the only way it pays is if you write a book about it. That's hard to do if you're depressed.

Anyway guys, I have an excuse.  I'm sick right now with an internal infection in addition to my usual pain in multiple places.  On an antibiotic, which seems to maybe be doing the job, but will fuck up my digestive system for weeks, despite my good probiotic.  Maybe I'm just cranky, the way kids get when they're getting better.  Maybe I'll be back some day radiating cheer and joy and stuff.  We'll see.

Idiot Compassion for Dummies

It has been some years since I first heard the term "idiot compassion" used by Zen Teacher Joan Halifax. Her example was that you don't help a friend commit suicide; that might seem like compassion, but it's idiot compassion. After much thought, I'd have to say, "That depends." What if someone you love were wasting away in a painful terminal illness, and too ill to hasten her own exit without help, and asked you to help?

I think idiot compassion interested me because I grew up in an alcoholic household, my father the alcoholic, my mother the explainer.

"He didn't mean it."
"He has a headache today."

The setup was that he chose me to be mean to, to delegate as the family scapegoat, as it is known in family systems theory. The scapegoat is the one cast as the only problem in the family: If it wasn't for Jeanne, this would be a happy family.  She ruins everything.

My mother's interpretation was that he was "strict" with me, which she said in a wondering way.  No, this was not true.  He was not at all strict with anyone, including himself, not setting clear rules and enforcing boundaries as a father should.  He lashed out at me and demeaned me whenever he noticed me.  My mother did this too; when she was ruminating on her simmering anger at him, she would insult me or kick at me.  Really.  That sweet Sunday school teacher. 

I think that however much he disappointed and angered her, she loved her role as "the martyr, always the virgin," as my father put it.  Her role was to be kind and protective of her Man. If he had treated her son that way, it would have been a different story, but I was just a girl.

If I complained to my mother about something brutal he said to me, she might say, "His back has been bothering him," her voice assuming a rounded, sacred tone.  She was speaking as a ministering angel.  She loved that role.  When I was sixteen, I did my best to commit suicide. 

Here's the thing:  it does not matter what motivates someone to harm others - the harm is done. We might need to help that person or lock them up.  But to excuse out-of-bounds behavior, to explain it away and let them do it again, that's idiot compassion.  You're not helping them, you're not helping the victim, whether that victim is your child or yourself. 

It's not uncommon for women to excuse away bad behavior, and not just with their partners.  I've watched with some disbelief how people accept and excuse rude behavior from a woman in my (former) social circle because, oh, she's worried about [fill in the blank].  My response to that is my favorite line from the movies:  I don't care what she's worried about - she's hurtful.  And I don't like to be hurt. 

In case you haven't seen "The Fugitive," Tommy Lee Jones is a federal marshal chasing an escaped murderer played by Harrison Ford.  In the confrontation above, Ford is trapped in a huge sewer pipe.  He turns and tells Jones he is innocent.  Jones' response is, I don't care!  Because it's not his job to judge innocence.  His job is to bring the guy in.  And all you men and women who are putting up with partners who are mean to you and your kids, that's not your job, either.  That's not what compassion does.

What to Do With the Mean Reds

I wrote the post below last Thursday.  Then Friday my mood was low.  Back up on Saturday, a pleasant mood that let me spend a very nice day with Cassie et al., celebrating both her birthday and my grandson's; he was born Christmas Day, so we try to give him a birthday party some other day of the year.  Otherwise, it just isn't fair.

Recently these visits have been so nice and stress-free that I've realized this is what childhood must feel like in a family of origin that is not hysterically alcoholic and abusive, a home you can feel safe in.  I am grateful I got to experience this at last.  Even today, in a bad mood, I'm grateful, and it's not just for a peaceable friendly meal, but also for the confidence I have that Cassie and Chris are responsible, kind people.  I'm glad I don't have to worry about them.  I don't think it's a good thing when people worry about their grown kids. Sometimes you do, but it shouldn't be a habit.

I used to feel a momentary blip of anger when my mother would excuse my father's rudeness, his black silent moods interrupted by an occasional sniff that conveyed his contempt for me.  She would adopt a voice she may have thought of as kind and compassionate:  "He's worried about you."  Well, that's a co-alcoholic doing her job well, saving her compassion for the alcoholic.  Covering the reality of the children's pain, excusing the poor sod who "doesn't mean anything."  This was a feature of his abuse of me, intended to diminish me in every possible way all my life.  His will dealt me a last huge blow after he died, the coward.  "Worrying" about me was not helpful. It was a form of criticism.  And these are the kind of thoughts that pop up when I'm in the mean reds.

I had to explain the term to Tom a little bit ago.  Here is what I had posted on my regular Facebook (though not on my Page, which I try to make more uniformly pleasant than my Self):

There are blue Mondays and then there are mean red Mondays. You are experiencing the latter when you are tempted to write to a spammer, "If I ever get anything from you in my inbox again, I will hunt you down and kill you."

And no kidding, I had just restrained myself from posting exactly that.

This is my brain on bipolar.  Holly Golightly, in Breakfast at Tiffany's, got the mood once in a while, as anyone might occasionally, but for reasons.  (Here is a link to the quote.)  The bipolar brain floats and dives on its own schedule and under its own power.  I've compared it before to living in a hurricane zone.  Hurricanes just happen, and you can't stop them; about the best you can do is hunker down.  What I was  maddest about today is that I had gone back into a rhythm of good day, bad day.  You can work with that.  You can get things done on a good day.  But today's the second bad day.  

I had a plan for today.  I'd been waiting to continue reading an old fiction I pulled out last Thursday, and read with pleasure and some admiration of the youthful energy that produced it.  I'd had to stop reading in the middle and go into my bedtime routine, or find myself awake half the night.  Now that I think about it, I don't like that, either.  I'm glad I realize that I have to control myself, though.  Mania feeds on itself.  The worst thing is to start  writing the Great American Novel all through the night, and the next day, and the next.  

On Friday I knew better than to go back to the story, because when I'm depressed I think everything I ever wrote is just not worth it.  There's the internalized Nasty Father, still criticizing harshly. Best not to give it the chance.  That's reality.

I could claim that years of practice have given me insights into karma like that, as well as the discipline to turn off the screen at night when I don't want to.  But that's about it.  It has not led me to constant joy or a reliable contentment.  The blues are bad.  The mean reds are worse - agitated depression, quick to anger at, for example, a photo posted by a friend at the end of a retreat, everyone in their black Zen robes with big happy smiles.  I can't do retreats anymore for multiple reasons of aging and chronic illness extending beyond the bipolar depressions into fibromyalgia and lymphedema torn rotator cuffs and sleep disorder. I wish I could, but I can't.

I can't think of any reason people shouldn't share their joy at a retreat of advanced students meditating their ass off and filling the air with good energy.  I remember how good it felt.  All I can do about my current reaction is refrain from commenting and go do something else.  Sounds like right speech again.  And again.

As for the mood, sometimes even a Danish and window-shopping at Tiffany's doesn't do the trick.  I just have to live with it.  Accept it.  That sounds like Zen to me.

Changing Other People's Minds: My Shortest Post

You can't.
(the end)
~~~~~~~~~~

p.s.  Really, that is the distillation of the efforts of an entire lifetime trying to get alcoholics (and other unpleasant people) to not drink so much or be so mean to me, to be more open to intimacy or see it my way, or keep up a meditation practice or pick up their clothes.  People do change but slowly and in our own time, and many psychotherapists and Teachers have wished they could help that change; sometimes they do, but it is in our own hands, and the mechanism that makes us deliberately walk out of our old ways is mysterious. 
~
Since that is still a very short post, I thought I'd kick in something else, a brief book review.  I've been given a number of review copies of Buddhist-themed books, and I've reviewed only a few because I am picky.  But I want to mention a book I am enjoying called Journeys on the Silk Road.  This is not an erotic memoir,  though it would be a good title, but a history subtitled "A desert explorer, Buddha's secret library, and the unearthing of the world's oldest book."

Aurel Stein expedition; that's Dash front and center

I read things like this slowly, and stop reading anything that bores me.  This book is not boring, though; the authors use the techniques of fiction well to create the landscape and sentient beings involved.  I was won over by page 11 when I read that the preparations for this high-risk mountain-and-desert expedition in 1906 included a custom-made fur coat for the explorer's dog, Dash.  Dash was one in a string of seven terriers, all given the same name, that accompanied the explorer and slept in his tent.  That's the kind of detail I enjoy in history or fiction.  The "oldest book" in question is the Diamond Sutra.  So if you know a Buddhist or an open-minded nonBuddhist who enjoys reading history, especially art history, this could be a good gift.

Other than that, I have few ideas about Christmas, except that it doesn't make sense for a celebration, especially if it's religious, to be stressful.  It's not for me anymore, now that my family of origin is out of the picture.  How I suffered trying to please them! always thinking maybe this will do it. That seems to circle back around to my title, trying to get people to love you that don't.  There you are.

Touching Base

[image: Thanks to Chris Hardin for suggesting this illustrated quote as a fitting homage to Teena Price, who was a wild flower.]

I have relatives who don't love me the way I wish they would, don't you?  The weather has been too hot, the air quality is so bad I have to wear a mask outside, my moods are up and down, I'm having an awful time with sleep, and I have to wear elastic on three of my four limbs, and sometimes I hate all this...... But today I am shrugging these things off (all but the depression, to be truthfull).  The universe has been giving me opportunities to see my problems in perspective.

As I wrote previously, Saturday night was a wrenching memorial service for a friend who died last Thursday.  This morning a beloved friend was at our front door to tell us that another friend died yesterday.

Greg Houston was 61 years old and seemingly in good health.  His truck went off the road for no apparent reason, and he was dead by the time the medics got there.  Greg and his wife of over 40 years are important to us, and to many, many other people, because they are lovely people who exemplify a life of compassion and generosity.  For a couple of years Greg has come over periodically to help Tom with projects around the house; it was a joy to me to hear them working together, both so polite and careful.

Yesterday Tom got an e-mail from Greg asking if he'd like help with anything.  The subject line was, as always, Touching Base.  If you want to know what it means to "lead with your heart," Greg was a fine example; Greg actually touched base; he looked at people and saw what we needed.  And he didn't just say, "Call me if you need anything."  He offered specifically to come and help with projects, and did that many times.

Many people had to be called about Greg's death, because many people love someone like that, and he was a pillar of the church.  I expect his service to attract hundreds of people, and we will all weep.

I want to say something very quietly here about the contrast with Teena's death and her service that I wrote about yesterday.  She was 76 and had been ill and uncomfortable with advancing COPD for years.  She took months to die, gasping for air.  Her death was a release from suffering, and I was glad she finally got to rest.  You feel different when someone who dies is much younger than you and vital, and it is an accident.

And it is logical that many people loved Greg and Judy.  But is it logical that so few loved Teena?  I don't know.  It's not uncommon, but it feels wrong.

I have heard from several friends who relate strongly to the post I wrote yesterday that talked about the stigma we feel if we are mentally ill or just, like Teena, unconventional.  I have thought about how many Buddhists work in prisons, often as volunteers, where they know the suffering is acute, and they might be able to offer someone a little peace.  Many others work in hospices, spending time I'm sure with people like Teena, whose own families don't want to be there, or can't.

But out in the social world there is, generally, a sharp division between the people we find easy to love and the people we avoid, or downright dislike.  Too often, people bond in groups on the basis of their mutual loathing for Sarah Palin or their mother or people with brown skin or Christians or those that have not accepted their idea of God. 

Teena was disliked for exactly the qualities that some of us liked about her:  she was open and honest, she was an original.  She said what she thought without regard for the niceties.  She was generous to me and never in my life hurt my feelings, and I never saw her say anything mean.  But she was outspoken, and had an attitude about that.

I don't know what she might have said to another woman in the church who just a few months ago told me she didn't want Teena anywhere near her private birthday celebration.  Teena had wandered into the room where it was being held, having come to church to make a payment on her pledge.  She was in a wandering condition then, liked to go spend time at Whole Foods talking to anyone who would listen, and came to church at every opportunity.  But she was not invited to that small party, not that she should have been; it was private.

I asked that friend, "You have issues with Teena?"

She said coarsely, "Doesn't everyone?"

I said, "I don't."

I didn't like that, but it didn't rankle me until Teena died.  Then I found myself furious with that woman (who has some annoying qualities of her own).  She felt entitled to hate Teena, as I gather some of Teena's children may have, too.  I was afraid that woman would show up at Teena's service, for she is another person who hangs around the church a lot.  I knew I would not contain my anger at her if she did, and I would probably regret that and it would create an uncomfortable break in our social set. But she didn't come.

I wish Rev. Mark had thought to focus Teena's service on our need to soften our hearts toward "the people we find difficult to love," a phrase he used once in a service to encourage us to say aloud or silently during the Silence the name of someone we love - or find difficult to love.  That was valuable to me.  It let me whisper, that Sunday morning, my own father's name.  My father was a shit to me, but the extent of his venomous hatred was only revealed to me after he died. When I found out that he was giving my siblings huge sums of money, and none to me because I was "mentally unstable," I was beyond hurt and angry.  I was the only kid who drove to Zanesville to visit him a few months before his death on Father's Day.  We took him and my mother out to eat.  He gave every appearance of loving our company that day.  There you are.  Life with alcoholics.  They hate you behind your back.

But saying his name in church let me open my heart that little bit and begin the long, long journey of learning not to hate him (and the rest of them, in fact).  Speaking his name with a wish that he rest peacefully let me begin the work of adjusting to that painful reality.

Some of us who are wounded have to work to open our hearts at all, for anyone.  Almost everyone needs to work on opening it all the way, to a cheating spouse, to a neglectful mother or a father who raped you or the man who killed your son in a fight.  Maybe cultivating this willingness to love is actually the fundamental practice.  Jesus thought so.  If enough of us did it, there would be no more war.  Because there would be no more concept of "enemy."  Maybe there would be no more unhappiness.  Because anger and hatred, that's hell, you know it is.

Does Connection Matter?

Grailville 2011, through a screen

from a Tricycle interview with Gil Fronsdal - 

..........the American Vipassana movement emphasizes interconnectedness when teaching anatta, or “not-self.” This is emphasized so much that a person might get the idea that realizing interconnectedness is the ultimate goal of Buddhism. It’s not; this is a very American emphasis. I think interconnectedness is inspiring to us as an antidote to American individualism and the pain of alienation it can cause. 

This interests me from a couple of points of view. One, I am a devoted member of a Unitarian Universalist church, which emphasizes interconnection as one of its seven core principles.  Two, I have seen this emphasis on aspiring to deeply realize our connectedness in American Zen, and a mystic's life is not for me.  I think it's important to emphasize the entire 8-Fold Path, which makes clear that our behavior is important.  If you set out to follow the precepts there, it will keep you busy.

On the other hand, as the scapegoat in an alcoholic family I grew up without a sense of having a family or connection, except insofar as I could connect with some poets through their poetry - sobering even to remember that intense loneliness.  So for me, personally, realizing my connectedness to what family I have, my friends, my church, has been healing; it's what kept me alive during my years of profound clinical depression. Therefore I stopped writing just now and called Nancy, a dear friend from years of meditating together.  And now, to connect with Tom over breakfast.
~~~~~~~
Oh man, such a long long too-much-to-do list today.  This is the result of addressing it sporadically, and a lot of change going on in our lives.  And sporadic is my buddhanature.  Meanwhile in back of mind, what is more important?  going to Zen tonight, see special friends there, or doing collage assn. while perhaps listening to a dharma talk?  Hmmmm........What is the most important thing?  I used to think it was my private spiritual practice, as in meditating.  Now it expands out to it being important to be there, sitting with the group, making the group.  The collage group tomorrow morning is a sort of practice, too, and certainly connection with other women in my age group.  But they really don't care if I do the assn, do they?  They shouldn't.......But my health and well-being is surely the most important thing. 

Breathe in, exhale. Cool down.  Abandon idea of going out in the noonday sun for major grocery shopping.  Decide to go to Zen tonight.  A bunch of Zenners meditating is about as cool as you can get. And staying cool physically and mentally is becoming a priority as summer barrels at us here, going up to 95 degrees today.  Already, even the little cat is irritable.

Are You Too Sensitive?

Sometimes art is all that saves us

Not feeling so good yesterday, I browsed around some scientific studies, as if to assure myself that I have an excuse for being depressed. I found, or rediscovered, that bipolar brains have thirty percent more monoamines, which produce "dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine. . . the altered brain chemistry due to the excess monoamine cells may directly impact the patients' cognitive and social function." These monoamines send signals between brain cells, or neurons and are involved in mood regulation, stress responses, pleasure, reward, and cognitive functions like concentration, attention, and executive functions. (link here)  Okay, so it's been really hard to get organized.

Then there was this:  "Bipolar disorder . . . is characterized by pathophysiological changes to the visceromotor network, disrupting the regulation of endocrine and autonomic responses to stress, and hence emotion and behavior." (link here)  Yes. So, a while back I got so irritated by a friend that I practically yelled at her. I'm sorry, and I apologized.  Even if I couldn't help it, I'm sorry when I'm rude and impatient.

But - here's something you already know - some people are never sorry for being rude.  I was raised by a couple of them, and I was trained to excuse anything the head alcoholic did or said to me, and he was constantly abusive.  He didn't mean it.  His back hurts.  He has a headache.  He had a hard day at work.  And my favorite, You're too sensitive.  You don't get to do things over, but if I could, I'd tell my mother, "No, I'm not.  He's too insensitive."  But when I was a kid, I didn't have the voice.

Sometimes I catch myself putting up with crap, to be frank, from the kind of friends who sometimes look like frenemies. I was trained, it was my habit, to find excuses for rude, thoughtless people. I was surrounded by them as the scapegoat in a very sick family.  And I want to say, when I had to work with people like that, I got along.  But in my social life, I don't have to. Putting up with their crap may in fact qualify as "idiot compassion," a term that refers, roughly, to enabling people in their stupid or dangerous behavior.

Thoughtless people often build a persona that helps other people excuse them.  (And many people like to have "an alcoholic" around, someone worse than them.)  I have known people who got away with murder because they had a stammer or chronic depression or a visible handicap. My dear, wise neighbor, Marge Endter, now deceased, once told me about such a person, "He trades on that."  Bingo.

I notice that I don't go through these things with people who are on a path, who have a spiritual practice.  Practice makes us more sensitive to the effect we may have on others, and the world.  And the religions I'm familiar with make a point of compassion, or giving, or love.  The Buddhists I know may have their issues, don't we all? but they believe in being kind.  They aspire or vow to be kind.  They write whole books about it. I have one.  And since I do, I will try to be kind in gently letting some people out of my life.  Because, actually, I'm too sensitive to be around them. 

Who's to blame for this mess?

Blaming doesn't even make sense.

I'm inspired to think this by a long article that hit my inbox this morning about who's responsible for the Euromess.  Googled "who's to blame" and got almost 6 million hits.  Six million.  Let's see, what failures are being examined?  The euro, the supercommittee, the great Gulf Oil spill, Nickelodeon's loss of ratings . . . everything but Who put jam on the cat?

The idea that some Wun Giant is to blame for giant things like this doesn't make sense in the light of our interdependence.  A great many actions culminated in that oil spill, including, I am afraid, my own reckless use of fossil fuel flying places in airplanes just for fun, drying clothes in a dryer, flicking on light switches.  I was a smaller contributor perhaps than a manager who decided some problem on the oil platform could be ignored, but I added to it.  Then there is the large diffuse problem of human nature and behavior.

The denotation of blame is to assign responsibility.  But it nests with words that assign judgement, like culpability, guilt, reproach, fault.   And what happens when you point a finger?  You have a war.  You have sides, someone saying "I didn't do it, Sammy did!  He did it!  You always blame me.  It isn't fair."  This is a pretty good translation of American political talk today.

I am sensitive to this issue because it takes place on the small scale of our lives.  I was the scapegoat in my family, courtesy of my father. There is an odd mechanism there, in which all the pain and distrust of an alcoholic family is laid at the doorstep of The Wun.  This is similar to sacrificing a goat to God to wash away our sins, a tradition found in some societies. 

What is the problem? The karma created by our actions is not washed away.  To restate: You don't get away with nothing.  It's easy to see how harmful the blame game is in a family - if the whole problem is Billy, nobody looks at their own behavior.  And if nations or politicians put their energy into blaming the other, we have gridlock.  The only way to move ahead is to ask, What are the causes? * To assume a nonblaming attitude.

This tempts me to go to the many finite causes of unemployment, such as doctors buying expensive software to answer and make phone calls, so they can fire the people who used to do that.  Or to climate change - public places cooling the air in summer down to 68 (the guys in suits are comfortable that way).  These things are matters of individual choice.  It gets subtle.  Fixing it is not about blame or exculpation, but about looking at reality.  Reality.  And that means looking fairly at our own part in this mess.
~~~~~~~

* Though you can never really untangle the causes.  Maybe the way to move forward is to ask, What needs to be done here?  or What can I do?

Notes on ego display

If I had a dog, I'd name her Karma, so I could enjoy scolding, "Bad Karma, bad."  (I have a weakness for bad puns, bad.)

Just thinking about that this morning as I scan my facebook, a way of having coffee with friends.  Here was a posting about someone who hurt my feelings recently, not on purpose, just doing his conditioned ego display. In his case it's correcting people, showing how much he knows.

Look at me!

His post this morning is about a minor health problem, a discomfort, and since it is morning and calm and my brain is not as busy yet as it will be, I heard myself think.  My self thought, Good.  This is not nice, and I wouldn't admit it to most people, because most people don't realize that they think things like that.  But I will so I can make some points about the whole thing.

First point:  it is not desirable to be glad someone hurts.  I must suppose I always knew that, but until I got going with spiritual practice and began to clear out my head, I didn't hear myself.  If I had, I might have thought it was good to enjoy someone else's pain; my (alcoholic) father did, out loud and at length.

My friend.  When he hurt me - however much he didn't mean to - he created bad karma: my anger toward him. Anger is in that balliwick we call "hatred," as in "Greed, hatred, and ignorance rise endlessly; I vow to abandon them."  This is one line of a central Buddhist chant, The Bodhissatva Vow.  And it says these three poisonous things rise in us endlessly; and we make a point of noticing them and leaving that neighborhood.

Of course, like my friend, you can make someone angry and not realize it.  Maybe you're fooling around playing Angry Birds on your cellphone in the grocery line and don't notice you should move forward and put your groceries on the conveyor belt.  Someone behind you who is in a big hurry and jealous of your cellphone is steaming.  Maybe rams her cart into your butt and glares.

Hopefully the karma won't be so bad that she follows you and rams your car, but things like that do happen, at least in mystery novels.  Point being, walk slowly and lightly, be aware, be kind, be careful, don't get too caught up in your own fun - it's easy to do harm.

Another point here: Wun is a human being made of all sorts of pixels of experience.  We can continually surprise ourselves.  A real person is not predictable, though a highly conditioned person can be.

My friend couldn't have predicted my reaction if he tried, and is not responsible for my reaction.  Unless you deliberately inflict pain, something direct like that, you are not causing someone else's reaction.  You happen to cause it.  I think this is a point psychologists make sometimes; you are not responsible for how someone else feels when they have what seems like an overblown emotional reaction.

At the same time, we can't utterly disown our impact on other people.  Or the earth.  Right?  That's why there are precepts about how we act in relationship, right speech, right action.  We are responsible for our intentions, for our actions.  We are supposed to intend no harm. You can relate this easily to The Golden Rule in its many forms found in religions all over the world.  My way of thinking about it is:  Be Kind.

So.  Sunday, and here's a sermon.  Now I'm going to church and not listen to another one.


[click here to go to the website that sells a poster of the image]

It's the little foxes that spoil the vine

Last night I had a stress break.  Hit Friday with two big things, no, three - the appt. with the transplant surgeon to assess whether and when my native kidneys have to come out, that appt. pushed back three weeks.  I don't see how I can have that surgery and get to the retreat in late September.  The one time a year when my Teacher, Ama Samy, comes to the US. But how can I not have that surgery ASAP, and risk a fatal infection?  Long story, many infections since the transplant, I've blogged before about all that.

This schedule change, more delay, I learned about late in the afternoon after talking to Joanie, my transplant nurse, who was leaving on vacation for a week.  She is my lifeline, she is the only person on top of my medical problems, which include frightening blood pressure right now.

My shoulder hurts.

But worse, Tom and I had a long talk with sister Diane, who lives far away and visited the folks recently.  Lots and lots of scary things there - they are very old and no longer able to take care of themselves, but will not leave their crumbling cluttered mansion.  House. This is a very bad situation, and it worries me, saddens me that my mother-in-law, whom I care deeply about, is trudging through hell with her very sick and mentally incompetent husband, and the kids don't do anything to help.  The whole situation is profoundly karmic. I know you can't undo someone else's twisted karma. I work on turning my over-responsibility into simple kindness, not trying to fix things.  But it blossoms up now and then.

Other little things - T and I had a playdate Sat. a.m. at one of those nice huge stores called Market District where you can buy cool things. But very soon his wheelchair ran low on energy and he had to go back to the van while I continued the shopping alone. Shouldn't have. This is a new chronic problem, him letting the wheelchair run down. I don't want to be responsible for that.  My shoulder hurts.  Tashi has diarrhea from the worming, though, thank God, she always uses her litterbox.

Yesterday morning after church got to talking to an old acquaintance, listening, rather. She detests her mother, always has.  Mother is in a home in the next state, has dementia.  My friend calls her every night and hates that her mother doesn't seem to know who she is, has nothing to say (I said, has dementia). Friend has a real rigid sense of the obligations a Perfect Daughter will meet.  I used to call the two of us Eldest Daughters. It is a song, the term repeated over and over in a simple bass line.  A mantra. Being an oldest daughter is a syndrome you don't want.  It involves a sense of responsibility that can make you end up totalling your car. i.e. being unable to do anything. That's where I am this morning. Totaled.

My shoulder hurts.

So I had bought a pork roast, been wanting to do that since I read that the USDA has lowered the standard for doneness of pork to 145 degrees, so you don't have to cook it to death anymore.  So felt that last night I had to go thru with the plan to cook it, tho I didn't feel real well - confused depression.  It turned out to be laborious to figure out how to do it, it's been so many years that I was too sick to really cook. Hot in the kitchen, though we have central air. I could have just stuck the damn thing in the freezer, but had this Plan.  It didn't turn out very good, and was cold by the time I had a stress break yelled at the poor cat for getting on the table, got mad at T who was supposed to watch her so that didn't happen, because I could die from an infection borne by cats, long story, I've probably written a lot about the various dangers of being immunosuppressed. Being aware of these very real dangers and careful and accepting that I could die any moment, well my enlightenment doesn't quite cover that yet. And my shoulder hurts. I'd really like to buy some colorful annuals to complete the front garden, but I can't plant them (bad back, dirt is dangerous) would have to call Karen, just don't feel up to it.  My shoulder hurts.

All the mother stuff tugged at my now ancient memories of the nightmare of dealing with my alcoholic mother and alcoholic siblings as she slid into dementia.  Her basic conversation was about Your Brother, whom she always adored to the exclusion of my sister and me, and how she loved this young bartender who she kissed on the mouth when we all went out to dinner at his restaurant.  The tragedy and ugliness of all this is mostly laid to rest right now, but sometimes when the moon is full the ghost rises from the grave.  Don't anyone dare tell me to get therapy on it - I did years of it.  Years of practice, too. It's memory, I remind myself - it's in my brain and cells, but not real anymore.  A torn rotator cuff is real.  My shoulder hurts.  I must have slept too hard on it.

So, a stress break.  I used to call this kind of thing A Nervous Breakthrough, but this morning it doesn't seem funny. Somehow the cat getting on the table (she walks in the litterbox with those paws), table I had cleaned with Clorox, Tom not watching her, all the hard work of trying to make a decent meal which didn't turn out very good - frustration overload.  I have to ease up, stop cooking, stop shouldering (note shoulder metaphor) responsibilities. There is so much to do taking care of myself, I don't have much space for anything else.

Last night 108 Zen Books posted about Joko Beck being in hospice.  Here is a sane, sober person, which is how you hope to be with enough practice and hard work, here is someone who accepts sickness and dying as natural, who is having a good death and not stressing out her kids with craziness.  It is like another planet from what I have had to deal with in my own parents and Tom's. It made me sad.

So what's a little stress, what's a big stress, WTF is stress?  

Anyway. By the time you read this I'll feel different. Things change.

About the little foxes:  the meaning of the verse from the Christian Bible is this: mature foxes eat the grapes.  That's an annoyance, a problem.  But the little foxes can't reach the grapes.  They nibble on the vines instead.  That can kill the vines.

The problem with being in the now

[image: an example of a Venn Diagram]
Of all the serious stuff I read, what stuck with me lately came from a column in a magazine I picked up in a doctor's office. The writer said that what you obsess about is not really your problem - that obsessing is a screen or barricade against your real problems.

I thought about how some people I know carry around obsessions you can count on. How underneath the constant working-the-problem there are feelings like loneliness and disappointment and frustration. I could see it in layers, like the cupcakes you can buy at Kroger's, huge fluffy decorated icing on top of a plain layer of cake. I thought about how I obsess about how to help my obsessive friends. Eventually I thought about my own case. That's always good when you get there.

I recalled how, when I had a lot of contact with my family as my mother needed caregiving, I used to obsess about various family members. "I don't know why she said that. Did she know how mean that was? Maybe she didn't mean anything by it. No, that's excusing her, that's exactly what my mother trained me to do. She had to know. . . . " You get the idea.

All that could not be unraveled, not by me, and what's the use of all this history, anyway? I'm sure my obsessive efforts to "figure it out" after each family event were tedious to my husband and my therapist. They certainly were to me.

On my second retreat the constant rewind, play it again in my mind had me frantic. I just so much wanted to stop thinking, to just be there in the beautiful building as the sunlight moved across the floor, to be at peace. I wanted the retreat experience as I understood it - the illusion that had brought me there. I remember making it to my room at lunch break and bursting out in tears, whispering to Tom, "I don't want to be sick." I was breaking the vow of Noble Silence, but that turned out to be a good thing. I went back for the afternoon sit, and I vividly recall feeling wonderful by 9:00 p.m., walking back to my room under a full moon.

I had begun to find access to the feelings that lay underneath that crazy mind, the frustration that triggered the inner and outer monologue. Feeling sounds so simple, Just do it. But it isn't simple when the feelings are painful and the issue is deep.

After that retreat I made progress in therapy, but my psychic pain and exhaustion didn't come forth until I apparently ran a red light (obsessing) and ran into an enormous new vehicle. Bruised and shaken, I still maintained my composure and got out to ask the other driver if she was all right. When she picked up her license plate and threw it in fury, swearing, I started to cry and just kept crying. 24 hours. A week. The lid had come off my real problem.

Tolstoy said happy families are all alike. I have to disagree. I've seen that unhappy families, especially alcoholic families, have many things in common, especially shared delusions. However, it was all new and unique to me. I was going through it for the first time, and glib talk and slogans were not helpful.

There is a very wide No-man's-land where the spiritual and the psychological occupy the same field (like the hamburger in the Venn Diagram in the interesting image above). I think obsession is also a spiritual problem, tied in to illusion or delusion, and to desire, which the Buddha said was the root of all our trouble - the craving for life to be different, the insistence that it fulfill our dreams. Desire: I want those particular people to love me. Illusion: Of course your parents love you. The mind is involved too, simple cognition. This belief/illusion leads inevitably to faulty logic, "You're crazy if you think they don't." (So it should be a three-way Venn Diagram, but I couldn't find one this charming.)

We talk a lot about wanting to be in the present moment, being mindful. Everyone wants "The power of now." The news is that we really don't - we don't always want to be there for our own experience; it can feel very raw. But I am here as evidence that psychic pain won't kill you. If it does, please contact me from the other side. I'm always eager to learn.

Making a difference in this world

We can do no great things - only small things with great love.
Mother Teresa.

Thinking this morning about doing things that matter - this Rothschild guy setting out huge projects to rouse awareness of global warming and trash - clearly he wants to matter, to change the world significantly. The New Yorker profile of him details the latest project, to sail around the world on a boat made of plastic bottles.

Most nights we watch NBC news, a sort of old-way kind of thing our parents did, like sitting on the front porch. The news often ends with a segment called "Making a Difference." These little video essays spotlight some formerly ordinary person, sometimes a child, who has conceived of a generous project, and drawn other people in. That's the key. It becomes more than one person, it's big. A system.

I have groused about these enough to Tom, so I'll keep it short here. The assumption of this series (and of Rothschild's projects) is that our gestures matter only if we do something big and visible. These stories never spotlight individuals like my old friend Marie, who appeared at the door after my mother died with a bunch of sunflowers. Marie was like that, dropping off soup. I got to think of what she did as her Bodhissatva work, though I feel sure she didn't think of it that way. She was just led by her sympathy, her desire to offer.

The importance of small actions is so evident when the action is mean - look how quickly a dog or cat learns to cringe or bite or flee, and it is very difficult to untrain them from their fear and their reaction. Maybe we are all that way. I know children are. I remember the single most important thing my father ever said to me.

I was in seventh grade and not adjusting well to the new freedom of changing classes and the new idea of junior high, a pen of adolescents, grades seven through nine, instead of the traditional K-8 grade school I had grown up in, where I'd been looking forward to being one of the big kids. Seventh grade was small kids here.

And now there was homework, on top of it. I didn't like to do it, I suppose. It seemed (and was) meaningless. More of the very boring. My public school education was like that all the way through, tired old teachers stuffing irrelevant facts in your head, you obediently wrote the fact down, Battle of Hastings, 1066, as meaningless as if it were Sanskrit.

Actually, I wish it had been. Then I'd have something to show for those years. How strange that kind of education seems now that we have the internet, the great cloud of facts, any fact you want right at your fingertips, so that it is slowly becoming obvious that mental skills like analyzing the reliability of a source are most needed.

Back to junior high. I had been getting some low grades and 5's in "citizenship," which really meant disobedience, esp passing notes and talking to others, as I recall. But now I had found religion - that's another story - and changed my ways. I was pretty much behaving perfectly, as I understood it.

I waited for my father to come home and sit down at the breakfast table. I must have waited eagerly, anxiously. This was supremely important to me. I believed he would love me now. I thought the love I got was all about how "good" (?) I was, about whether or not I deserved it. I thought I could earn love. I had a Bible that said "As you sow, so will you reap." I understood that in a very simple way, expecting fairly instant results.

I put the report card in front of him, a beautiful clean grid of A's and 1's.

"Straight A's," I said proudly.

He glanced at it and made a dismissive sound like "Harumph." Then he said, "Why aren't they A pluses?" I can still hear the timbre of his voice, can feel that scene almost sixty years ago.

I fell from delighted anticipation to shocked disappointment. My father was hypersensitive to facial expressions, and must have noticed mine. Quickly he said in his rare more human voice, "Oh, I probably shouldn't have said that." Alcoholics do that, express regret. I understand they do it after they beat up their wives.

But he had said it. The moment had occurred, I had taken it in. Nothing could erase it - it was a fact.

It was a long time until I remembered that event, but it left big footprints in my life from then on. I had been trained. I believed that nothing I did would ever be enough (and my father's behavior toward me kept confirming that, the apology forgotten). I don't think I have to tell you how that played out in my life, and not just in the next report cards, not just in how I felt about trying in school. In life.

So many years, decades, later, I realize my father didn't really have volition. He just passed down the cruelty and indifference of his own father. His fire temperament, his DNA if you like, predisposed him to love alcohol, which quickly loosens the tongue. His experience in the trenches of the last great world war left him with the extreme reactivity of post-traumatic stress. What was inflicted on me was a general cruelty of the world you could say. The suffering he had experienced was funneled down to me, and to my brother and sister in different patterns. And this is always true. We are dots in a cultural context. We are the sum of all our experiences. If we don't seriously work on ourselves, we will pass on the the distorted gifts we were given.
It was a really awful moment for me, the time I heard myself hector my little girl in my father's voice, catching yourself in a passing mirror. Slowly you learn to do the only thing you can do, watch yourself and your reactivity, those conditioned things you say. Listen to what comes out of your own mouth. Hesitate. Think of the other's reality, think how you can be kind.

Grand gestures, fabulous stage shows, oh, maybe they influence the world. But when I look at my own life, the great events of my time did not matter nearly so much as that one moment when I presented my report card for my father's approval. He is long dead now, but how he lives on.

Approaching Sheba

Here is Sheba sleeping trustfully on her chair beside my computer. When I noticed she liked this chair, I put down a folded hand towel for her. During her five-month stay in Cat Welfare, her territory consisted of a low sort of pillar made for a cat to stay under or on, on top of which was a piece of chenille - one of those things it was once fashionable to put on the lid of your toilet, just the right size for the pillar. So now she likes the territories around the house marked by her very own square of towel.

I have no idea what Sheba was like before she got to this sort of Ellis Island for poor homeless cats. I do know she stayed in what the volunteers call "the old ladies' room," a glass-walled room about 4 x 8 feet with a sign on the door, Staff Only! There were four or five other cats who stayed in there, each curled on its own spot - the cats who just didn't like other cats, or maybe just wanted to sleep peacefully. Sheba was premiere among them, genuinely afraid when a strange cat came in the door after me. I suspect that in all her months there she never willingly left that room to join the great central room where a hundred cats mill around, watching DVDs of birds, spatting, climbing up to sit on the cages and look out high windows. Those cats include some who will never leave this place, like the one who is erratic about his litterbox, as well as many young cats able to adapt to all this company.

Sheba had not adapted. She was only three, but the forced inactivity of the little room had plumped her out a bit - we didn't really know that until we got her home, because we had hardly been able to observe her standing or walking. The center of the room was filled by a tray with catfood and water on it. To the side, a litterbox, always kept clean. Whenever I came in the outside door and looked over, she was straining to look at me. She seemed to ask silently, Are you my woman? Are you going to take me home? When that happens, you might as well give up. You have been chosen.

Our beloved companion Sherlock died just about two months ago, having woven his way through our lives for thirteen years. I thought it would be many months, maybe years before I was "ready" for another cat. Certainly I'm not "over" losing him.

But it was just because I missed him so much that I went to Cat Welfare, initially just to pet cats, to be around them, and I found it made me feel better. I went back, Tom with me. We asked about foster cats. Well, they don't really do that, except sometimes when there are kittens that need socialized for a couple of weeks. We knew we are too unsteady on our feet to have kittens around.

We went back again. We started to consider various cats. But my attention kept being drawn to Sheba on her lonely pillar. She was a nervous cat. When I went in (closing the door behind me) she stood and strained toward me, eager to bump her head against my hand, but then frightened and withdrawing. Yet, that eagerness was there, that head bump and that silent question.

Years ago I read a children's book about death called Missing May. It tells how a parentless child is taken in by two kind elderly people who see that she is hungry in her foster home. They give her an abundance of food and love. It's a book everyone should read. It helped me understand real grief, as feeling people experience it. I had lost family members over the years, but in an alcoholic family, grief is avoided, as all pain is avoided. And the loss of difficult people is very complicated, different from the loss of an animal companion. Their love is so straightforward and authentic. And I certainly have felt real grief since Sherlock died, and still do. He was not, as I often told him, "just a cat."

We have had Sheba three weeks now, and she is settling in nicely. It's a pleasure to see her trustfully arranged on the chair beside me, sound asleep. She loves to be petted, it turns out, though she remains terrified of being picked up, and struggles so much she cannot be held.

Tom remarked the day our warranty expired, as he put it. Cat Welfare will take a cat back, and give you back your adoption fee, within a ten-day period. That fact had reassured us, uncertain as this thing seemed. Moreover, this place - and there are many, many such shelters trying to alleviate the suffering of at least a few animals - this place will take a cat back anytime, so none of the cats they have made a commitment to should ever have to end up as strays.

Our commitment to Sheba has deepened gradually. It has gone to another level now that we scheduled her for a vet visit Tuesday. She will have a baseline exam, and perhaps be told to lose a pound. She is still not used to not having food available all the time. We will discuss those front claws, which present a problem in a cat that won't hold still for trimming. She is still jumpy from an attempt a couple of days ago. It was a battle she won. Well, that's the kind of cat she is.

Life has taught me that you can't pick out a cat like you do a car. It just doesn't work to go to the animal shelter and announce, "I have to have a lap cat." Actually, that was one reason I brought Sherlock home all those years ago - the volunteers said he was a great lap cat. It turned out that once he got home and had the run of a two-story house, lots of plants to knock over and windows to guard, people to meet, he became uninterested in sitting in laps.

When you take a cat home, you don't know the back story, whether this cat flinches because someone hit her or it's just her temperament, things like that. And you certainly don't know what that cat is going to be like in this new environment and relationship. In that regard, it's a lot like getting married - be prepared to be surprised. If you look at it the right way, that's what makes life interesting.