Old Woman in the Retirement Building Across the Street

April, 2022

Her bedroom curtains are always open and I can see when the light beside her bed is off

or on.

5:00a.m. Her pillow askew. The sheets thrown back. The slippers gone: I know that both of us are once again awake before dawn.

Then I get sick.

I’m sleeping around the clock. Until one night, I get up a lot to have a pee or take a pill.

I see her light is still on, her white head asleep on her pillow, curled on her side towards the window.

And I still don’t stop to wonder about her because I’m so sick.

Maybe the day after or the one after that. I finally stop and see she’s gone. Along with everything in her room.

The windows are open.

The light of the sun sweeps across the bare floor.

Until someone comes, and her curtains for the first time, are drawn.

“Wight Christmas” an Anthology of Christmas Horror

The “Wight Christmas, Holiday Horror and Seasonal Subversion” is available from Amazon and my story “The Selfless Gift” is included.

My story grew out of a writing exercise where the words “velvet silence” were a prompt.

I have spent part of my life traveling through places covered with snow returning to family homes for the winter holidays, in various states of mind, through different eras and phases of my life.

The thing I like most about snow is what it does to sound, so, the words “velvet silence” could only mean for me a snowy night. From there I saw a lonely road driving away from one difficulty towards an uncertain tomorrow.

Christmas, for many, can be the most difficult time of the year. Birthdays can be ignored but Christmas punches a hole in the calendar and threads wishes, family, love, longing and regret together through the years until it can almost seem an entity in itself. I tried to capture those traditional pains and joys in a short story.

Was there ever a better story than a Christmas ghost story?

Woman Poem

Woman Poem
by Rio Murphy

When she was my child 
I paused at the perfect curl of her earlobe.
She was a comma in my diatribe
about laundry and bills,
my aching back,
the sticky handprints everywhere,
the runny noses and endless nights of fitful sleep:
The Joy of Her.
#
When she was myself,
if I looked away
and back again
just in 
time, 
She was a blinking cursor.
#
When she was my old mother
with her tissue paper skin
and brittle bones on which it hung,
one black pupil 
narrowing within
the colourless iris of
her one sighted eye
—the spoon suspended halfway to her lips Like a question mark—
she was the poem
I could not write.
#
A woman poem is a ribbon in a river flashing underwater, 
It catches on an ankle,
Then slips away over black river stones, unknown.

LOVE AFTER LOVE
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

This reading is part of On Being’s altogether wonderful poetry archive.

Doing the Next Thing

I am in that weird place in life when I have lots of time to just observe things. I see when the wheel on the wagon is wobbling but it’s not my wagon.

Not any of it is my wagon.

I just try to appreciate every moment and applaud every success. “Yay!”

Crazy people, cruelty and all the other painful things humans can perpetuate on each other, hatred, confusion, obscuring the way forward; It is a crazy time. Maybe it is always a crazy time.

I find zazen, sitting staring at a blank wall excruciating, but preferable to action often because I don’t know what I can do in the face of so much suffering. I know I am probably getting my practice completely wrong. I imagine Bodhisattva cringing. I remember teachers telling me not to talk about my practice outside the Dokusan room…

The other day the bus was so full the driver told us to try to get on at the back door. It looked impossible and I was the last in line. All these backs towards me, every shade of skin a human can possess represented before me, me, covered in liver spots and freckles. For the doors to close, fat, thin, male, female, shy, brazen, tall, short, young, old, we had to smoosh together.

“Well, we are all good friends now!” Laughter and smiles, people looking over their shoulders at me in the crush, somehow making room for me where there was none.

That was enough.

It is never a personal Titanic on which we arrange the deck chairs.

I Find Reading About Neurology Helps Me Feel Better About Myself.

I just finished “Being Mortal” by Atul Gawande and now I am reading, “The Man Who Wasn’t There, Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self”  by Anil Ananthaswarmy. The first made me feel a lot better about my mother’s death, which was a “good death” all in all. He makes reference to several other books which put me on another path of reading, hence “The Man Who…”

“Thinking Fast and Slow” is the next one I hope to get from the library although I am 369th on a waiting list.

I have had a few experiences and I possess a few patterns, at times frightening and other times  wonderful . But I have never enjoyed being “odd” or “weird” except perhaps when I finally gave up trying and just practiced Zazen and Tai Chi a lot. It is exciting for me to learn that neurology is coming up with some very neat connections; New ideas that sometime sound like Buddhist psychology, Zen, Shinjin.  🙂

Buying Time

This is a link to some famous guys talking about their time.  You can Google Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and find out who they are if you don’t know.  Which is cool right?

http://www.swiss-miss.com/2017/03/you-control-your-time.html

Anyway, a basic lack of awareness is the biggest time waster of all and no amount of structure, lists or schedules can provide it.  I remember when a mom I knew who had been a palliative care nurse in a hospital told me she had had nervous breakdown.  She said the cut backs in support staff were so severe that her job had become moving patients around like cords of wood just to get the basics done like changing sheets and cleaning bed pans and she realized that she had started to see them as impediments to the function of the floor rather than the reason why she was there. “I wasn’t interacting with them as human beings. I had lost it”.  What had she lost? She lost the awareness of what she was actually doing there, perhaps because it was no longer possible.  I don’t know, I don’t doubt it was devastating for her.  She loved her job, she said she felt had been good at it.

This is a drastic example but not unusual.

Still, we have more time than we know, we have right now.  We have the breath in our bodies. We have the light entering our eyes from whatever screen we are looking at this from, the air moving around us, perhaps playing with dancing tiny flecks of dust, the sounds around us, intentional or insidious, humming aspects of twenty-first century life.  Or maybe nature: Robins bursting with exuberant declarations of spring love, or trees swaying in the wind or rain falling on hard ground…

Ah but there is that other blog we wanted to check and the coffee we want warmed and damn aren’t we late for something!!!  But if we bump into another human being as we rush to where we are going we can take a moment to notice them (if we are Canadian we can apologize) before we rush off.  We can be AWARE and it can make a difference.

Have a Nice Day!

This moment is brought to you entirely free. 🙂

 

 

I think I was talking about my concussion,

…meanwhile I am so dizzy and this is my day: sit down, think of something I need, get up to get it, start something else forget what I got up for, sit down and remember what it was, get up and get distracted…spin and repeat. After years of looking after my mother while she was in a similar state I am now in that state myself!  I feel like I am fighting through mashed potatoes.

finding myself waiting for a bus in the heat and the sun (the bus shack is like a solar cooker, what is the point of a clear roof?) A nice young woman said she would let me know when the bus came so I could stand in the door of the Egg Smart restaurant.  By that time my head was throbbing and I thought I’d throw up…the medication I am taking is not really helping, I feel like I am reduced to waiting for the moment the yogurt will expire

not original

I don’t see the neurologist again for two months.  The thing about seeing a neurologist is, how do you really know what she has said if you are brain impaired? A friend cut out an article for me about post concussion syndrome.  I feel like I should just carry it around with me as my saying, “I have a concussion” gets no real response other than “Yeah eh, but you look good, your nose is really healing…”  I cut my bangs so you can’t see the lump that is still on my forehead.

This concussion, like with migraine, makes it so I can’t gage my affect.  Am I too loud, too urgent too hysterical or have I over compensated too much until I am whispering, calm to the point of coma, and sitting in a burning house?

Avoid parties, bureaucrats, people with agendas, opinions, and or grievances,  real or imagined, sunlight, heat and humidity, the urge to buy dresses…

Is it an affront that I am asked to get my photo ID for OHIP and told if I don’t my doctor’s assistant won’t book an appointment for me?  How useful will the photo be when I won’t have bandages on my broken nose forever?  Am a reasonable to not want to listen to my doctor talk about how difficult OHIP is making it for her and then tell me that despite the fact that I am crying she has a lot of other people to see and there is no time to discuss what I am upset about?  Or is it my brain?

Is it my brain?

I want to spend all my time with my grandson and his dog. They seem to be the only people who do not confound me.   😛

What I Would Put on a Shirt

Hot off the re-press!  http://printallover.me/products/0000000p-the-michael-edition

 

If I had a t-shirt made up it would say, “Hot Water Bottles are Good in Bed!”

Here is a picture of last year’s Linton shirt:

  modeled by Denise  and Marjorie.

I don’t know, is it me, or does it look better on a hot young model?

My Cell Phone is Sick.

I had to take it to the service provider who’s name cannot be spoken.  Saturday I was all set to run out to the mall (killing two errands with one bus ticket) and S. called.

She is my Scottish friend who is of Chinese decent, she has the weirdest accent you can imagine, plus she seems to have adopted the stereotypical traits of both cultures, she tends to be blunt, likes to save money and shop for a deal (she is a one woman resource for where to find things in town) and she has a rather perfunctory approach to friendship. She calls me and tries to drag me out to go swimming at 6:30am on a weekly basis, “because it is good for you and everyone needs to talk to five people a day to stay happy”.

I disagree with this on so many levels. (I could write an entire post about it and it would be funny. “Oh Rio, you make me laugh!” is her response to my opinion.)

We compromise with going for coffee and complaining about our aged mothers. She is a caregiver too. So she offered to drive me to the mall.

Apparently they need a R.C.M.P. dossier on you before you can get them to do anything. My passport is out of date and I don’t drive. The little girl, and this is not meant to as a derogatory expression, (she was tiny and maybe eighteen years old, this was her first job and her last day), well, the wee pet, I’ll call her Janet, was willing to take my phone and send it for repairs but she would not be working there when I came back and without proper documentation/I.D., they would not give me the phone. Argghhhhhh. This is not an Ipod, it’s not even a phone they make anymore but it has a slide out keyboard arranged in the same layout as a standard keyboard and I can use it without my glasses. I REALLY LIKE IT. IT WORKS FOR ME. I AM WILLING TO PAY TO FIX IT… I don’t think it would be worth it for a stranger to pay for the repairs to steal it. I was proud of the fact that I didn’t get upset.

I said, “I am so glad you got another job, I hope it is better than this one!”
“Oh it is!” Janet smiled.

Meanwhile, S. is waiting and waiting. She decided to wander off and do some of her own errands.

They had no courtesy phones left to lend me, never a good sign, but I suggested that she introduce me to someone who WOULD BE THERE ON MONDAY and she could give me her name and number and I would do the same (it would be on all the forms I had to sign) and we could keep in touch as to when I could get a courtesy phone and all the details of the repair, cost, time etc.

I introduced myself to another young lady, A. She questioned whether I had gotten the phone wet and Janet defended me. I really congratulate Janet on finding a job where her customer loyalty might be rewarded.

S. had returned after completing several shopping miracles. “THIS IS WHY I’M NEVER GETTING A CELL PHONE! TOO MUCH HASSEL…”, she announced to the store in general. We went for coffee a quick coffee after that. It was getting late and my mother would be back from her church bizaar…

I have call Voldemort this afternoon, just to keep the relationship between “A” and I fresh…

Sunday with Wednesday the dog!

On Sunday I got to look after Wednesday. She was a rescue. She had been used to breed puppies. Now she lives with lovely Chaase and Meagan who were away for the day to watch the Pride Parade. Toronto is hosting International Pride Week!

Wednesday would not chill out and just watch t.v. At one point she did have a nap (as did I) in the backyard but in view of the car.

She just wanted to check over and over…

She ran around a bit…

but it always lead to the door.

Food was a distraction.

But before long she wanted to check again…

She looks like an Ewok!

She knew they wouldn’t leave the car… Dogs are more like little children than cats, even when they are smaller than a cat. I remembered a very young child in my care for the first time would have behaved in the same way.

Poor pet was exhausted. She fell asleep under the kitchen table shortly after they arrived. That little dog can snore!