Living in Bali

In June, 2000 I did a thought exercise I read about somewhere:

The designer Milton Glaser assigned his students at the School of Visual Arts: design a perfect day for yourself five years from now.

I set myself down to do this in one nonstop session, the way I was keeping my journal in those days. The exercise caught my imagination as I wrote, and I am surprised, looking back, how it creates a whole community, an ideal civic order of cooperation and neighborliness. It was a life of no work and harmony on a sort of fantasy island, as I then thought of Bali - as a culture where the arts are sacred and pervade life. In that design, we lived in a sort of gated community where nothing evil could enter.

My fantasy began with a house with glass walls - such as I now live in. It sat in a small community of close neighbors - which I now live in. We are not on a beach, it's true, but on a woods, next best thing - our own little woods. What we "own" goes steeply down to the ravine.

We have come a long, long way since then, but it has not been an island paradise. Life has been punctuated with illness and deaths. Yet, as the poet Robert Frost said, "Earth's the right place for love." This life is what we have, complete with all that.

The photo I chose today marks one instructive event that took place two or three years ago. My grandson Otto was visiting, and Tom was gone. It was a pleasant summer day, warm and with no wind, and Otto and I were at the dining room table playing a board game, maybe "Life" (I'm not making that up) when we heard an odd sound I identified as a loud swooshing. My peripheral vision caught something happening to my right: a huge bouquet of leaves falling past the window to our right. We blinked, stood up and went to the window. The back yard was covered with green leaves springing out from a branch. A branch of the maple had broken off and fallen.

I remember that I just kept on saying, "Oh my God." Utterly astonished. It is interesting to think that it didn't seem to rattle Otto at all - maybe when you're seven years old, a whole lot of things are inexplicable and surprising. But he obediently went with me to inspect the back yard. The branch had not scraped a window or poked through a porch screen. Nothing was harmed. We circled the house, had to go across the street to see just where the branch had broken off, high in the tree.

There are moments when our conception of a safe, secure reality is torn apart, and we see the true nature of life - how a branch can tear off when there is no wind, no apparent disease in the tree. There are reasons somewhere, maybe in the unseen world, the 90% that scientists say our senses do not detect. Maybe the buddhas whose spirits are thought to be everywhere gathered to push that branch down just to break me out of my complacency and give me an amazing dharma lesson. But it is also true that organic life is complex, and birth always leads to death. And death is not necessarily announced. Again and again, it cuts through our belief that we have things in order.

Grandma Defeats her AR

Enough pictures of the cat, already. This is my grandson, Otto. undated photo. I'd say it's last year, when he was 7 1/2. He still looks like this, but not. His hair is a couple of inches longer now, stylishly disheveled, and his face is--what is it happens to our faces? more formed, perhaps. More individual.

I came close to missing the moment today. When Cassie called Wednesday night to tell me that today would be Grandparents' Day at Otto's school, my Automatic Reactivity (AR) kicked in. I have no patent on the AR; actually, I suspect everyone has one. It is that tightly woven collection of preferences; the way I like things to go.

I like things to go on schedule and on time. And I already had Friday organized. I had moved my usual Friday afternoon coffee with a friend to morning, so I could be home when Tom gets back from retreat. Then too, I am working hard now to stay rested and not overdo, so I don't get sick. I thought about having to get up with an alarm, which I hate, driving an hour each way on freeways by myself. Changing my meeting with my friend again. Bad weather was moving in, and my fibromyalgia was flaring up.

But somehow I didn't give her a firm no. And I found myself trying to imagine myself back in third grade. How I would have felt if I'd had grandparents who cared enough about me to come to my school. I told Cassie yes.

Friday I woke before the alarm, then, wow! I was on the road at 8:00 a.m., coffee in commuter mug, deftly switching lanes, making it through downtown rush hour and heading east.

Route 70 turns into six spacious lanes about the time you notice the landscape has changed from flat to rolling. Low clouds, an irregular band of bright light above the horizon, mixed forest on both sides of the road. Mowed cornfields. Black angus cattle like paper silhouettes.

Soon I was at Hopewell Elementary, jostling into a parking space on the grass, then directed through brightly-painted hallways into the tech lab, where I sat with grandparents decades younger and older than me in a surround of---computers!---ready to be escorted into Mrs. Youman's third grade. I had worn my pretty flowered sweatshirt, and felt more appropriate than usual.

I drove back with my colored-paper blue ribbon taped to the dash, and the kind of memories you file to play over during that long, comfortable deathbed scene. Otto's face when I came in. The teacher asked him to read his essay about his grandparents first. He did. I listened to how he sees us. I have written a book, he said, and used to teach college. We play games with him. Our house is pleasant.

Then Otto and I and another boy worked on, believe it, a handout of a Venn diagram. Two circles that overlap. On the left side he wrote things that he thought were different about his school. On the right, things I said were different when I was in third grade. (We had to sit totally still, I said. We never got to talk in class. He could see how awful that had been.) In the middle, where the circles overlapped, he wrote things we agreed are the same. An alphabet posted above the dry-erase boards. Windows. Rules. (One unwritten rule, I learned, is still in force: you can look out the windows if they're not watching.)

I sat on a tiny chair beside him, watching him cooperate with the other boy to tell what we had written, aware all over again of how much it means to feel loved. I don't know that I have changed a bit in that regard since third grade.

To end it, the children lined up to sing a song in praise of grandparents, and then we all filed down to the gym/cafeteria where we had homemade cookies (limit, 2) and our choice of red, white, or blue (raspberry) punch. Women came up to me and introduced themselves; Cassie's neighbor; a neighbor of Otto's other grandmother. Over near the stage, a small toddler with a pacifier in place toyed with a small computer; a notebook, I suppose. "That's different," Otto said knowledgeably.

Sitting with Otto, I ransacked my purse until I found the three Star Trek stickers I had picked up for him yesterday---I guess this is why grandmothers have to carry big purses. He stuck them deftly in a pocket, to look at later. I asked if he still liked to go to the zoo. "Yes!"

I asked him what he wants to see there. "Everything," he said.

What Grandmothers Know

I may be the only grandmother there tomorrow who isn't wearing a sweatshirt with something like this on it. I had a nice Grandmother sweatshirt my daughter got me, loved it, but Otto is almost nine years old now, and I have gained a size (at least) since he was born. And moved. Don't know where the shirt went. Maybe in the tote box labeled Clothes that Don't Fit.

Tomorrow? Grandparents' Day at Otto's school. I will drive an hour each way for the pleasure of watching his classroom on its very best behavior for half an hour. And refreshments. We women will look at each other and smile; all grandmothers know the same things.

It has me thinking about just what those things are. Say, the preciousness of an individual life, the resonant depth of connection. Is that understanding you can teach? How? Not by lecture or even dharma talk, I suspect. And---if you stop to think about the wars you've known in your own lifetime---maybe it's the single most important question: how can we teach those truths so they are deeply known, felt in our bodies, so that killing other people is out of the question?

Powerless in Ohio

No picture today--my computer "is dead," Tom says, and I am at the library on #28, which does not have an ergonomic keyboard. One of oh so many ways we are suffering.

We have drinkable water, even hot water, and a gas stove you can light with a match, but not the oven. Oh well, just use the toaster oven. No. Okay, the microwave. No. And more good news, the weather is perfect, 75 today, cool at night. If it were the dead of winter we'd have to be bundled up a foot from the gas fireplace.

It's been like this since Sunday at about 4:00, when the hurricane(!) started. That's almost 3 days now. We have emptied the refrigerator, and rolled the trash to the curb. A fine chance to clean the thing out. We have four various-sized coolers going. Yesterday Cindy brought us two bags of ice, free from Whole Foods. Mark and Karina gave us dinner Sunday night, and the next day cleared all the fallen debris from our front yard. Mark opened our electric garage door so we could get out the van, in which is the wheelchair, which so far does not need to be charged. Tina called, she has power, so we took over cellphone and electric toothbrush to charge them: things we don't want to live without if this goes on all week, as originally predicted. We dropped off the Chicken Tenders we keep for our grandson, Otto, for Barb, whose oven works.

Electric power out for dozens of different reasons. You'd be amazed. Every single thing you do is different, and that makes for strain.

By 8:00 pm the street is dead dark, except for a couple of our solar yard lights, and the nearly-full moon. We wear little LED flashlights on ribbons around our necks, then. We are too old to take a fall well. We read a while with flashlights, our habit. Tom is sleeping semi-upright, unable to use his ventilator. So far, he's okay. But even the cat has been disturbed, and can be found sitting in unaccustomed places sphinx-like, all drawn in, wary.

Of course, we are the lucky ones, we all say. Our houses are not flooded (we are on a hill, so don't rely on sump pumps.) None of us had a big tree fall on the house or us, though a branch fell on one neighbor's new car. And it could have happened, you see. We have drinkable water, food, money to eat out. We have plenty of batteries and a weather radio. We are going crazy.

I started to write by hand a Twitter of this event Monday morning. Words are the shelter I weave around myself in an anxious life, waiting for a call from the OSU Transplant center, "We have a kidney for you," a call that is not likely to come for another two years, but could come right now on the cellphone in my shirt pocket. I was dying to write the minute this started, so much to write about, and to check the blogs I follow, and my e-mail, and research things on the internet . . . you know. No, you don't know. How did my whole life come to center on my computer? Ten years ago I didn't even have DSL.

Monday at 9:23 a.m., a neighbor, Kathy, pulled up with ice, and we realized we had to get with it. I stopped my strange Twittering on a yellow pad and haven't resumed. This morning I wrote a poem by hand. I have no way to type it up. My manual typewriter's ribbon is 50 years old, and I'm older, and can't type on a manual anyway.

People who have phones are all calling each other. The community here on the street came to life during the storm we didn't realize was going to qualify as a hurricane, with winds over 75 mph. Debris was flying straight sideways, like in the Wizard of Oz, but you couldn't stand to stay alone inside.

Tom and I, being variously disabled, mostly have our communities and communications online. All gone, thrown back to, well, people you see in the flesh. You wouldn't believe how disconcerting it is.

We are seeing how easy it is to lose much of what keeps our civilization going. Stoplights not working in most of Clintonville, and no police in sight, either. A huge tree uprooted, blocking Glenmont. On another street, a tree took power lines down and landed on a car. The whole scene is surrounded by yellow crime-scene tape. A live power line can kill you.

In this neighborhood, half the stores are closed. People's phones out. At night, the dark. How close we are to that total dark, no streetlights, one lone gas coachlight, and the house so quiet, no furnace fan running, that when a train goes by two blocks away, you feel the vibration through your shoes. Only the cat is used to it. I'll post his picture when it goes back up, which will either be tonight by 8:00 or Friday, or Sunday by midnight, depending on which rumor you believe.