Everett Coogler

One night 37 years ago, Bill woke me up. “Listen to this.” He read me the first Everett Coogler poem. I thought, He’s gone completely around the bend, but in the morning I realized that wasn’t it at all. He had created a wonderful character and what would become the first of many poems about Coogler. Bill is a wonderful reader of his own poetry, not too dramatic, but dramatic enough, not the usual drone. People laughed uproariously and Coogler became much beloved.

The Lament of Everett Coogler

After
17 years at
The same stand,
I,
Everett Coogler,
Would say,
That life is a stream rushing on,
Alive with
Red
Herrings.

A True Account

Too generous
I threw out stale
Jelly donuts to my
Friends the grackles
Along with their seed

And now one poor
Fellow staggers and falls
His foot plunged deep
In soft raspberry center

Free at last he rolls and flies
Perching one-legged on a birch limb
He cranks the other foot
Up and down in the morning air
To see if it will dry

And yells at me
Shuddering with rage
Or the sheer feeling of repellent novelty
“Do you mind telling me
What the hell this is
I’ve got between my god-damned toes?”

Bill Bauer

The Weather as Metaphor

It snowed last Thursday when we had to go to Bill’s pre-op clinic, and it is snowing again today. In between it has been unusually cold. We are waiting for a date for Bill’s bronchoscopy. At my age I shouldn’t be wishing my life away, but it is hard not to wish the weather would be better and that the bronchoscopy would be over. On the weekend I wished time would slow down because our two sons and their families surprised us with a visit. Fishing season opens on Monday. A friend tells us that this is the first year he can remember when he won’t be able to find a piece of ground where he can dig for worms. I remember the day my mother was buried, April 2, I think it was. A small group of us was standing in the Strawberry Hill cemetery. It was cold, dark, but the birds were singing. The metaphor was apt: a gloomy day, yet with a hint of hope. This late winter is an apt metaphor too; summer will come, it always does, but it is difficult to imagine the experience.

Friends of ours are driving to Moncton today to keep an important doctor’s appointment. Schools everywhere are closed. It is an hour and a half drive. There is a stretch of the highway of perhaps 30 miles where there is no habitation, no exits. What a terrible decision to make: go or not go. Some birds have returned from the south, but they are nowhere in evidence today. On the weekend we saw robins and a cardinal. The grackles are back.

I have just spent some time looking for Bill’s poem about grackles. I haven’t read his poems for a while. They were brought back to me. Every once in a while someone will begin to recite their favorite poem from Bill’s books – the Tantrum Poem, or Everett Coogler, or Unsnarling String. A recent e-mail ended, “Let Bill know that I have been unsnarling a lot of string in the past three months.” I couldn’t find the grackle poem.

Things are Moving

Bill has his consultation with the anesthetist today and will have the bronchoscope done sometime after April 17. I am writing some columns ahead, two so far, and this weekend I will tackle the music one that is giving me so much trouble. I console myself with my past experience that the harder a thing is to write, the better the essay, although on a rare occasion passion has let me write a good one right off the top of my head. I am spending way too much time on these columns, but they keep me concentrating on them for a few hours and not on our problems. I probably am earning about a dollar an hour. Of course when I write novels, I am making about a penny an hour.

Anniversaries

Tomorrow is the first anniversary of this blog. It has wiggled and wobbled from subject to subject. What wiggles and wobbles at the bottom of the sea? A nervous wreck. I have got off the subject of tracing my way. I have noticed that other people periodically change the focus of their blogs. I think I will try that, but what should the focus be?

What I didn’t anticipate was the great fun of meeting up with other people and becoming interested in their lives and opinions. I have added and subtracted blogs from my blogroll because I realized after a while that I couldn’t read too many regularly; there just was not enough time. I do occasionally think to myself that since there are millions of blogs, there probably are quite a few by people who would turn out to be kindred spirits. I wish I had kept a journal of how I came to the blogs I regularly read. Usually it was “way leads on to way.” to quote Robert Frost.

I hadn’t remembered until today that I had started the blog on the anniversary of my mother’s death. I don’t know if I was aware at the time, although it was serendipitous because the first few posts are about her naming of me.

Labyrinths

I am just getting caught up reading other people’s blogs. Some entries are long and dense, but interesting, so I will go back to read them again. Yesterday a woman who runs a twice monthly reading series asked me to fill in this afternoon for a poet who has laryngitis. This morning I am wondering why I said yes since I have so much to do. I was, however, intending to go to the reading anyway. I decided to read the ailing poet’s poem which addresses another poet, dead more than 20 years. In the poem, Robert Gibbs addresses Alden Nowlan who addresses John Keats and Samuel Johnson. I like the idea of Nancy addressing Robert addressing Alden addressing John and Samuel. A set of nested Russian wooden dolls. Or six degrees of separation. I am going to read an old, unpublished story, partly because I can’t remember which stories I have read publicly in recent times. In the story I am imagining ideal readers, so Nancy will be reading to an audience about writing for an ideal audience. When Alison asked me to fill in for Bob, I thought I would read the beginning of the novel I am working on but that would necessitate my typing it and I don’t have time. I know from bitter experience that I can’t read from my own handwriting. Now I have to steel myself to go down cellar to see if it is flooded. Yesterday and last night we had snow and then terrific rain and melting.

The Metronome

We have had warm weather the last month or so. By warm I mean zero or above Celsius. Today it is already 6 above. For an unaccustomed pain in my chest my family doctor sent me to see the cardiac doctor. He put me on a treadmill and said to say stop whenever I wanted. I kept going so that the test would be accurate and because I was embarrassed by my huffing and puffing. He stopped me. He is alleged not to have a good bedside manner, but I like him, mostly because he is reputed to be the most brilliant doctor in our area and that is what made me happy when he was looking after Bill. He has an acerbic sense of humor. He explained that my heart is fine for someone my age, but he said, “What the test tells me is that you don’t do very much.” I had to confess that was true. Dr. S suggested I buy a treadmill, and I probably will do that, but Bill’s cardiovascular system has to undergo improvement too, so ever since the warm weather arrived we have been walking. We will enjoy the walking when the snow goes and we can go along the trails in the park or the river. Now our walk is metronomic and our pleasure is in how virtuous we are and how healthy we will be.

My first controversial column last Saturday so far has only elicited comments from people who agree with me. This Saturday’s column is non-controversial. The editor said that it was “beautifully written.” Another reader said it was “lyrical.” I can see that I won’t be able to keep up writing one every week.

On Being a Nurse

I have learned a lot about being a nurse the last 6 weeks. While Bill was in the hospital, I watched the nurses closely. I saw how they shaved him, and when he came home, I duplicated that. So far, knock on wood, I haven’t given him a knick. When the kids were little I played nurse on quite a few occasions. By coincidence, I have nursed 6 kids through chicken pox.

I have always admired nurses. They acquire an astonishing facility to do things most people couldn’t bring themselves to do: draw blood relatively painlessly, stick needles into tender body parts, and take care of various bodily wastes in a manner that doesn’t embarrass the patient. They also have a knack for getting the patient to do what he should be doing, eating or drinking the noxious substance or taking a pill, without sounding like a harridan.

When my dad was in the nursing home, not in his right mind, I heard a nurse say to him, laughing, “You like my poobahs, don’t you.” The nurse was from the Caribbean, and I realized that her poobahs were her breasts and that my father had touched them. She was not only kind to him, but pleasantly kind.

Over in One Word, Zhoen writes about being a nurse in the operating room. She seems to revel in her competence. To have that kind of competence in such an important job must be truly wonderful.

Eerie

Last summer I wrote what I thought was a short story. It began with an image I had of a family event. In October, starting to type it up, I realized it wasn’t a short story but the beginning of a novel. This has happened to me on several occasions. I began to go deeper into the story, and several characters emerged, one of whom was the husband of the central consciousness, Anna. It also gradually emerged that her husband had had a severe stroke. My father had had several strokes, and I thought as I was writing that was the experience I was building on. My father’s strokes had left me with the dread that I would have one, leaving Bill to look after me.

Now the strange part: it wasn’t me who had the stroke but Bill.

In 1969 I was writing a novel (never published) about a woman who went on a protest walk to NYC. I wrote on a Thursday, and the next Tuesday I was called home because my mother had gone into a coma. A few days later she died. A few weeks later I went back to the novel and read what I had written on that Thursday: “When she was sixteen, her mother died.” I was troubled. Something similar has happened a number of times, although not quite so troubling. I wrote about a mother and father who were sitting in the “quiet room” of the emergency ward, where they put people whose loved one is in dire straits. Their son had had an accident. Once when I had been in the emergency ward with one of the kids for a minor reason, I had glimpsed the quiet room and saw a couple in it so I knew what it looked like. A few months after I wrote about the quiet room, Bill and I were sitting in the quiet room. Our son had been bitten in the face by a dog.

One of the main characters in my first published novel keeps more and more complicated lists. She makes lists of her different lists. Her daughter gives her nicely bound black books to keep the lists in, and they comprise a kind of family history. My mother kept lists but not as elaborate. A few years ago I realized I was keeping lists of lists, a book in which I listed where other lists were kept, like my character. And two years ago I bought a black book in which I write everything down so that I won’t forget and only later did I think of the black books of Flora’s mother.

It’s all kind of spooky.

Vulnerable

Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you, but I didn’t realize just how bad it is. I knew that your chances of getting cancer rise when you smoke although not everyone who smokes gets cancer. If cancer were the only bad result, you would just be taking a gamble, like climbing Mt. Everest. Or even driving a car. I have learned, however, that there are many other results of smoking. The doctor told Bill that because of his smoking his condition is that of a man ten years older. There are so many things wrong with him that I am overwhelmed. For example, his ability to metabolize food is affected. And heart rhythm. And circulation. The only good thing that can be said of his smoking is that he was pretty old when his bad habit of 60 years caught up with him.

The young, pretty, female, heart resident leaned over Bill and asked him if he wanted his heart to be started again if it stopped. “This is something I have to ask you.” He might die, I thought. And then I thought, He is going to die. Now. Tonight.

Our youngest son was standing there too. I haven’t asked him what he thought. I only know that when our neighbor phoned him to tell him Bill had had a stroke, he left his house for the hour and a half drive without his wallet and in his crocs (in the middle of a New Brunswick winter.)

Now we are waiting. Bill can’t have anesthesia for at least another two weeks. We have had a month of harshly cold temperatures with bitter winds. We haven’t had such weather for several years. I can’t remember where I put our down-filled coats. He can’t have coffee or alcohol. And of course no cigarettes. He is having difficulty writing. The deadline for my column is tomorrow morning.

In her introduction of me in the new section of the newspaper, the editor called me “venerable.” A francophone woman e-mailed me about my first column and misquoted the word. She called me “vulnerable.”

Hiatus

There will be an hiatus here because Bill is in the hospital.

From Bill

I am tired of being with people
who never have heard
of Charlie McCarthy
or Mortimer Snerd.

The Wider World

My father worked for the Boston Globe in the artist room for 35 years. The artists’ main job was to make ads, but they also were called upon to draw other things: crime scene maps and cartoons, for example. The powers that be at the Globe felt that the artist room contributed a lot to the success of the Globe. For the last twelve years of his working life, Dad was the director of the section. One night the publisher, Mr. Taylor, was showing someone through the plant, and as he introduced Dad to the visitor, he said, “This is the director of the artist room, and he is just about the best in the business.” It was a compliment my dad cherished.

His connection to Boston and to the Globe gave the rest of the family a wider outlook on the world. My mother was a great baseball aficionado, and Dad would bring home tidbits of news and rumors to her. One of the sports writers told him where the catcher Bernie Tibbetts lived, and Dad drove her to Nashua to see his house. He would go into Boston’s Morgan Memorial to buy books for us all. Later, Dad would become one of the best customers of Vic the bookseller. Vic’s peddling rounds included the newspapers in Boston. Eventually our library included thousands of books – religion, philosophy, anthropology, biography, history, poetry.

When it was determined that I needed glasses, I went to a children’s specialist in Boston, and on those trips taken to see various sights: the glass flowers in one of the Harvard museums, the swan boats in the Boston commons, a trip on the el. Dad was the connection to the big city for the whole village, an hour’s drive away. A young neighbor, six foot tall, would drive with him into Boston to go to a tall people’s club. She eventually married one of the members. The student ministers for our small church would ride back and forth with him to Boston University, discussing theology all the way. Anyone wanting tickets to the Red Sox would commission him to buy them. He got several people jobs at the Globe, and they would ride with him.

When Dad arrived back home, he would make himself a lunch, pour a glass of wine, and sit reading for an hour or two. It was the best time of the day for him.

Bill detected that Dad had a slightly different accent from the rest of our family, and we decided it was the Boston influence.