Lydia Aello looks at me

 

LYDIA AELLO LOOKS AT ME

©

 

I was a skinny, noisy kid who had an answer for everything, and an inability to keep quiet about it. Although I grew to six feet tall, before puberty I was usually the shortest kid in class, and had an answer for everything.

 

It must have been in fifth grade that this thing happened, I know that it was just before lunch time, that the weather was warm, I remember the walk home for lunch after it happened.

 

I read everything that came into sight, I was bright, considered myself brighter than anybody else in my class or at home, along with being small, considering myself the brightest led me to having a difficult time in grade school, and not that much easier in high school.

 

The teacher’s name was Miss Orr, at least I remember it that way, this happened about half a century ago, I know that it wasn’t Miss Coulter, because Miss Coulter gave me the strap a few times, she frightened me, which was her modus operandi.

 

When it happened I was sitting in the third row from the windows, it was a nice day I had been looking outside often.

 

Lydia Aello, whose father killed chickens, was looking at me. I’d known Lydia since I started at Memorial Public School three years before, she was the girl who walked to school with Norman Hope’s sister Muriel, they had a poultry business behind their house, she was bigger than I was, she had long dark hair, that’s about all that I can remember about her. I can’t remember much about any of the other girls either, they just didn’t figure for much in my world.

 

 

Anyway, Lydia was giving me this look, looking right at me with this funny smile that somehow told me that she liked looking at me. This had never happened to me before, I had never considered it happening to me, there was nothing in my vocabulary for this. The difference between boys and girls was a fixed thing, they were what they were, and a girl looking at me as if she liked doing it? I didn’t know what was going on. I can remember looking away, then looking back, there was no mistake, she did it again, right at me, with this funny little smile. For once I had no answer, and I always had an answer for everything.

 

I can remember walking home across the fields we called the ‘hydro’ fields, because the high voltage electric lines from the hydro electric power plants, that surround the falls at Niagara, ran through them, I didn’t have much to say to Tommy, Gary or Bob that noon hour. If I had been hit alongside the head with a sandbag, I would not have felt differently. That afternoon I smiled back at Lydia Aello.

 

Since that time I have not always been in love, but I can definitely say that I have never doubted its existence, would not even consider the question. I don’t understand love much better now than I did then, but that it exists is obvious.

What Lydia’s look signaled was that I was acceptable. I don’t know that anyone had ever given me that message before. Those were not the words that would have been used, the child’s term “she likes you” is as close as it ever came.

The notion remained as a ungerminated seed in my soul, not nourished nor often repeated, just buried in the soil, waiting.

 

My thing with Lydia Aello lasted two weeks, or a little less. I got teased about it, I can remember a smile from Miss Orr when Lydia chose me again to answer the multiplication exercise that she was monitoring, I chose her when it was my turn. I never did get to hold her hand.

 

Now jump forward about four decades to when I am about to kill myself.

 

A variety of pills are in the coffee grinder, stuff to make me drowsy, a glass of milk in which to mix the ground medications sits on the counter, a vinyl shower curtain is draped over the kitchen stove. I will drink the milk and drugs mixture, blow out the pilot lights and open the circuit breakers, and then climb under the tent, there will not be an explosion from the gas when I open the oven valve. The plan has been fixed in my mind for some time, simple, clean, final.

 

I am going to kill myself because there are no options left to me; over fifty years of fighting major depression that continues to worsen, I am divorced for the second time, my daughter wants nothing more to do with me, any career is long gone, there aren’t any friends left. I have looked for help since 1959, that is the first time I lived in a city big enough to have a psychiatrist, it had continued in half a dozen places, and with about a dozen and a half therapists, all the medication had been tried, multiple shock treatments, and it just gets worse, the hole gets deeper, all options are gone. This list of failure keeps running through my mind, the conclusion never varies, there is the only way to end this pain.

The list of rejections and failures went again through me, this time there was no “perhaps” that I might insert, my position allowed me for no excuse, there was no person, no endeavor, or place that wanted me.

 

 

I am standing, next to the stove, leaning on the counter, everything is in front of me. This is it.

 

I now see the void of death, in just a few minutes I will be of it. I have never considered the blackness before, there has always been some myth or platitude diluting it, but not now, this is pure, this is reality as I had never known it.

 

It was as if I was naked, standing on a rock, with a storm having blown every reason to live downwind. I stood there in this experience, the second hand didn’t move.

 

And then my stomach heaved, I began to gag, I ran to the bathroom, to retch out something bitter and nasty from my belly.

 

It took me a weeks to know that in that moment of nakedness, I had experienced something else, something other than the feral instinct to live, a notion that I couldn’t and wouldn’t see.

 

Regarding the depression, I made one more effort, using an technique that someone from Mayo Clinic had suggested years before, I started asking around, “who is the most effective person in Chicago treating depression?” The emphasis was on ‘effective’. I attended a couple of lectures, searched bookstores, and asked whatever doctors I could find that question. As had been promised me by the Mayo doctor, physicians are not loath to tell give their opinions. One name and one method came out of this. And the nightmare began to end, the depression was vulnerable after all this time.

 

To get back to whatever it was that I experienced at the time when I truly believed death was next. I thought on that, have been thinking on that ever since; it has become the focus of all that has followed. I experienced presence, not a presence, just presence, more of a verb than a noun. And even though it is more ineffable than love, it has been the subject of writings for several thousands of years, and continues to be.

It has another thing that cannot be doubted, no more than that love I felt when Lydia Aello first looked at me.

 

I assume that everyone I meet has been in love, it may not be true, but it isn’t far from it; I sometimes forget that not everyone has had a religious experience, the two seem so natural and obvious, available to everyone, when the situation comes to it.

 

I realized that it was at this point that the seed planted by Lydia Aello had sprouted, it came to life. That I am acceptable, not by any person, any code, but as an inherent part of me.

The Presence I experienced is that of Being Acceptable.

A truth that needs no argument. It just sits there as testament to my being.

 

Roger Johnson: April, 2007.

 

Saying goodbye gently

It was a good thing to do on the last day of the year, visit Bert in the nursing home on the day when the year is wrapped. Bert is wrapping his last chapter, though his memory is lessens he is coming to terms with it.

The city is quiet on this first morning, a couple of inches of snow and the general holiday combine on this blue-gray morning, a quiet, gentle morning.

Bert has both colon and bone cancer, he might also have lung and heart problems, is incontinent; the specifics of his condition are off limits to me a rule that doesn’t concern me. There is a scale they use to measure the level of life, 100 is someone who walks around and takes care of business unaided, 0 is dead, Bert was at 30 a couple of months ago, he has slipped since then. I probably wasn’t supposed to be told that, but what the hell.

He asked for a drink of water, butI am not allowed to give him one; all Ted’s liquids have to be thickened, thickener is added to his cup of water to prevent it going down the wrong way and choking him. Another reminder of his situation.

I have been told that bone cancer can be painful, and I ask Bert each time if he is in pain, he never is. Whatever drugs he is on seem to take care of the pain without making him drunk; but he is dying.

He is dying, there will be a time when I won’t visit him, that time isn’t far away. We had a nice visit, he thanked me for coming, couldn’t remember my name or if I had visited previously, a benign smile, maybe it was the medication, maybe it was the natural process of coming to terms with saying goodbye.

Goodbye is a quiet activity, it is the moments after the visitor’s car has left, the time when everyone has gone and the cleaning up is begun.

I did tell Bert a joke that made him laugh: “Bert I have a confession to make to you, sometimes I feel as if I am a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.” He got the joke immediately, the nurse who was nearby didn’t, she seemed uncomfortable hearing it; a dying man had a laugh, she might welcome that instead of acting otherwise.

I have shut the work radio off, bought groceries for a couple of days, sorting and put away clothes, papers, the empty box from the new tv, books and memories; putting on the shelf all those things that are not being used today. Playing a male Welsh choir recording, remembering my father’s memory of hearing the miners on their way to work before dawn, coming home after sunset, singing as they came and went in the dark, Sunday was their day off, the day to see the sun.

Saying goodbye is a quiet and gentle thing, but it brings great sadness, I am very sad this morning, and know that out of this sadness will come joy, later on today.

Slicing through the now

Yesterday I received two different comments that disturbed me. They disturbed me in that good way, put me just somewhat askew, and I thank both of my correspondent friends for sending them to me, they were just what I needed. I have spent much of the last day trying to nudge my gyroscope back on course. The first comment was in reaction to a shot I’d made about the U/Us, that she felt ‘at home with this bunch of seekers’. The second comment had to do with the birds at the feeder experiencing the joy of being in the present to an extent that man cannot. (I hope that I have transferred both ideas in the correct spirit.)

In 1960 I went to Europe on an ocean liner, the Q. S. S. Arkadia, quadruple screws was the reason for the Q. S. S.; this was still the standard method of going overseas, we were 7 days Montreal to Bremerhaven, with a couple of intermediate stops.

I liked to go to the bow and look down to where the prow cut the water, fascinated by looking slightly ahead at the smooth surface that will be cut and disturbed by this monster shoving through. Tens of thousands of horsepower drove us at 25 knots through cold dark water; the North Atlantic Ocean in October is cold, the water under our keel several miles thick; the contrast of this great ship as just a speck; the little curl of the bow wave and the wake changing nothing of the 2,000 fathoms.

Perhaps a foot or two in advance of the prow a small hill of water formed from the standing pressure wave of our progress, in a way this bump was as looking into the future, the present was where the steel split the ocean, the mound was just prior to that. Looking into the future is impossible but here it was happening, and it was irrelevant, by the time the hill of water was recognized it was under us, gone under foot. Seeing that short distance meant nothing, and once it passed under us it meant nothing. One couldn’t contemplate that patch of water rising to meet us, it would be gone by then.

The only thing that mattered was our moving through. The present is only important because it is now become the past. It is the becoming that is important to our being. One can focus on the wake of the ship, as would a conservative; one could look a mile ahead, as foolishly optimistic as Mr. Micawber; but it is where that hull disturbed the surface of the great ocean that one knows excitement.

To say that the birds feel joy is to misunderstand what joy is, it is because the present passes us and we know it, that is what makes us special, we know that what is is now gone, and that there is more coming. We know grief, despair, surprise, we feel joy in all of it.

I don’t know if any of this makes sense, it did for an hour or so at 5 a. m.

I am not sure that I feel less disturbed than I did, but I sure feel alive, feel the joy of sailing the deeper ocean.

I find nothing enlightening in organized religion: Some guys sitting around a table, deciding a program, that doesn’t enlighten in any way. The only thing holy about that scene is the word hot-stamped on the cover of a book. What I get from the business of Jesus, Judas and the Romans is that Jesus intuitively knew that to transcend what came before he had to feel the depth of scorn and rejection, feel the impersonal indignity of torture, feel the despair of certain and prolonged dying. Jesus had to feel the knowledge that God was not about relieving that pain, it was then that he could and did leave port on a new course. His boat then sailed a different sea. It is now our opportunity and obligation to gain a grain of wisdom from that unique example.

Warm Wet Winter Weekend

I’ll try this again, after having erased all that I wrote for the last twenty minutes I’ll see if I can put down a few words that express where I am this morning.

I was dissatisfied  with the way I left the ‘acceptable’ piece that I wrote yesterday, it wasn’t adequate to explain the different layers that there are in a person,  that at bottom there is something that is just right, is acceptable, something is not affected by what goes on in life.  The story of Jesus going up the hill with his cross as an example of this. Buddhist study of mindfulness as another example.   Luther’s proclamation that I can know the divine as well as anyone, and so can you, as a further example.

There must be dozens more, but the message is always the same.

I am not sure that I am satisfied with leaving that idea right there, but it is all that I can come up with this morning.

Here is something else, lighter and fun:

¢ ‡ µ  € Ø ¡ ¿ ¿ ¿
I just learned how to put down here those characters that are not on the keyboard:

http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/accents/codealt.html

There is the website that lists how to do it; there is one thing to remember when you try this, you have to use the keypad on the side of the keyboard, the numbers up top don’t work.  I have all mine on a mousepad from the LRB, but this is the first time I took a look at it.

To get back to that other thing for just a line or two:

This might be the time of year when it ain’t always easy to separate the joy of solitude from that of pure loneliness, there are all sorts of suggestions and diversions offered, but occasionally it is going to be damned difficult, sometimes it will be impossible not to feel loneliness; perhaps that is why I have tried to explain a basic truth of existence, perhaps the basic truth.  I will use it to help myself during those lonely moments, to get back to that place where solitude is wonderful.

It’s time to go and sort out that bird feeder again, perhaps think of buying one that isn’t so prune to clogging.

Drippy, gray weather

I have the desk light turned on even though it is past sunrise,I can hear the sound of meltwater dropping from those heavy pads of snow that sit on garage roofs, see tree trunks, charcoal brown, against the grayness all around.

The weather person on last night’s news said that today’s weather would be “miserable”, an adjective that caught my attention; the sky is gray, the temperatures above freezing, but nothing is miserable, except perhaps what was in that guy’s mind. The weather is whatever the weather is.

Someone asked me last week what it was like to do hospice volunteering, my answer was that a person had to be comfortable in one’s own skin-accept that I am acceptable. As I remembered this conversation I understood that what we offer the dying person is the reminder that he is acceptable as is. It is an ultimate truth.

Brought up to be judgmental meant that I was discouraged from the concept that I am acceptable as is, that others are also not acceptable as is, that love was conditional. As a result I grew up to have a hardened case of major depression, one that began as a child and lasted until just a few years ago. I felt the need to fall in love with women who brought judgment to their relationships; believed that it was my right and duty to judge others.

To get rid of the depression it was necessary that I learn that I am acceptable as is, and a hard damned lesson it was; I fought that concept– gagged, spat, swore, did everything but hold my breath in my refusal to accept that I am acceptable as I am, but in the end I couldn’t refute it. It was as turning an ocean liner around at speed.

There has been a group, groups, that promote the idea that one is defective, that one has inherent guilt, that one cannot approach the divine—this is wrong. How could it be that I am not acceptable? What separates me, or any of us, from being simply animal is that I know that I am, I know existence and the end of my existence. It would be an oxymoron to state that know I exist means that I should accept guilt, believe that I am defective, that I cannot know what others have known of the divine.

Being mindful of my being is the fundamental and most powerful notion there can be, and with it comes acceptability.

I can’t say it stronger than that; it is when I denied that idea, that I was miserable. It is when my friend Joe couldn’t buy into that idea that he had to hang himself on a rope in a stairwell. I was going to come up with other examples but I realized that anyone who reads this knows dozens of examples.

Old Bert comes out of his dementia for a minute or so, the first thing that he does is to ask my forgiveness for not being able to hold a good conversation with me. As if I was sitting with a dying man in order to have polite conversation. I suggest that we just sit and watch the passing parade: ladies with their walkers, nurses going after one patient then another with medications, cleaners doing the incessant cleaning that keeps the place from tipping into nauseousness, just enjoy the parade, just be.

There are a number of definitions of God, the one I like most often is “the ground of being”: it encompasses acceptance, infinite love, mindfulness, and just being about the day’s business.

Before I turned on the gadget to write this I lay in bed, framing a few phrases, remembering some things I wanted to tie together here, and feeling that this is an idea that I would like to roar from the rooftop. Luckily I can sit inside, drink strong coffee, use a keyboard instead. Now that I have vented I can finished getting dressed, go for a long walk, get on with the day.

Going about one’s business after the storm

The awe that comes with a good fall of snow has passed, walks  shoveled to the narrowest that allows for one-lane walking, cars  strained by repeated starts at low temperatures and by the physical assault of hitting  drifts and scraping underneath; but we need to go to work, need groceries, need to get out of these, now too small, homes, to just get out and walk around.  People on the street more likely to give a nod on the days afterwards.

Last night I attended, as a volunteer, the seasonal dinner and remembrance service  put on for kids who have lost someone, and for those who remain.  Mothers straining to hold together a rambunctious family, to hold themselves together; fathers doing what I had to do, searching for what needs to be done next, to play a role for which there was no expectation.   The whole evening is part of a schedule that allows people, of all ages & situations, to work through their grief, the natural progression that requires only that it be allowed to work.  What I am trying to say is that every one of us knows inherently how to sail through the grief of a great loss, the process is delicate in that a person needs support of the gentlest kind, someone there but not controlling, someone who stands testimony that there is a way through this difficult passage.

The temperature will rise a few degrees above freezing later today, the sun shining in a clear sky; the effects of this sudden drop of snow onto us will disappear naturally; appointments will be kept, shelves stocked, restaurants filled, and everyone will have a storm story to tell.

It is easy to imagine that attending a bereavement holiday ceremony will be depressing, will bring you down, will be just the opposite of what Christmas, Hanukkah  and  New Year’s Eve is all about—-but it is not that way at all.

The only heirloom I have from my Scots grandparents is a book ‘Poetical  Works of Robert Burns’

AULD LANG SYNE

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to min’?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And days o’ lang syne?

 

For auld lang syne, my dear,

For auld land syne,

We’ll tak’ a cup of kindness yet,

For auld lang syne!

 My long dead grandfather once told me that when he was young, in the time of Victoria, it was not unusual for a man to have to work on Christmas Day, but for New Year’s there would be at least two, perhaps three days to celebrate; sometimes it takes more than one day to say a proper goodbye.

For auld lang syne.

 

Cold Monday morning

The sky is dull, mottled gray, the remaining leaves waving husks, the snow hardened by ice, the feeder is encapsulated and empty, the fun of yesterday is gone, . This is the weather to trim or cut down a tree, the sap has disappeared. Nothing alive but those waving husks.

But I know that everywhere the germ is waiting.

The interior of every seed and bulb has a vibrating molecule, waiting.

Within every tree are the dry tubes and cells, waiting.

Inside every window sits a person looking out, and waiting.

It may look as still as death out there this morning, but we all know that it is just a time, a waiting time, a necessary time.

And there is no stillness in death, there is sadness, loss, grief, there is a point of change: there will be the joy that arises from  sadness so intense that it is beyond tears; but there is no still ending.

Digging out in Chicago

Will there be any news reader who does not use the phrase “Chicago is digging out” today?

Perhaps it would be a good day to consider “digging in”, to burrow under layers, occasionally peeking out the window to admire the branches heavy with snow, the bright sun on the still whiteness, before another nap?

There is one sparrow flitting, looking for a way to get at the covered feeder, nothing available until I go out and clear it free of snow and the moisture that clogs the openings. My dispatcher called last night to tell me that I had the option of booking off tonight, that there was so little doing that there wouldn’t be enough orders for everyone to have at least one, I told him that I would be in; this morning I am not sure of my decision.

It’d be easy to make the decision to stay home, warm & dry, not to slog through the heavy stuff in order to gross $30, no one could blame a senior driver for not making the effort without the need. On the other hand it means that I will not have anything to do with anyone else all day, that I will be my own company, do I not get enough of that ordinarily?

The most recent weather forecast says that the winds will be gusting to 25, consider that number rather than the temperature.

There is a region between loneliness and solitude, the areas on either side of the dividing line are clear, I am in that ambiguous zone of wishing for friendly company while knowing that there isn’t anyone I care to be with for any period. I zig zag between the two situations.

Tomorrow is the holiday dinner for the bereaving patients of our hospice group, this is still very new area for me, I don’t know what it’ll be like, other than intense. A person could always use this recent storm as an excuse, if an excuse be needed.

Thinking of that Robert Frost poem about the fork in the road as if the decision was always clear, that the decision need only be made once, that it was taken without regret or doubt. I look back down the path, I don’t see a clear and straight line with a single fork far back; I see a line heading strongly in one direction, and then a course correction of ninety degrees followed by a tentative path, another course correction, another speed, another distance, no change mimicking the previous, no long and straight drives; and yet there is certain movement towards one pole, a destination without a terminus, if I just raise my eyes occasionally.

I will probably not go to work this afternoon, but I will not evade being witness to these widows and kids who are going through their first or second holiday alone, they know the difference between solitude and loneliness, they know where fate has placed them for now.

So I may not dig out of the drifts this afternoon to drive a Town Car to O’Hare, but I’ll do tomorrow what is truly important, be witness to that next stretch of road.

Accept Meaninglessness

If it is that accepting meaninglessness requires the greatest courage, and I can’t come up with something that requires more, then what are the rewards of doing so?

To accept meaningless takes a long time, the roots for the idea of ‘the meaning of life’ are many and deep; but as almost everyone dimly realizes, the plant they feed bears no fruit. The various meanings that people try evaporate, they give no sustenance, are both shallow and superficial; to accept meaninglessness leads to anxiety and a loss of direction, or does i?

There is that scintilla of a notion that accepting meaningless is right, and it is. The courage to follow this notion, to admit that the patent recipes for Truth and God that bombard us from the fundamentalists are all puffballs, tests and then strengthens one’s own being. And then one is on the other side, transcending the mundane.

I will try to write about this again.

The day after visiting a dying man

I visited Bert yesterday, he was anxious and making a lot of noise. I sat with him for about half an hour, trying to have him focus on the present for a few minutes, to confront his fears even though his mind is deteriorating; just doing what a friend can do, offer help, sit for a while, let him know that he is not alone.

Visiting him will not change what is happening to Bert, it is the way of things that his mind breaks down and away; I must never believe that what I am doing will change anything, it is just to be with someone as they go. This isn’t easy to do.

The day after visiting someone who is dying I react with feelings of emptiness, helplessness, I scramble to make sense of something that has no more sense than is living and dying. Visiting a dying person is an intense experience, the next day is the reaction to that intensity.

As I was about to leave, thirty minutes was all I could take, he stopped his anxious rambling to take my hand and thank me for coming, to apologize again for not being all that he wished, he hoped that I would come back again, his smile was genuine. For that smile and recognition I felt joy, and there you are.

I am playing Bach’s ‘Art of the Fugue’, Glenn Gould at the organ and piano; if Bach and Gould cannot fill a mind and life that feels empty nothing can, this is rich stuff.